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MMORPG Worlds Don't Need To Be Big (Or At Least Start Big)
seacow1g
Member UncommonPosts: 266
Hi everyone,
I just recently joined these forums because I wanted to help stimulate and participate in discussions about the design of current and future MMO's. After taking part in a number of discussions I have came up with some thoughts about a number of design concepts that I would like to hear the community's feedback on. I've decided to make a series of threads about these concepts individually in order to stimulate discussion about each one separately so that I can gauge how the community feels about them. The first topic is on the size (or lack thereof) that a quality MMO should have upon launch in order to be considered fun for the players:
TOPIC #1 Do MMORPG Worlds Need to Be Big (Or At Least Start Big)
I will first go on record by saying that I personally don't believe MMO's need to start with a large world in order to be fun, and here's why:
-Currently, most of the land in MMO's serves as quest hubs which the player travels to and then moves on from while he/she levels up. Rarely do the players have a reason to return to these locations except when passing them by, so unless there is a constant stream of new players or old players rerolling new characters these locations become highly unused. This design mechanic is both inefficient in terms of game budget and a waste of virtual space. In order to accommodate this model the developers have to create vast worlds in order to keep the players chasing after the carrot.
Why do regions have to be arranged by level? Why can't low level regions have areas with monsters that are super dangerous for them and they have to avoid? I know in open games like the Elder Scrolls series if there's an enemy in a certain area that's too strong for me even if the rest aren't I just avoid him/it. It doesn't ruin my gameplay in any way and actually creates a better illusion that i'm in a real world. Having mixed content in the same areas serves a dual purpose; it creates a sense of wonder in lower level players who wonder what's over there and it gives higher level players a reason to revisit the area multiple times.
Sure I like to see a bunch of varied lands and peoples in my MMO experience but it doesn't mean it has to start that way. I'd actually PREFER to be stuck in a modest, very well populated with things to do space and fully delve into the storyline of the few regions and few peoples before striking out and exploring more lands. I'd like an excuse to explore every nook and cranny of a place before moving on, and still have reasons to come back later incase I was feeling a bit nostalgic.
And just because a game world starts small it doesn't mean it has to FEEL small. Developers could create the illusion that there's a much bigger world out there that hasn't been discovered yet by putting dangerous terrain that you can't cross without dying or hostile regions with legions of unbeatable and unescapable NPC's or something like that.
Please bear in mind though while thinking about this that I think an MMO shouldn't have a SMALL game world like an island or something. I imagine it would be preferable to have a gameworld about the size of Kalimdor in Vanilla WoW or a little smaller but much more densely developed.
Comments
While I agree that I would like a mix of difficulty within the same regions, I still think a game world needs to be larger. I say this mainly because one of my favorite things to do in MMOs is explore. A small game world would have less to explore obviously.
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I'm sure you say this with the concept in mind that the MMO would play like your average modern MMO, i.e. most of the land wouldn't have anything to do or see and it would be easy to travel from one area to another. What if you actually had to WORK to explore the smaller gameworld? My mind goes to games like Zelda where the world was populated with puzzles you had to figure out or hidden passageways you'd have to discover in order to get to new areas. What if it had some platforming and terrain that was difficult or dangerous to cross in the middle of it all? All this would significantly increase the time it takes to travel around in the gameworld and make it feel larger and more interesting than a pointlessly large game world that you just run through mindlessly.
This all feeds into the concept that a world should be more densely populated with things to do, whether they be quests, minigames, platforming challenges, puzzles etc. Have you ever taken a hike into the wild irl? Even if nothing happens it's still often an adventure in of itself because the land fights back unless you're following a trail (and low level players in such a game would be STRONGLY encouraged to follow the trail
).
You may say you like exploring but you won't explore anything unless you have a reason to do so. What if the game were smaller but gave you more reasons to explore every bit of whats there? It'll still end up taking a huge chunk of your time.
Two very good points.
Solution = Do both. Big game world, with lots to do and see
EQ1 had a huge world when it first came out, and now I think is way to big. World of Warcraft had a huge world as well. The thing that helped these games is they had the races start in their own citys and fleshed out the surrounding areas to make it feel like a world:)
With EQ1 you where so engaged with your surrounding and the mobs so hard you really didn't feel like you needed to just run from one zone to another.
Doing both would be too expensive. My argument for the smaller game world is to lower the development budget for the sake of focusing on content rather than one-use-only digital real estate.
And Issling yes I think the mobs in an average MMO are too easy. I don't think you should necessarily have to be in groups to beat them (ala stupid FFXI getting a group of 5 to kill bunnies) but you should at least have to use your whole skillset and be mindful of yourself for 90% of encounters. This would make a smaller gameworld much more engaging.
This was a decision that Turbine faced when discussing the size of Middle-Earth in Lord of the Rings Online. Here's a bit from Jeff Anderson, former CEO/President of Turbine:
Some people were saying that they wanted it to actually take - calendar time - 6 months to walk from the Shire all the way to Mount Doom just like it took Frodo in the books. Someone else replied basically, "Are you kidding me? I want to teleport there." Both sides were arguing the pros and cons with one guy getting very lore-specific and the next guy saying "Well you're going to be walking through wastelands for week. How much fun would that be? Tolkien was about entertainment, he wasn't about boredom."
It was a very interesting and heartfelt conversation about the world-size. Well the realization we came to is that you can't make both sides happy; they are just too diametrically opposed. But what you can do is the same thing that I talked about with Melanie over three years ago now. You can make sure that people understand the objective what you've got. In our case, it's to just build a great Tolkien game. The marriage of those two concepts requires us to make choices.
Sometimes you want to make things that are fun, but we also don’t want to do anything that is in direct conflict with Tolkien’s work. We make those game design choices. So for most of the game, you'll find pretty much a very tried and true experience. You have to walk to a place first before you have to “teleport” there a second time, in essence. In our case, you can walk from the Shire to Bree and once you’ve done that, you can have access to the fast horse travel back. - Jeff Anderson (source)
It's all about what value that extra worldspace brings to the game. In Asheron's Call, players enjoyed the expansive, dangerous frontier of the Direlands, but over time they found that in regular gameplay they wanted more freedom to quickly get to where they needed to go. As a result, more portals and more ways to portal were added to make travel to content faster, while leaving most of the Direlands and northern regions a relatively free roam area for those that still wanted something to explore.
IMO, for most mainstream MMOs, the game world should be as big as its content but small enough that players do not feel they are alone in a world. Many devs have gone the other route and tried to make the game world seem huge, compensating for that with zone and global chat channels. This often has had a rather noticeable negative effects when populations drop.
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Wanna cut some cost? Stop with that the damn voice overs and cut scenes. This isn't a console rpg. As much as most of you want then to be, there not. How large was the budget for SWTOR voice overs and cut scenes? I sometimes think that they blew their whole budget on it because the game... IMO... was a piece of shit. They should have just scraped the game and made an CGI movie with what they spent. Would have been a bigger hit.
When you say big, you are restricting it to geographically.
I would say - that's kind of a misnomer. There are more ways that an MMO can be big/deep/engaging than just geography.
Take Diablo 1 for example. It's not an MMO, sure, but just to continue the discussion. D1 occurs all in Tristram, and as far as actual static geography goes - that's it. Sure, there is a lot of procedurally generated land, but it's all dynamic and random as you go inside the dungeon - so does that count as real estate? That means D1 either has some of the least real estate, or an infinite amount (being that it's random and cannot be repeated).
So is geography the only way a game can be big, or even feel big? D1 felt pretty large when it was first released. It had a deep story with it, simple to pick up combat, and a fairly robust random item generator. For 1996, it wasn't too bad, and really helped to put Blizzard on the map.
Do MMOs need to be big? Yes - they need to be bigger and more engaging than the real world. Does that mean they need big maps? No. They need big communities (friends, guilds/clans/linkshells, chat/voice channels, anything to tie people together), big mysteries to solve (uncovering storyline, exploring, character development), and engaging and meaningfully deep mechanics and activities (combat, crafting, minigames, etc). Exploring a geography may be one of many activities that go into making an MMO big, but it's far from the only thing you need to make an MMO world "Big."
It all really depends on what you find fun.
Disnleyland in California is fun. You can see all of it in about a day and it is jam packed with stuff to do.
I also think hiking off trail is fun. You can get lost and you have to make your own camps, cook your own food, be wary of wild animals that could see you as a snack.
Two different kinds of fun. Its not one or the other.
MMO worlds dont need to be one or the other in order to be fun. Both can be fun on their own merits.
I would much prefer a fun and smaller world, than a big and empty one.
In fact, it is about gameplay, not the size of the world.
For those who don't want the large open space, they could create a lobby server with microzones with only "the real content" they would like. They will never have to walk in the open world and can simply port around with a queue system.
I want a large world.
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Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
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Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
There are some good MMORPGs where there aren't lower level and higher level areas. See, for example, Puzzle Pirates, A Tale in the Desert, or Uncharted Waters Online. The last two of those need an enormous game world to make it work, though. But what do this games have in common, along with some others that don't say you go here and this level and there at that level? They're sandboxes.
The theme park model is one of having various areas correspond to particular level ranges. When your game is heavily based around combat and has massive amounts of progression, you basically have to do that to make it work.
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As for the size of a game world, it's not the size so much as how much interesting stuff there is in it. An infinite featureless plane would be boring. But is the same amount of interesting content spread out over a larger area really any better or worse than over a smaller area? Taken to extremes in either direction, you can certainly make it terrible. It's all about finding a good balance.
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Relying on puzzles to make travel difficult won't work unless you've got some awfully creative puzzles. The reason that the eighth dungeon of the second quest of Zelda was hard to find is that we didn't have the Internet back then. Today, solving a puzzle mostly means checking a wiki for many players, and you have to design a game such that that won't ruin the game for your players.
Just because Rift didn't properly populate the smaller world doesn't mean that a smaller world is needed to make a good game. For one thing Rift is easy, I can't see any smaller game world where you can run around mindlessly as being good.
As for the argument about larger vs smaller world with the same amount of content, the thing you gain with the smaller world is less wasted virtual real estate.
All these AAA titles dump development money into things that I don't think are needed to make a quality MMO. If companies focused on the things that actually mattered to players then we'd have games come out faster and most importantly, more polished.
That's why I want to talk about topics like these, for the community to debate and decide about what they REALLY need for a quality MMO, and where the companies can pay less attention. You can't do everything to the max or a game would cost too much and take many years to produce (as they have been). We should start focusing on the important stuff to get to where we really wanna go.
I think world size is not too important if the content is ample. A world can be built as you go, but good game design is key.
I don't really have a problem with smaller worlds. Rift, for instance. That landmass was sufficient. On the other hand, in SL they added 2 more continents, but the continents were barren and boring. I'd rather have something smaller.
Granted, a large detailed landmass isn't usually a problem for an AAA developer (Vanilla WoW, GW2).
The situation is also different for sandboxes. With them, you kinda want a lot of filler space for <stuff>. Aka SWG.
Favorite MMO: Vanilla WoW
Currently playing: GW2, EVE
Excited for: Wildstar, maybe?
How exactly do you waste virtual real estate?
It's virtual - it's not like you can run out.
Sure, there may be technical limitations on how big a map can be imposted by the graphics engine, but that's where zoning comes into play. Anytime Everquest 1 started to run out of real estate, they just added new zones. Then they got to the point where there were so many zones, they started going back and retrofitting old zones that weren't used again.
How does the concept of wasted real estate play into that? It can't be wasted because it's a limited resource (unlike real, physical land on Earth, which is extremely limited) - that much I cannot accept. So, was it wasted because it didn't have any "content" on it (I can think of very little real estate in EQ1 that didn't have something that was interactable or killable in sight of it)? Was it wasted because it wasn't directly involved in a nearby quest, mechanic, or in the function of moving from point A to point B? Was it wasted merely because it was decoration meant to set the mood and enhance immersion(like most of the larger cities - empty buildings, but still populated with tables/chairs/doors)? Was it wasted because it wasn't utilized by players?
I don't think you can waste virtual real estate.
You can, however, waste development dollars - and this is commonly done, and is often direct corollary of wasting development time. You can certainly waste a player's time (which will only happen so many times before that person becomes an ex-player). You can waste bandwidth, computing power, and other tangible, technical resources.
All those keen away from real estate being an assest in an MMO - CONTENT is the real asset, in all of it's millions of different variations and flavors - you need as much map as you need to hold your content. You can't waste it - it's like saying fish waste water when they swim, or people waste air when they breathe (which is somewhat debatable in some cases, but the best analogy I can come up with off the top of my head).
Also, I get the funny feeling Seacow1g is really Mark Kern, or some other Red 5 employee, and this is really a big discussion about Firefall.
It will be hard to get an accurate answer because everyone's opinion won't be open minded,they will be based on the games that are presently out there.
Obviously with so many wanting pvp and tons of exploration,it really shows how shallow these games are.
Imo if a developer puts a lot of effort into the entire game design,you do not need to start out big.matter of fact,i don't like too big after the fact either.
Who thinks it is fun seeing noob zones completely dead,definitely not i and i think many others don't like it either.
This is why people that have played shallow games like Wow that have only one character class,will be looking at never going back and always wanting a new zone and a new level.
Games with sub class designs aka FFXI,will have you going back to starter zones MANY times over,not only for quests but for leveling all those classes that you can play on the same character.Also there is farming as well,lots of reasons to keep using the same zones.
A developer should only make new zones if they have exhausted all they can do in a zone.New zones should not be an extension for adding more levels either.I see tons and tons of games with tons of empty space in zones.If players are that bored with the game that they need a new zone to look at,you really should not be designing games.
The ONLY reason developers add more zones is to warrant selling you an expansion pack.If all you did was improve current zones ,then players would cry foul if you tried to sell more content that way.
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I dont know how big EQ1's world was when it launched back in 1999. But it "felt" massive, you couldnt just jump on a mount and explore an entire zone without a care in the world.
These instant ports to anywhere, flying mounts or ultra fast land mounts everyone needs everything so fast these days. Then they complain when all the content is dried up.
So one solution is making a world FEEL larger by making it more diffucult to actually explore it. And the only way to do that is to add harsher death penalties and zones mixed with varying leveled mobs.
That said, there are multiple games I can enjoy. I've enjoyed tight lobby-and-instance games, I've enjoyed sprawling continents, I've enjoyed wide-open infinite-size world. Space is largely an illusion, it's a question of what you want it to feel like - claustraphobic or endless frontiers. Do you want a landscape you settle in or new lands you cycle through to get different atmospheres.
There's an idea from the old game Spore that I've often wondered about. In the earliest stage of the game, you are essentially levelling up a small water-dwelling creature from single cell to ready to emerge from the sea. As you grow, the "low level" content fades away into the background and the "high level" content slowly phases into view. I've often wondered if the idea would work in an MMO. Essentially the same map could work for many levels of character but you can only see and be seen by mobs of +/-5 levels. As you gained levels, high level mobs would slowly phase into view and low level mobs would vanish from view.
Virtual real estate gets wasted when you spend thousands of manpower hours designing land that hardly gets used. If 90% of a games zones are hardly being used at any given time then you wasted the virtual real estate. Sure virtual land is "infinite" but it takes money and effort of real people to make it; money and effort that could be used on other things of more importance to the players.
Now I'm not arguing that MMO worlds should be small, but I do feel like the worlds that are being made more often than not are getting squandered. If you can make a world with less zones that are of value to the players at all stages of the game, wouldn't that be better than making more zones that only are of value to the players for 5-10 levels?
By identifying how much of their budget MMO developers should be spending on certain aspects of a game to make a good game for players, the better the games will be. If you feel a massive world is a good place to spend a huge chunk of the budget on even if you're only gonna care about most of it for short periods of time then that's fine, I'm not gonna argue with you. I just wanna know what people think about this.
AAA companies may have the money to do both, but they're not doing it. And if they tried to they might cut corners in other places that you might care about more...
And no this is definitely not a big discussion about Firefall. Sadly I'm not interested at all in that game despite me and Mark Kern sharing alot of the same ideas (which I just found out cause someone above mentioned that I sound like him lol). No for me this is purely a discussion about the industry.