Considering the benefits that come with focused/concentrated content, it is very hard to justify a large map with scarce content. Player encounters are more frequent, less travel more action, finding a group gets easier and takes less time (because everyone near your level will be doing content near you)...
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Do I like action, monsters, quests, and new gear? Certainly, but I also think games need exploration and quiet downtime. It's like most good movies have periods of action, sad moments, happy moments, thoughtful moments, etc...the whole roller coaster. I think games should be similar. I think these areas help the world feel vast and immersive. They also help you better appreciate the architecture, etc of the cities and villages areas.
I definitely think it is an aspect of RPG games in general that is being lost.
That is being lost because most people don't want quiet down time in a game.
In fact, quiet down time is cheap to make .. think about why it is not done.
Certainly you need some pacing to the action .. but 10-15 seconds in between fight is way more than enough. If you want a real break, save the game, log out, and do something else.
Games are not like movies .. which is a coherent two-hours of entertainment. Games are disjointed sessions, and people can (and have) put breaks into the game themselves. There is no need for games to add in long stretch of down-time because if someone so wish for long stretch of nothing to do ... just log out, and watch the backyard.
Originally posted by Drakephire This thread made me think of a game on the other end of the spectrum. I've been watching game-play vids of Dead Rising 3 to see if I want to buy it for PC, and talk about ridiculous. Jam packed with zombies every two feet or so. Lulz.
Sounds fun.
I would much prefer something like DR3 than walking empty world for 10 min.
Now i am not arguing there should not be some pacing of the action .. but something like D3 (10-15 seconds between fights), or Dishonored (taking time casing and planning the take-down) is enough.
There is no point (for me) to waste 15 min walking and doing nothing else.
I remember walking/running in early MMO's for litteraly an hour. People I worked with would wake up an hour early for work so we could travel in game and be ready to do our thing together after work.
When I hear 15-20 seconds to prep for the next fight I just remember when we did that it was instant death, due to needing to plan the fight like a war. Put it this way I ended up tanking as a healer in cloth because someone jumped into a fight before I had the tank healed. The funny part is I saved the entire party from certain death by running in circles around the party while they wacked on the mob and I healed myself. Reason I did it was because death meant a loss of 2-4 hours worth of xp. I assumed they would run and at least I would be the only one to lose the xp.
To me a 30 minute travel time is just a quick hop, maybe I'm just too darn old lol.
I agree wildstar is way busy. Thankfully the aggro distance is really short.
I'm all for sprawling landscapes, but not empty ones. Make a huge map, with some time inbetween spawns, but make it rewarding and dangerous to explore the reaches. And while we're at it, get rid of the damn convention of walking into the very beginning of a portion of a zone and mapping the entire chunk. I miss the days/games when your map "uncovered" only the area immediately around you when you explored, say in a 20x20 tile size around your character's location. And make it the same for dungeons, too.
When I look at the minimap in a dungeon I want to say "hey! theres a little bit of area behind the fire fields that I haven't explored yet! Wonder whats back there."
I remember walking/running in early MMO's for litteraly an hour. People I worked with would wake up an hour early for work so we could travel in game and be ready to do our thing together after work.
I remembered that.
Such a drag ... i am glad games are not like that anymore. If so, i would not have come back to the genre.
Asheron's Call had the biggest area of any MMO i've played. So huge and spacious. 270 sq km of open world - no invisible walls - no loading - no nothing. It's really easy to get around the world via portals but if you wanted to you could take an entire day to run across the continent..
That worked in Asheron's Call because it was designed very differently from today's MMOs. The most significant difference was that mobs and player levels were no so locked together as they currently are. In most MMOs, from DAoC to today, if you try to fight something more than five levels above you, you're facing almost certain death. The way this plays into the terrain design is that such an open area would have to be very tiered in content, lending to a feeling of being multiple zones with within a zone. In the Direlands, you had no idea what you'd meet travelling between point A and point B. With such a zone in today's MMOs, you'd know that the minute you landed at the AB drop, there'd be mob X then mob Y then mob Z between you and town. Much of the vast world feel would get diluted in the predictability.
While some might suggest that modern MMOs can easily solve that by having varied mob spawns... good luck with that.
Which is exactly why it was a great game. But your post assumes that every MMO is guaranteed to be an Everquest/WoW derivative. It's a shitty paradigm for the genre be stuck in
Comments
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
That is being lost because most people don't want quiet down time in a game.
In fact, quiet down time is cheap to make .. think about why it is not done.
Certainly you need some pacing to the action .. but 10-15 seconds in between fight is way more than enough. If you want a real break, save the game, log out, and do something else.
Games are not like movies .. which is a coherent two-hours of entertainment. Games are disjointed sessions, and people can (and have) put breaks into the game themselves. There is no need for games to add in long stretch of down-time because if someone so wish for long stretch of nothing to do ... just log out, and watch the backyard.
Sounds fun.
I would much prefer something like DR3 than walking empty world for 10 min.
Now i am not arguing there should not be some pacing of the action .. but something like D3 (10-15 seconds between fights), or Dishonored (taking time casing and planning the take-down) is enough.
There is no point (for me) to waste 15 min walking and doing nothing else.
I remember walking/running in early MMO's for litteraly an hour. People I worked with would wake up an hour early for work so we could travel in game and be ready to do our thing together after work.
When I hear 15-20 seconds to prep for the next fight I just remember when we did that it was instant death, due to needing to plan the fight like a war. Put it this way I ended up tanking as a healer in cloth because someone jumped into a fight before I had the tank healed. The funny part is I saved the entire party from certain death by running in circles around the party while they wacked on the mob and I healed myself. Reason I did it was because death meant a loss of 2-4 hours worth of xp. I assumed they would run and at least I would be the only one to lose the xp.
To me a 30 minute travel time is just a quick hop, maybe I'm just too darn old lol.
I agree wildstar is way busy. Thankfully the aggro distance is really short.
I'm all for sprawling landscapes, but not empty ones. Make a huge map, with some time inbetween spawns, but make it rewarding and dangerous to explore the reaches. And while we're at it, get rid of the damn convention of walking into the very beginning of a portion of a zone and mapping the entire chunk. I miss the days/games when your map "uncovered" only the area immediately around you when you explored, say in a 20x20 tile size around your character's location. And make it the same for dungeons, too.
When I look at the minimap in a dungeon I want to say "hey! theres a little bit of area behind the fire fields that I haven't explored yet! Wonder whats back there."
It's not hard to find open landscapes in new games.
http://i.imgur.com/0jDNlSL.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/dRvd1Eg.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/uPZ5FQa.jpg
The problem is that players don't really want them. The large, open zones of GW2 - such as Lornar's Pass - are also its least popular zones.
I remembered that.
Such a drag ... i am glad games are not like that anymore. If so, i would not have come back to the genre.
I love that third pic, show me on the map of GW2 where that is?
I'm assuming it's life is feudal.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
+1
Dungeon Finder is my substitution for Lobby
EQ2 fan sites
Well I thought the giant sig at the bottom of my post would lead to conclusions but here you go http://lifeisfeudal.com/
Life IS Feudal
Which is exactly why it was a great game. But your post assumes that every MMO is guaranteed to be an Everquest/WoW derivative. It's a shitty paradigm for the genre be stuck in