Quote:Original post by Wavinator
Are future games going to give us territory fatigue?

Not too long ago I moved from the US to Canada, and one of the cheapest flights I could get sent me from California to Vancouver and then over what felt like a third of the Great White North. There were indeed some beautiful sights, but it was a good reminder of just how repetitive terrain is in the real world.


Reading about techniques for generating obscenely huge levels and even entire planets brought me back to that memory. There are games (like Spore) coming out that promise building civilization across an entire world. Others, like Evochron, let you fly seemlessly through solar systems and down to cities on worlds. With such a heavy trend toward realism, I can only see this envelope being pushed farther.

While this is all awesome in terms of technical achievement, I sometimes wonder if the worlds are getting too big for the content that can be provided and the time a gamer has to enjoy it.


Can massive worlds, by their nature, diminish your role in them?Astronomers, for instance, talk about how observing the scale of the cosmos can make any human endeavor insignificant.

What about the ratio of terrain traveled to unique interactions-- Is there a point where the amount of territory can dwarf the amount of unique gameplay?

Or (jaded question here) does this trend toward realism doom us to a future of nothing but MMOs because any other world would be huge and empty?

Would you really want to walk on foot across 24,902 miles of ground? Or spend an hour trying to find something or someone across a planet of hundreds of cities and towns?

To me, a realistic planet seems pointless for most games. It can only serve as eye candy, terrain to fly over while you're getting to where you really want to be going.

Agree? Disagree? Why?

Game Worlds can be made to make travel as tedious as real travel usually is, and those games will not be played by most players and the games will fail.

I would take the current large game worlds (ex - LOTRO) which can take 1/2 hour to run the entire width of the world and fill in the existing space with more details (even the current sized worlds are mostly pretty deserts, devoid of anything of real interest and endless encounters with the repetitious spawns laid out like a minefield).

Add 10x as many small micro scenarios. Make the inhabitants interact with each other instead of mostly standing individually like mannekins or walking purposelessly back and forth waiting to be killed like ducks in a shooting gallery.

The scripting for more complex 'purposeful' behavior isnt impossible these days and when templated dont have to be too expensive to develop.

More interactive objects with simnple reactive behaviors ....

More little nooks and crannies to explore....

Enemies you actually have to use different/creative tactics for instead of the inane repetative 'moron could do this' stuff we mostly see today.

i used to play a game on the sega genesis called starflight that was about a phenomenon that was destroying stars. you were a citizen on a space station called arth and the whole point of the game is to travel the universe to find an inhabitable planet to colonize before your solar system is destroyed. you land on planets to mine and get resources that you can sell for money so that you can upgrade your ship or bye more fuel so you can fly further and explore more planets while making sure you have enough to return to arth. that game is really fun and i used to play it for hours because there is so many aliens and stuff to explore. i have still never explored all the solar systems yet. its was a 2d game but it was way ahead of its time. another detailed game to checkout for pc is dwarf fortress. that game focuses on realistic details, like you have to get wood to make a masonry workstation so you can make blocks to make a well. you have to make a bucket and chain to go with it. you can dig tunnels to divert water to supply crops. that was an addictive game for me also.

Quote:Original post by CitizenJames
i used to play a game on the sega genesis called starflight that was about a phenomenon that was destroying stars.

I have a bad case of nostalgia for that game. Never played the sega version, but the PC version had 200 stars and 800 planets. And it's quite likely that it will never be seen again.

Why? Because the standards are (pardon the pun) astronomic when it comes to depicting the universe. People will expect Mass Effect graphics for the crew (which you never saw in the old game), a profusion of creatures that rivals Spore, and far more to do than just mining and collecting animals. I hate to be cynical, but I doubt a team of five can pull off what Binary Systems once did.

I disagree entirely with the initial premise: one bleak stretch of Canadian frontier does not a critique of every possible landmass arrangement that the known universe can support.

There exists "realistic" terrain on the moons of Jupiter - I think a distinction needs to be drawn between "nonsensical," "impossible," "mundane," and "realistic."

Which is which?

Food for thought: people have tracked through miles of bleak tundra for fun. I'd imagine they wouldn't find your average bleak tundra simulator very enjoyable, however. Much of the details of the merits of a game concept have less to do with the realities of its inspiration, say, the bleak and apparently boring environment that it is based on, and more to do with people's perception of what inspires them.

I'm sure you missed a lot of what you looked over on your trip: for all you know, that repetition is an illusion. Maybe the Great White North is more interesting when you aren't flying over it. A game made based on the experience of flying over it might be boring. But that's not to speak on the merits of basing a game on some other experience relating to the Great White North: perhaps there is some merit there you have yet to discover.

One penultimate digression (:D): if you think about things in absolute, the universe is a giant procedural generator. The fact that you have found anything interesting to do in your life means that a gigantic and expansive procedural world, based on some laws (E.g. the laws of physics) can be interesting.

If you're thinking of applying that to games, the question isn't really "realistic or not," it's simply "interesting or not." It applies the same whether or not your game has a large world: is it fun? You can't answer that but on a case by case basis. I don't think there is anything that says that games based on a large world cannot be entertaining or that they must diminish your role - I think it's easier to get caught up in emulating specific parts of our experiences and feelings with say, massive worlds, and miss out on creating an experience for the player.

The more territory you have means the more unique game play you need to fill it with for it to continue to feel coherent and realistic.

But, you do raise a good question with your last point:

Quote:Or (jaded question here) does this trend toward realism doom us to a future of nothing but MMOs because any other world would be huge and empty?

This is interesting, I was under the impression that a future of nothing of MMOs would doom us to nothing but huge and empty. A bigger world is just more work. MMOs are the example of large worlds done wrong: they never provide the same immersion as the storyline of smaller, shorter, offline games. It requires a paradigm shift to design entire worlds full of content, the result is that it tends to be stretched thin. Given that type of world, it is just eye candy.

But not every world must be so empty and meaningless. It's easy for things to feel vacuous when you fill them with nothing. The solution is to always keep your world full of content, regardless of size. If you can't fill the world with content, you should be making it smaller. Size does not automatically mean empty - it's just easy to mistake the correlation for causation.

I felt a little territory fatuge while playing s.t.a.l.k.e.r. Had there been vehicles available (like a scrambling bike.. how cool would that have been) I would have been happy with it but wanted MORE areas to explore. It should not take more than 5 minutes to cross the entire world from end to end with the fastest method of moving. (e.g. in stalker, you get artifacts that increase your sprint time to an infinate distance. these were cool and provide a way to get from A to B in 10 minutes)

It also just depends on how much of the space your character is going to be traversing through. It would be a waste of resources to model spaces that your character isn't going to travel through - if you, say are to traverse through a few stars in a galaxy, then it would only make sense to model those few stars rather than the entire galaxy, and then make the rest of the galaxy an illusion. Generally if you want an illusion of traversing through a galaxy, just make enough stars so that the player is convinced, then turn the rest into an illusion.

But if you are making a game that allows people to explore a realistic-sized galaxy in its entirety, I can only see procedural generation (let the computer make the stars, not the developer), size reduction (make everything hold less data so you can have more of them on screen at once), and data compression used (the data won't load until you get close to it - meanwhile a representation is used). For instance, when making both Earth and Saturn to have realistic sizes, to make this hardware-compatible, you could just reduce Earth to a size enough so that Saturn is doable. And these planets will only be load up when you are in the Solar System - when you are out of the Solar System, these planets will become compressed to take up less space. And then with the zoom-in zoom-out camera feature and variable travel speeds on your exploration ship, I'd say that that could be an impressive game in itself.