Does Size Matter?

I'm currently "between games", just trying out games that offer free trials or beta versions, until I get City of Heroes. I'm in the Lineage II open beta until the end of the month, but have to wait for the NDA to be lifted before I can write a review. But playing different games for a short while gives me the excellent opportunity to compare. And while browsing through different games websites, I noticed that some advertise how huge their worlds are. But does size matter? Or is it just a cheap marketing trick?

What players are really interested in is to have a large number of different areas for exploration and hunting. Huge, repetitive, computer generated landscapes which are just empty, with no monsters to hunt, are uninteresting. Putting monsters everywhere, but sparsely populated, like Star Wars Galaxies does it, is better. But even in SWG the huge planets don't add much value, as much of it looks the same. You can see which planet you are on without looking on a map, but not which part of the planet you are.

The other thing people are interested in is to get from where they are to where they want in a reasonable amount of time. One of my early MMORPG experiences was to run from Freeport to Qeynos with my low level EQ character. That is a long run, through monster-infested territory. It is interesting to do once, but not something you would want to do several times. So, later in my EQ career, I made a nice profit as a druid, one of the two classes that can teleport other people, by playing taxi. Everquest, like many other games after it, also had boats, public transport leaving every X minutes, like a bus. Developers love boats, because they are pretty. Players don't like them that much, because you usually wait 10 minutes for the boat to arrive, and then you are stuck on board for another 20 minutes. So with Shadows of Luclin some sort of public teleport transportation was added to EQ.

The same forms of transports exist in different games. Going places on foot is obviously possible everywhere, although it not necessarily get you to your destination, if it is on a different island / continent / planet. Running speed can be enhanced by magic (the famous Spirit of Wolf SoW in EQ), or by using some sort of vehicle or mount, up to riding a big yellow bird named chocobo in FFXI. Developers continue to use boats, sometimes cleverly disguised. Dark Age of Camelot has horses, which run "on rails" to a given destination. Star Wars Galaxies has shuttles, which thankfully are more similar to a teleport, even if you have to wait for a shuttle to arrive. Many games have bind spots, the place you teleport to when you die. In some of these games some character classes have the ability to teleport themselves to their bind spot, in other games everybody can do that. And if you are in a game where you can't teleport yourself to your bind spot, but the penalty for dying is reasonably low, you can always tickle that dragon to "ghetto warp" to your bind spot by dying. The most comfortable way to travel is by teleport, with either public teleport portals like in Horizons, or with the help of some character class able to teleport others.

It is important for developers to balance whatever size of world they imagine with sufficient means of transport. MMORPG are social games, where people play together. Nothing is worse than trying to organize some event with your friend and guildmates, and then somebody tells you on guildchat that he'd like to participate, but it will take him over half an hour to get to where everybody else is. People also need to travel for quests, or to get to new hunting grounds. But developers shouldn't give everybody the ability to instantly teleport to any place either, as that would kill most of the fun of exploration. The best is to link all cities with some sort of fast public transport, make vehicles or mounts available in these cities to be able to reach your hunting ground fast, and give some people the ability to teleport a whole group to some central wilderness locations. Final Fantasy XI got the later part of this right, but the transport between cities is slow and only available after having done a high level quest, which is too late, while mounts are available after a mid level quest, which is okay.

The other space problem developers usually have problems to balance right is housing. Many games avoid the problem by having no houses at all (EQ, DAoC), or by having invisible houses that don't take up any space, where on the game world there is only an entrance that leads every player to his individual house (AO, FFXI). But the ability to build a house and to show it to others is attractive to players. So attractive that if you limit the spots where houses can be built too much, not everybody who could afford a house finds a spot to build one, which is bad. This happened both in UO and Horizons. UO having a rather small world, and allowing housing on every large flat area, had the additional problem that houses and player cities sprang up in regions that previously were designed as remote wilderness. I happened to be around when houses came to UO, and watched a flat ice dessert turn into a city over night, with walrus and seal still now running through the streets. Horizons cleverly allowed houses only to be built on special housing plots, opening areas full of housing plots as pre-designed player cities. Unfortunately they didn't add decay, and now most plots are blocked by the first players, many of which have long left the game. One of the recent "news" of the Horizons world was that they would clear the deserted plots on the first of May. SWG housing is better, due to the planets having enough surface for everybody, and houses needing maintenance to stop them from decaying. But the problem of houses springing up in every remote hunting ground was only partially addressed by adding advantages to a limited number of player city areas.

So size does matter, but bigger is not always better. There has to be enough space for everybody to hunt, or build houses. But that size has to be balanced with fast means of transport, because people don't want to spend hours just traveling between two known places. And there have to be centers of attraction, places for people to gather and meet. Even housing is better if carefully guided into player cities. Standing alone in the middle of a pretty landscape with nobody around in a 10-minute radius is only attractive for about 5 seconds, then it gets boring.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:18 AM Permanent Link