I was just doing some browsing of old everquest zones, trying to remember some of my favorite spots, and it hit me just how large the world was/is. And I'm talking about pre-kunark even. I played the game for approximately 2500 hours total and when I go back and look at the list of zones/dungeons/etc it becomes obvious that I still didn't see everything. It amazes me that a game can be so big and so immersive that even in that many hours you won't see it all.
Obviously that got me thinking about Pantheon. How big do you want the world to be? Do you want to be able to see it all? How many hours of gameplay do you expect to put in and what percentage of the world do you expect to experience?
The world doesnt have to be huge imo. It just has to have enough content to continuously provide incentive to keep me wanting to play. From what we have seen it will be more than large enough.
I expect to easily put in multiple years of /played time on my main character alone if everything works out.
Part of the "big" effect of the world with EQ1 (early on) was the fact you couldnt really fast travel (non druid, non wizzy). Mounts were something only crusaders got and it wasnt really any better than SOW. And unless you had a pocket bard you were running at a fairly slow pace relative to the size of the zone (And even with the bard it was slow).
Yeah, I'm talking early EQ1, there were definitely no mounts haha.
Also, it doesn't really have that much to do with travel speed for me. All it had to do with was where I chose to spend my time. It's not like I ever said "nah, that takes too long to get to I'm not going"...remember, I spent 2500 hours in the game. I had no problem running across continents and taking boats for 2 hours to get to a location I was interested in. I'm just surprised at how much I chose to never see or experience.
Content density in EQ1 was actually really low. Some of that as server limitations from the late 90s and some of that was to make up for infinite agro until zoning. Once you throw 1000 players between 40-50 on a vanilla server it seems very small and crowded. Lets not even get into the headaches involved when even 100 of those players are interested in raiding weekly.
Really how large the world will feel though will be greatly dependent on server population targets and hard logon limits. A server that is intended to support 200 lv1s 1-10, 400 lv1s 11-20, 800 lvls 21-30, 1600 lvls 31-40 and 3200 lvls 41-50 will look a lot different than one focused on serving an order of magnitude lesser or greater than those numbers. A game that some how manages to get players to have an even distribution of levels will also look different.
If a zone can support 10 groups of 6 (similar to numbers mentioned in the streams) and the above numbers are close to the number of peak players per server per level range then you will need: 4 Lvl 1-10 zones, 8 lvl 11-20, 16 lvl 21-30, 32 level 31-40, and 64 level 41-50 zones. For ease of racial starting zones its advisable to make 8 level 1-10 zones so that each race has its own.
Iksar said:arazons said:EQ1 (early on) ...Mounts were something only crusaders got...
Huh? Was that EQ2?
The first mounts that appeared in the game were limited to crusaders (Paladins and Shadowknights) from AA's. But yea they were later (Luclin?)
Ranarius said:Yeah, I'm talking early EQ1, there were definitely no mounts haha.
Also, it doesn't really have that much to do with travel speed for me. All it had to do with was where I chose to spend my time. It's not like I ever said "nah, that takes too long to get to I'm not going"...remember, I spent 2500 hours in the game. I had no problem running across continents and taking boats for 2 hours to get to a location I was interested in. I'm just surprised at how much I chose to never see or experience.
For me that was almost entirely because just about no one regularly grouped in those places. West/North/East Karana, Toxxulia, Najena, Runnyeye, Splitpaw, Permafrost, Rathe Mountains, Lake Rathe, Gorge of King Xorbb, lower levels of Befallen, Steamfont Mountains.
Rarely if ever spent much of any time in most of those, especially in groups. I passed through many of them going to other places or when fully outleveled just to take a peek though.
arazons said:Iksar said:arazons said:EQ1 (early on) ...Mounts were something only crusaders got...
Huh? Was that EQ2?
The first mounts that appeared in the game were limited to crusaders (Paladins and Shadowknights) from AA's
Shadows of Luclin isn't usually considered "early EQ" from what I have observed. Early is generally considered release through Velious.
Iksar said:arazons said:Iksar said:arazons said:EQ1 (early on) ...Mounts were something only crusaders got...
Huh? Was that EQ2?
The first mounts that appeared in the game were limited to crusaders (Paladins and Shadowknights) from AA's
Shadows of Luclin isn't usually considered "early EQ" from what I have observed. Early is generally considered release through Velious.
Yea I believe the cutoff for "early EQ" traditionally ends at Velious. My point wasnt about the era or when early eq is defined though. I was just illustrating that people moved slowly throughout the world and the options / methods to increase your speed to traverse through a sizable zone were limited. Slow movement and lack of fast travel options had the effect of making the world bigger to me.
I would like the world to be a decent size and there to be a multitude of content outlets. I am not a huge fan of the theme park and handholding mentality. I think there should be a system that can help navigate the player into the perception system and keepers tome, but beyond that, a player should have to get out and explore the world to find points of interest, quest hubs, and other interesting content. I also think certain content should be locked behind hidden feats and unknown player accomplishments.
As such I don't think that it should be a reasonable expectation to go in and be able to experience everything. I would also say that even if you maxed out a character completely and did EVERYTHING available to that character, there should be content that is locked behind race, class, and race/class combinations on top of the various other feats required to access that content. Therefore, if you truly wanted to experience everything you would need to play multiple characters of various races and classes to truly be eligible to experience everything.
In terms of hours of gameplay vs what percentage of the world/content you get to experience that is hard for me to answer. In all honesty, I would like to see a scenario where even years later there is still some content that players hadn't accessed or only very few have and it's impossible to know-how based on the hidden requirements. I think that this adds an air of mystery to the game and allows for people to still be able to discover hidden content years later.
Philosophically I agree with Baldur's statement above :)
From a practical standpoint, I do want to see large areas of land mass - in 3 dimensions - to travel across and explore. A mountain range should *feel* forbidding and hard to traverse. A vast desert should actually BE vast, and not something you can run across in five minutes. Crossing a continent should feel like a pretty major undertaking. I recognize that there will be concessions made for the sake of allowing people to play together, but the physical size of the world *does* matter.
Content density matters as well. While I don't want to see large areas of dead space with nothing more than a few wandering creatures, at the same time, having some buffer between different content and points of interest helps make things feel less like the theme park we all don't want to be playing. As such, there's a sweet spot when it comes to how much content you can put in a zone, and how close together you can put it.
Finally, thinking about our journey through Terminus - it shouldn't be a straight line or a set path. Along the way we should come back to zones we've visited before, but go to new parts that we haven't seen. At every step, we should have choices in where we go and what we do.
For all of it's flaws, one of the things that I loved about Vanguard was that the world really did feel big and vast and untamed. Some people choose to fixate on the unfinished areas and the empty space that resulted, and I can understand that criticism. But I'd rather have empty space and meaningful travel, than have a world that feels small. Hopefully, Terminus can be a world that we can really spend years in and still not have seen everything.
Quality always better than quantity.
Certainly quality is king, but a tiny world won't have the same feel. The Karanas, for example, were fun to play hide and seek with rare spawn mobs like Quillmane and it's PHs. If the zone had been smaller, the hunt would have been trivialized.
Travel across a continent should be more than a trivial decision. You're making a decision to relocate. If you could run it in 10 minutes, it's trivialized. The world needs to be large enough to explore over an extended period.
I don't think it really fits with Pantheons direction but it would be interesting to see if there is a good way to get both quantity and quality by mixing hand crafted areas and well scripted procedural generated dynamic content.
Basically the developers would hand craft major cities and their connecting areas. These would be semi static and behave similarly to EQ. Then a combination of key points of interest and modular world blocks could be created for more out door areas. The key points of interest would have a set geographical location but the world blocks surrounding the key points of interest can be more dynamic.
The outer boundaries of the hand crafted areas could be a large area of procedural world blocks. Really well designed grey box world blocks can pull from high quality reference libraries to still build high quality procedural world content. Arguably these world blocks would have little lore until the devs flag an area to keep or drop a new point of interest into a procedural area.
Again with adequately skilled design even small dungeon environments can be grey-boxed and template filled in order to create temporary dungeons and special encounters that fit with the above ground world blocks.
Nephele said:I do want to see large areas of land mass - in 3 dimensions - to travel across and explore. A mountain range should *feel* forbidding and hard to traverse. A vast desert should actually BE vast, and not something you can run across in five minutes. Crossing a continent should feel like a pretty major undertaking. I recognize that there will be concessions made for the sake of allowing people to play together, but the physical size of the world *does* matter.
Baldur said:I don't think that it should be a reasonable expectation to go in and be able to experience everything. I would also say that even if you maxed out a character completely and did EVERYTHING available to that character, there should be content that is locked behind race, class, and race/class combinations on top of the various other feats required to access that content. Therefore, if you truly wanted to experience everything you would need to play multiple characters of various races and classes to truly be eligible to experience everything.
I would like to see a scenario where even years later there is still some content that players hadn't accessed or only very few have and it's impossible to know-how based on the hidden requirements. I think that this adds an air of mystery to the game and allows for people to still be able to discover hidden content years later.
Hegenox said:Moderate at the beginning and growing with each expansion.
All of these together pretty much cover my outlook.
The world should be large enough..
So that not every square foot needs to be filled with danger.
So that there is diversity in regions.
So that being on the other side seems like your a long way from home.
So choices involving locations matter and take consideration.
So we feel that sense of awe and wonder when we do encounter a new region.
Yes, the world should be large (not just *feel* large, even).
The challenge of getting to some places should be that it takes a long time, at least part of it. Not everything needs to be about being able to slaughter your way there quickly.
Even with things needing to be broken into 2 hour chunks, you could still have places that take a (relatively) long time to travel to so it's a real and impactful decision.
disposalist said:Yes, the world should be large (not just *feel* large, even).
The challenge of getting to some places should be that it takes a long time, at least part of it. Not everything needs to be about being able to slaughter your way there quickly.
Even with things needing to be broken into 2 hour chunks, you could still have places that take a (relatively) long time to travel to so it's a real and impactful decision.
I agree the world should be large, large to the point it cannot be traversed from end to end in a two hour session without help (druid or wiz port). I understand the dev's desire for "something can be accomplished in 2 hours" but I'm sure they don't mean ANYTHING can be accomplished in 2 hours.
For scate, I would like to see the run from any major city to another taking the 2 hours Dev. Tare time.... this would put the run from one side of a continent to the opposite side of another at 4-5 hours... THAT to me is a "world"
Counterfleche said: Zone boundaries play a big part in how big a world feels. When a zone is mostly walled in with only a few passable routes to other zones, the world feels small and segregated, and sometimes even claustrophobic (Guild Wars II is like this). A truly open world will let you head off in virtually any direction and travel for great distances. Yes, there will be some impassible areas, but zones won't be artificially boxed in. Players should be able to travel by compass heading (with deviations around things like mountains) instead of playing connect-the-dots navigation from zone boundary gap to zone boundary gap.
That is an interesting point I never really considered. I tend to compare this to EQ (like many others) and EQ was definitely boxed in like you describe. A zone surrounded by impassible mountains with a single gap at some point that allowed you to travel through the mountain into a different zone.
Hmmmmmm
Counterfleche said: A truly open world will let you head off in virtually any direction and travel for great distances. Yes, there will be some impassible areas, but zones won't be artificially boxed in. Players should be able to travel by compass heading (with deviations around things like mountains) instead of playing connect-the-dots navigation from zone boundary gap to zone boundary gap.
An excellent point. If I remember correctly, one of the 'selling points' about Vanguard was that wherever you happened to be, 'anyplace you can see, you can go to'. Just start running and (assuming you survive the trip) you will get there.
I believe Pantheon is following the same ethos. I certainly hope so.