14 Dec, 2009, Confuto wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts on world size and how much is too much (or too little, for that matter).

Obviously this is a little different from game to game, but my game uses rooms and I distinguish between the main areas of the world (cities, roads and surrounds) and the adventuring areas (dungeons, etc). I'm not really concerned with the number or size of adventuring areas (the more the merrier!) but the main area of the world is (for the most part) where players will be engaging in PvP, roleplaying, and doing other multi-player activities. As such, I'd like for them to bump into one another fairly regularly, but at the same time I don't want a terribly small world.

So how big is too big? Is there a point to having a particularly large world if everyone's just going to hang around one part of it? Do players look down on games that don't have those 30,000+ room counts?
14 Dec, 2009, Lyanic wrote in the 2nd comment:
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I don't think players look down on a MUD that has 30k rooms. I think they do look down on a MUD that has 3k (or fewer) rooms. I say a bigger world is always better, even if people just hang out in a small subsection of it. After all, who knows when they'll all suddenly get the urge to go off together to some distant place they've never been before?
14 Dec, 2009, quixadhal wrote in the 3rd comment:
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It depends a lot on what those rooms are used for. 4000 high quality rooms that are all parts of various adventurers are far superior to 200,000 rooms of wilderness with random encounters at least IMHO.

This is part of the reason I've wanted to build a world using some kind of fractal generated map. I like a good solid wilderness that feels like it goes on forever, because I like to explore. However, I wouldn't count any of those rooms towards my "reported" room count, because they are just filler to give you a sense of space and distance. They serve as the backdrop to the stage. I would implement them as virtual rooms that get auto-described in some manner.

When you wander around the map and find a good place to build a city, cave, whatever… those rooms are the ones you use to tell your story, and give people memorable adventures. For a MUD to be open for business, *I* would want there to be at least 2500 or so of those. To be honest, I think the number of adventures is more important, as some things can be done in very tight quarters, while others may require a more sprawling layout.
14 Dec, 2009, Fizban wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
I am of the view that bigger is better, but ONLY if all of them are of a sufficiently high quality. 3,000 well done rooms is better than 3,000 well done rooms with another 20,000 that are crap. On the other hand 23,000 well done rooms is the best of both worlds.
15 Dec, 2009, Igabod wrote in the 5th comment:
Votes: 0
For the main area of a mud I'd say the size is nowhere near as important as the layout and ease of finding your way around. You are less likely to attract new players if it takes them more than a few minutes to get a good feel for the layout of the main area. This being said though, I do appreciate a main area with a lot of secrets and side roads to be discovered. You just have to make sure all of the important things are easy to find and then you can worry about adding alleys and side roads and other explorers crack. Also, just having easy to find things isn't always good if all of the important things are on opposite sides of town from eachother and it takes you 5 minutes just to walk from the armorer to the weaponsmith.

Just my 15 cents (inflation is a bitch right?)
15 Dec, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 6th comment:
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It seems to me that the appropriate metric is perhaps not merely size but some combination of the following:

- density of players (players per room)
- common area for players to always return to (which would serve as the social hub of the game)
- likelihood of players to bump into each other "in the wild"
- etc.

Density on its own isn't too useful either, I think, because you could have a relatively sparse game but with people who always hang out together. I think that having a strong social hub – with a gameplay-relevant reason for returning to – is rather important. The third point is affected by the number of interesting things to see/do "out there" vs. the amount of filler space in between them. If there are only so-many really interesting things to do, then people are likely to go to one of them when adventuring. (But then again, if you have a huge filler area with nothing in between a relatively small number of interesting places, maybe something else is broken.)
15 Dec, 2009, Scandum wrote in the 7th comment:
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You could create a small accessible world for newbies, and a large challenging world for people who've played for a while. Personally I particularly dislike large worlds where the newbie areas have been randomly mixed in with the high level areas.
15 Dec, 2009, quixadhal wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
If there are only so-many really interesting things to do, then people are likely to go to one of them when adventuring. (But then again, if you have a huge filler area with nothing in between a relatively small number of interesting places, maybe something else is broken.)


This is an interesting point, and it's one that might apply very differently depending on how your plan out and form your world.

Consider, the average MUD world is drawn up and laid out with X adventure areas, typically spaced out so that there's some kind of progression from newbie areas, to low level content, to mid-level content, and finally end-game material. As new things are added, they tend to get tacked onto the edges, so adding a new mid-level zone requires finding the right spot to put it so you don't have to traverse the dangerous high-level wilderness to get there.

OTOH, the model I'm picturing is one where you create the entire world right at the start. Draw a map, use fractals, perlin noise, GSM maps of part of Earth, whatever you like. Then you look around the map and decide where to place your starter areas, and find locations to add more content around them.

That might sound similar, but it's a very different way of doing things. In the former model, if I have a good idea for an ice cavern, and there are no arctic zones, or none that are adjacent to the right level range zones, I have to make a new one. POOF! Out of nowhere, a new chunk of the world comes into being. In the latter model, the arctic areas already exist, but have only wandering monsters. Now, suddenly a cave is discovered.

To me, this keeps people wanting to explore. If you've already walked all over tundra3.zon and found the polar bear village, you know there's no reason to revisit it again. If content is added in-place, filling in unoccupied parts of the existing map, you can't just look at the zone list and know if you've seen everything or not.

Of course, you still have the issue of wanting to place content in such a way that it's a progression… but by having an open world map, people can go around high-level danger zones. I think it's more flexible, and more immersive.
15 Dec, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 9th comment:
Votes: 0
I don't view the models as hugely incompatible, mainly that people tend to proceed a little willy-nilly with the first model. I agree that there should be some coherent game vision for the world, but it's ok to leave some unplanned space around the edges. And it's still ok to add stuff like caves in already-mapped out areas.

Things get tricky when you want to build two cities that are supposed to be far apart, but you don't want to build the scary swamp in between them. You need to either make them artificially close, or put in something very bland in between as filler-that's-not-even-proper-filler.
15 Dec, 2009, JohnnyStarr wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
I would like to play around with an X,Y outer space type area model.
However, I would hate to make the players type each move to traverse the
universe. I thought it would be at least more realistic to use a coordinate
based system that actually required you to wait until you reached your
destination. Kind of like riding a Griffin in WoW, its a great opportunity
to go over your skills, and strategize how to customize your character.

That in itself isn't too difficult, but I do see the need to make areas, or
planets more interactive if you want to give the impression that there is
a large space in between cities. Another approach is the travel / wait system
to where perhaps instead of walking the void, you could use a train
or speeder to get there, in which you have limited access to explore your vehicles
but are forced to wait a few minutes.
15 Dec, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 11th comment:
Votes: 0
If you can deal with the noise, the 'Movement' thread covers some of these issues Johnny (relating to moving around in large spaces, with individual moves vs. landmark-/coord-based movement). You can probably stop reading when we start talking about graphics and movement, if you only care about the movement part itself.
15 Dec, 2009, quixadhal wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
Yes, there are plenty of tricks you can use for long distance travel.

In a fantasy setting, portals (provided by mage guilds in the city) are an easy method. In sci-fi, shuttles would do the same. The main catch is that you have to still provide an incentive for people to explore overland as well. If you connect two cities and put all your content right next to them, nobody will have any reason to walk the distance and find the ruins you stuck out there. :)
15 Dec, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 13th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
If you connect two cities and put all your content right next to them, nobody will have any reason to walk the distance and find the ruins you stuck out there. :)

Unless, of course, the Great Sword of Awesomeness +10 can only be found in the ruins :smile:
16 Dec, 2009, Confuto wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
Hrm… so it would seem, then, that the important things are that the world is of sufficient quality and there's enough to do in it. I think it's generally accepted that a small world is one with only a few thousand rooms. Does that seem like a lot to anyone else? I think even a 500 room world can be large enough if there's a particularly high density of interesting content in it.

A project I found pretty interesting was The Harrowing - an overview of the thing is here. Unfortunately it's now defunct.
16 Dec, 2009, Chris Bailey wrote in the 15th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
quixadhal said:
If you connect two cities and put all your content right next to them, nobody will have any reason to walk the distance and find the ruins you stuck out there. :)

Unless, of course, the Great Sword of Awesomeness +10 can only be found in the ruins :smile:


Like Morrowind? You can opt to to ride a giant flea to another city, but you miss out on all the pretty scenery and the opportunity to explore ruins using the crappiest first person combat system I have ever witnessed. (Game is still cool though!)
16 Dec, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 16th comment:
Votes: 0
Chris Bailey said:
Like Morrowind? You can opt to to ride a giant flea to another city, but you miss out on all the pretty scenery and the opportunity to explore ruins using the crappiest first person combat system I have ever witnessed.

Yes, that's the idea. Morrowind (and Oblivion) give you very strong incentives to visit places along the way. The side quests that can be found in the middle of nowhere (like Daedra shrines) are another reason to go out and find things.

I didn't find the combat system so horrible, but maybe I was just used to it. I wasn't expecting to play a twitchy FPS, so perhaps I wasn't calibrating my expectations to a proper FPS.

Confuto said:
I think even a 500 room world can be large enough if there's a particularly high density of interesting content in it.

Given 10 players, this is one player every 50 rooms, if you assume that players are evenly spaced (which is not a realistic assumption IMO). I think that this is small enough that players might be kind of packed one on top of the other – unless of course that's exactly what you want (for a more deathmatchy type of experience, perhaps). Of course, if you're aiming for smaller numbers of players, there's nothing at all wrong with this especially if the content is sufficiently interesting.

Confuto said:
Hrm… so it would seem, then, that the important things are that the world is of sufficient quality and there's enough to do in it.

Your OP was asking a question about world size with players bumping into each other as a criterion for success. You can make a very large, very high-quality world with all kinds of interesting things to do, and not achieve that goal of sufficient player closeness.

Of course, it's extremely hard to predict what your playerbase will be ahead of time. Perhaps the best is to have buffer content available in case you need to make the world bigger to accommodate more players, while being able to keep the world of a 'satisfactory' size (for whatever definition of satisfactory is appropriate).
16 Dec, 2009, Brinson wrote in the 17th comment:
Votes: 0
A smaller world forces interraction. I'm a fan of this.
16 Dec, 2009, shasarak wrote in the 18th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
That might sound similar, but it's a very different way of doing things. In the former model, if I have a good idea for an ice cavern, and there are no arctic zones, or none that are adjacent to the right level range zones, I have to make a new one. POOF! Out of nowhere, a new chunk of the world comes into being. In the latter model, the arctic areas already exist, but have only wandering monsters. Now, suddenly a cave is discovered.

To me, this keeps people wanting to explore. If you've already walked all over tundra3.zon and found the polar bear village, you know there's no reason to revisit it again. If content is added in-place, filling in unoccupied parts of the existing map, you can't just look at the zone list and know if you've seen everything or not.

Of course, you still have the issue of wanting to place content in such a way that it's a progression… but by having an open world map, people can go around high-level danger zones. I think it's more flexible, and more immersive.

The idea of creating a large, initially empty, world and connecting new zones into geographically appropriate areas is a good one; but I'm not so sure I like the idea of having to continually explore and re-explore every single part of the MUD just in case something new might have popped up in a familiar area since you last visited. If the location of new zones is publically advertised, that's fine, but it's no fun at all constantly re-exploring places you've already explored and (most of the time) not finding anything new.
16 Dec, 2009, quixadhal wrote in the 19th comment:
Votes: 0
True. I'm a fan of doing things like that through story, so rather than having "goblin camp (10-15)" just pop up in the "area" list, or having a big login banner plastering it, I'd probably link the area in and then have some NPC's talking about the goblin raiders that have been spotted out by some nearby lake. Gradually have more NPC's talk about it, or have other clues start showing up, until players find it and start exploring it themselves.

I'm don't cater to people who don't read room descriptions, or who insist on running around in brief mode with auto-everything turned on. To me, that's coddling and driving content by the lowest common denominator. It works great for primary school, or when you're trying to get 12 million paying subscribers, but not so good for me. :)
16 Dec, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 20th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
or when you're trying to get 12 million paying subscribers

Yeah, I can't possibly see why anybody would want that… :tongue:
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