General Discussion

Let's assume that the world is a complete one when I talk about how large it is, not just one with huge tracks of open land with nothing on it.

For most gamers, bigger is better and there is so much work required just to build a small corner of an MMO that it's hard to imagine this ever becoming an issue.  A classic example is Vanguard, but so much of that world was empty that I count that one as being incomplete when it was released.  If it had been done, I think its size would have been perfect.

So from that perspective, I guess I answered my own question.  If VG's world had been made much larger, even if it had been completed, it would have been too big.  But since it wasn't done, that just proves how difficult it is to make a large finished world.  Are there any online world's out there that are complete that someone thinks is too big?

Youd have to say that it all depends on the specific MMO and the design of the game world.  I think a massive game world could work out well, if content and populations are concentrated in specific areas.  Darkfall (yea yea, dont derail the thread) sounded like the type of MMO that could reallt make use of a large game world.  The typical quest train, them park MMO, on the other hand, would not benefit from having a large world.

The size of SWG was what really kept me playing that game, despite the fact that "content" was quite a bit lacking.  Of course, swg needed that big of a world to support the resource harvesting system, which has been unmatched to me in any other MMO I've played.  Add in player cities and player housing, and there's good reasons why a large world does not need to be completely populated with quests and tons of mobs to be a neat place to play in.  Some people hate the vast amount of nothingness, but to me the exploration factor was the best part of the game. 

Yeah, I really miss a super large world.  :( 

It is possible to make an online world too big if there is a severe lack of decent and fast player transportation.

Altho I do believe that bigger is better in this case SWG was a great example of how vastness worked out. 

The factor I'm most worried about when making huge persistent worlds is size vs travel time. No one likes to spend alot of time doing nothing ie just traveling to one place from another.

A game world can be too big if the player spends too much time traveling.

But thats not a question of game size, thats a question of how much a player has to travel and how fast travel is.

And it depends upon what kind of gameplay you are planning to offer.

A game where you want to spend a lot of time exploring areas and looking for well hidden quests, where you do most quests solo or expect players to party with each other for a long time, will need more space than a game where you expect people to handle questlogs with 100 quests and teleporting all the time between different areas for their level.

There is no point in making the game world big if you aren't going to make it look decent or fill it with content.

AC 1 had a load of empty space you had to run through, pretty lame.  However if you have a giant empty space with the possibility for players to fill it with their own property that is different.

Guild Wars world is quite big... will take ages for me to discover it all for my Legendary Cartographer title. But basically the question could also, in my opinion, be posed as "Is it possible to have a too few MMO subscribers in comparison to the world?" The answer to that is of course yes. When a world becomes so big that you can run for hours without even encountering a single other player it's too big, but of course it's not good when you run into hordes of players all over the place. As with all things, balance is the best way to go; thus the world can be too big.

I wont be happy untill the day I can head east and eventually wrap around to where I started. Of course they would have to downsize the over all planet size to a point where the gravity would not be realistic but it still would be great to have a round world.

Indeed.  Vanguard probed that point.  A huge map, with a small pop = problems for people LFG.

If you have a giganteous interesting map, well populated, it can be lots of fun. But the odds to have everything is low.

No one like small maps, but everybody want his friends and a general vendor.

Maybe. I think as an above poster pointed out, the bigger the world the more you're going to split the players. Though, in Everquest there are so many zones so what the developers have done are 'hot zones' which keep people more together- so there are ways.

Incidentally, I thought WoW was too small weirdly. The Gryphon rides sort of shrunk it.

Originally posted by Zindaihas

Let's assume that the world is a complete one when I talk about how large it is, not just one with huge tracks of open land with nothing on it.

For most gamers, bigger is better and there i