Vanguard by far is the best one currently i can think of...They have added several modes of transportation to help with travel.. Which in all honesty you need. In all honesty not having a riftway system in Vanguard sucked. It sucked having to wait an hour and a half to have your friends get to you to actually be able to do quests and such together..

But ya Vanguard is Massive. The rift system has made it seem alot smaller but still its massive.

Originally posted by BioNut

 

The title asked the main question but I'll elaborate.

There are a lot of cool games out there and many with really great looking worlds. LoTRO comes to mind as a masterpiece of world building and even AoC has some very pretty, yet small, environments. But no modern games have really "massive" worlds. Some are bigger than others but even LoTRO can be traversed in 30 minutes on horseback.

I was playing fallout 3 the other day when I came to a realization that I would love an MMO that made me feel that thrill of adventure that F3 does.  I want a game that takes place on a single island and takes you at least 3 hours to traverse. Give it some big cities and some small towns. Sprinkle in a lot of hidden "gems" that only a seasoned adventurer would find. Make it big enough that even though 1000s are on the server you rarely run across more than 5 people doing the same thing in the wilderness.

I want randomly generated mobs of randomly generated levels. I want to feel the thrill of adventure when a fellowship of my friends sets out into the unkown to accomplish a goal.

Give me story quests that matter and allow me to take repeatable job quests that don't. With that said everything should be optional.

 

Why does creating a living breathing world scare away investors? Would it not be profitable to be the first to do something so massive? Will we ever see something on this scale?

I think counting out LOTRO like that is not entirely fair. It has tremendously grown since it launched, and technically you can cross any world in 30 min, maybe outside of UO. It just is not entirely my sort of game.

However, as much as I'd love to see it, I don't think we will see those massive world games in any time I can see. There does not seem to be any MMO in the making to fit that idea. SWG was the only one I experienced which met that idea for me. ^^

My problem is the mmorpgs all seperate the zones like EQ2 where you click on bells and stuff so what would be a large world feels like a set of maps.

Originally posted by veritas_X

Originally posted by BioNut

Why does creating a living breathing world scare away investors?

 

Because the masses would rather be on level treadmills.  And because doing what you're talking about would be unbelievably expensive.

I'd like to see it happen too, but I seriously doubt it will happen in an mmorpg.  I'm more inclined to believe an experience like that will happen on a private server run by competent admins.

Veritas_X: What if the very gods of our reality were behind such a massive world game? They care not for money; they have tremendous amount of effort and power at their disposal to create entire worlds in the blink of an eye; for the heaven's sake they have all living beings programed in real time. (That's right, even you and I.) Imagining that such a game world could be crafted by the most vibrant minds in reality without care for cost is workable. Also, I should note that for production of content to fill such a massive game world is also in their grast; they do the best stories. Hell they even did cartoons in my head that were first-rate.

But as to when we'd be able to play such a game? Maybe in our next life. :)

Of mainstream games Vanguard might be the largest with actual content.  SWG would be bigger technically but most of the terrain is empty and lifeless.

Dark and lIght probably had the biggest land mass but then again it holds the title for worst game ever made.

For games in development Alganon might be what you are looking for.  Check out the maps.  The world appears to be absolutely huge.  But keep in mind its a low budget game that will likely be released with a rather small amount of content.

You want a truly massive game world? First off if you tried to run all over Asheron's Call without using portals it would take forever, it is pretty big and it isn't instanced or zoned.

Second, people complain on every game that exists that it takes too long to get where they want to go. So if you made the game worlds bigger you'd just get more complaints. People say they want massive worlds but they don't, because those same people want to be where ever they want instantly.

 i think what the op meant is a big seamless world that is actually interesting to be in, i could quite happily run around in tortage for hours just because of it's beauty if you could translate that into a large seamless world it would be great, where just getting to the next city is a quest in it's self

if they could make it  seem immersive at the same time as being huge then that could make it work

Originally posted by Cyborg99

Daggerfall is the largest land based game area according to the Guinness book of world records gamer edition. It's 163,492 square kilometres (63,125 square miles), which is roughly the size of two Great Britain's.

However, the biggest gameworld ever will be some flight simulator that simulates the whole world, albeit in very low quality.
 

 

I don't want to get OT for the thread but I have already done a lot of work on 'world size'.

"Miles" and "Kilometres" are meaningless measures.

Thread here http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/2591865#2591865

With links to other threads.

if you want a big place, that takes a long time to explore then, WoW is the game for you!

even with your flying mount you wont be able to travel from outlands, to azeroth to northrend in under 4 hrs. 

.

A massive world after a point would require random generation, which would suck a lot of ass for an MMO. It means that the content is just random, has no real meaning and it would feel a lot like oblivion where they just have the random ass caves around. Exploring in oblivion was not fun for me because it was just the same randomly generated dungeons with a different path, boring.

It would be nice but technology just doesn't allow for someone to create something like that, unless you want it to take forever to come out. Personally I want a game to be a good experience, not me wandering around bumfuck nowhere trying to find something to do.

Originally posted by Shoju

Then don't play the game, it is really that simple.

Well, that's a hell of a business strategy.  It just might work!  We'll make our game so boring, nobody will play it! And then we'll make tons of money!

Originally posted by BioNut

 

The title asked the main question but I'll elaborate.

There are a lot of cool games out there and many with really great looking worlds. LoTRO comes to mind as a masterpiece of world building and even AoC has some very pretty, yet small, environments. But no modern games have really "massive" worlds. Some are bigger than others but even LoTRO can be traversed in 30 minutes on horseback.

I was playing fallout 3 the other day when I came to a realization that I would love an MMO that made me feel that thrill of adventure that F3 does.  I want a game that takes place on a single island and takes you at least 3 hours to traverse. Give it some big cities and some small towns. Sprinkle in a lot of hidden "gems" that only a seasoned adventurer would find. Make it big enough that even though 1000s are on the server you rarely run across more than 5 people doing the same thing in the wilderness.

I want randomly generated mobs of randomly generated levels. I want to feel the thrill of adventure when a fellowship of my friends sets out into the unkown to accomplish a goal.

Give me story quests that matter and allow me to take repeatable job quests that don't. With that said everything should be optional.

 

Why does creating a living breathing world scare away investors? Would it not be profitable to be the first to do something so massive? Will we ever see something on this scale?

As a game designer i can tell you, yes in theory this is awesome, but in reallity is not, it costs alot of money to make this games, 

Some mmos are already pretty massive, by 10-15 years ago standards.. today mmos are massive. In the future mmos will be bigger for sure.

Here is my analysis, the gaming industry is in a standby, is not that investors are scared, there is alot of risk on making an mmo and any game in general.  You might think is profitable, but it involves so many risks, the invesment is not worth it since the risks are bigger than the chances of profit.

The mmo genre is a slow one compared to others, since it takes so much man power to create a good mmo. It costs alot of money to make a good mmo. So eventually the mmo genre will improve more and more.. Hell one day we will have virtual reality

**crosses fingers***

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Originally posted by bonobotheory

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Originally posted by Shoju

Then don't play the game, it is really that simple.

---

Well, that's a hell of a business strategy.  It just might work!  We'll make our game so boring, nobody will play it! And then we'll make tons of money!

---

nonono, you misunderstand bono. The best way to make a game is to have it appeal to 3,000 people :). That's almost a server, right?

Originally posted by Pro_Pwnerer

if you want a big place, that takes a long time to explore then, WoW is the game for you!

even with your flying mount you wont be able to travel from outlands, to azeroth to northrend in under 4 hrs. 

Fly to Shattrath, take a portal to Stormwind or Orgrimmar, take a boat or zeppelin to Northrend. Five minutes.

Or go through the dark portal, take the gryphon from Nethergarde to Stormwind or the Wyvern from Stonard to Undercity, then take the boat or zeppelin to Northrend. Ten minutes.

I think if they were going to make a truly massive game world they would need to release it in stages.

The first area might be as big as World of Warcraft's world, with tonnes of quests to participate in and plenty to do, and a decent reason for why you can't go into the other game world areas (perhaps there's military tensions between the areas with big blockades set up in choke points).

Then as the game goes along, they could release new areas of the game world. The reason for doing this is because having a massive game world on release is a big risk. You need to have alot of expense in programming and design and huge investment in server infrastructure for all players to be able to play all over the game world. Furthermore, you have the problem of having your starting subscribers being too spread out, so they won't get the whole MMO feel either.

By releasing the game region by region, you essentially limit your risk - if subscriber numbers are too low, you can hold off the release of the next region and focus your development on adding content to the first region. If subscriber numbers skyrocket, then you can focus development resources on perfecting the next section of the game for release. Staged release gives the developers inherent options that they otherwise wouldn't have, and those options increase the total worth of project, making it easier to attract investors.

 well the world of eve is far more massive then all the other mmos put together, honestly every system in eve is bigger then all of wow in cubic miles, you can fly at 1500 km/second and it takes hours to cross a system at that speed. there are hundreds of these systems, and wormholes added a ton more, even with warp drives it takes days to cross said universe from 1 end to the other.  i dont really care for eve myself, the combat is too simplistic for me to love, but the world they put you in is truely massive.

Originally posted by neorandom

 well the world of eve is far more massive then all the other mmos put together, ... it takes hours to cross a system at that speed. ... it takes days to cross said universe from 1 end to the other.  ... but the world they put you in is truely massive.

Have you actually done this yourself?

I ask because in other thread today another poster claimed to have (almost) crossed the entire EvE universe in 4 hours.

You could easily have a massive game world if there's not much in it.

If you have a massive game world with lots in it then the players would get too spread out.

I think the compromise would be densely packed areas and wilderness areas. The densely packed areas would be for the bulk of the players while the wilderness areas would be mostly for people who were doing solo stuff anyway i.e gathering crafting supplies or specific quests for people who liked exploring that were flagged up in advance i.e a quest chain that specifically stated they involved massive travelling. That way people who liked huge wilderness areas could get their fix and/or get their rare crafting supplies while everyone else could stick in the densely packed areas.

 everquest had a massive world that had zones people never even went to 

I loved Oblivions world because you could do any content when you pleased and that would work well in an mmorpg as it did with SWG because your friends can jump in and play with you straight away. Only problem with Oblivion is it didn't offer any skill progression or anything like SWG so people didn't like the lack of character progression.

Originally posted by John.A.Zoid

I loved Oblivions world because you could do any content when you pleased and that would work well in an mmorpg as it did with SWG because your friends can jump in and play with you straight away. Only problem with Oblivion is it didn't offer any skill progression or anything like SWG so people didn't like the lack of character progression.

the thing about Oblivion was that monsters scaled to your level 

Regarding technological capacity to create huge worlds of high detail, it's already here. The entire gameworld doesn't get loaded into RAM all at once. It streams in and out relative to where you are. Think about WoW for a moment. Ever notice how all the entrances to cities are the same layout? They have that "divider wall" thingy that you have to walk around to get inside. Likewise for highly detailed interiors, such as the Cathedrel in Stormwind.  They're designed so that once inside, you can't look outside, because the game "unloads" the outside scenery from RAM in order to load the city detail. The same goes with landscaping, but on a broader scale. In the simplest terms, if you can't see it from where you are, it's not loaded into RAM.

So, based on this, you could theoretically create a game world that's 1:1 scale with the earth, as long as the environments had natural visual borders, like mountain ranges, etc. to create "pockets" of data to be loaded into RAM at any one time. I'm not talking about instancing, either, as the data streams through RAM as you move around the area, and from area to area. This is exactly how WoW's "overland" world works.

The limitation isn't so much technological as it is practical. How much money and man-hours would it take to create a world the size of the earth and fill it with enough detail  to make it interesting? That's the roadblock. MMO world sizes are merely the product of practical limitations.

Originally posted by Gyrus

Originally posted by neorandom

 well the world of eve is far more massive then all the other mmos put together, ... it takes hours to cross a system at that speed. ... it takes days to cross said universe from 1 end to the other.  ... but the world they put you in is truely massive.

Have you actually done this yourself?

I ask because in other thread today another poster claimed to have (almost) crossed the entire EvE universe in 4 hours.

I forget what the official word on Eve is but I know it's supposed to be so massive that if you tried to go from one end to the other by regular spaceflgiht it would take weeks, but its completely empty space. Also Eve has jump gates which gets you places quickly. Maybe an Eve player can shed some light on this. All I know is what I have read as I have never played.

Well, EverQuest was pretty massive.  It took many hours just to travel across Antonica from Qeynos to Freeport, and that was just one continent.  Of course add teleports and it changes things.  Plane of Knowledge removed travel from the game so now it seems smaller.

Point is, there already are games that are massive