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?

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.

From what I have read this is what Mortal Online is doing

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.

Yeah money is a problem. Guess Blizzard is the only company that would be able to pull it off. It would be successful too, just by putting their name on it that would get at least 5million subs to start out.

Originally posted by Mazin

From what I have read this is what Mortal Online is doing

I doubt mortal online is big enough to be called massive. Though from what I have read it is a step in the right direction. Too bad it is first person (can't personally stand it for rpgs).

Actually there are games out there with truly huge game worlds.

Most notably EVE has probably the biggest contextual game "world" in that it's literally an entire galaxy with realistic style distances. I also believe WW2Online has a pretty big game area, I may be wrong but I think it was either 1/2 or full scale map of europe. Vanguard also has a pretty expansive game world if I remember correctly.  You just have to look for them.

Of course, it's all relative though. Once you get a truely huge game world, people start complaining about how much time they have to spend traveling rather than fighting or crafting or other fun stuff. Eventually you spend a lot of time just getting from one place to another, and that can get tedious. Sure it could take you 3 hours to walk across the game map in Fallout 3, but there's a reason they put in the ability to hop around from places you've been before.

There is a game like that already out. It is called Asheron's Call. It is huge. Alot of dungeons in the middle of nowhere.

SWG has quite a lot of terrain to travel, the problem is, that most of it is boring as hell. I prefer small interesting game space opposed to massive boring game space.

It would be awesome if developers could actually make a large interesting world though. Although, a problem with making many landmarks/static buildings/dungeons/etc, is that it leaves no room for player buildings, assuming the game has them.

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?

Because it won't be fun. I am not playing a game that requires me to walk hours before I see something interesting and i don't want to fight generic random generated mobs. I want professionally designed quests an encounters.

Massive != good. The sahara desert is massive but i highly doubt you want to go there to play.

People would argue against the long travel times, but perhaps if they made each other their own little country where you didnt "need" to travel to another. Such as a person living in europe never having been to austrailia. Sure you can if you want to take the time and travel survival or achievement is not based on that.

It'll happen eventually.

The genre is still in it's early stages; we're only 10 years on from the pioneers of the modern genre like UO/EQ, and although it is progressing rapidly, one can't expect a perfect, massive, immersive game world already .. we'll be lucky to see one in our lifetimes.

A big part of Fallout 3 is instanced though.

I can fly across the F3 wastelands in 10 mins with my jetpack anyway.

Technology is still not advanced enough to make this fluid for really large crowds. The problem is the millions of triangles and their respective textures that have to fit into your RAM. When a person walks by, everything they are wearing has to be rendered and re-rendered, a long with everyone else running around. And then their is removal of meshes/textures that are blocked because someone/something is between you and that object...and then reflections have to be calculated, shadows, stencil shaders, lighting transforms,  etc...

They can't store all of that on the hard drive and then load it when a person walks by, because that takes too long. They have to cram as much as possible into video RAM  and your system RAM so that it can be accessed lightning quick.

Now multiply all of this times thousands of players moving among each other. Anarchy Online attempted this in 2001. At their height, I believe they said they had 50,000 subs on one server. They had to go back and add sliders to the UI that let you turn off people who were within a certain distance from you. Otherwise, you lagged out or had to stare at the ground, just to walk.

I enjoy lengthy realistic travel times. More to see, more opportunity to meet new people.

Actually, I expect to see a fundamental change in how MMORPGs are done in the next 10 to 15 years.

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.

Idd very expensive and very time consuming. Everything would be done independantly not just through a random generator.
 

But as MMO's evolve as a genre i am sure that some game with a massive world will monopolize the community long enough so that world can be created. 

Originally posted by Derol

There is a game like that already out. It is called Asheron's Call. It is huge. Alot of dungeons in the middle of nowhere.

indeed. one of the oldest and still has one of the biggest maps. even when i was playing it, when it was one of the 'big three' of the time, there was a huge area to explore with a lot of things you could just discover through random travelling (i will never forget exploring snowy mountains and coming across the oasis of Crater for the first time).

and with the lack of zones (the only 'zoning' was the local strength of mobs) if felt seemless.

Originally posted by Samuraisword

I enjoy lengthy realistic travel times. More to see, more opportunity to meet new people.

I don't. It seems extremely boring. I play RPG to hack & slash & loot, not to walk around.

Plus, once you walk a path once, the second time would be unbearable boring. Plus, it is easier to have cities/quest hubs to meet people in. It would be worse if I have to stop my long trek somewhere to talk to people.

Originally posted by Cyrussphere

People would argue against the long travel times, but perhaps if they made each other their own little country where you didnt "need" to travel to another. Such as a person living in europe never having been to austrailia. Sure you can if you want to take the time and travel survival or achievement is not based on that.

I like this. You mean like having 5 to 7 different "countries" that you never have to leave because they are so big you can get to level cap, do raids, find resources, travel to cities within the region, without leaving right? But if you really wanted to you could travel to another country to experience their flora and fauna which would be totally different from yours. Maybe you have bonuses in your region because you grew up there but a snake from another country might be extremely deadly to you because you have no immunities. This could be really cool.

Anyways, the main drawback to having a massive world is that people start off  too spread out. Then people say the game is failing because they don't see anyone else around. There have been a few companies that tried to start off with massive worlds but have just failed (not closed down but didn't achieve the sub numbers they expected). Eve is pretty massive and everything is on one server but generating massive amounts of empty space is easy compared to generating say a computer world the size of the Earth. Vanguard and Roma Victor just to name a couple started off with massive worlds and just never really caught on. That's not to say they didn't have other problems but one of them definitely was the travel times due to world size.

Originally posted by Mazin

From what I have read this is what Mortal Online is doing

Oh please. Stop with the MO fanboism.

The only thing massive that MO has is how massive a fail it will be and how massive you can make your penis