Originally posted by metalliham

Originally posted by SnarlingWolf

Originally posted by metalliham

Originally posted by SnarlingWolf

The problem comes down to server power, and PC power.

 

Take a game the size of LotRO, or even as huge as WoW. The amount of processing power needed to have everyone on one shard (since server isn't really the right word as almost every MMO uses multiple servers to power one "world") would be immense.

 

Now you have games like Champions which basically combines all the "Worlds" into one and so you get the city instances if one is too full.

 

 

The other end of the spectrum is PC power. If you genuinely try to get thousands of high poly player characters on screen at a time, most PCs would just choke.

 

 

It's nice to dream, but it's better to have ideas based in the realm of possibilities.

 

Um, guys...

Fallen Earth is a very large, single-server, non-instanced server with thousands of players.

Man, I buy you books, and buy you books...what do you do? You rip out the pages.

 

Yes the entire population is thousands. Other MMOs are hundreds of thousands or millions, thus the huge difference in server power. Most sharded gamessupport thousands of players online at once per world , it's just the fact that FE only needs one to support it's players

 

The game is great and it's always packed.

It was just released a month ago, and you really can't fault a game for not having hundreds of thousands off the bat.

Do you know anything about MMOs? Sheesh!

Wow you are not getting it. It has nothing to do with if Fallen Earth is a good game or not. You are trying to use FE's small population being able to fit in one shard as an example of why every MMO can do it.
 

Fallen Earth's population could fit on a single shard of most other modern MMOs. They didn't figure out some amazing technical feet that all the AAA developers have been missing, they just have a small enough population to keep it all on one world.

But yes we get it you like FE and want everyone to play it but that is not what this thread is about at all.

Originally posted by SnarlingWolf

The problem comes down to server power, and PC power.

 

Take a game the size of LotRO, or even as huge as WoW. The amount of processing power needed to have everyone on one shard (since server isn't really the right word as almost every MMO uses multiple servers to power one "world") would be immense.

 

Now you have games like Champions which basically combines all the "Worlds" into one and so you get the city instances if one is too full.

 

 

The other end of the spectrum is PC power. If you genuinely try to get thousands of high poly player characters on screen at a time, most PCs would just choke.

 

 

It's nice to dream, but it's better to have ideas based in the realm of possibilities.

Welcome to the beautiful world of server-clusters.

One huge world for all the players to play in together sounds great, but not very practical.  Theres the technical limitations of the servers and your own computer as others have mentioned, but there are also gameplay and world design problems with such a proposal.  Its possible with EVE because EVE is in space.  There is not much content to build and fill the world with.  EVE is also basically a series of rooms connected by hallways, characters can not move as freely as most other MMOs and it would take some time to travel from one end of the map to the other.  Try building a more standard fantasy MMO world that can handle 40,000 people at once like EVE.  It would have to be huge and the developers would have to be very smart about how they construct the world to minimize too many players blobbing together.  When I played Asheron's Call I think we had around 2,000 people on at any given time on our server, and even that would sometimes be frustrating.  You'd go to a dungeon with your friends to complete a quest and you'd end up waiting in line to fight the boss.  And Asheron's Call was a pretty big world.  Awesome game by the way.

As for character races, I have no interest in playing anything other than a human.  I think funky character races is a waste of time and resources for the developers.  I'd rather that time and effort go to something more important.  With wildly different player races the work it takes to make a set of armor goes up dramatically.  Then there is more work to do for animations, and more work making sure every building and dungeon and doorway is designed so that none of the characters do any clipping.  With only humans you only have to make one version of each armor set.  Maybe two, for male and female.  Again, pointing to Asheron's Call, I think it was a good call to stick to only human races.  They were Aluvian (European), Gharundim (African/Arab), and Sho (Asian).  They all shared armor sets, animations, and sounds.  They had some small differences in starting skills but nothing major, so most of the time you could choose based on looks and not be forced into a certain class just because of the race (or in this case, ethnicity) you chose.  Thats the way I like it.  Same goes for EVE, all human characters. 

I generally prefer things to be more realistic and subtle, which seems to be at odds with the average MMO player, or average gamer in general actually.  Whenever I play a game with playable fantasy races, my initial impulse is to be human anyway.  The only time I wouldn't be human in this case is if their lore/culture in the game was not agreeable or compatible with my personality.

Originally posted by SnarlingWolf

The problem comes down to server power, and PC power.

...and publishers and billing systems and localized versions and...

 

The other end of the spectrum is PC power. If you genuinely try to get thousands of high poly player characters on screen at a time, most PCs would just choke.

 I don't think anyone is suggesting thousands on screen at a time. A few hundred would definitely rock, though. 

 

It's nice to dream, but it's better to have ideas based in the realm of possibilities.

Fallen Earth, EVE Online and several other games have been designed to support tens of thousands of concurrent users within one game world. Lineage 2 and other Korean MMOs easily support sieges of a few hundred players at once.

You'll be happy to know that the far and distant future you await is not only here, but has been around for well over a half a decade.

Originally posted by Luneth7

''Well then baby, you better train every part of your body'' - Bruce Lee.

An MMORPG should be populated with tons of players and almost every place in the game world should be full of liveliness with players.

Single server, no instancing should be the way MMORPG's are made. It helps bring the community together and create a lively fantasy world.

A variety of interesting and creative races should also be present in MMORPG's of today. A good example is Dark Age of Camelots race selection and Shadowbanes.

Gameplay should be flowing and intuitive. It shouldn't feel overly restrictive or have superfluous complexity.

''I'm talking about a real MMORPG baby, as in one filled with players and life, expression of simplicity and freedom of flowing and community'' - Bruce Lee's Soul







 

OMG... Hibernians!

I miss playing it... if only they hadn't told me to change the names of my characters "Sledge" and "Tremera" because some asshurt Midgar GM's I pwnt decided to flag my names as inappropriate. Abercrombie and Willow were fine for Midgars, though...

Regarding OP topic: If devs weren't so hellbent on the next biggest LENS FLARE eyecandy graphics for games, then I could see this being a possibility. However I do not know the capabilities of one server's tolerance to having all the subs of say, WoW, on one server with no instances, or the limits of bandwidth in how it'd function. *shrugs*

If it's fun, i'd play it.

Originally posted by GreenChaos

I'm sure no developer has ever thought of that before.

And they don't split the population up for technical reasons, they do it just because they haven't read your post yet.

I bet they all feel stupid now.

Gameplay reasons too!  Some people like content density so that it doesn't require excessive travel time between the interesting stuff to do.

Originally posted by SnarlingWolf  

Fallen Earth's population could fit on a single shard of most other modern MMOs. They didn't figure out some amazing technical feet that all the AAA developers have been missing, they just have a small enough population to keep it all on one world.

 But yes we get it you like FE and want everyone to play it but that is not what this thread is about at all.

Its not entirely true what you say. One of the reasons why they have managed to have one server is because they made the gameworld so incredible huge. Atm the overall map is 10 thousand square km, they are only using about 2000 square km of the map atm but that is still a very very large game area so they spread out a big game population on a single server but that server is hosted by scores of machines.

They plan to expand the game until they use 60% of the map but even then they have backup plans so if the population becomes too big they can expand into the other 40% to increase the play area for all levels.

Its not because the population is low that they can have 1 server, its because that server creates a playground there is maybe 10 times larger than most competitive games and maybe 50 to a 100 times larger than a game like CO or AoC.

Originally posted by afoaa

Originally posted by SnarlingWolf  

Fallen Earth's population could fit on a single shard of most other modern MMOs. They didn't figure out some amazing technical feet that all the AAA developers have been missing, they just have a small enough population to keep it all on one world.

 But yes we get it you like FE and want everyone to play it but that is not what this thread is about at all.

Its not entirely true what you say. One of the reasons why they have managed to have one server is because they made the gameworld so incredible huge. Atm the overall map is 10 thousand square km, they are only using about 2000 square km of the map atm but that is still a very very large game area so they spread out a big game population on a single server but that server is hosted by scores of machines.

They plan to expand the game until they use 60% of the map but even then they have backup plans so if the population becomes too big they can expand into the other 40% to increase the play area for all levels.

Its not because the population is low that they can have 1 server, its because that server creates a playground there is maybe 10 times larger than most competitive games and maybe 50 to a 100 times larger than a game like CO or AoC.

Yes and wait until there's enough people in the pvp area to have 200v200 battles and watch the server melt just like it did in SWG. It's fine and dandy when the players are spread out, it usually was in SWG as well. The second a fight broke out in a busy cantina/ starport or between two large guilds, the server would simply crash. I've noticed a lot of similarities in regards to performance in early SWG and FE. I wouldn't doubt if performance was similar in regards to large scale pvp.

Originally posted by Malickie : Yes and wait until there's enough people in the pvp area to have 200v200 battles and watch the server melt just like it did in SWG. It's fine and dandy when the players are spread out, it usually was in SWG as well. The second a fight broke out in a busy cantina/ starport or between two large guilds, the server would simply crash. I've noticed a lot of similarities in regards to performance in early SWG and FE. I wouldn't doubt if performance was similar in regards to large scale pvp.

Heh no it won't crash the server, it crashes people's clients. Problem is already there now in PvP, fight for 1 hour in a battle with maybe 30-40 people and your client simply shuts down because of memory leak.

I can only imagine that if you had 200 vs. 200 then everyone would crash every 2-3 min and since a raid leader has to manually invite relogs constantly then it will impossible to maintain a force under those conditions.

http://www.fallenearth.com/node/45

This?

I play EVE and enjoy a single game environment, however its not practical to think this model could be sustained by anything other than a niche game.

Can't see someone creating a single world that say, 1-2M people could enjoy, at some point you'd have to go to multiple server clusters.

I do like  a variety of races and classes in fantasy MMO's, and even EVE would really rock if you could play an alien race.

The aspect I like about a single server with no instancing is that the game world will be full of players which will result in a lively atmosphere. Where as with lots of mulitple servers, in most games the population is really spread out and only a couple zones / towns have a healthy population and a lot of other places are ghost towns, especially with older games. But this is also a problem in game design, when you make level advancement relational to tiered zones, then you have towns and zones that become very dead, where as in games like Ultima Online It wasn't like that and Britannia and Moonglow were always alive with tons of people.

I don't need t0 play with 10,000 players on one server. I can't interact with them all.

DAoC works fine, about 3K on a server.

single server mmo are the best thing if there are several servers there will be one underpopulated all the time and on long run the game will bleed players because of that

Originally posted by afoaa

Originally posted by Malickie : Yes and wait until there's enough people in the pvp area to have 200v200 battles and watch the server melt just like it did in SWG. It's fine and dandy when the players are spread out, it usually was in SWG as well. The second a fight broke out in a busy cantina/ starport or between two large guilds, the server would simply crash. I've noticed a lot of similarities in regards to performance in early SWG and FE. I wouldn't doubt if performance was similar in regards to large scale pvp.

Heh no it won't crash the server, it crashes people's clients. Problem is already there now in PvP, fight for 1 hour in a battle with maybe 30-40 people and your client simply shuts down because of memory leak.

I can only imagine that if you had 200 vs. 200 then everyone would crash every 2-3 min and since a raid leader has to manually invite relogs constantly then it will impossible to maintain a force under those conditions.

 

It depends on the area mostly, as I've been in groups with 20+ people PVPing (no clue on how many were on either side, but my group had 13 at least).  I would guess that higher end computers have less of a problem as far as client side problems.  For instance in a town I can easily see 40+ people on my screen (oilville anyone?) and since oilville is already hopping with tons of NPCs and activity, I could definitely see that being a big crash point for lower end clients as it is.

But out in the open, like the outskirts of a conflict town or something, I could see a decently sized battle with minimal crashing.

Originally posted by Burtzum

One huge world for all the players to play in together sounds great, but not very practical.  Theres the technical limitations of the servers and your own computer as others have mentioned, but there are also gameplay and world design problems with such a proposal.  Its possible with EVE because EVE is in space.  There is not much content to build and fill the world with.  EVE is also basically a series of rooms connected by hallways, characters can not move as freely as most other MMOs and it would take some time to travel from one end of the map to the other.  Try building a more standard fantasy MMO world that can handle 40,000 people at once like EVE.  It would have to be huge and the developers would have to be very smart about how they construct the world to minimize too many players blobbing together.  When I played Asheron's Call I think we had around 2,000 people on at any given time on our server, and even that would sometimes be frustrating.  You'd go to a dungeon with your friends to complete a quest and you'd end up waiting in line to fight the boss.  And Asheron's Call was a pretty big world.  Awesome game by the way.

As for character races, I have no interest in playing anything other than a human.  I think funky character races is a waste of time and resources for the developers.  I'd rather that time and effort go to something more important.  With wildly different player races the work it takes to make a set of armor goes up dramatically.  Then there is more work to do for animations, and more work making sure every building and dungeon and doorway is designed so that none of the characters do any clipping.  With only humans you only have to make one version of each armor set.  Maybe two, for male and female.  Again, pointing to Asheron's Call, I think it was a good call to stick to only human races.  They were Aluvian (European), Gharundim (African/Arab), and Sho (Asian).  They all shared armor sets, animations, and sounds.  They had some small differences in starting skills but nothing major, so most of the time you could choose based on looks and not be forced into a certain class just because of the race (or in this case, ethnicity) you chose.  Thats the way I like it.  Same goes for EVE, all human characters. 

I generally prefer things to be more realistic and subtle, which seems to be at odds with the average MMO player, or average gamer in general actually.  Whenever I play a game with playable fantasy races, my initial impulse is to be human anyway.  The only time I wouldn't be human in this case is if their lore/culture in the game was not agreeable or compatible with my personality.

About the huge maps: I love that, especially when it takes hours to travel from one side to another