Jul 26
Quick straw poll
In World of Warcraft and most other major MMORPGs, large cities are much larger than they ought to be, according to the scale of the world. By this I mean that the inside of Ironforge is substantially larger than it appears from the outside, Stormwind is nearly as big as the whole region it’s ostensibly inside (probably now larger, since Stormwind has been expanded to include a port), etc.
One of the perks you could earn in the 1.1 development branch of MMORPG Tycoon was being able to create “capital cities”. From a game mechanics point of view, “capital cities”, while very expensive to build, would provide all the services of each of the other building types (taverns, quest-givers, inns, auction houses, etc), and existed within their own server instances, which meant that they didn’t contribute toward the network limitations imposed on the regions they were in.
I’m planning in 2.0 to have similar rules about capital cities, but I’m interested in whether people would like their capital cities to be fully built out to proper MMORPG-style scale, or whether that would just get in the way, and the cities should be built to the same compressed scale as the surrounding world. In practice, under the “full scale” approach, a capital city would be a type of region; so instead of marking your region as wilderness that contains monsters of levels 1-5, you’d mark the region as “city”, and it would be filled up with roads and buildings, including the necessary “useful” feature buildings. Once built, you’d be able to walk around inside the city (though not inside the buildings inside the city). Under the “compressed scale” approach, the capital city would be a single (large) block of city geometry. It would be much much smaller in expanse, and you would not be able to enter it or see what was happening inside. On the other hand, it would take much less time to walk past, and wouldn’t be as expensive to draw, so would be better for people with old graphic cards.
Anybody have thoughts on which way they’d prefer?
July 26th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
I think that “proper” cities would be excessive, especially if the player is tasked with creating the layouts for them. My impression is that MMORPG Tycoon is more about large-scale balancing, rather than micromanaging the details. Even if the player is not so engaged in the building process, it sounds as if this would essentially be an eye candy sort of thing. Not that that’s bad, of course.
Also, WoW cities bigger than they appear? I’ll grant that the internal scale is much greater than the rest of the world, but it’s not like Ironforge is poking out of the mountain (well, except in the mundane there’s-gotta-be-a-way-in sense).
July 26th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
I think it would be awesome if we could make arbitrary “gates” or “portals” to “interior” zones that could be either cities or dungeons, and have no relation whatever to the overworld.
July 26th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
I like the idea of having regions which make up cities and think it would look amazing. The only downside I can think of is the one you pointed out being that older cards would have a problem with drawing it all.
So I suggest that somehow you put the ideas together:
Maybe you could have the single piece of world geometry like in the older versions but double clicking on it would allow you to go into a sort of sub world inhabited by the geometry of the city which you can then proceed to walk around in. Thus solving the problem of low level graphics cards and allowing the people who want it to have the pretty large city bits when they want to see them. This also means that the city part can be left out of the initial release and put in later once you have a better idea of how to do it (if you don’t have an idea yet).
I have also presumed that the capital city layouts are generated and not planned out by the player.
July 26th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
I should clarify that my approach for developing MMORPG Tycoon 2 is that everything (apart from raw mesh) is to be editable and placeable by the player, and to then write procedural generation code to automate the creation of the things which the player doesn’t want to do himself. So the player could set roads in his city and leave the AI to create the buildings, or place buildings and leave the AI to put in the roads, or just let the AI construct the whole lot by itself, and perhaps tweak a few things to taste, when he’s done.
I’m currently working on the final little bits and pieces for placing and storing buildings and other world props (trees, roads, fences, bridges, etc), but haven’t yet started on creating these things procedurally.
July 27th, 2009 at 12:46 am
I leave my comment as is then. So the player could spend many hours placing each part of their capital city if they want but don’t have to and if they want they don’t even have to look inside it.