Open World- How Big can we make it?

[FauxFurry]

5 hours ago, MagnaSonic3000 said:

That's because in things like Star Wars they just kinda whoosh everywhere in like 3 seconds.

They use Hyper Space Travel, essentially traveling through a pocket dimension with separate rules of physics.

Other series such as Macross use Space Folding, a process which is far from instantaneous (it can take days if not weeks) but it faster than normal space travel, achieved by actually bringing to points in space-time closer together then releasing them, tossing the craft halfway across the galaxy as space-time re-expands.

[FauxFurry]

2 hours ago, Darkpig said:

I played in a sandbox once. Then I learned that my choices don't matter in this fucked up world and then I turned into a boring adult. Just kidding. I still have fun kicking down other kid's sandcastles.

 

On a serious note. The thing about an open lifelike world is that life does it better. Sure you can add fantasy elements to it but that is about it.

 

To put it in perspective think about Starwars. It is a massive franchise set in literally a massive universe but the plot is a simple good vs evil storyline. Why? Because people love that shit. Stories have to either be more engaging for people to follow the complicated plot or add small details to a simple plot to make the story's world look more complicated. Think Adventure Time.

Mobile Suit Gundam accomplishes something similar without the Good vs Evil set-up, substituting Space Separatists vs Globalists who have their own good and bad actors in their ranks. Game of Thrones uses Man vs Man vs The Wild/Beast (the Others/White Walkers fill that category for all intents and purposes).

The most engaging stories tend to either be 'High Concept' or easily able to be boiled down to Elevator Pitches.

[AceofWind]

If we're talking a modern setting, having a large map to explore is one thing, having things to see and do in it is another. IMO, having a large map to explore is sort of meaningless if all you ever get to do is run/drive around a metropolitan area and kill NPCs. Modern open world games should instead focus more on the attention to detail rather than just trying to make a map the size of Texas, and a good example of this is Saints Row 2. Large map to explore with several unique environments and lots of unique interiors (some with interactive elements), and then you have several NPCs spread about with behaviors that differ from the normal NPCs, like the cheerleaders performing around the college campus.

[KoolHndLuke]

7 hours ago, AceofWind said:

If we're talking a modern setting, having a large map to explore is one thing, having things to see and do in it is another. IMO, having a large map to explore is sort of meaningless if all you ever get to do is run/drive around a metropolitan area and kill NPCs. Modern open world games should instead focus more on the attention to detail rather than just trying to make a map the size of Texas, and a good example of this is Saints Row 2. Large map to explore with several unique environments and lots of unique interiors (some with interactive elements), and then you have several NPCs spread about with behaviors that differ from the normal NPCs, like the cheerleaders performing around the college campus.

 I remember getting lost in that game several times and discovering some cool little tidbits here and there like the police doing stupid shit or something- had absolutely nothing to do with the story at all and served no purpose other than just being funny/lewd. I would imagine programmers hide little shit like that in open world games a lot and just see if anyone explores enough to find it. I really enjoyed exploring the city in SR2 (and buying whore clothes). They sort of moved away from that more with every game in the series after SR2. Maybe it was just too much work? I can imagine the designers decided they should streamline/downsize things to make it more manageable and easily replicated for the next installment in the series as things went forward. Too bad I say because games like SR2 had the detail you talk about to make it worth exploring instead of just getting bored and shooting through the story to be done with it.

[MagnaSonic3000]

Yeah after SR2 the game kinda lost some of the extra bits, but that might be because it went from a GTA clone to basically this really fucked up gang story about how you become space Jesus.

[landess]

Memory is the limit, including the storage capacity of the drive(s). Because you can't be everywhere at once, then time also becomes a factor.

 

Reading through the responses is good gauge of what players would want, or expect to find in their open world experience. My response is to the question which opens the post.

 

There are obvious answers in regards to this. Anyone familiar with Novalogics Delta force series knows that game was built using voxel based terrain which was grid based, and extended in any direction with cleverly repeated maps which could be traversed until your system crashed. Another example in more recent times would be the concept used by Elite Dangerous - this one blows my mind, yet still follows the same rules: If you had the time to explore the entire galaxy, then anything discovered would need to be stored in memory, or on a drive until you ran out of room, or your system crashed (or information deleted).

 

With newer games, more eye candy requires the use of anything from loading screens, to in game bottlenecks to limit player movement while the system loads new information. Tomb Raider (and now others) use the squeezing through cracks form of bottlenecking to give the system time to do this without loading screens. Artificial barriers to distance rendering allows the same result. LOD, texture reduction, etc. all contribute to a programs ability to give an illusion of distance, while trying to limit the stress on memory.

 

I've mentioned before: In the future, it wouldn't surprise me to see a form of Google Earth used as a stream-able database to allow games to explore a ridiculously sized experience which would free up client based memory for generated content to augment the game/program in question.

[FauxFurry]

One of the fringe benefits of big game world spaces with a lot of hidden details in it is that it creates a cottage industry of Youtubers dedicated to sussing them all out to point them out to the more casual players out there.

Like this guy, for example:

 

[iJaVaFx]

On 1/4/2019 at 5:33 AM, KoolHndLuke said:

 I love open world games for the exploration, item gathering, npc encounters, quests etc. But I wonder how big can devs actually make them? I mean in terms of scaled world space. But first let's determine what makes a world-space feel expansive and interesting in the first place- is it sheer space or the content therein? Recently playing Dragon's Dogma DA for the "umpteenth" time I can say that I feel it is a smart, creative mixture of both in terms of enemies. items, etc. My personal preference of course, but how much more can be done to really expand the open-world experience? More world-space in and of itself is boring without distinctive characteristics and other things like different npcs, quests, and maybe some unique loot. It depends greatly on whether the creator is simply extending things for the sake of making the world feel bigger or to actually try to create a sense of stark differentiation between one area and another in an effort to make the created world feel more "alive".

 

Overall though, what are the technical limitations of making an open-world game? Is it more a limitation of specific game engines/hardware or is it more to do with how much dev time is required vs projected sales?

It's all about the computer spec an open world could go as far as the universe, but have you the tools to render it ?

A big open world got issue :

-1: Console rendering

-2: computer spec. not anyone have 2 EVGA gtx 1080 runnig along side with 128gb of ram with a powerfull cpu to handle is all

 

[KoolHndLuke]

5 hours ago, iJaVaFx said:

It's all about the computer spec an open world could go as far as the universe, but have you the tools to render it ?

A big open world got issue :

-1: Console rendering

-2: computer spec. not anyone have 2 EVGA gtx 1080 runnig along side with 128gb of ram with a powerfull cpu to handle is all

 

True. I care much more about content than about how a game looks. By looks, I mean most people's wanting the absolute best graphics. I would be fine with "good" graphics sort of inline with what Skyrim was or similar. Speaking of Skyrim, the limitations seem to be more about strings and scripts more than anything else. I have a lot of new lands mods installed and what I noticed is that the engine handles all of them well so long as I don't have too many quests open. Start a quest, finish a quest before moving on seems to be working for me in that game. Another I'm playing, KoAR, runs almost perfectly no matter how many quest I have going. Granted, it is a somewhat different engine I think. Would be interesting to see how it handles a large number of scripted mods.

[iJaVaFx]

17 minutes ago, KoolHndLuke said:

True. I care much more about content than about how a game looks. By looks, I mean most people's wanting the absolute best graphics. I would be fine with "good" graphics sort of inline with what Skyrim was or similar. Speaking of Skyrim, the limitations seem to be more about strings and scripts more than anything else. I have a lot of new lands mods installed and what I noticed is that the engine handles all of them well so long as I don't have too many quests open. Start a quest, finish a quest before moving on seems to be working for me in that game. Another I'm playing, KoAR, runs almost perfectly no matter how many quest I have going. Granted, it is a somewhat different engine I think. Would be interesting to see how it handles a large number of scripted mods.

I believe game are made to be push to the limits, boundaries to be cross, mods and scripting to be troubleshoot . In other word my ideology in pc gaming is achieving the best in term of performance and quality, why run 15 fps at high if medium give 30 fps, but why reach for 60 fps when ultra become not enough. The graphic cards is able to push  boundaries, mods must be created and texture must be optimized.. 

[KoolHndLuke]

21 minutes ago, iJaVaFx said:

why run 15 fps at high if medium give 30 fps

Ummm.....for closeups of my sexy waifu while she sucks and fucks her way to game-porn stardom? PIXEL PORN RULES!!! But other than that, I get what you're saying. 

 

The problem if you look at Beth for example, is that their engine ain't that great and the games they create are poorly optimized to begin with. So I wouldn't say that's a mod authors job to do. Other devs are trying to catch up on the modding front I think and they have perhaps better engines and optimized games to build in/on.