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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Ah.. be Mr Nice at home and Mr. Not Nice next door! that expends horizons!
WoW Classic wasn't actually that big. The character models were scaled down to make the world seem bigger. I always felt like an ant running around a garden in that game. Ashes, at least far as I can see is actually populating the world with to scale assets for the environment.
For me at least, it doesn't have to be massive for it to be good, but it does help!
mapsize however may chnage if expansions will be added in
but a to big world would only make the space feeling empty. i mean there are games with even larger space that the listed once from OP thinking about DualUnivers, Entropia Univers or EVE also minecraft is hellish big.
but what is more important AoC will have multiple servers. not like EVE or others where it gives 1 Server for all. if AoC would be 1 server for all then 1200 Km2 would be way to small.
and more important to than the size is the content in it. thinking about what you can do in just 1 Km2 would take you several hours or even days. and we should not forget that the size of the map is 1200 km2, not the size of the ground. cause there will be some content in the sky (for those with flying mounts) and the Underrealm, as well instanced housing and instanced dungeons and open world dungeons under the map. so it will be in the end way bigger, only thinking if i would take a mountain and flaten its surface it will be a lot more space.
the map of Aoc the only thing i find a bit sad but its absolutly ok for a High Fantasy setting is that the heatzones doent follow a logic like top north is cold then it gets warmer to the center (Aquator) and then getting colder again. also that the eastern continent contains both the big snow and the big desert area while the western continent has lower temerature changes.
Perhaps that might provide some alternative comparative?
So back in vanilla wow, servers capped around 3000 players online. Also after some digging on map size of vanilla WoW, it's roughly 142 kmsq. Do some quick math, that's about 21 players per 1kmsq at max online population. Now if we take the 480kmsq ashes map+ 100kmsq for the underrealm. We have 10000 players occupying that space which would be about 17 players per 1 kmsq. Neither of these include oceans.
This is some pretty light math and there will.be more densely populated areas than others. Not to mention we are comparing a game where every dungeon and raid is instanced while ashes of creation is not. So it's hard to say just how similar or different the comparison will be
to build up to this - I don't remember what Everquest km2 is - but a healthy server pop is 2-2.5k.
Currently in p99 it ranges 1.5-2.5k green server. In official EQ timed server, it is 3-4k and feels very competative and resources / farming / Xp area is very rough with that many ppl online.
Since it's not a seamless world, but zones - each leveling zone would host on average 40 players.
dungeons were also split into zones, not all but they would hold 40-60 players contesting areas.
east commonland, the most popular zone for traders/sellers + newbies would host around 100-200 players currently on p99 and on official - would be 300+.
dont know how big each zones are - but the game overall felt massively huge. XP was hard - cause there wasnt mobs everywhere. it wasnt packed and honestly I think that is great. Too many modern MMO packs 30 wolves, 30 skeletons, 30 goblins every 5 second walking/running distance. In Everquest - 1 zone can take 15-20 min walk and you'll only see 1 mob per minute. Unless you went to a "camp" area ala Orc Camp, Goblin camp, then you'll see 5-8 enemies. respawn every 6-10min.
This IMHO made the world feel real, scarce and competitive. Players had to fight to tag mobs to get XP. XP was slow and painfully good, but now xp resources are scarce. everything became slow and you got to enjoy more things in this slower based version of the game.
I hope AOC doesnt pack mobs in every nook and cranny. I hope things are spread out, players gotta fight for XP, for camps, for spots, for resources.
If you like the Guild Wars 2 conveyor belt you're high. Just saying.
All of those are important actually. Part of why New World failed initially was because there was only 1 end content zone where everyone farmed gear. Need a large world to spread players and content out.
And thats not even considering all of the T5 nodes with plenty of high level content(not top end) as well. And if the node simulator is any indication, T6 nodes will be on the rare side and there will be a lot of T5 nodes spread across the world.
It worked this way in L2 and was great
Huh? I think you might be the high one here. I've never mentioned GW2.
Just saying that GW2 tried packing stuff in and a lot of people thought GW2 was great; but it's bad and much of that is the conveyor belt feel of it. Not that big worlds solve all that but there are a lot of subjective definitions of "quality" and "depth". Or rather people say what they don't mean and don't care lol.
WvW in GW2 was phenomenal before they changed the stability buff.
When I say quality and depth I mean actual quality and depth. Not just spamming the open world with meaningless "Stuff" in order to give people something to do (I'm looking at you vistas!)
Depth should come from interactability, including being able to chop the trees, mine the stone/ore, fish the waters and hunt/gather the flora and fauna. POI's should actually be interesting offering well-written and cohesive lore/history of the environment. Dungeons and Bosses should be thematically and mechanically relevant and should represent the environments they are in.
I was really impressed/happy with the Basic Melee Attack Dev Stream, not just because of the combat, which I think is looking good, but the comments Steven made regarding how most MMO's just have mobs randomly scattered across the world.
Having dynamic environments (like the stone golems in the Dev Stream) makes the world feel alive. I really hope they introduce mob types for all the different gatherables. You go up to cut what looks just like another Tree but it reacts when you hit it with your axe and you have a fight on your hands.
Alright. Living world. But do you think the starting areas of GW2 were good or bad?
Another thing I thought of today is the ocean between the 2 continent - what is the distance from shore to shore and is that sufficient enough for PVP/Trading content?
the distance of ocean between the 2 continents varies between about 3.5km and 8km
translate this to minutes - is that sufficient enough for naval battles before reaching the safety zone
I think servers should be placed on a real scale planet sized surface.
Then let players do caravans between them.
Size is about time. If you have to stop at each 100m to fight, the map feels large.
Same if you enter a labyrinth, a dynamic one, where you cannot follow a wiki walk-through.
Could be wise to hire a local tulnar path finder in the depths.
Will there be terrain features that make traversing the land longer, like mountains, a huge swath of water etc.
And it will be based on movement speed.
Case in point, I'll assume everyone here has played World of Warcraft. Back when it launched (no expansions) the world felt absolutely massive. Mounts weren't easy to get at the time. And traversing took time. So the world felt really big. That very same world with flying mounts feels smaller then a battlefield map (the FPS game)