I’ve been playing some Titan Quest recently, and I am reminded of one of my favorite things that way back in the day used to be a big deal. I think Diablo 2 was the first game that really talked a lot about it, but having kind of a continuous world where you would walk right into a cave and just be in there. No load screen/transition/break, just a natural flow and no break in immersion. I had forgotten how much I miss that little detail until playing TQ again.
Not trying to criticize, but LE is fairly egregious in the amount of load screens it uses. I’m generally curious why that has kind of fallen to the wayside 20 years later when things like memory and hard drive speeds have improved so much.
I’d assume you’d do it as each time period was it’s own large level with loading whenever you timetravel (excluding the “small” bits like in/near the temple of eterra…
i think having the server precalculate the whole world and keep track of every thing in it would lead to high serverload per instance, and increase the network load. of course there may be means to minimize this issues, but this would require development time.
I can see this working with the campaign, but I’m not sure how an “open world” concept would work with the MoF, since they’re smallish contained “time bubbles” by design.
My guess is that it would be pretty jarring going from a continuous open world in campaign to a very loading screen heavy MoF experience?
I’m not too sure, but maybe also more resource intensive for an indie team to pull off?
While I like the open world concept, I don’t think it’s necessary for an arpg like this - I’m thinking of the Diablo 2 feature-set as the gold standard. They were able to give the illusion of a world where you could walk into a cave or a building and continue out of it to a totally different area without any sort of load screen breaking the immersion. Only when you left the “Act” did you have a load screen.
And add to that they were able to make their maps semi-randomized, plus support 8 player MP. It’s really an amazing achievement if you think about it - at the time I was impressed but I always assumed it would be the new standard and would continue to improve. 20+ years later, no one has been able to duplicate all those features together in one game, let alone surpass them, which is really surprising to me. Look at the original system requirements for D2, it looks like a joke. How is it that our standards have regressed after 20 years lol?
That’s a bit overstated don’t you think? Sure TQ is lacking a lot of the bells and whistles of today’s games, but it still looks pretty damn good to me, especially on an iPad/iPhone.
While Macknums post is a bit hyperbolic the core statement is true. You need a lot more computing capacity with today’s games. Just compare disk space requirements. As you stated, the game needed 650MB disk space. What does the average game need today? 12 to 20 GB? Game mechanics, physics and stuff all get more complicated. And you need exponentially more power to perform little improvements.
But I don’t think this prevents from creating an open world or seamless world game. Imho the development is much more complicated. If you split your world into smaller pieces you can also split the work. And you can finish certain areas and make them playable without even touching later content. This way EHG can add chapters by just connecting them with a portal.
As an indi dev team you have to set reasonable goals. See what a massive amount of work was and still is put into LE. Dealing with all this and implementing it into a seamless world is much more complicated.
There’s a reason why this stuff is not state of the art in every actual game. If it was easy to do and cheap, no game would miss it. I guess the opposite is the case.
But assuming a game is a specific size, the only difference between having it open world (TQ/GD/Sacred 1/2) versus levels (PoE, LE, etc) is whether you’re doing a little bit of loading all the time (for the section of the world that the player would be heading towards) or a lot of loading whenever the player transitions between zones.
But is it? I don’t think that there’s been a dev (not specifically EHG) with experience of it who has commented on the matter. Crate were also a very small indie dev & they made Grim Dawn as an open world, so it can’t be really difficult. Granted, Crate’s initial employees were from Iron Lore who made TQ so they had experience with the concepts (& engine), but if it were really difficult & required massive resources, then they wouldn’t have been able to do it… Of course, this is also the reason why EHG chose Unity as the engine for LE, they had experience with it.
I suspect/assume that doing an aRPG as a level-based is more common because more companies do it so people have more experience with it. It may also be conceptually simpler.
“Openness” of any game worlds is just an illusion given to a player. In its core open wold is made of lots of zones which a loading when players get the opportunity to reach or see them soon. This logic may be pretty difficult but the simplest example is to load 8 zones around the one you’ve just entered.
So no: making isometric open worlds is not a problem of machine resources. It is about dev’s skills and time… and sometimes engine, because Unreal engine has this mechanism built in, as far I know.
I’m really happy that the game is not an open world.
My sons plays several open world games and most (not all but most) of them are falsely open. You can go everywhere, but you have very few things to do and if you want to permanently be doing something, you will explore 20% of the map, no more. Open worlds are good for people who like to visit, but most are rather poor in terms of quests, of kind of activities, etc. Why have an open world if all quests are “go there and bring me that”… when you find a quest? It’s boring. I really do prefer planned environments like LE, where you have multiple things to do and never wonder where you are and how to find interesting stuff. Personal opinion.
Perhaps we should use “seamless” word instead of “open” to avoid misunderstanding. I mean, people above used such examples as Grim Dawn or Diablo which are obviously not open but seamless.
Not necessarily, I imagine it depends on how it’s done. How large the zones are that the server/pc loads as the player moves compared to the zones that LE has.
If, for argument’s sake, the “open world” zones were 1/10 the size of the LE areas, then the server would be have the zone the player is currently (1) in plus the adjacent zones (8) so it’d only have to load 9 zones that are individually 1/10 of the average LE area you’d end up with a similar amount of level data in memory at any one time.
Less than to keep calculating everything for a whole world. I mean, if we imagine 50+ zones game world, calculating 8 zones of 50 is obviously an easier task than to calc all 50 zones.
Diablo games are good examples of such algorithm. While you traverse through the world on your own you won’t see any loading screens. But trying to teleport to any location, even those you left not so long ago, requires some time. Because any zones, that are not around your character, are not expected to be met, and game algorithm doesn’t hold them in its “memory”. But player’s choice forces the game to load that zone right here and now, which requires time. That’s why you see loading screen at that moment.
Yep.
Good decisions require skillful hands to be implemented.
