There was a vid from blizz stating the same and you finaly see said pixels wanted to be garlic in the past :D.
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.
2 Likes
Oh and that wouldn’t cost server resources?
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. 
so we can finally agree that the most server resource-friendly implementation would be to just have one zone per gamestate & intance that has to be loaded and calaculated instead of loading additinal more, while the player just can be in one zone at a time?
No, that depends how large the zones are. If the entire game world were treated as a single zone to be loaded, that would take significantly more resources than if it were just the current zones (& similarly, if the current zones were cut into smaller areas then they would take less resources again).
i think i expressed myself in false way as i said
the point was that having just one small zone as it is now in the game vs additional more where the player could go to, if the world is seemless.
for example:
when you just have that small zone/level e.g. temple of eterra then is clear what and how many entities are in and that zone and can be loaded by server/ client immediatly. now the server can focus on validating the players input and don’t need to care about loading other zones with all its entities while the player travere through the zone. having the server to load zones where the player could be, while the player just can be in one, would be a huge overhead.
Well, yes.
This approach is simpler for an engine, devs and their and player’s machine resources. But in this case player’s time is sacrificed (loading screens).
I think the thing with LE is that most of the maps I can think of would be perfectly conducive to a “seamless world” type of approach. Because generally there are only single entry and exit points (or maybe a couple), so the amount of “pre-loading” or whatever you want to call it is a fixed, known quantity. One of the most egregious examples I can think of is when you approach the ship, I think in the Imperial era. You get a load screen to the dock, walk like 10 seconds, encounter like 3 enemies, then have to load again to get onto the boat. I’m assuming that “map” is just some sort of placeholder, and they intend to have more content there, but otherwise it just feels like such a break in continuity that really doesn’t add anything. Another one is when you are collecting the left and right things at the end of the first era. You get the timeshift load just to walk a few steps and grab the thing, then load again. It’s really non-sensical.
It’s really not a big deal to me, I was just thinking how odd it was that the state-of-the-art has gone backwards over time, even though processing power, RAM, hard drive speed/space has progressed so much further. The environments look a lot better now, but are they really 10-100 times better? Frankly I’d trade bells and whistles like extra lighting and shadow effects for the illusion of seamlessness, but that’s just a personal preference.
1 Like
Don’t forget that the number of pixels that’s having stuff done to them has increased significantly, from, say 320x240 (QVGA, 76,800 pixels) up to 3840x2160 (4k, 8,294,400), that’s 108 times the number of pixels, plus they’re doing a lot more with those pixels.
1 Like
I just posted a similar suggestion on Discord and was directed here.
I do not think LE has to be Open World (though I would prefer it) but IMO the level design needs to feel way more open. As it is the level design in LE is I believe the weakest element of the game. Everything feels like a corridor with a circular connection or branch added. To be honest it is really dull and very claustrophobic. That is OK for some areas maybe but really the area designs need to be greatly improved and way more open feeling. Even in POE and D2 a lot of the areas are open. To be quit honest I think ARPGs should be more influenced in terms of level design by Sacred and Divine Divinty than POE and Diablo and GD. As it is level design is probably the weakest element of the game
1 Like
The advantage is that you’re not wondering where to go. I’m here to slay monsters, not to walk on all sided searching for them. For this, I do not like open worlds. But I know my opinion is a minority one. 
A good example for an open feeling world was / is World of Warcraft. They have loading screens only when it’s necessary. With their layering technic they could even change the world for single players (during quests).
The game is very old - isn’t all this available in current engines?
I don’t know if you read the original post in detail, but both Titan Quest and Diablo 2 are probably better examples since they are in the same ARPG category. And both pre-date WoW as well… not to mention Diablo 2 added the twist of having randomized portions of maps.
The point made by @Llama8 about 4K resolutions, etc is good, so perhaps there is an issue trying to pre-load with that in mind. I am very excited to see how the new Diablo 2 remaster performs and plays, as it should re-establish an interesting baseline comparison for this type of technology.
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.