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In a recent Kotaku article, Michael Fahey found an image on Digg of a graphic comparing the sizes of a few game worlds. MMORPG.com reposted the info and went a little further by focusing on the sizes of MMO worlds. Does size matter?
As we all know, playing an MMO and not seeing anyone around can give a lonely feeling. Blizzard keeps using this as their prime reason for not including player housing in WoW. They claim people would spend time at their house and not in capital cities. This would rend the open world as empty. My initial reaction is “Blizzard doesn’t play other games.” Having a house is nice, but you don’t spend a whole lot of time there. This is a whole other debate.
Getting back on track, according to calculations that someone, somewhere did, WoW is 80 square miles. Lord of the Rings Online is 30,000 square miles. So lets pick it apart.
If you think about flying or even running from one end of Kalimdor to the other, it honestly doesn’t take as long it would to travel across a real continent. That’s good, right? I mean after all, this is a video game. Who wants to spend their time traveling?
Think about time spent from 10-40 or so. How many people did you see? Not that many except in big cities and even then, only in select cities. Undercity and Thunderbluff were sparse at best. Orgrimmar had a decent amount of people running around, but don’t even think of Silvermoon… That place is an utter ghost town now.
Then look at Dalaran. People with lower end computers can barely go there. Why? Because of the massive amount of people crammed into a small space. This is brilliant! Sure, a slow processor or bridge won’t be able to transfer data fast enough and you’d get some sputtering, but how alive does Dalaran feel? It feels like a bustling city. How many people are really there at one time? 200-500? OK, honestly 500 might be pushing it, but think about it. How many people are in a moderate sized city compared to how big the land it is sitting on is?
I’m all for an amazingly big world to explore, such as LoTRO’s. It really adds to the huge feeling of walking around in Tolkien’s world. The scale feels more natural and it is easy to feel more immersed in the game world. The downside to all of this is the hardware limitations of servers today. There is still a cap on how many people a developer wants on each game world. This is to avoid lag and server side crashes, but the downside is the vast emptiness of a forest feels…well, empty. Even the cities dwarf WoW’s. Bree feels to be double the size of Stormwind. While this is more realistic, it isn’t necessarily better.
While Lotro is hells of fun, the empty feeling in places does suck. Point goes to Blizzard for having a big enough world to move around in, yet small enough to keep players crossing paths.
Moral of the story: Bigger isn’t always better.
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To be fair man you also have to look at game population. If a world like LOTRO had the population of WoW then Bree and other places would probably not feel anywhere near as empty.
Still you do raise a good point this can also go the opposite though when you look at a game like EVE which has a MASSIVE amount of space for you to explore and yet most of the time when war’s between player alliances are going on 99% of the people are in 1 or 2 systems instead of the 50 star systems around them.
So even if you have lots of space you still usually get the “Dalaran” like places where everyone seems to be.
Agreed, but total population doesn’t mean anything when you divide it down by a number of servers. The real factor is how many people per server are the devs allowing? Say the magic number, just for the sake of argument, is 10,000. Of that, say 50% are on at prime time. So 5,000 focused by the devs to one small city will feel “busy” and “bustling” rather than 5,000 scattered out.
I do hear that lotro zones get much more populated at the higher levels. It’s just an odd situation. I like the “big city” feeling WoW can pull off with a small city, but I like the scale of Lotro. Not complaining either way, just giving props to Blizzard. Performance or not, when you are in Dalaran you feel like its a real city or village or whatever.