Good day, I am currently the creative director on a fairly sizeable new project designing a new 'MMO' First-Person Shooter. I know that the term MMO will result in groans of horror from the majority of people on this forum, but I believe we have steered well clear of competition with the majority of MMOG's on the market, and will fill a hole in the market. The game is a survival-horror game with a focus on Player-v-Environment combat. Mood is a big thing for us, fear and isolation are primary motivators. The question we are currently addressing is what size, in terms of real-world equivalent, could a 30-man team feasibly produce? The focus on isolation means that character and settlement density will be low, and the majority of settlements will be ruined. Obviously each area must have a focus, but open land will be common for game-play purposes. So, if technical considerations are set aside, what do you believe would be a reasonable size for an MMO game world under these circumstances? Thanks in advance.

The size of your team means nothing,

How much experience does your team have, what are their individual skills and what technology are you using

Depends on a lot of things.

Kaze already mentioned some important variables.
I'd like to just throw around a few numbers to get a general idea.
If you were to have a world with, on average, one settlement per each 8km^2, and if you wanted that, on average, it would take 16 tries for any player to find an actual populated settlement, and if you were to consider the smallest amount of players your MMO should have in order to achieve a measure of success to be 1024, then:

8 * 16 * 1024 = 131072km^2

This seems like a lot.
If you allow the players to know the coordinates they are in, they don't even need to look around, they'll just post them online so other players can go there directly.

Instead of creating an entire world I'd think about just creating small worlds, with and without settlements and when a players travels between them just create some logic to determine which world the player should be moved to, you could do it randomly, or you could even directly control the chance a player has of entering a world with a settlement. You'd just need to create enough small worlds to create some diversity and isolation. You could even release the game early, with few areas, and increase them as the game gains population.

You'd need some logic in place to avoid players moving from, lets say, a lava world, to an icy world directly, this is trivial though, just setup a type for each world, and just allow moves to specific compatible types.

Xor, your idea for navigation is certainly good. Although it has already been considered and discarded for this particular project. The nature of the game-play demands a physical flow between locations. In addition, the environment will remain fairly uniform in terms of climate across the world. There will, of course, be terrain and environment variation, but it will be based on a modified real-world situation.

I have full confidence in the team's abilities, although that means little I know. We have a large modelling team that are highly capable, and those less capable will work, under supervision, on less vital areas. Experience wise, the team varies greatly. We have some individuals with many, many years of experience, whilst we also have members straight out of tertiary education.

The technology we are using is still under consideration. It will depend on the funding we can secure.

I understand this is probably a frustratingly vague question, but the consideration is for early design purposes. The physical location of the game has little to do with narrative or mechanics, and is more to do with the terrain itself.

You'll need to generate a lot more content per player then any other game out there.
You'll need to create a space that isn't repetitive and has very small settlement density, yet must have enough thematic settings/buildings/creatures/quests/items in the remaining space in order for it not to be boring/barren, for each and every player.
I guess you could still just release early, and continuously add content, but still sounds like an epic task.

What sort of numbers are you expecting?

Regarding the addition of content, we have a system for managing this dynamically, with specific player actions resulting in major changes in game-play, some environmental modification and, in effect, mini-expansions.

The game play will have a strong focus on shooter, survival and exploration elements. This reduces the need for 'quest-based' game-play, the norm in most MMOG's these days.

To ensure that the world does not become barren and boring, there will be several moving 'front-lines' in the conflict, which will focus interaction on smaller areas, whilst allowing players to escape constant combat by engaging in exploration on both sides of the front.

Exploration will have its own reward via a system we'd rather not yet announce publicly, as we believe it to be a key game-play concept that is yet to be done before. This will provide a vast number of small objectives for character improvement and server-altering purposes, scattered all across the environment.

Regarding players, we are currently uncertain. We hope, of course, for the best but we're all really in it for the enjoyment, and out of a drive to earn experience and improve our own abilities. We definitely think this game has the potential to be a great success. The PvE focus should relieve the requirement for a fast take-up, and the experience should still be enjoyable even with lower player numbers. In fact, the more players online the harder the game will become.

This sounds like a perfect use of instances to me. Think about how guild wars is setup, when you enter a town you are with other people but when you leave town you enter your own instance.

Now I know that isn't exactly what you want but its the base of my idea. The way i would handle this is to create a variable number of instances (for the sake of this this we will say that the number of instances will be 1/2 or lower to the number of people on the server).

Basically how i would handle it is, when a person leaves the settlement/town they enter into a random instance. This will give the the possibility of running into another player or entering into an instance all of there own. You could even give them the choice of going into a private instance a new instance or into a currently running instance.

The number of instances would be directly proportional to the number of players logged into the server. This would make it so the possibility of running into another player isn't absurd.

Quote:

Original post by NathanRunge The question we are currently addressing is what size, in terms of real-world equivalent, could a 30-man team feasibly produce?

It's an unanswerable question. With the right approach, a 1 person team could create a galaxy. With the wrong approach, a 100 person team would struggle to make one town. The speed at which you create individual content depends on your art team (the size of which you've not specified) but the proportion of the content that needs to be 100% original depends on your code team (the size of which you've not specified). Too many unknowns.