What is the top factor for MMO engines limiting world size?

I would think the biggest reason to limit world size isn't technical, it is human.

Imagine your game world is the size of the UK. That's small by real world standards but still takes eight to twelve hours to drive across North to south. That's several days solid walking.

Now imagine you have 1 million players in that game world and it's not sharded.

The population of the UK is many times more than 1 million and still vast tracts of land are unpopulated.

If the game world was huge you could travel for hours before encountering another player, and all the players would congregate in cities leaving the rest of the game world a boring empty ghost town.

It would take days to travel to quests etc without fast travel and nobody would venture far from fast travel portals if it had them, so developers wouldn't have much incentive to put anything relevant in these vast open spaces of wilderness.

Even a game with a square mileage the size of gta 5 seems to suffer this artifact as everyone gathers in the city centre and the wilderness and mountain areas are void of real people and just full of AI creatures, cars and cops.

I can't say I'd want to play that game...

If the game world was huge you could travel for hours before encountering another player, and all the players would congregate in cities leaving the rest of the game world a boring empty ghost town.

You've just described Elite: Dangerous! :)

I've just thought of another reason the worlds aren't getting larger.

It's about the money too. To fill a large world with relevant content costs money, and the bigger the world the more content you need.

At best guess, if you double the width and breadth of the world you multiply the content needed by four (models, areas, quests, npcs etc). That's a four fold budget increase.

As mmo games are already the most expensive type of game to maintain I can't imagine this growth is sustainable in the long term without significantly increasing subscription costs to the point of driving away players.

What do you think to this?

There have been write-ups of world sizes.

WoW is currently on the order of 60 square miles of actual content. Most of the older areas are vacant ghost-towns, content that is no longer played even though they have millions of people.

Skyrim and Dragon Age: Inquisition are both on the order of 20 square miles of actual content.

GTA 5 covered about 100 square miles, but the vast majority of it was fake/duplicate buildings. It was probably around 2-3 square miles of actual modeled stuff plus about 10 miles of modeled roadway segments.

Filling virtual worlds with compelling content is hard. Filling them up with generic formulaic terrain isn't that difficult and has been done many times, but typically doesn't make for good RPG material.

To fill a large world with relevant content costs money

I concur. This trumps anything else.

There have been write-ups of world sizes.

WoW is currently on the order of 60 square miles of actual content. Most of the older areas are vacant ghost-towns, content that is no longer played even though they have millions of people.

WoW's problems aren't world size. Its that they made it a theme park MMO, you go from one area to the next as you progress. There is no reason to return once you are a higher level. Ultima Online doesn't suffer from this.

Yes, current MMO games couldn't deal with a larger world. I am not thinking of current game worlds but what will come next. Go play a game called Wurm Online, it is a huge world compared to most MMO's, and the game works just fine. The game you play and seem to think of are cookie cutter games, no imagination or creativity. They are designed with a treadmill mentality so you will play the game as long as possible. You level up, need more gear so you do quests for gear. On and on and on, insanity.

The reason i was asking about world size, is that if you combine multiple gameplay features, throw out End Game, and give players a reason to take part in the game world, not just walk through it. Have a capital city where players start, multiple large and small towns spread through out the game, allowing players to build around current towns, setting up shop, homes, business's, and exploring the vast unexplored area's for hidden temples, resources to be claimed and refined. Then you pay merchants and/or caravans to spread the word of your supply and charge to delivery.

So you only have to develop a number of area's and let the players create as they go, similar to an RTS like Stronghold, play it like an RPG like Skyrim, have an economy like The Guild II: Renaissance.

Yikes, sorry for all this.

I am working on a research project how MMO's have a shortened lifespan, what the cause is, and how to fix it in future games. I have studied game design and MMO's specifically, since UO to Black Desert Online. So I apologize.

Yes a large "theme park" MMO would be expensive, and a large "sandbox" MMO would be boring. But combine them somewhat, add RPG and RTS features and it would work.

Thanks for the information.

>> Yes a large "theme park" MMO would be expensive, and a large "sandbox" MMO would be boring. But combine them somewhat, add RPG and RTS features and it would work.

if my understanding of the definition of "theme park MMO" is correct - IE you progress though various areas of content until you complete all areas - then there's still a serious design flaw when it comes to replayability and using up content. its would seem to me that an MMO, with the ability to add players and content over time, would be ideal for building "living worlds" as opposed to just "big levels" or "a series of big areas".

I am skeptical of how a sandbox MMO could be fun when scaled to MMO populations. Sure, running a store or a business in-game might appeal to some people, but what about when there are hundreds of other people selling the exact same stuff? And how could there possibly be unexplored areas and temples within the game? To produce this much content would be impossible as the players would surely explore all areas faster than it could be created by orders of magnitude. You could procedurally generate it, but how then would you keep it interesting? And further than that, the technical challenges to dynamically generating and persisting that much content upon request for that many users would be daunting if not impossible. Also I believe people enjoy replaying content. When I played WoW I frequently replayed instances with friends and even went back to play low-level instances solo. There was satisfaction in learning the strategies to beat the bosses, learning the nooks and crannies, and being able to share that information with other players.

I'm not saying that WoW is the pinnacle of MMO gaming or anything like that, but it gives the players what they want. It may not be infinitely repayable, but there is no shortage of content. People have been playing for ten years now and it's still going strong. That says something about "theme park" MMOs.

So MMO, around 200,000 to 500,000 players. The difficulty there remains one of content. The world-limiting size is still the limits of creating compelling content.

You stick 500,000 active players inside a 10 square mile area and your population is so dense you can hardly move. A density of 50,000 per square mile, or about 20,000 per square kilomter, gets you at about the top 30 most dense places in the world in real life. It would be so crowded you could hardly move.

You stick 500,000 active players inside a 20 square mile area, and on the same list it drops you to a population density similar to New York City. Dense enough there is always interesting stuff going on, but still a little crowded for a video game.

The same 500,000 active players inside a 30 square mile area, now you're looking at a population density similar to most comfortably livable larger cities around the world. About 15K per square mile, or about 6000 per square kilometer.

Few MMOs hit a half million active players at once. And they don't do it by offering completely novel areas for every player.

Even in the large games you replay the same quests each with slight variations to them, in the same areas you have walked time and again. Often the areas are blocked off; this quest uses zones 1,2,3,6,7, that quest uses zones 2,3,5,7,9, the other quest uses zones 1,2,4,5,8, but still heavy on the reuse.

When people start talking about Earth-sized worlds, 200 million square miles, and are talking of a few thousand concurrent players in the world, that's on the order of one person per 200,000 miles. You might potentially interact with another human at some point in the game, but it is not enough for teams and cities and guilds and such.

If you've only got a few thousand concurrent players (four digits) then you need to focus on a small amount of quality content. 1000 people is not enough even for a small real-world town. If you create a bigger world, a world size of 20 square miles for those 1000 people, about 50 per square mile or 20 per square kilometer, and you barely have enough people that they can greet each other in towns, let alone naturally form groups to run quests and guilds and adventures together.

Bringing it back, it is really hard to have worlds that are bigger than that. You can procedurally generate them but it is hard to fill them with interesting stuff. Even if you manage it, you need an enormous number of players to keep the cities vibrant. Without the players, the cities are empty ghost towns full of idle content, as much of WoW is today.

But combine them somewhat, add RPG and RTS features and it would work.

Every five years, someone tries that idea. It has it's niche, but it's not what most people are looking for.
Most people already have an eight-to-six where they put together widgets for the use and consumption of others; coming home to a virtual widget-making business just isn't that compelling.
Only a few "active worlds" have had staying power (and, ironically, Active Worlds wasn't one of them :-)
Eve Online is probably the biggest example; Entropia Universe is another, although the draw there seems to be mainly the lottery aspect.

The main problem is: Most people don't want to play the role of subservient to some other player in any but the most abstract sense.
Guild leader? Seems OK, the Guild adds enough social value to put up with it.

Front-line soldier in an RTS, going where other players tell you to?
Farmer, clicking the "plow field" button over and over again?
Policeman, dealing with griefers?
Not player enjoyment.

The theme park design has not grown up because game developers "lack imagination." Imagining is easy, relatively speaking. The "free worlds where I can do anything" games aren't being kept out of the market by a lack of enthusiastic developers wanting to make it happen. The reason the MMO game world looks like it does, is much more fundamental than that, and has to do with what most people are willing to pay for as a gaming experience. Building a lasting business requires a product/market fit, which is much harder!

But combine them somewhat, add RPG and RTS features and it would work.

Every five years, someone tries that idea. It has it's niche, but it's not what most people are looking for.
Most people already have an eight-to-six where they put together widgets for the use and consumption of others; coming home to a virtual widget-making business just isn't that compelling.
Only a few "active worlds" have had staying power (and, ironically, Active Worlds wasn't one of them :-)
Eve Online is probably the biggest example; Entropia Universe is another, although the draw there seems to be mainly the lottery aspect.

The main problem is: Most people don't want to play the role of subservient to some other player in any but the most abstract sense.
Guild leader? Seems OK, the Guild adds enough social value to put up with it.

Front-line soldier in an RTS, going where other players tell you to?
Farmer, clicking the "plow field" button over and over again?
Policeman, dealing with griefers?
Not player enjoyment.

The theme park design has not grown up because game developers "lack imagination." Imagining is easy, relatively speaking. The "free worlds where I can do anything" games aren't being kept out of the market by a lack of enthusiastic developers wanting to make it happen. The reason the MMO game world looks like it does, is much more fundamental than that, and has to do with what most people are willing to pay for as a gaming experience. Building a lasting business requires a product/market fit, which is much harder!

True, Eve has done it, but its a niche game i agree.

As for the RTS front line soldier, Planetside 2 is going strong still, people love it, and many fantasy MMO's have PVP so we know that works. Work it into the story where players are defending their territory or trying to take new land.

For farming, instead of hitting the same button over and over, let that character be a semi autonomous so you can have it doing stuff while your out adventuring or PVP'ing. It would server a purpose of adding food or raw materials to your faction. Plus making money for you. Try playing a game called "The Guild", it shows how things can be fun doing that stuff.

Who said playing subservient, social communities work together and i have seen it in many games from Wurm Online to Horizons and Darkfall.

Every five years? so 3 people have tried it then? EQ came out 17 years ago and that leaves little room for trial and error. FPS games have such short production time their evolution has been the most rapid, also helps their genre was one of the earliest to appear in graphic form. For me, RTS haven't evolved too much, look at Command and Conquer, same dynamics, but it seems to work. But I know many people who play these current games and are tired of the same old thing. And yes, many have a steady job, some are in the military or work in technical jobs and still want more meaningful MMO than level, grind gear, level, endgame, raid. raid, raid...

Just because you haven't seen it done yet doesn't mean it can't be done and not bankrupt the company. But this waiting in line to for mobs to spawn, bouncing into players where ever you go isn't what I see as ideal. Just spread out things as if you were scaling an object, instead of 1/2 a mile from the capital city to dungeons, make it so as players slowly populate towns and push into the wild, it opens ups new area's to play. Look at how a game called Horizons did it, now called Istaria, and many of us older gamers loved it who played it.

I have been watching MMO game world design since EverQuest 1. With the current technology of hi-speed internet, computers with terabyte hard drives, server technology that has come a long way, and over 17 years of learning from all the MMO's that have come and gone and are still coming out. What are the bottlenecks of larger streaming worlds?

It just feels like the MMO genre has stalled and stagnated like Richard Garriott has stated several times.

Check out shores of hazeron. The game's an MMO that's bigger than no man's sky, with procedurally generated everything (terrain/resources/animals/weather/textures/models/animations/buildings/weapons), custom ship building with no limit (well, there's SOME physical limit to size I'm sure, but I've made multi-mile long ships), and each (or at least most of. I've seen some small planets) of the (trillions of possible) game worlds is larger than Wurm online's maps. Add to that it has RTS/faction building elements of seemingly no scale (I've got a 800 soldier troop transport, with each soldier being a separate NPC), and it should be considered the ideal large-scale exploration MMO.

Yet it's not a commercial success by any means, costing money to run and dying several times. Game world simply isn't an important/fun aspect to expand on in MMO's, content and player interaction are what you want to work on.

For farming, instead of hitting the same button over and over, let that character be a semi autonomous so you can have it doing stuff while your out adventuring or PVP'ing

A.K.A. "the plot device of the book REAMDE."

Just because you haven't seen it done yet doesn't mean it can't be done and not bankrupt the company.

Agreed! What it does mean, however, is that the "obvious" approaches don't actually work, and to make it work, you need to have something that the previous entrants did not, in addition to the surrounding prerequisites of funding, artists, marketing, etc.

I just posted a post in a different thread that is related to this, about how I want more "content-DENSE" worlds (with better quality of content), not merely larger land masses and not merely more generic content.

To me, "better" is not "more of what is boring", but instead "more enjoyable". I'd be delighted with games that are only 10% of the size of the GTAs and Farcrys and EQs and WoW, if the game was more enjoyable.

This post I wrote a few months ago might also be interesting to you, but is less directly relevant.

I just posted a post in a different thread that is related to this, about how I want more "content-DENSE" worlds (with better quality of content), not merely larger land masses and not merely more generic content.

To me, "better" is not "more of what is boring", but instead "more enjoyable". I'd be delighted with games that are only 10% of the size of the GTAs and Farcrys and EQs and WoW, if the game was more enjoyable.

This post I wrote a few months ago might also be interesting to you, but is less directly relevant.

I will check out that thread, thanks for letting me know.

Some people like the game where there is 100's of people on screen, and not far to do the things that are fun.

This is why I am using Atavism in Unity to test my idea's with 2 or 3 of my gaming guilds and see what the feedback is. True, many times I do bitch that its just to far to go for things. I am wanting to try using a once every 3 hours long range teleport to a friend. Maybe that will make it more acceptable. Its just that, if exploration and a battle between the forces of mankind against demon hordes, large area's seem best. We shall see. But thanks for the feedback and discussion, can't live in isolation and know whats going to work!

This Content limitation (as in DETAILED content and INTERESTING content) to fill any bigger world?

I say that as big as they currently are, they are ALREADY still largely pretty deserts -- mostly devoid of uniqueness and interesting detail and interactions.

Some day (maybe in our lifetime) we might have games where Players produce alot of the MMORPGs Assets

(Ive talked about this before -- Tap into the Players abilities/imagination/creativity to build the game worlds)

Advantages :

Major cost of MMORPG - the Assets is cut out of the company expense

1000X as much imagination and labor available in the players, than from the game company (note all player production would be done for free)

With a broad spectrum of abilities (from simple assets and assemblies of assets, all the way to behavior AI, and even game mechanics improvements/additions) Players to be able to create upto their abilities.

What one player creates, 1000 players will play with in the game

Assets can be incrementally improved by expertise in different areas of production (hierarchically template everything to maximize reuse and minimize reinventing the wheel...)

Assets can be shared across genres (one system + many games) to maximize whats available from the Players efforts

New content being added constantly (and for some 'players' the creation will be THEIR game)

Leverage of more than a little Open Source Tools which exist

Problems :

Need ALOT of easy to use tools which rival these games in their cost (though can be reused across many games) -- idiot proofing for general player use is a monumental task (and integrating all the tools into an online production system)

Need a really thorough vetting system BEFORE anything published to the running game worlds (and that too largely would be the work of Players)

The game would need alot of definitions (to be kept to) to the genre/canon/quality levels of acceptance

A major community effort is needed (has to be managed -- and largely NOT by the company) to facilitate cooperation and collaboration (and especially to NOT waste anyones time, where possible) Comprehensive planning/testing/review/advice/collaboration/publishing processes.

To get started, certain popular genres will have to be used, to get their interested player groups having a critical mass (after that, reuse can make many smaller genres workable building upon the basics)

Broad well done generic design (not just the bits and mechansism used for a particular game) The company would have to build sufficient basic assest to get the games going (possibly reusing/converting assets they already possess from previous games)

All kinds of Legal Crap.

Why it wont happen soon :

The cost of creating the whole system... TOOLS (even with one of the game engine companies being the organizers of it)

The game companies losing the profits they make for content (fire all the artists ....)

Risk adverse companies who know the model they use NOW can work and want nothing to do with an unproven system (will wait for SOMEONE ELSE to prove it works)

The 'sharing' parts (like asset standards) might be blocked by company rivalries

This is Next Next generation type of stuff (the extent of the thing I would have it be), but its Development Utility also could be used for Media production and Advertisements (and even facilitation and lowered costs of creation of Solo games by inhouse talent) THINK of it as something of the magnitude of what Computer Publishing was.

An no this isnt Second Life Plus Plus ... that thing is a shadow of a shadow of what I would envision this possibility .

this isnt Second Life Plus Plus ... that thing is a shadow of a shadow of what I would envision this possibility

Second Life had almost exactly the vision that you lay out.

Could you try to analyze why they, with lots of smart people and funding, did not manage to actually make that reality?

(Having worked in this space for a long time, I have my own theories, but I'd like to hear your take as a fresh perspective!)

Some day (maybe in our lifetime) we might have games where Players produce alot of the MMORPGs Assets
(Ive talked about this before -- Tap into the Players abilities/imagination/creativity to build the game worlds)

People have been talking about that for a decade or so, and while it may work for a few games and can definitely be profitable, I don't think it's ultimately the best solution, design-wise. Let me try to explain:

By having thousands of players make content, no matter how quality-controlled, it still suffers by catering to the lowest-common-denominator of quality.
It suffers from massive lack of cohesion from many tiny variations of styles (assuming you cut the macro-variations in style), instead of unity of design. It'd require aggressive culling.

If you remember Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is crap. So even if you cull 90% of what is created, you're still only left with "not crap", but that doesn't make it great. 99% of everything is still not great - you'd have to cull 90% of what's left after already culling 90%. And 99.9% of everything is still not incredible. :mellow:

Basically, by heavily going towards player-generated-content, you are forcing yourself to insult 99% of your players by telling them their work is sub-par trash (to put it lightly), you are forcing yourself to invest heavily in coordinating massive amounts (hundreds of thousands if not millions) of people instead of coordinating mere hundreds, or else you are, from the very very very get go, regulating your game to merely being "average" (if not below-average) but never being incredible.

It'll be a 'reversion to mediocrity' of players contributing work, taken from a sampling 90% occupied already by poor creators. If the developers set the standards low, the game quality will be low (Second Life-esqe), and if they set the standards high, it requires immensely more labor from the development team, immensely more wasted effort from players who get their work culled, immensely more structure (which makes everything less fun except for those higher up the structure),

You mention massive planning, review, coordination - the more things are structured, the more it's no longer "playing a game" but "work" for players. For some, that's fine, but for the majority of others, it'd ruin it. You'd basically be trying to organize a player-ran government, with all the bad aspects of a government bureaucracy, and the higher you elevate players, the more they love to exercise authority and the more you turn into an ostensibly-meritocratic jerkocracy. If you look at things like Wikipedia, of the millions of people who have participated with Wikipedia, the vast majority (99%) give up and leave, and the most active are an even tinier percentage (<0.1%). And this is with unsubjective work ("is it true or not?"), and with text. How much higher do you think that will be with art and subjectivity? You'd need what in the 90's they used to call a noob hose: A continuous stream of new players ignorant of the reasons of why 90% of your old players are leaving.

Use of player-generated-content can definitely be leveraged successfully, but I don't think turning over the majority of the game to players is ideal anymore than I think turning the majority of the world over to procedural generation is ideal - for a few games/MMOs, fine, but not as the default of the future. There are four or five different major problems coordinating together to ensure such games are far less than excellent, and with the amount of work you'd have to invest to make sure it is excellent, despite the mass of players' sub-standard creation, it'd would be better invested just making the game itself, supplemented by selective use of crowd-sourcing. From where I sit, the way those kinds of games would be profitable is by tricking players (either maliciously or out of self-belief) into thinking things will be better than they will actually turn out - i.e. the end result being making money, rather than a quality creation worth playing.

There is some incredible work "the internet" does - overall, people make some incredible work. But those gems are surrounded by ten times more trash. Crowdsourcing seems to be the idea of dragging in huge trawlnets hoping to find those gem-creators and tricking them into making the developers' game for them so the developer can profit instead of the creators (sometimes developers ""benevolently"" give them a cut of the money they made for the developer), and toss back into the sea the trash-creators.

This is my opinion obviously, and others' views vary! :)

I'm pessimistic of that method of development, as I'm sure you've gathered. :P

Note: When I say 90% (or more) of artists/creators on the 'net make trash, I'm in that category also (as a 90% programmer, 90% designer). I'm not much better than the masses, even in my areas of specialization. Thankfully, I interact in real life with some writers and artists that are in the 9% category, which motivates me in my programming and design to try harder to reach the 9% tier of programming and game design, but it also gives me (I think) a broader picture when looking at the combined 99%. I don't currently know anyone in the .9% tier.

Having deep experience with user generated content, I second the suggestion that Sturgeons Law applies.
If you want to build user-generated content, building a way to make good content naturally flow to the top of discovery is important!
And, the simple ways of doing that, tend to favor some very few who have the most main-stream offerings, leaving great content that caters to niches somewhat under-exposed.
This is a really, really, hard problem! (You see this on all online marketplaces, including things like Steam!)

Again, perhaps you have some breakthrough in organization or business model that will work around these known challenges, and if so, I encourage you to share! Dreams don't become reality unless you can clearly articulate them to others :-)