🚀 go-pugleaf

Spalls Hurgenson <spallsh...@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:

>On Thu, 01 Aug 2013 11:03:31 -0400, Xocyll <Xoc...@kingston.net>
>wrote:
>
>>Markus Sch�fer <markus....@rub.de> looked up from reading the
>>entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
>>say:
>>
>>>Am 01/08/2013 02:19, schrieb Xocyll:
>>>
>>>> I rather like the way they did it in Skyrim - walk there to "discover"
>>>> the city, thereafter you can fast travel there if you wish (assuming you
>>>> aren't encumbered.)   I just wish the actual landscape of Skyrim was at
>>>> least a dozen times larger, not the province stuffed in a large backyard
>>>> they implemented.
>>>
>>>My feelings exactly. I think Skyrim got the basics right but the feeling 
>>>of vast, open landscapes breaks down especially once you have explored a 
>>>bit and notice that many places are not separated by actual distance but 
>>>by carefully placed obstacles.
>>>
>>>It's obvious that it wouldn't be much fun having to walk miles and miles 
>>>for every quest. But I believe there must be some kind of compromise 
>>>between an extreme like WoW (and LotR it seems) where you can just 
>>>choose instances like counterstrike maps, and a realistic landscape that 
>>>forces you to walk for hours.
>>>
>>>> Daggerfall I had it down to a science - I'd play the mage guild up until
>>>> I had access to the guild teleporter, plant a mark in front of him (that
>>>> I could teleport to,)  get a mission, recall to him, have him teleport
>>>> me to the mission, do mission, recall to him, have him teleport me tot
>>>> he city/town/whatever where the mission giver was, hand in mission.
>>>> I sometimes cleared out multiple dungeons all over the play area all in
>>>> a single day.
>>>
>>>Ah, I remember Daggerfall and its huge landmass. It's a shame that the 
>>>wilderness was so monotonous and flat that the only relevant aspect of 
>>>navigation was choosing a heading and going straight for the dungeon 
>>>entrance *g*
>>
>>I did run overland a few times due to being a vampire and unable to use
>>any kind of fast travel or wait during daylight.  (I had health regen
>>items that kept me alive, but the game wouldn't recognize them and let
>>me fast travel.)   
>>
>>Technically this is still a problem in Skyrim because the devs were lazy
>>shits in how they calculate damage and fast travel.
>>[Sunlight does X damage per second, items provide Z health regen per
>>second where Z = X.1. Player would take no real damage no matter how
>>long the trip.
>>Except they implemented it as - trip took Y seconds, player takes (X *
>>Y) damage in one lump amount, and dies instantly.  Where they should
>>have done player takes ((X-Z) * Y) damage, which would have been zero.]
>>
>>
>>I got lost more than once going overland - even the tiniest bit off
>>course means you can miss your destination by _miles_.
>>
>>>What I really liked was the size of the cities, especially compared to 
>>>Skyrim. Solitude is supposed to be the capital of Skyrim province but it 
>>>is pitifully small. I remember the cities in Daggerfall being ten times 
>>>that size in some cases. Granted, there was a lot of repetition in their 
>>>layout but at least they *felt* like cities.
>>
>>
>>Hell some of the _villages_ in Daggerfall were bigger than Solitude.
>>
>>That's the other problem with Skyrim, you have these capital cities and
>>a few farms here and there, but no real villages, no sense that this
>>country could actually grow enough food to feed itself - there just
>>don't seem to be enough farms or peasants around to do the job.
>>Or pay for those THOUSANDS of tombs scattered around the tiny
>>countryside.
>>
>>
>>That's the thing, if you look at the Tamriel world map, the area covered
>>by Skyrim is pretty much exactly the same as that covered in Daggerfall.
>>
>>Only while Daggerfall was something like 700,000 sq km, Skyrim is 20ish.
>>
>>Even Luxembourg isn't that small.
>>
>>Skyrim should have been a minimum of 5x larger, preferably 10x.
>>That would have made it large enough to actually seem like a country
>>(albeit still abnormally small for a country), but still small enough to
>>walk places and not be bored silly.
>>
>>As it is Skyrim feels a whole lot like a 5yr old kid playing Wilderness
>>Explorer in his backyard - even when he's on the top of the tallest
>>mountain in the remotest wilderness, he's only seconds away from lunch
>>when Mummy calls.
>
>Yeah, but that's a problem almost every CRPG has had. The ones that
>don't - "Daggerfall", "Darklands" and "Lords of Midnight" are the only
>ones that come to mind - are the exceptions. Its a limitation of
>technology and resources. It costs a lot - in memory, CPU, developer
>time - to create huge worlds, especially these days when we expect so
>much detail applied to every little thing. And while there may be
>added realism to gigantic worlds, it rarely adds much to the gameplay.
>Even the aforementioned exceptions took shortcuts by using generic
>templates to create all the extraneous villages and dungeons, and not
>always to the game's benefit.

You break the world into parts - Skyrim would be dead easy to have done
this with all the mountains - simply make each area that's not visible
from the others a separate zone and thus NOT loaded into memory.

That or split into cells, much as Morrowind did.

>Now, obviously in a perfect world we'd have a game with a landscape
>the size of Daggerfall and the overwhelming detail of Skyrim and
>hopefully one day we'll achieve that. But given the choice between the
>two, I prefer Skyrim's methodology; the world map might be
>claustrophobic but at least I am assured of finding something
>interesting every five minutes or so. Daggerfall felt far too
>mechanical in comparison; it wasn't fun. 

I'm the opposite;  Daggerfall felt like a world, Skyrim feels like a
set.   
It's just too small to be a country, hell it's too small to be a county.
The entire map would fit into a corner of Disney World.

If it was 5x the size, it would still be easily walkable, and it
wouldn't have been that much more work doing the graphics (since a great
deal is just snow covered wilderness) but would have been large enough
to at least _possibly_ feel country sized.

That entire country would fit a couple times over in the distance
between my house and the High School I went to - that's not a scale I
can take seriously as a _country_.   No I don't live out in the boonies
either.

Xocyll