I would argue that Minecraft is not a “world” as much as an endless plain of generative content.
If I can run in a straight line around the circumference of the Gameworld and end up in the same place, then I would consider it a world. I don’t know of any games that do this on a earth like planet scale.
Astroneer is a game where if you run around the whole planet, you will end up right where you were. store.steampowered.com/app/361420/ASTRONEER/Great game and worth a play even if it seems a bit kidish May not be earth scale but still fairly large planets
Space Engineers can get even closer but I have only seen it done with modded planets and they are still no where near earth size
This is a design choice, intentionally made, for the sake of immersion. Once you know that, it is very cool.
But if youre going to play it you need to know that it intentionally doesnt use menus, because without knowing that you will feel very lost for your first few hours
There have been plenty of other open world games years before Minecraft existed. Elite 1984, Legend of Zelda on the NES, Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind. Etc.
The term itself just hasn’t been around that long.
I don’t think you can handcraft a whole world with any reasonable team/timeframe for video game development. Looking at the (very short) video I suspect there will be handcrafted areas like cities, and they’ve put more emphasis on that than in NMS because the size is more manageable. But 80 or 90% needs to be procgen to make it something that can be delivered in years and not decades. Although being a single world, maybe that let them have more visibility of what was being generated (vs checking millions of planets) and then tweak manually large parts of it.
But is it procgen as you go? Or did they procgen a whole map, which exists from start for you to explore?
Because the latter is very cool, but the verbage around it so far feels like they mean the former, and Ive no clue how that would work with what theyre claiming the game is.
I think it’s the second. Even on No Man’s Sky, with the bazillion worlds, they all exist “as they are” and are consistent from the beginning. If you revisit a planet, it’s exactly as it was.
Now with what I know about this technology, I suspect the way this happens is every planet had a seed (a number) that you can pass to the “random planet generator” it will generate exactly the same thing over and over. Then basically when you load a new planet it goes “right, with this seed, what would we have in these coordinates?” And the answer is persistent.
However having seen how that looks in NMS, I feel they’d have had to add a bit of extra spice to be able to sell a single world. In my mind that involves manually crafted areas almost necessarily, as well as checking most of the planet manually to oversee the procedural generator and massage anything that doesn’t pass a level of quality. If I were to make this game myself, I would use procedural generation for the different areas and not for the whole planet, so that I can give certain sections of the map a “reroll” if I don’t like them.
Sounds plausable. I guess they generated the planet an then told the generator “place this handcraftet city/dungeon/cave/whatever x units away from another handcraftet thing” at least i hope they did otherwise it will get boring pretty quick i think.
I put something like 500 hours into No Man’s Sky at various points (PC and PS4pro). It was fun! I’ve moved on. But if they get anywhere near that with Light No Fire, I’ll be buying in once again :)
IMO, on the Game Awards where it was announced, he looked extremely nervous to say much of anything. And he seemed like he was trying to downplay what the game has with his comments on it being a small team working on it. Which I don’t blame him.
Yeah I sure hope they’ve learned from NMS and specifically underpromise and overdeliver, but most nervousness can be explained by him just being an introverted dork. I can relate.
Homie, I’m sorry but open world really just means its one map and it implies you might be able to go anywhere on the horizon. Rain World has an open world, Elder Scrolls definitely does except for Arena, pretty much any MMO, Astroneer, your OLD GAME No Man’s Sky is open world. Seriously take a step back from your own project and breath for 4 hours before making announcements. That being said, Light No Fire looks ridiculously good and I can’t wait for it.
Oh yes! Funny, I was going to comment somewhere else on this chain about Ultima’s ecosystem that was present at launch and quickly removed. The players just killed everything with no regard, which was not taken into account when designing the system.
So I’m left wondering, first real what? Ultima had an open world and ecosystem, rain world has an open world and ecosystem, Spore even has an open world and its ecosystem is not really an ecosystem. This game looks great, I’ve wishlisted it. But they clearly need help with the marketing so it doesn’t just sound like Randomly Generated Survival Game 3498.
I think they’re just talking about the game being open world in a full planet that you can clearly see is a planet and is large and diverse enough to actually feel like a full planet.
Still not the first at that either. Valheim for example is a round planet and open world and has several biomes. But there the world isn’t really impressive, so maybe that’s what they are trying to be the first of?
Based on the trailer they are clearly trying to be the first game to actually achieve something but it’s hard to define what that something really is.
Yup. I remember messing around with some mod once that let you find gear with a bunch of cool, random enchantments on them. I ended up finding some pants that let you walk on water… was pretty silly just running across oceans, but it actually led me to explore more of the world then I would have bothered to do otherwise.
Arena is one of the most open world of TES games. You can go anywhere in Tamriel. That said, it’s fairly limited with what it can do, but it’s so much more open than later games. Daggerfall is similar, except it got limited to one region.
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