Comment by chevill
5 years ago
>promising an infinite open world and then having a large-but-limited one.
This is also flat out lying, its just that most people will realize its not true. Simulated gameplay that's labelled as "simulated" is fine but if you end up not delivering anything close to that then you'll rightfully lose all credibility.
Scalable simulation worlds are more or less just a networked cluster of nodes with an octree topology. I suppose there are limitations to local node density but other than that providing a seamless experience is more about how to architect the core system than rocket science.
Yes, it's hard. I have no idea if people even want that. Or can you make the node-to-node transit non jarring for players. But I don't really see it as lying. Ambitious certainly.
Can they pull it off? No idea.
I don't think many people expect a literally unlimited world. I'm almost 40 so I don't have enough time to finish most of the non-infinite games I start. I just take issue with his statement that promising literally unlimited content and then delivering a lot of content isn't a lie. I'm not a great programmer (or a pro) and I suck at math so I don't actually know what's possible in terms of infinite worlds.
There have been attempts at delivering more content than a person could play in a lifetime. However, the broader the scope of a game is, the less compelling the content becomes. For example, No Man's Sky is probably the best attempt thus far at a literally infinite world (I don't know if it actually is or not). Its a really great game and I sank about a hundred hours of time into it, but after a while even though you're going to different places it begins to feel too familiar.
The 2nd Elder Scrolls Game, Daggerfall wasn't infinite but it did have 16,000 cities and quests generated in all of them. Supposedly someone figured out it would take about a week to walk from one end of the world to the other but you could actually do it (unless it experienced one of its many crashes while you were attempting it) Its one of my favorite games of all time. While by today's standards the quests were frequently shallow, there was enough hand crafted content to make the overall experience feel pretty authentic.
I think "Infinite" has to be understood not in the mathematical sense (as obviously nothing is infinite) but in the sense of letting the player experience as many new environments as they like. No mans sky is a good example of this, I think.
I also don't find too large game worlds intrinsically interesting, but there are many popular things I find boring so I'm not using my own sentiment as a gamer as a benchmark here.