Meaningful distance in MMOs: A discussion

[killem2]

Isn't World of Warcraft more or less like that anyway?

It very much is, aside from the hearthstones you foot your way across the landscape.

Sure a mage can teleport themselves and people to capital cities, but in a fantasy setting i can accept that big cities have facilities like this.

It has lost some of its flare with the dungeon finder/warlock summoning abilities now. But there has to be some ease, MMOs cannot be a grind. That is the old way, it is about the easy now.

[GolemsVoice]

Nothing however stops you from physically walking everywhere, safe for the areas that have to be reached by (manually) flying there.

[mangosta71]

Give me a few examples of games that feature time passing (a cycle of day and night, etc) that have it happen at the same rate as IRL. Pokemon's the only one I'm coming up with. Skyrim, for example, has a clear day and night cycle, along with things that only happen at certain tims of day, but that cycle is a lot faster than IRL. It's a well-established game design feature, and doesn't have any of the problems with time compression you mentioned.

This is about day/night cycles now? I thought we were talking about distances in the game world being comparable to distances in the real world, which is what would make the travel times comparable, which is why time compression would be necessary (unless you honestly want your players to spend months just to accrue enough play time for their characters to travel from one city to the next). Anyway, if you're speeding up the passage of time so that people are choosing to play the game instead of, say, slashing their wrists, why don't you just play any of the current flock of MMOs and tell yourself that the map is big enough to be realistic, and time is simply so sped up that it only takes a couple minutes to go from point A to point B? The fast travel features are completely optional, so if you feel it spoils the immersion you can choose not to take advantage of them.

[PracticalM]

Puzzle Pirates originally did not have whisking potions and so travel between islands was via sailing there. Now there are potions that allow you to move between islands and you have to buy them from shops/stalls run by players. (Players could also be invited by a player who has a ship/shop/stall/home on an island so there were ways to move between islands without potions.)

For people looking for a player run economy, Puzzle Pirates is worth the look. You need rum and shot to sail (pillaging, trading, hunting sea monsters) and rum and shot are made by players. If you want a sword you either must find them in sea monster hunts or find a shop that will make or sell you one. Clothing, bludgeons (for rumbling), mugs (drinking game), paint, furniture, and ships are all mostly player made. Players bid against each other for different commodities and post notices for labor.

http://yppedia.puzzlepirates.com/Economy gives a good summary.
http://yppedia.puzzlepirates.com/Economy_diagram gives an idea of how different commodities tie into the economy.

Puzzle Pirates just turned 10 years old and I'm still having fun after playing for more than 8 of those years. If anyone is interested in checking it out, try this referral link. It should put you into my crew on the Cerulean ocean but you don't have to stay there if you don't want to (there are 2 other oceans). I'll be happy to introduce you around to the game.

Puzzle Pirates Link

I like the idea of increasing travel times, but I think it may be impractical. A better solution might be making there be multiple types of currency which may provide a similar effect (keeping people local) and create currency markets among players. Puzzle Pirates originally had different currencies in different island groups but that was changed even before I started playing. I think it could have been very cool though.

--
PracticalM
Silverstache, Drunk of the Mad Mutineers of the Cerulean Ocean

[Heliomance]

This is about day/night cycles now? I thought we were talking about distances in the game world being comparable to distances in the real world, which is what would make the travel times comparable, which is why time compression would be necessary (unless you honestly want your players to spend months just to accrue enough play time for their characters to travel from one city to the next). Anyway, if you're speeding up the passage of time so that people are choosing to play the game instead of, say, slashing their wrists, why don't you just play any of the current flock of MMOs and tell yourself that the map is big enough to be realistic, and time is simply so sped up that it only takes a couple minutes to go from point A to point B? The fast travel features are completely optional, so if you feel it spoils the immersion you can choose not to take advantage of them.

What I'm suggesting is not distances so large that you have to spend two days of real time walking to get anywhere. What I'm suggesting is distances large enough that travel time is an actual obstacle, such that you don't simply pop over to the city on the other side of the continent because you need to run an errand over there. I'm suggesting distances that can be travelled when you want to go somewhere else, but that encourage you to stay in one place until you have a compelling reason to go elsewhere. To make different places actually feel like different places.

[Saskia]

I used to play Final Fantasy XI. Some zones could take the better part of an hour to navigate end to end. The inevitable first trip to Jeuno fairly early in the grind could take three hours or so if you didn't have help since you had to avoid aggressive enemies. Even with a teleport (there were only three places you could teleport to, later they added a fourth and other ways to get places a little more quickly) you could reliably expect a trip from a major city to anywhere important to take an hour or two, even with a mount. Because of how integral the game's day/night cycle, elemental days, and weather were to the core mechanics (spawns, magic damage and resist rates, and even unlocking one of the playable classes) getting places quickly and efficiently for different quests or to avoid the powerful undead that spawned at night was often very important, particularly during the lower level grind but even sometimes at maximum level. And don't get me started on the boat/airship schedule.

While I suspect that your game may be flawed from a marketing perspective if utilities like this are actually necessary for getting anything done, I can't say that I don't look back on the game fondly. Yes, it was a pain in the butt and a source of endless frustration, but it made for a wonderfully flavorful world and travel. It was still aggravating when you needed to wait 8+ hours because you're a summoner, or helping a lower level summoner, and the elemental monsters you need to kill for top-end class-related gear (not to mention your core summoning abilities) would be a pain in the butt during a different game day. Personally, I like that kind of depth even when it makes me want to pull my hair out, and things like that were the lion's share of reasons I played that game as long as I did. The travel time and general pain in the rear that the game was did give a sense of accomplishment when you finished something. I'm not keen to admit it, but that's reason number one reason that I kept giving Square-Enix money even long after I stopped logging on: The sense that I had succeeded in something and wanting to have access to my "trophies". Even aside from the sense of having accomplished something by virtue of having the biggest baddest summoner gear (oh my god that sounds so stupid), some of my best friends and I bonded over that game. The people I had met through that game (some of them even still very close friends) and the stories we have that relate to it, stupid game-jokes that became so ingrained into us over years that the word "goblins" is still synonymous with "Mujahaddin", and myriad other mental trinkets that mean a lot more than they should at face value are attached to that game.

That's what makes a financially successful subscription-based game, particularly since the NUMBERSNUMBERSNUMBERS people and the "I just want to stab things with my epeen" people already have WoW. You cannot compete with WoW directly, no matter how much money you have behind you (I'm looking at you, TORtanic!). The MMO market already has its Call of Duty, and Battlefield cost a LOT of money to make its way into that market. The MMO market doesn't need another cartoon game where any given character is 20% body, 10% clothing and 70% shoulder pads as if fashion had only gone further south after the 80s, and the world doesn't WANT another MMO with a quest-based experience system where three quarters of the content is nothing more than "go to X area and kill Y number of monster Z." I suspect the only way another MMO is going to make way is by being different and actually engaging its players and sucking them in so that they become emotionally invested, but travel times and sweeping vistas only go so far to making that game satisfying. Visuals are not the core engagement of any game, despite what the drooling simians at CryTek would have you believe. Populating that massive world with interesting creatures and characters is no mean feat, and creating interesting content for most of those areas (because not every area needs to have four dozen hub-based quests) is not a simple proposition, either, and nobody is going to pay a subscription fee to play Dear Esther: Online Edition. Who is really willing to put up that kind of money? Square-Enix met with success with FFXI but then XIV was a market disaster, EA is hemorrhaging money thanks to TOR, and everything else has been mauled to death and its skull displayed on a pike outside of World of Warcraft's blood-stained cave.

Obviously the next big MMO is going to be in some significant way different from WoW, but a game world which would be end-to end 10+ hours of legwork would be A) going to be extremely expensive and have terrain consisting mainly of large sections of Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V; and B) nobody will want to play it because it will take so incredibly long to get things done, not to mention scheduling nightmares for player groups. I admit that a MMO on a scale even a tenth of Daggerfall would be impressive, but the cost would likely push into ten figures, and that's simply too much risk for any company with its head screwed on right.

[Brother Oni]

Square-Enix met with success with FFXI but then XIV was a market disaster, EA is hemorrhaging money thanks to TOR, and everything else has been mauled to death and its skull displayed on a pike outside of World of Warcraft's blood-stained cave.

Just because a MMO doesn't have the income or subscription numbers of WoW, doesn't make it a failure.

Eve Online for example is still showing consistent growth even nearly 10 years on.

Incidentally, Eve also fulfils Story Time's request for stationary landmarks (gates and the sun in each system remains static, planets and other stellar bodies move very slowly and missions/complexes/wormholes spawn as and when scanned out), although as a space game, there's a lot of empty scenery.

[Mynxae]

It very much is, aside from the hearthstones you foot your way across the landscape.

Sure a mage can teleport themselves and people to capital cities, but in a fantasy setting i can accept that big cities have facilities like this.

It has lost some of its flare with the dungeon finder/warlock summoning abilities now. But there has to be some ease, MMOs cannot be a grind. That is the old way, it is about the easy now.

Actually, since Mists of Pandaria (released in September), warlocks are 100% more useful. So are summoning stones. Considering for challenge dungeons you need to summon people to them (as in actually LFG in a city first, then travel there from wherever the five of you are), yeah.. I remember when they implemented the pre-Mists patch - everyone was like 'WHERE'S 'HAVE GROUP WILL TRAVEL' ?!' (mass summoning spell that's been around in.. Cata I think only?). Personally, having been a GM of a guild before, I'm glad they got rid of it. All 90% of the guild members (and we were the biggest social guild on the server at the time) did when they wanted to come back to Stormwind was whine in guild chat constantly if they can have a summon to Stormwind until someone did it. Got annoying after the first day or two. And don't get me started on the gold beggers..

But also on the fast travel issues, probably 50-75% of the time you can find a mage who can portal you to whichever city/continent you want to go to really. And it's usually inexpensive, depending on your level and the niceness of the mage. Once my mage is max-level I'll give free portals to guildies and anyone under level 80. Anyone above that, probably 10g, just 'cause if they don't have that much at that point, they shouldn't be playing WoW..

Just because a MMO doesn't have the income or subscription numbers of WoW, doesn't make it a failure.

Eve Online for example is still showing consistent growth even nearly 10 years on.

Incidentally, Eve also fulfils Story Time's request for stationary landmarks (gates and the sun in each system remains static, planets and other stellar bodies move very slowly and missions/complexes/wormholes spawn as and when scanned out), although as a space game, there's a lot of empty scenery.

All I know about Eve Online is that it has spaceships and is apparently cool. Is it worth looking up? (And yes, I know it requires a subscription, like WoW, which after a year of playing I'm getting bored with)

[Rockphed]

This is why I say the game should be built around it from the ground up. Thus there wouldn't be anything that required you to go back and forth between cities that are an hour away from each other. You'd start in one city, do everything there was to do there, and then later you'd move on and go somewhere else. In the real world in the middle ages, people didn't go back and forth travelling all the time. Journeys were things that you planned for, and were significant.

Sounds awesome, really.

One more thing: I like games where players have ways to make a lasting impact on the world. (The main reason I play MUDs over MMOs). How about a game where players formed nations that would then, first, have to build streets or train lines between locations? And warring nations could attack those train lines to cut off supplies and player reinforcements?

"Our train line was cut!" "What do we do now?" "Walk to the border." "But that takes six hours!" "Well, set your chars to automatic, we'll be playing our alts."

I think an MMO with more of an economic rather than combat bent. Players would be merchants or nobles who were trying to build an economic empire. As such, they would spend most of their time in a single place trying to milk it of goods, services, mercinaries, and money. Having many alts tied to a single account would probably be a must for transporting goods between locations. Either you would grab 4 or 5 of your alts and tell them to follow a combat character through the wilderness, or you would have your alt follow a group of combatants who won't be paid until he gets to the other end safely. People doing the walking through the inbetween would either have their characters on auto-walk and just get notified if combat starts, or would have some basic, low level interaction with the environment with occasional bursts of interesting, read dangerous, stuff going on.

Aside from whatever combat and economic skills exist, there should probably be an "alertness" skill that allows a character to sense when other characters or monsters are about.

There would probably be a few NPC run towns, but, in general, players would build everything. Expect someone to build an inn at the top of the tallest mountain, just to ruin the view.

[Acanous]

This is not an idea I think I'd enjoy. I'm used to City of Heroes, with it's

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Train, Ouroborus, Supergroup base teleporters, Pocket D VIP pass teleporters, Long Range Teleport power, Black Market Teleporter, Midnight Club, Ferry, Helicopter line, Superspeed, Flight, Super Leap, Mission Transporter, Vanguard DPO, TUNNEL network

14 different means of fast transit. (Usually, picking what you want to use to go somewhere takes longer than going there.)

Of course, I've always championed the idea of an MMO where *Death is Permanent, roll a new character*, *To keep your wealth, you must leave it in a bank* and *To keep your levels, you must get married, procreate, and spend resources on raising your kids*

If you wanted to add long travel time to that? I'd still play.

[bluewind95]

Those that have said WoW is kinda like this are right. I remember once, when there was going to be a server restart, I was all the way south of a continent. I really needed to get to, like... halfway up the continent (from Tanaris to Felwood) due to the chance of getting a rare spawn pet (minfernal!), and I really needed it to be before the 15 minutes before the server restarted were up. I mounted up. I have paid for the fastest mount travel. I set up auto-run, keeping an eye out for obstacles.

... I got to Felwood with less than 3 minutes to spare. This was via the fastest travel speed, direct line, practically no turns or obstacles (just a few times correcting my course to take the most direct way).

Back at the lower levels, before I had a mount, travel times were pretty impressive. You pretty much had to stay in one area, not really popping over to another city for an errand. Major cities were indeed mostly inter-connected, but anything else meant walking for a very long time. I think a run from the starter area of a race to the main city can take like 10-20 minutes, depending, and that's if you didn't catch the attention of enemies along the way. Some errand quests were pretty awful because of this, though thankfully going from town to town was a rare thing. Usually what you do is finish all the quests in one town, and then you get a quest sending you over to the next. When you get a mount, travel times become bearable, and you can sometimes spare time to go for an errand elsewhere. Or just to explore. But never before a mount (especially if you're gonna be a crazy person exploring places 20 levels ahead. You need to outrun the enemies!).

Thing about travel times is that you don't always have a long time to spare on a game. Those quests that needed traveling would often take half the time I had avaiable, and then I wouldn't be able to really get anywhere. Oh, I do love to explore, and that's part of the charm WoW holds for me. The different areas are all so different and it's just nice to see this amount of variety. But... I want to do things too (mind you, I am FAR from a min-maxing player. I have been told I play WoW wrong because I never go for the most efficient level-up plan, nor the best equipment possible). And oftentimes, if it takes me 2 hours to get to the next town, I likely won't be able to get there *and* do something in there, but just... get there. So I prefer to have the option to get there faster. Especially at a high level, when I've likely traveled the place so many times.

While I think that a game focusing on traveling would be a wonderful thing, I think that the schedule of people in general is a pretty big obstacle. Some kind of vacation/retreat virtual reality where you get to do that for a few weeks would be great, cos then you'd have all the time to really dedicate yourself to it. But as it is, I think very few people would be able to enjoy a game like this, even if it's a really nice idea.

[Brother Oni]

All I know about Eve Online is that it has spaceships and is apparently cool. Is it worth looking up? (And yes, I know it requires a subscription, like WoW, which after a year of playing I'm getting bored with)

Spoilered for off topic.

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The TL,DR version: Eve Online is a very niche game and the best recommendation I can give is to try it out for yourself before committing to a subscription (it's one of the more expensive games out there, I believe).

If you ask nicely on Other Gaming, there are a number of Eve players here who can give you a referral for a 21 day trial instead of the standard 14 day one.

A brief rundown on the lore: You are a capsuleer, a rare breed of spaceship pilot that can interface with special ships via alien technology (a pod). Since a capsuleer can command the entire ship directly instead of having a command crew (or in some cases, replace the crew entirely), a capsuleer ship has much better combat effectiveness, resulting in a massive military advantage that can (and has) won wars.
You can have multiple ships (although you can only pilot one at a time) and changing ships is pretty much like changing classes in other games.

Now onto what the game is actually like: this CCP video (The Butterfly Effect) is true but hides the fact that good intel and organisation is often critical to success (hence the perjorative but accurate nickname Spreadsheets Online).

The game has a very high death penalty - if your ship is destroyed, it's gone along with probably most of your modules (equipment), which can be looted by your killer. In addition, you can be killed directly (after your ship explodes, you're left in your pod which can be shot up), which can result in skill point loss (which would take real time to re-learn).

While the tutorial and basic hand holding has been improved, the game still has a fairly high learning curve - this is offset by the fact that you can do anything you like in it. If you wanted to jump straight into pvp, you can (you can be useful to any group almost right from the get-go); you can trade, do missions (NPC quests), mine asteroids for minerals, courier goods or run blockades, go exploring - you're not locked in by your initial character decisions, which are mostly cosmetic only.

This level of freedom does mean that if you're not used to setting your own goals and like a vague framework to work through, you're not going to find it in Eve.

As a consequence of this freedom, you can be scammed by other players in-game and the GMs will not do anything about it: account hacking and the like are properly punished, but if you get scammed on contracts (in game auction house), you're out of luck. This leads to Eve players being generally very paranoid and if you can't get into a good corp (guild) soon after the tutorial, you may find your play experience very lonely and boring.

[mangosta71]

What I'm suggesting is not distances so large that you have to spend two days of real time walking to get anywhere. What I'm suggesting is distances large enough that travel time is an actual obstacle, such that you don't simply pop over to the city on the other side of the continent because you need to run an errand over there. I'm suggesting distances that can be travelled when you want to go somewhere else, but that encourage you to stay in one place until you have a compelling reason to go elsewhere. To make different places actually feel like different places.

Okay, this sounds a lot more reasonable than the impression I had of what you wanted. Still, once your players have finished the quests in one area, the majority of them won't want to spend an hour just in traveling to the next area. This could be mitigated somewhat via breadcrumb quests, so that you're actually progressing a story as you go from one area to the next - as long as they feel like they're accomplishing something/have a goal, they're more likely to stick around. Or perhaps having questlines that gradually move you farther away from one point along the path to another. But then you get into the type of "go to this little farm, do the quests here, then go to the next" thing that I think you want to avoid.

Now, suppose someone realizes that he missed a quest and, for whatever reason, wants to go back and do it, but said quest is several areas behind the zone he's currently in. If there's no fast travel system, he either has to forget the quest or spend several hours traveling just to get back to that area. This is why I like having fast travel to areas that you've visited before - otherwise you're spending a lot of time just running between areas that you've already been through. Instead of teleporting for instant travel, you might prefer a taxi service like WoW's birds or TOR's speeders - they're a lot faster than you can travel on your own, but it still takes time to reach your destination and you pay a service charge for the convenience.

[Saskia]

Just because a MMO doesn't have the income or subscription numbers of WoW, doesn't make it a failure.

Eve Online for example is still showing consistent growth even nearly 10 years on.

Incidentally, Eve also fulfils Story Time's request for stationary landmarks (gates and the sun in each system remains static, planets and other stellar bodies move very slowly and missions/complexes/wormholes spawn as and when scanned out), although as a space game, there's a lot of empty scenery.

Absolutely! Eve also isn't competing with WoW though because it serves a fundamentally different player engagement than WoW does. Eve is in fact exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about when I say that any game to survive in the MMO market would have to be different, and for exactly that reason. Anybody who's interested in a MMO for the numbersynumbers thing already has WoW, and WoW already has a big playerbase and online support infrastructure (wikis, etc) so people aren't going to change games en masse over what amounts to a reskin, QED The Old Republic.

Okay, this sounds a lot more reasonable than the impression I had of what you wanted. Still, once your players have finished the quests in one area, the majority of them won't want to spend an hour just in traveling to the next area. This could be mitigated somewhat via breadcrumb quests, so that you're actually progressing a story as you go from one area to the next - as long as they feel like they're accomplishing something/have a goal, they're more likely to stick around. Or perhaps having questlines that gradually move you farther away from one point along the path to another. But then you get into the type of "go to this little farm, do the quests here, then go to the next" thing that I think you want to avoid.

Now, suppose someone realizes that he missed a quest and, for whatever reason, wants to go back and do it, but said quest is several areas behind the zone he's currently in. If there's no fast travel system, he either has to forget the quest or spend several hours traveling just to get back to that area. This is why I like having fast travel to areas that you've visited before - otherwise you're spending a lot of time just running between areas that you've already been through. Instead of teleporting for instant travel, you might prefer a taxi service like WoW's birds or TOR's speeders - they're a lot faster than you can travel on your own, but it still takes time to reach your destination and you pay a service charge for the convenience.

That's exactly why quest-based level grind is so intrinsically flawed though, not even getting into the inevitable mountains of "Go collect nineteen wolf tails" which is made even more absurd when any given wolf might have 0-2 tails. Quests should be just that: Quests; tasks given by people in need for more than a minor errand with significant rewards. Sure, you can have the requests to suppress populations of X monster or Y but they shouldn't be the lion's share of of experience in the grind either. Just ditch the WoW-style quest system and make exploration and enemy variety (and thus strategic variety) primary engagements over repetitive grindy combat. Otherwise that gigantic world won't pay off anyway because you're competing with WoW and that just doesn't work.

[mangosta71]

Well, Rift is still around. And it even has an expansion launching in a couple weeks. To be fair, MoP has morphed WoW into a completely different game than it was originally - Rift is more similar to vanilla/BC-era WoW than the current incarnation. Most of Rift's playerbase is ex-WoW junkies that quit after WotLK launched.

In my opinion, BC was the high point of WoW and Rift is superior to that.

[Susano-wo]

Absolutely! Eve also isn't competing with WoW though because it serves a fundamentally different player engagement than WoW does. Eve is in fact exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about when I say that any game to survive in the MMO market would have to be different, and for exactly that reason. Anybody who's interested in a MMO for the numbersynumbers thing already has WoW, and WoW already has a big playerbase and online support infrastructure (wikis, etc) so people aren't going to change games en masse over what amounts to a reskin, QED The Old Republic.



That's exactly why quest-based level grind is so intrinsically flawed though, not even getting into the inevitable mountains of "Go collect nineteen wolf tails" which is made even more absurd when any given wolf might have 0-2 tails. Quests should be just that: Quests; tasks given by people in need for more than a minor errand with significant rewards. Sure, you can have the requests to suppress populations of X monster or Y but they shouldn't be the lion's share of of experience in the grind either. Just ditch the WoW-style quest system and make exploration and enemy variety (and thus strategic variety) primary engagements over repetitive grindy combat. Otherwise that gigantic world won't pay off anyway because you're competing with WoW and that just doesn't work.

I would play that game. I would play it sooo hard!

I like the idea of distance in MMOs (and I had the exact same experience with FFXI..damn, I want to get back into that game. I had just gotten my Red Mage up to lvl 41 before having to quit for various reasons...sorry back to the topic), but you have to design the game around it. Have different, interesting things to do at each of the locals, so its not just 'moving to the next area,' its making your home base this or that area for a while, so traveling to the next home area takes some time, so you feel as though its in a different part of the world

But the idea that exploring, and fighting different kinds of monsters, that employ different tactics and require different tactics sounds awesome!

[Haruspex_Pariah]

Wurm Online has significant travel distances. One of those sandbox MMORPGs, looked very much "in progress" when I last played. If you want to travel fast you can ride a horse, or hitch horses to a wagon to carry lots of stuff, or build a boat to sail to other parts of the map (or even other servers). Roads increase foot speed, and you also need to eat and drink or else your stamina will take a hit.

Cooperative players gather together in villages, focusing on areas near water, lumber, and minerals. I saw one of the more experienced players ride a two-horse cart halfway across the map to trade with another player. He didn't come back for about an hour.

It worked because we were on a PVE server and we were kinda laid back, not too obsessed with big projects or what. On PVP I guess things would be different.

[Jonzac]

You have this exactly..its called EVE Online. You have distances that cannot be shortcutted, exploring to do and people who will kill you on the way...just because you might carry something good.

[Brother Oni]

You have this exactly..its called EVE Online. You have distances that cannot be shortcutted...

*cough*Jumpdrives*cough*

[Mynxae]

*cough*Jumpdrives*cough*

Aren't they only on Capital Ships though?

[Brother Oni]

Aren't they only on Capital Ships though?

Not any more. You're right in that all capital ships have jump drives, but Black Ops ships now have them as well.

Starbases and titans can also generate jump bridges which allow any ship to bypass distances and Black Ops ships can make covert jump portals, which apparently allow covert ops, SBs, Force recons and blockade runners to make jumps as well.

This is also not including wormhole randomness that can spit players out multiple jumps from where they went in.

All in all, the 'no short cuts' view of Eve is looking distinctly creaky.

[Empedocles]

The most important thing with this IMO to make it appeal to a wider audience would be to make most of the land you travel over interesting. Not in the sense of nice scenery, but rather wildlife and villages and mines and bandits and isolated huts and so on. You also couldn't have one of those games where a player will constantly have to access something in a village. For example, in Runescape, players constantly run between villages since in one village there's a furnace, and in another there's an anvil. If that were the case here, and it took 2 hours to get from village to village, and the mines were another hour away to the east...