More on Vanguard and world design

Looking at vanguard: just as good a *design* - dead creature, tents - but the connectivity is poor for whatever reason. It just doesn't feel as alive. The fence, gate's and tents look like they are about to fall down. The sea creature looks like it has just fallen out of the sky and landed on the ground rather than having led there for ages. Also someone could just swim round that fence. What's it defending against? No signs of it being a real barricade. WoW here would have supplies behind the fence, strong supports holding it up. On the other side there would be bits of broken wood, swords or corpses (like a fight has happened there so a fence is needed)

None of this is representative of anything but scenery of course. But there is easily a distinction. Personally I like the 'organic vs constructed' or 'scene management' terms rather than 'world design.'

Well, that's world design.

You get an editor, the art assets and start to lay down all the pieces so that they make sense, so that the scene is cohesive and immersive. Of course this is one side of the work, because then world design is also about gameplay.

I see world design as the middle ground between the artists and designers.

The artists come up with the concept of a zone and then build the art assets to be used. The quest designers give the zone its own story and personality and start to organize the quests so that they carry on the story and so that they are fun to play. The world designers take all these elements and preliminary work and build the zone concretely. The roles blur together.

As if you were building a map for an RTS. From a side you would try to make it pretty. From the other you would try to make it tactically interesting.

In a mmorpg this is slightly less important as the terrain is there more to give atmosphere, but the way a zone is built also determines it's flow. This is also important even if rather invisible for the average player.

It is a lot easier though to criticize a world that is based on realism though.

That's a false perception. It's not a matter of realism, it's a matter of consistence. You can build a world that is built on fancy rules, but for it to work you still need to make it consistent.

A Disney CG movie isn't "realistic" but an insane amount of work goes into it to make it consistent. The fact that stylized is easier is a myth. It looks simpler, but it ISN'T simpler.

Actually it's much harder to develop a style than just stick with real world and try to mimic it (photography references and documentation).

I didn't say it was easier to make a world based on realism. But there is much more nitpicking of the minor details in games that aren't stylized - games that are supposed to look realistic. When you have real world things to compare what you're seeing to - you're going to make those comparisons.

I understand what you're saying about making it consistent. I can't really say anything about VG's consistency at this point because I've really experienced very little of it. =/

And about the execution comment, I couldn't care less if they bought a tree modeling engine, it is in fact well done and way better looking than wow trees.
I doubt blizzard doesn't have enough money to buy it if they really wanted to.

I dislike SpeedTree. It makes some pretty trees and immersive environments, but it gets repetitive, has a major impact on the framerate and the LOD adjustements are ugly. It puts some hard caps on what you can do with it, which is a rule with every kind of middleware: it allows you to build something much faster, but it also limits the flexibility of what you can do (a silly but true example: SpeedTree couldn't render some huge trees as the one in WoW's Ashenvale).

WoW's trees are consistent with the style of the game. They fit well in the game even if they aren't incredibly detailed (and laggy).

they are cubic and non-imersive, big or not. That's my point... Neither is perfect, each game has it's flaws, and the LOD problems you seem to mention more than once, are also limited by current technology. With infinite RAM and processing power they shouldn't / wouldn't be needed... I consider it better, for example, the the fog present in wow. I'd much rather see a blurry Ironforge up ahead than this foggy thing that adds, again, little to the immersion.

If you say "damn, Vanguard's gameplay sucks", ok, it's your oppinion, but the art, even if not as polished as you'd have hoped, it's still not remotely as bad as you portrait it.

I didn't like the art at all either. Franky from what I saw of it I considered it bad. As it was so inconsistent, somethings looked very good, others looked just horrible. Not to mention even with near state of the art hardware the game performs badly, and it doesn't even look that good.

First impressions with the game where bad for me. There was nothing in the game that made me want to come back to play the game even a second time.

I suppose I didn't give it much of chance, only played for maybe (big maybe there) 6 hours. I just had no reason to come back. Oh well, just by .02$

Point is that there are engines out there that deliver much, much more than Vanguard. It's both the art and the engine (engine in particular) to be bad.

Black & White 2 is one year and half old but has an AWESOME render. It looks absolutely amazing, you can zoom from the blade of grass to the sky in half a second without an hint of lag, can have on screen a massive clip range, it has wonderful water and even simulates dynamic clouds and rain.

It looks hundreds time better than Vanguard. Obviously they are two different kinds of games. But Vanguard reminds me more of EQ than a modern engine. It has the weight of a modern engine but its look is stuck to EQ with more bloat.

From a game with high hardware requirements I expect A LOT more.