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100 lines
4.6 KiB
Markdown
100 lines
4.6 KiB
Markdown
# Zone Design
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This is currently the thinking I plan to follow on roughing out the first few zones.
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This is a high level overview on how zones should be designed.
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Note that art should trump these (like when things becomes monotonous, etc), these are just guidelines.
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Look at this as a staring point.
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## Notes
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MMO = A Massively Multiplayer Online Game
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## Problems
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### I want complex MMO-Esque classes in the game.
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Levelling also actually need to serve as a tutorial.
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### The game should work well in single player.
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Levelling needs to be shorter than in MMOs, because it will be boring otherwise (MMOs typically make levelling slow,
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in order to help people meet and quest together). However this makes traditional levelling slow and extremely tedious
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in a single player setting.
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This also means that zones need to be extremely big, and that you need to create tons of them.
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For example Vanilla WoW has something like 18 (Kalimdor) + 22 (Eastern Kingdoms) zones not counting dungeons and battlegrounds.
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Something like this is really cool, but unnecessary, and will not work well.
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### The game needs to support multiplayer.
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Especially if the classes work well, it would be a wasted opportunity not to have it.
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However the game shouldn't be an MMO, as MMOS are designed in a way where you NEED to have certain numbers of players
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per server in order for everything to function properly, which is a big issue, if you don't have enough players.
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IF (and that's a big IF), the game turns out really good, people will likely want to have mmo like features,
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but that's out of the scope of this particular project, stuff can be reworked like that in a different repo
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IF and WHEN the need arises.
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### World Scaling
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Since the game will need to support both single and multiplayer I'd say that world scaling (like the one in skyrim, and in WoW)
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is out of the question, especially since I was (un?)lucky enough to see multiplayer player + world scaling in action in WoW.
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It does not work well, especially not in PvP.
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Now there is a way to scale worlds, that I think will work in this case, which is a "new game +", or diablo solution.
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I think this will be implemented, especially before there is enough content to level a character, but even after,
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it will be able to give optional content to people that want it. It will be similar to Diablo II's difficulty,
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except maybe it could go on for more (that could mostly be used for multiplayer challenges).
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It should not powercreep gear though (it should drop better gear, but only up to a point
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- Also I think gear should be hand crafted -).
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Note that the World - Viewport separation in the engine is preparation for this feature + dungeons to be able to work
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on servers.
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### Levelling cannot be too fast
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Since I want classes to be complex, this means they will need to have lots of levels. (Not yet sure how much.)
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I'm pretty sure it will be 70-80-ish.
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If levelling is too fast, players either outlevel a zone without really being able to finish it, or
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if mobs are scaled to a levelling setup like this, then the end of a zone will be way too high level,
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and it will look awkward.
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WoW actually used to have this problem before they did the level squish, and levelling rework at the end of BFA.
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(To be fair, I think they caused more issues with the levelling rework, but let's ignore that for now,
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as it's really irrelevant.)
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### In essence
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The main issue is that levelling has to be slow, but not too slow, also the world cannot be just scaled around
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the player like in Skyrim.
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## The solution
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I think I came up with a base setup that might work.
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A normal run-of-the-mill zone should be similar in size to a standard MMO zone. This will give lots of leeway.
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A subzone is a quest hub with it's perimeter. Usually I saw around 5 of these in a zone in MMOS,
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that I ended up messing with. Note that it does not really have to be a normal quest hub every single time,
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so it doesn't get boring.
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### Zone Setup
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The starter zone should level players from 1 to (around) 12, as the lower levels can be quite boring before you really
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start to have your class spells. This will have to be baked in into the stats.
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The next zone should level players to around 20.
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After that each standard zone should give around 5 levels (1 per subzone) if you can finish the entire zone in maybe an hour or 2,
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not counting optional dungeons. And of course not counting artistic variations.
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This would ensure that zones don't need that much gap in mob levels, while the thing won't get boring, and repetitive.
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Also less quests to create.
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This will get fine tuned when I get to it, but I think this is likely a good figure to be aiming at.
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