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Why don't they ever get forests right!?
Elikal
Member UncommonPosts: 7,912
Yeah, you'll say, what's wrong with the man?
I am speaking about FORESTS. I know city folks used to electric lights may have a hard time to imagine how a REAL forest is. Most MMOs are set in fantasy or medivial settings. And in those days forests were NOT like our cultural forests, especially if you are European, likely you never saw a real forest. Or if you are a city slicker or live in a prarie area, too.
A REAL forest, is FUCKING DARK and FUCKING DENSE! There ARE no paths! Even in daylight, it is gloomy and you can't see very far. The trees and underbush essentially form a WALL left and right to the path and you can not SEE and you can not WALZ between them, unless let your clothes ripped off!
And even worse wrong are the nights. People, night time in a pre-lightbulb era is PITCH BLACK FUCKING DARK. You city folks have no idea how dark an area is. In most of Europe the entire continent was DENSE with forest. Read the reports of the Romans about Germany. A land covered 95% with thick, dense, dark forest. Impossible to conquer, because of the forests. Meadows in between exist because of men, because they used to have cattle and chop wood. But a fantasy world, most of the world should be closed woods. (Unless it is desert or prarie or ice.) And the night times are so unrealistic. Just walk in any wood, away from cities, in the night, and carry a torch. You see 2 meters around you and the rest is PITCH BLACK NOTHING. End of story. It is spooky, terrifying and dense nature all around.
Why does't any MMO ever get that? I have only seen two forests halfway real, the Old Forest in LOTRO and the Duskwood in Azeroth, WOW. They felt halfway real. (Which is odd, given both are more cartoony.) I guess it is a matter of placement, colours and atmosphere, much less than of realism.
THIS is how REAL forests untouched by humans get over centuries:
You DONT just walz left and right into these!
/rant over
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Comments
Everything creates huge amounts of negativity on the internet, that's what the internet is for: Negativity, porn and lolcats.
Why then did WOW and LOTRO at least halfway get this in their age old graphics?
And should that not be a point of development? Should not symbolic worlds be a matter of the past?
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
I imagine a lot of it has to do with people trying to make any individual tree look so good that systems short of super hot couldn't handle a forest worth of them, Lotro's old forest was mostly one sided tree with enough detail to give the illusion of 3d (I bet if you could fly over that world it would look like a bad movie set)
It does look nice though, Lotro really did a good job on landscapes.
Honestly, the "design" of forests probably wouldn't even make it into my top 100 issues or 1000 issues these days but I quite like it when people bring issues up even or maybe even especially they aren't mainstream.
I honestly don't think that there is a place for such thick forests in MMOs. While it would have a potentially interesting ambience I could see so many issues with crossing the forests. It would probably just boil down to loads of tree walls forcing you strictly on certain paths what then again would make people complain about being lead along on rails. I honestly can't recall to ever have felt remotely close to terrified, spooked or even just uneasy in an MMO. Guess there in general is so much room for better ambience design, no matter if in forests or elsewhere.
LOOL true. XD
Still, I am really getting cranky over MMOs these days. People just walz and run through worlds who are PRESUMED to be dangerous! Do you guys have any idea how TERRIFYING nature seemed to our ancestors! How FUCKING FRIGHTENED they were walking through a forest?! If a bear or a pack of wolves jumped at you from the underbush it was a mortally dangerous thing, not some yawnfest "oh yawn another 20 bear paws to gather".
People CAN run through these worlds, and that is whats wrong. The old games like EQ1 grasped that better. EVERY DAMN STEP was DANGEROUS and fearful! That is how worlds are supposed to feel! It hasn't to be full of grief, like corse-run or what. But the worlds just pose no danger! People can run through a forest, a cave, a ruin, anything like a stroll in a city park! And that is just plain wrong!
God I never thought I say that. But every new MMO is easier and less a risk until it just has no feeling of excitement, of accomplishment. I recall even in EQ2, when I finally was able to cross the Nektulous Forest, it was some accomplishment! Today environment is just like a city street or a park. It's just no longer fun, when it is all so safe like passing through a zoo!
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Trees are expensive to draw. Big trees with lots of branches are really expensive to draw. Drawing lots of trees at once is really, really expensive to draw. And if you want them to be lots of different trees, rather than lots of copies of the same tree, then, well, I hope you like single-digit frame rates. On high end hardware. At low graphical settings.
I think it may be possible to ease up on the computational burden of drawing complex trees somewhat by having a handful of leaves or small sections of branches and drawing lots of copies of them in geometry shaders. But that's tricky to do, and only partially ameliorates the problem.
The reason forests are dark is that if you look in a random direction and draw a straight line, it might go through ten different things before it goes off into space (or into the ground). But having to run pixel/fragment shaders 10 times for each pixel rather than one or two will kill your performance. If you're using any sort of transparency to draw your trees, you can't ease the computational burden with early fragment tests, either.
While I can't speak for LOTR, in the case of wow? they didn't. Duskwood isn't dark because its a forest, the whole zone is dark because its cursed. Even the (scaled down) town is dark, which isn't a forest, and its graveyard, and its ogre pit. Areas that during the day should get full sunlight are always dark.
And the reason? its a ton of work. One true sized town would have as many buildings as Orgrimmar, and be the size of most of the zones in that game. A true untamed forest could be hundreds of square miles. How big are the biggest worlds? Kalimdor is a few kilometers wide as I remember, that whole continent could be a single forest. Imagine the design budget if their world suddenly had to be 10x or 100x bigger (or if we wanted an earth sized world... who knows? 10,000,000x bigger?). Imagine how bored the player base would get if they had to ride for 20+ min just to get across a single zone (as the crow flies, which would also be impractical if it was a true forest).
Designing an entire world, even if it wasn't in a playable engine would be an monumental undertaking. Let alone if that world had to work in the terms of a game.
We play in scaled down versions of worlds because its practical. I really have no idea when or if we'll ever move on to a true "world" sized playing field.
Everything creates huge amounts of negativity on the internet, that's what the internet is for: Negativity, porn and lolcats.
TL;DR:
It is more the feeling of safety in today's MMOs which I feel is WRONG. In a MMO walking through wild lands should always feel dangerous and not easy like a city park!
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
"Let destruction rain!" from Asbel Tales of Graces f
that's because they're easy and too many ppl who are terrible at them are the ones paying for them. People don't want danger or adventure, they want rewards for clicking a button.
Auto generated terrain and developers are more into designing not just visual paths but gaming paths as well,they miss the whole point of a role playing game and rpg world.
That is why i detest people who start labeling the genre with notions of themepark or whatever else.This is simple a RPG genre,create a world that looks the part.
What devs are doing now, is they are procedurally drawing the world literally in front of your feet.With the high cost of development,they are all simply treating it as a business first and game world second.They are looking for all kinds of ways to run the game cheaper,hence tons of instances and shards instead of an actual world.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
To be fair, if I could throw fireballs conjure food and water and teleport around I wouldn't be too worried about the wilderness.
Everything creates huge amounts of negativity on the internet, that's what the internet is for: Negativity, porn and lolcats.
The balance is restored, thanks Elikal I got a good laugh. I used to go hiking in north west BC, Canada and yes I ran in to a pack of wolves and quite a few bears(not all at once) and I am still here to talk about it. A little knowledge and preparation and you should be safe in the big bad forest. I did know a guy that got attacked by a Grizzly though, lost part of his ear...
A nice maple forest is actually pretty open beneath the canopy - the ground cover gets grazed down by deer rather heavily. The ground of true wilderness can get a little lumpy because of the layers of decaying logs, but they're a lot easier to walk through than light scrubland covered with a solid tangle of bushes and brambles.
What's more noticable to me is the difference between flat ground and hills. I grew up on flat land and I've really never quite gotten the hang of hiking in forested hills.
Heh. I grew up in the Bavarian Alps as a kid. So yea, I am a real rural boy, and I remember there was a forest outside our village called "Gallows Wood", because they used to hang witches and heretics there in the Middle Ages, and it was a REALLY dark and spooky forest like out of some horror movie. Only real. I saw only once *some* animal in the distance. It could have been anything, and GOD, it was the most creepy experience I EVER had, because forests, real forests devoid of people, just are like that.
Keep in mind, you can avoid bears and wolves because we modern men can watch nature documentaries and we have guns and all stuff. For the surpersitious people of the past with only pitchforks and torches... it was NOT so. And while maybe we have a fireball and teleport in fantasy games... the enemy has too! Because there are ghosts and skeletons and owlbears and DRAGONS.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Age of Wushu actually has some ok dense brush areas, the tang man zone has a few if I recall, it also has the large cities, GW2 does a good job of giving the illusion of a large city as well.
actually doesn't GW2 have some decent forest? I can't remember...might have to log in and hunt one down..
Because real forests are not fun in a game.
Gamers don't want to spend 90% of the time trying to clear bushes so that they can go from point A to B.
Some of the Neverwinter Nights modules & PW's have it nailed where 1 or more party members need to carry a light source so the party can navigate the dark.
You might take a look at Ryzom, It is still the best ambiance and NPC AI that I've seen. And a large part of the game is just getting around. Every zone has normal animals that you could kill, and carnivores that kill those animals, and probably you. And then mixed in are wandering animals/bosses that you really have no chance of killing.
This is complicated by seasons, so in summer that path might be safe, but not in winter.
I agree about new games though.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
If they did make forest like this then I would harvest the shit out of them, so think your self lucky.
Asbo
OP.. good thread and you bring up something I think many games missed completely , or only touch on a little.. One thing I loved about EQ, was the uniqueness of each zone.. Considering how dated the technology was back then, it was great.. Swamps actually felt like swamps, same with most forest and mountain regions.. People brought up Duskwood in WoW, and that was a rememberable zone, and rightfully so.. People should be able to get lost in a forest, it only makes sense... I'm not sure if it's because the devs don't have the skill to design such zones anymore, or they just nerf zones down to carebear status.. /shrug..
BTW.. I don't mind villages being small.. Think of the old west, or our original settlements, where the towns were just a commercial location in the middle of farms and homesteads.. I think a fantasy realm would be the same way..
This gamer wouldn't mind spending a somewhat lower percentage of his time clearing bushes if there was the prospect of revealing something interesting behind them.
While I agree with you that forests in mmos look shallow , I disagree with your ideas of forests being dangerous places for people who live near or in them . I am from Lithuania and forests in mythology and history is shown as safe havens for locals. More dens it is the better , more swamps = safer . Most of our battles were fought in forests and swamps cos ppl who live there knows those places well . Invaders not so much
. Ewen in recent times (ww2 and later) most resistance members were living in those same forests and swamps for same reasons as a thousand + years ago .
Wilds animals (wolves , bears ) usually always avoid people . The things you should be looking to avoid are snakes and other poisonous animals and insects .
Not Nariu...and he will keep rallying against it. He wants it all NOW NOW NOW. Perfect recipient for the quoted below.