» Fri Feb 18, 2011 6:17 pm Size comparison with Oblivion and various video game worlds (thanks Raptoriv): http://static02.mediaite.com/geekosystem/uploads/2010/05/Large-Video-Game-Worlds.jpg
And another: http://gamingbolt.com/ten-largest-worlds-in-video-games
We all know how Oblivion with "visible when distant" mods can bring any computer to its knees. Apparently Fallout 3 deals better with showing far terrain without constant loading pauses, I haven't played it much yet so I can't tell. Then we have Skyrim and it looks like it has great view distances, but Todd Howard saying they're still working on pop-up issues worries me. (http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/01/26/skyrim-will-feature-dark-brotherhood-five-cities-and-130-dungeons/)
So if their Creation engine isn't so hot after all to create a huge outside world, I think Beth should consider the Avalanche Engine 2 (maybe 3 at that point) to make the exteriors of future games. At least they can look at it, so they can see what they're up against now !
(If they adopt it it would only replace some graphical parts of the game anyways, and perhaps the physics; there's a lot more to a game engine than what you see.) The engine actually looks vastly underused in the industry, something I can't quite comprehend... unless there are some secret titles in the works. Right now I only know of the rather niche free-to-play http://www.thehunter.com, which
Other interesting gameplay lessons to learn from Just Cause 2:
- There are hundreds of locations to discover, and they somehow manage not to feel generic. Lots of small villages with markets, citizens milling about, etc. Of course this is harder to do in Beth's RPGs since they try to give unique dialogue to every NPC, but personally I'd rather see a lot of generic peasants in their little villages than just wilderness with monster-filled dungeons every 20 meters. You can always keep in store a few interesting NPC backgrounds and assign one of them at the right moment to a peasant the player is talking to, to break the monotony.
- Traffic. Other games do this successfully as well, but instead of the empty roads of Oblivion a medieval adaptation of the JC2 traffic would be great.
VehiclesMounts. JC2 has a special key to jump on a vehicle or from one to another; applied to horses and other mounts it could be a lot of fun.- Excellent translation. JC2 is the first game where I opt to play the French version instead of the original English since the translated voice-acting has a lot of character and is actually better than the original. (Well, it's corny in both cases, but in a fun, overdone action movie way.)
Now I'm definitely not saying "lol make Skyrim just like Just Cause 2", since the latter is a light action game and Skyrim is an RPG with great heritage behind it. But the huge and beautiful terrain is definitely something I wanted to show you so you know it has been done, and other aspects could be interesting given a proper adaptation in the TES spirit.
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Edit: thread's getting long and not everybody bothers reading the whole thing, so here's my answer to the first two pages of posts:
I don't know why some people say that the JC2 engine wouldn't work for an RPG. Especially after three titles done with a heavily customized, pretty horrible GameBryo engine... so much for "purity" as someone was claiming, Beth uses a lot of external software. Sure, the GTA IV and Bethesda games in general have more "details" in the sense that you can meet fleshed out characters, go on quests, go inside buildings, etc. But if those are not in JC2 I think it's more because of design choices: if you're a smart games developer, you don't try to do everything at the same time unless you want to fail at everything. For JC2 Avalanche Studios picked which kind of game they wanted to do and honed it pretty much to perfection. You may or may not like the gameplay style, but you can hardly deny it's well implemented.
For me the strong points of the Avalanche Engine 2 are cities that look just as good close up as from afar, with big buildings you can still recognize clearly 5 kilometers away. Same with the mountains, jungles and deserts: they look pretty much like you'd expect them to do, no matter the distance. This is in part due to the engine using a lot of procedural techniques to generate textures on the fly and create some variety, instead of just stupidly tiling the same handmade texture all over the place like Oblivion and FO3 do.
If you look at the cities and villages in JC2, they actually have a lot of little details like fruit and cooked dishes on market stands, cafés with tables, people hanging around and leaning against handrails, etc. I don't see a reason why a game with an RPG focus couldn't make those objects pickup-able Oblivion/Fallout3 style, add more complex behaviors to NPCs, and so on. The engine runs so smoothly that there's plenty of processing power left for whatever details you want to implement. Just look at the free to play The Hunter (link in the OP) if you need convincing you can make a completely different game (and in 1st person) with the same engine.
Lastly about the size of the game world: I really didn't like how Morrowind and Oblivion were packed full of dungeons, so that finding yet another Ancestral Tomb (at least for those the frequency made some sense) or "rare and mysterious" Ayleid Ruin (no comment) didn't feel special at all. I guess Beth won't have the balls to try that and will stick to their tried and true recipe, but I'd love to see a company attempt a medieval RPG with similar scale as Just Cause 2. First, you don't have to fill every inch with "interesting" (read: generic) locations. Most of the map can be randomly generated wilderness with the occasional surprise, and the hand-made content can be in similar quantities as Oblivion, just 2 or 3 times more spread out and concentrated in regions where people might reasonably want to live. This would give a more "Lord of the Rings landscape" feeling to the world instead of a medieval fantasy theme park. Of course traveling the wilderness would be very lenghty if you choose not to use travel services/fast travel, but with huge view distances and realistic sized terrain you could finally experience the awesome feeling of a long solitary travel in the wilderness, and then come upon a huge valley with an abandoned temple at the bottom. No, not a temple every 10 meters! A huge frickin' valley just for that temple!
And yeah, exploring such a huge world on dragonback would be awesome, too. Don't hope for that in Skyrim, since the world will be so small (Oblivion size) that being able to fly would make it seem just tiny.
For me the strong points of the Avalanche Engine 2 are cities that look just as good close up as from afar, with big buildings you can still recognize clearly 5 kilometers away. Same with the mountains, jungles and deserts: they look pretty much like you'd expect them to do, no matter the distance. This is in part due to the engine using a lot of procedural techniques to generate textures on the fly and create some variety, instead of just stupidly tiling the same handmade texture all over the place like Oblivion and FO3 do.
If you look at the cities and villages in JC2, they actually have a lot of little details like fruit and cooked dishes on market stands, cafés with tables, people hanging around and leaning against handrails, etc. I don't see a reason why a game with an RPG focus couldn't make those objects pickup-able Oblivion/Fallout3 style, add more complex behaviors to NPCs, and so on. The engine runs so smoothly that there's plenty of processing power left for whatever details you want to implement. Just look at the free to play The Hunter (link in the OP) if you need convincing you can make a completely different game (and in 1st person) with the same engine.
Lastly about the size of the game world: I really didn't like how Morrowind and Oblivion were packed full of dungeons, so that finding yet another Ancestral Tomb (at least for those the frequency made some sense) or "rare and mysterious" Ayleid Ruin (no comment) didn't feel special at all. I guess Beth won't have the balls to try that and will stick to their tried and true recipe, but I'd love to see a company attempt a medieval RPG with similar scale as Just Cause 2. First, you don't have to fill every inch with "interesting" (read: generic) locations. Most of the map can be randomly generated wilderness with the occasional surprise, and the hand-made content can be in similar quantities as Oblivion, just 2 or 3 times more spread out and concentrated in regions where people might reasonably want to live. This would give a more "Lord of the Rings landscape" feeling to the world instead of a medieval fantasy theme park. Of course traveling the wilderness would be very lenghty if you choose not to use travel services/fast travel, but with huge view distances and realistic sized terrain you could finally experience the awesome feeling of a long solitary travel in the wilderness, and then come upon a huge valley with an abandoned temple at the bottom. No, not a temple every 10 meters! A huge frickin' valley just for that temple!
And yeah, exploring such a huge world on dragonback would be awesome, too. Don't hope for that in Skyrim, since the world will be so small (Oblivion size) that being able to fly would make it seem just tiny.
I kind of get a feeling of you're sensing that from me. 
