I'm unaware if someone already started a thread or made a post regarding this, but what do you guys think would be a good way to create the "World" of Fallout On-line?

The way I imagine it would work is a WoW-like form of earthly structure, in which a main body of water separates two "continents" these continents could be either something like East and West USA split by an enlarged Mississippi River, or something like USA and China split by the Pacific, and either boats and/or buses could be a form of "fast travel" between major points and the "continents" themselves.

But that's just my ramblings on what I think would work, anyone agree/disagree?

Well, it can't be too big. Having something as huge as the pacific in there would be a lot of dead area in the game. Plus China, really? Were there even any vaults there?

It'd have to have a variety of locations, can't just be one big brown mess, so I'm guessing it's going to be set in a condensed version of several states perhaps?

Personally, I'm not one for speculation. I'll work myself up into a frenzy of hope, and then I'll only be disappointed since it'll never live up to my wild expectations.

Terribly impatient though.

I like the idea of 6 or 7 areas, either separated by water or mountains.
By making clear that it is not the whole world, only what has been rediscovered (or some other plot device) by the Vaults you leave the game world open to later expansions

a big part of the 'fallout feel' is about being alone in the wastes. Honestly I am not sure how an mmo could do this correctly. In fallout it is you against the world. Mostly everyone is dead, humanity is hanging on by the barest of threads.

In an mmo there will be too many people for that. There will always be some random guy running around near you farming the radscorpians. And having any sort of a chatbox will ruin the feeling of wandering around alone in the wastes.

Of course I have hopes they have some amazing idea to work around this problem. But I can't think of any.

To reply to the idea about boats and bus transportation... would fallout really keep being fallout (i.e. the decimated post apocalyptic world) if it had a regular transportation grid? That doesn't sound very fallouty to me. Maybe you could have brahmin caravans. But once you get to building and maintaining mechanical vehicals for the masses then the world is on the mend and the fallout world is practically over.

Fallout is about struggling to survive in a radiated mutated world where most everything is dead or a monster trying to eat you. It is about tiny pockets of civilization eking out their living from the desiccated corpse of a ruined world.

I think since this is an mmo, they have to give the idea of something of epic porportions.

That said in my opinion the best way to show the massive side of the game would be like the eastern coast of the us, and then some kind of transport sistem (boats, planes etc.) to go to europe (france,england perhaps?)

Water is an OK boundary, but you can also add irradiation boundaries to this world, the Rocky mountains, ext. Rads can only get you so far...

I would expect the main part of the game to, at least initially, be localized in or around LA.

Bigger is definitely better. It would be kind of cool if the entire globe was open to be explored. It would just be really hard to get to certain places and there might be a lot of nothing in between.

Speaking of WoW...it would be really fun to have instances you could enter with a team to search for tech or maybe just for supplies. One of my favorite parts of FO2 was going up to find Smiley the trapper. It was really fun exploring that vault and it would be a lot of fun to explore a cave or something else like that with a group of people.

I agree, the game world should have a barren feel to it, but at the same time, be a very, very dangerous place. As far as fast transportation is concerned, I do not think that a player crafted motorbike would break the lore?

Large, yes. Dangerous, yes... Fun, YES!

Morrowind style travel system. I loved that game so much.

They used a series of set travel lines where you could choose a destination along the line to stop at - and from one location you could travel along a diffent line. You get me?

As for the world itself, I hope it's big and fun to travel around with a few major cities, yet more villages and settlements, with a few outposts. The entire globe is stretching it a bit, but im hoping for something at least the size of FUEL.

Take a look at this picture, I find it useful to imagine the scale of game worlds: http://i.imgur.com/xJU7Q.jpg

To me, one of the critical components in V13, would be a factional system.

Players of like minds would want to group together to act as settlers, raiders, caravan guards, salvage operators, traders and so on. This is the nexus of single play, social play and identity.

With such a big open space, you might want to help make a whole town, not just decorate a private apartment. You might want almost sports-like contests between bands of caravan raiders and guards over shipments of goods. You could, join with others, to create commercial districts with trading, crafting, auctions and so on (though economic design will be critical).

Once the factions are conceptualized, they must be balanced to insure reliable and sustaining play.

Wastelanders, Raiders, Muties, Ghouls... there's your factions. Make guilds/clans if you want, join them if you want, or spurn them.

Make it HUGE. MAMFA Huge. Miles and miles of f*** all. LA from the beaches to the mountains, from the mountains out to the desert, desert to more mountains, mountains to plains. Compressed to a point, of course. But unless you have some type of transport (say repair 75%+ a couple of special quests and a load of special gear that you've spent a long time to aquire and you can have a Corvega, or a nice motorcycle) you are Not crossing the entire gaming zone in less than a couple of hours real time without using transport from town to town.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that the game should indeed ultimately included the entire globe.

That being said, it would obviously be far too much to begin with. Both from a developer standpoint and a possible future standpoint. Logically, they should start the game with only a fraction of that. Might I suggest a single continent? North America obviously.

Think about it. The Vaults (to our knowledge) were only in the USA. Seems like a fine place to start. We can begin in a number of different vaults based on how/where we wish to begin our Character (based on how that vault developed right before/after they opened up. East coast, west coast, civil, raiders, traders, farmers... etc.

Alaska, Canada, Mexico and the islands in the gulf could be a nice place for mid-upper level areas. With only 1 of 7 continents at launch. This would also give them 6 OBVIOUS choices for expansion possibilities in the future (I hope it'd be a good enough game to keep me that long).

...speaking of lore: Weren't only the USA and Russia involved in the cold war? Correct me if I'm wrong, but Fallout is based on the end of the cold war turning nuclear and the USA and the USSR destroying the world. This would mean that, besides fallout, radiation and such... parts of the world wouldn't be leveled. Heck, Africa could become a final expansion, where they are the most developed continent on the world at that point.

Just a few thoughts from one Fallout fan to another.
~Steve (hoping for a mature and graphic MMO)

The whole world was nuked, not just the US and China (who was the main enemy of the US in the Great War, not the USSR).

Fallout's timeline actually diverged from ours in the 1950s, and the Great War did not take place until 2077.

Fallout intro:

In 2077, the storm of world war had come again. In two brief hours, most of the planet was reduced to cinders. And from the ashes of nuclear devastation, a new civilization would struggle to arise.

Fallout 2 intro:

The earth was nearly wiped clean of life. A great cleansing, an atomic spark struck by human hands, quickly raged out of control. Spears of nuclear fire rained from the skies. Continents were swallowed in flames and fell beneath the boiling oceans. Humanity was almost extinguished, their spirits becoming part of the background radiation that blanketed the earth.

Jesse Heinig, one of the FO1 designers:

One of the recurring themes of Fallout is that life will find a way to continue, albeit often under great struggles and with violence and suffering. It's not unreasonable, given this notion, to presume that U.S. remnant forces remain in parts of China, just as remnant Chinese elements are in the U.S.; and that other countries are similarly ravaged and war-torn, with survivors crawling out of the rubble. If Australia was untouched by the war, for instance, then presumably after 200 years they would have projected their powerful industrial presence and comparatively high population all around the globe to take control of any remaining resources, and the Enclave would find itself locked in a war with the Aussies. It's likely that some underpopulated parts of the third world escaped the full brunt of nuclear devastation, but since these would have been low-population unindustrialized areas anyway, they are not exactly in a position to take advantage of their "good fortune," such as it is. (I don't imagine that many nukes were wasted on the Sahara.)

The very first Fallout 1 timeline by Scott Campbell and Brian Freyermuth (from which all other Fallout timelines in existence are derived):

Other countries, seeing the US's missiles on their way, fire their warheads as well. What ensues is two hours of nuclear bombardment upon the earth's surface.

The Vault - Fallout Wiki * Fallout Online * Fallout IRC Channel * Fallout: New Vegas

The US West Coast is easily big enough for an enormous amount of content. Go walk from San Francisco to LA and write down what you meet along the way. And how long it takes you. Plenty of room for epic there.

The most important thing about an epic feel to the world, is not to trivialize it. In the 19th century, traveling to other continents was epic. Why? Because it was slow and dangerous. Nowadays we just hop in a plane and hop off when we're on the other side of the world. The world has grown tiny and very non-epic.

I want Fallout to feel more like the 19th century. Getting anywhere should take time and effort, and there should be tons and tons of stuff along the way. A town, a truck stop, a farm, a young village, a deserted vault; there's millions of variations possible there.

well guys, there is only so much world that you can build with a budget, within a project timeline. 'scope' is an important concept here.

you want the world to feel detailed, populated and rich with locations and things to find, right? that takes a lot, *a lot* of development hours. assuming developers and development hours are a limited resource (you have a finite number of both), you can only accomplish a certain amount:

- perhaps you build a world that is absolutely massive and sprawling where you can walk for hundreds of miles with no load screens, but the world has very little in the way of detail. nobody wants that!
- perhaps you build a world that is small and confined, yet dense and hand drawn and absolutely packed with content. again, that would be a letdown.

i see only a couple possibilities:
1) a metropolitan area comprises the game world. like the most recent versions of Fallout, only larger.
2) multiple unique areas in a region (i.e. west coast) comprise the game world, and are linked together through virtual 'fast' travel.

try to pare down your vision and hopes for what pv13 will be, based on the realities of what a limited dev team, with a limited budget and limited timetable, can accomplish.

Note though that faster travel is only going to cost even more work. With a larger area to cover, the lack of detail is going to stand out like a sore thumb. You've got a bigger area to cover, and players are more easily able to travel to the edge of the world.

If you want to save time and work, start small, and make that area seem big. You can always expand from there.

1) a metropolitan area comprises the game world. like the most recent versions of Fallout, only larger.
2) multiple unique areas in a region (i.e. west coast) comprise the game world, and are linked together through virtual 'fast' travel.

I think a single metropolitan area (with some surroundings) is the best way to go, then. If you want to tackle the entire west coast on a limited budget, it's going to be empty, with gaping holes, and any metropolitan area is going to seem small.

Better start with a single area. If you want a big one, I'd go with the Bay Area. It's classic Fallout territory, but it's not quite a single city. There's room for variation, and also lots of room to expand, if you want to tackle more metropolitan areas later. (LA seems like an obvious one.) And then slowly have the world grow to cover the entire west coast, if the game is successful enough.