It's Not The Size Of The Game World, But How You Use It


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I don't see how it's entirely accurate. Guild Wars: Nightfall's map size is in no way bigger than WoW's or Just Cause 2's maps. The only way it would be bigger is if it included all of the maps from all the Guild Wars expansions. But if you did that then you have to include WoW's expansions maps too..

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i don't see lineage 2's map on there and years ago it took hours to run across and has become much bigger since then.

a big map can be good or bad. if it's mostly dead space then it's bad. but if it's filled up with interesting locations, useful towns and npc's and mobs and clear areas to pvp at in the world(but well placed between quest/mob fields so ppl actually go to them normally) then it can be good.

look at swg for instance, fairly big maps, but interesting locations were few and far between mob spawns were far apart so they were mostly dead space just meant to increase the time it took you to travel from one useful or interesting place to another. although on some servers at certain points in the game's history a fair number of dead spaces were filled up with player towns, although after seeing a few of them you'd pretty much seen them all.

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In Smoke and Mirrors there is a drive from AZ to NV. The bus you're driving tops out at 45 mph. The trip takes 8 hours (real time).

Damn:

Penn said that the prize "was going to be, you got to go on Desert Bus from Tucson to Vegas with showgirls and a live band and just the most partying bus ever. You got to Vegas, we're going to put you up at the Rio, big thing, and then, you know, big shows."

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Probably Some MMO - , but it's not one big map is it? It's split into sections that aren't all loaded at the same time. In Just Cause 2 you can see the whole map in one fell swoop.

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Minecraft /infdev/

<<snip>>

/thread

The thing is that from the developer's site:

...and a huge (huge) randomly generated world map.

Randomly generated can be infinite but having an actual super large world is much more difficult.

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I'm pretty sure most huge game worlds are randomly generated up to a point (by the developer...), but then they're tweaked and filled with stuff.

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I'm pretty sure most huge game worlds are randomly generated up to a point (by the developer...), but then they're tweaked and filled with stuff.

The maps from this post are all "real", though. In Just Cause (the biggest one shown in the image) I can go to any of those locations and besides enemies spawning, everything will be the same. You can't do that with random generation.

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By building a weak physics engine and rushing the story xD (just cause!!!)

In its defense, the JC story was purposefully lame and campy. Its not a serious game. :rofl:

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The maps from this post are all "real", though. In Just Cause (the biggest one shown in the image) I can go to any of those locations and besides enemies spawning, everything will be the same. You can't do that with random generation.

Randomly generated doesn't necessarily mean that its randomly generated each time you load it. It could just mean that the map was originally created through random terrain generation, which isn't that uncommon. Not sure which way it is in this case though.

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The maps from this post are all "real", though. In Just Cause (the biggest one shown in the image) I can go to any of those locations and besides enemies spawning, everything will be the same. You can't do that with random generation.

You misinterpret what they were saying. The maps a obviously randomly generated to an extent during development. There's no reason for developers to go over every inch of terrain and raise/lower/texture it/add foliage etc. if it's just some background scenery or never going to be seen etc.

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In Joint Operations the map size was seemingly infinite as you could spend the entire game, some rounds lasted for weeks, traveling away from the battle. It just keeps randomly generating new terrain. I once kept the W key depressed and went to sleep then woke up to find my guy still running away from the battle. I couldn't even see where the battle was.

However it's the amount of detail within the map that counts. It's one thing to have a 60,000 square kilometer map of deserts and fields with some villages sprinkled in. It's something else to have a 1:1 scale of New York City complete with subway and buildings you can go inside.

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Where is Fallout 3?

I was wondering that. The DC area seems immense, but I would be interested to see how it compares to the other games listed here.

As for Just Cause 2, that's insane. I played the demo and didn't really get in to the mindless destruction, but I might have to give it another go now.

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Should driving/racing games really be included? I mean the object of the game is to drive through the area, you're not really experiencing anything. =/

Those photos are not to scale at all. Especially Burnout Paradise, look at the size of the roads and objects compared to the supposedly smaller maps. There is no way that's a bigger game world than Oblivion or World of Warcraft (speaking of which just where is Northrend and Outland by the way). Terrible terrible comparison.

I agree regarding WoW there. Even disregarding Outland and Northrend land areas, I don't think the WoW map is to scale because the gap between the continents is larger than that.

There's no way WoW is not the biggest game, including instances, raids, outlands, northrend, and the original world. I feel they turned down the scale on it.

IMO instances should not be included, they are ON a continent, and that is the landmass that is calculated in the diagram. If you live on an acre of land (43,560 sq ft), and your house on that land is 1000 sq ft, do you total it to 44,560 sq ft? No.

The figures on these seem to be off a bit, but as some food for thought from the Kotaku comments, this is glossing over a couple of rather large examples;

Flight Simulator X - You can fly around the ****ing world. That's got to win out over these 40-miles squared areas...

Eve Online. The game's universe is about a hundred light-years across. Of course the caveat is, being a space game, it's accurately 99.999% empty, but still, for boundaries and scale, they won this particular competition.

Yepper. If total map size is what counts (whether it's empty space or not), Eve Online should win.

LOTRO's map size was a factor that made me quit playing. I was so sick of having to walk for about 10 minutes to another town, and like 30 minutes to another area.

I think travel really makes some games. For example, in Ragnarok Online there is one class that can teleport people (to a limited selection of places), and you can use a teleport service to some major towns (also to a limited number of places), but there are many more maps than are available teleports. Having to walk through them can be quite annoying. I felt this way also in Guild Wars. Even though you could teleport at any time to a town you had been to once, there are some zones that aren't connected to anything and you have to way (and fight) to get there. For that reason, many maps are hardly used, as the only reason to go there might be a rare monster, world exploration, or some random quest.

Probably Some MMO - , but it's not one big map is it? It's split into sections that aren't all loaded at the same time. In Just Cause 2 you can see the whole map in one fell swoop.

WoW with its continents is the closest I've come to a continuous map. All other MMOs I've played had each map in a separate "zone" with a portal-type thing connecting all of them.

All of those games are not in the same scale; you can't compare them that way.

A mile is a mile. However, some game maps don't nave a measurement scale, they just exist. Other games, like racing games or space games where distances are counted in light years have actual real world measurements we can compare to. Regarding the size of Middle Earth in particular, I don't know how it's represented in LotR Online, but I'm sure that in some form or other Tolkien wrote it all down (I don't recall from reading LotR myself unfortunately.)

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TBH I prefer smaller games...something around the size of GTA: Vice City. It's a size the promotes exploration early on but later in the game it's not so large that you cant have learnt the map for the most part and thus as missions become harder youre familiarity with the world means you can take advantage of the map without having to constantly plan a single mission ahead of time or repeat it because you drove down a dead in in a part of town you dont recognize.

Many open world games are that sparse that they don't gain anything over having a smaller map with points of interest closer together.

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Cant edit -

100% Eve online - just look at the size of the map

http://evemaps.dotlan.net/special/DOTLAN-EVE-Regions.pdf

Actually, I'd like to argue that D&D has the biggest (not the PC game) :p.

Still, it is very true what the title says. The Reason EVE's size is great is because it is in an arena where scale is just that. Other games like GTA don't need huge environments because they can still feel large without them. I know that I still think that Manhattan Island takes forever to traverse in Spiderman 2 and Fallout 3's world seems pretty awesome despite its far smaller size in comparison to Oblivion. It all comes down to what the game requires and that is key to figure out in a game.

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I was wondering that. The DC area seems immense, but I would be interested to see how it compares to the other games listed here.

I'm pretty sure the Fallout 3 map is smaller than the one in Oblivion, so jut look and the one provided and think smaller, lol.

All of those games are not in the same scale; you can't compare them that way.

As pointed out, a lot of games these days have a "mile" measurement on the map, so they can be compared.

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