So what is good support for exploration.

[Amaron]

I'd like to see someone go with a massive procedurally generated world.  Something so large that the entire player base would only fill a small portion of it.  Then try to procedurally distribute neat things all over it.   Put in normal major cities and put all the "content" near them then let the explorers have everything else.

[Hutch]

Asheron's Call would be the pinnacle of Exploration for me.  The world was freaking HUGE, and there were little dungeons, caves, huts, houses, camps and all sorts of things scattered everywhere.  And I also think that pretty much every square inch of the world was explorable. No invisible walls or the like blocking your way.   I probably spent at least 2 years in that game and only saw maybe 1/5th of the whole map.   And since, other then the loosely connected portal networks, there was no "fast travel" like flightpaths and whatnot from every minor stopping point to every other one, simply getting places was often a big adventure in and of itself.

A lot of games now are designed the way Chekhov said stories should be written, where every part plays some vital role. In MMOs this usually means that every bit of the map is part of some quest, that you will eventually be breadcrumbed towards it, and if you "explore" it you are simply going there out of order.

I also think of Asheron's Call when I think of exploration. The loot model in that game encouraged you to find a place that had mobs you could tackle, and start farming them.

In many other games, farming mobs is not only disincentivized w.r.t. xp ratios, but also, if you're out somewhere farming mobs (for some valuable drops, say), you're probably interfering with someone else's Kill 10 Rats quest.

An Explorer's game has places in it that the game doesn't send you to directly, and where the rewards are not necessarily something you can tally up.

[Xuri]

I'd like to see someone go with a massive procedurally generated world.  Something so large that the entire player base would only fill a small portion of it.  Then try to procedurally distribute neat things all over it.   Put in normal major cities and put all the "content" near them then let the explorers have everything else.

What you're describing is a multiplayer Daggerfall. Intriguing.

[Xanthippe]

Hub questing kills exploration. WoW is a good example of this. When it launched, it was much less linear but became progressively more so. While I enjoyed leveling up through the story line, I did not enjoy it as much on the later expansions as I enjoyed the first times through, because exploring is the most interesting thing about playing mmos.

Resource gathering invites exploration.

I agree that Red Dead Redemption is a good exploring game with the little random events. I would love to see a Red Dead mmo.

Punishing death penalties (like corpse runs) does not make exploring more interesting for me. Probably the opposite.

Quick transport doesn't kill exploring for me. It's nice to be able to get around from major place to major place without taking 20 minutes to do so. That way, I can spend more time exploring.

[Mrbloodworth]

Eh, risk of loss is not something I care about as far as exploration, with exception I likely need to find it again if something were to happen. That's enough for me.

What makes exploration to me, is if something in the distance catches my eye, I go there and find something that feels like there is a history ( good art direction ETC.. ). Or a random path off to the side that just says "go down this way, what could be here?". Something I am not directly lead to by quests, but may have something interesting, be it do doodad, or maybe some lore. It does not even need to be written lore, but it should be implied by the culture/placement/architecture of what ever it is I have found. Things that makes areas more of a world, not just a place for a quest to exist. Something that tells a story in its placement, functions, or look. A small burned village outside of main quest corridors. Things like that.

[Ingmar]

That corpse run thing seems exactly backwards to me. It totally disincentivizes risk-taking.

If  one is  trained on instant gratification of today flavor of MMOs  it might appear so. But  the thrill of danger is worth something in itself - you play a game to experience  something entertaining, exploration of new places with potentially dangerous consequences is one of such things. What do you experience facerolling the filler world mobs or grinding dailies for rewards besides the  junkies addiction to "dings" and achievements?

One of the blogger reviewing tsw complained that one part he doesnt like in TSW is that there is no feeling of achievement by getting the long laundry list of meaningless quest marked as "done", as TSW doesnt even allow to have long laundry list!

The endless stream of "achievers" MMO is ever present on the market - endless treadmills grinds for loot and rewards that is all that is in there.  But some of the elements which were present in older games are almost gone.

Adding the "thrill of danger" to exploration depresses the number of people who will explore; the more danger, the fewer people who will do it. That's not "supporting exploration", that's discouraging it.

[Khaldun]

Asheron's Call would be the pinnacle of Exploration for me.  The world was freaking HUGE, and there were little dungeons, caves, huts, houses, camps and all sorts of things scattered everywhere.  And I also think that pretty much every square inch of the world was explorable. No invisible walls or the like blocking your way.   I probably spent at least 2 years in that game and only saw maybe 1/5th of the whole map.   And since, other then the loosely connected portal networks, there was no "fast travel" like flightpaths and whatnot from every minor stopping point to every other one, simply getting places was often a big adventure in and of itself.

This times ten. You could go anywhere, and almost anywhere there was interesting stuff. There was one place in the Southern Direlands where you could go up the coast for a long ways. You'd have to deal with dangerous spawns much of the way, there was an interesting terrain structure, but nothing particularly amazing--but then suddenly there was a tower, and in the tower a chest, and if you opened the chest, there was a note from the developer basically saying, "It's really cool that you came all this way to see what was here...thanks!" No achievement, no special item, just an acknowledgement that hey, somebody might explore the whole thing.

The best thing I've ever done in a MMO, I think, was deciding I needed to see this "Direlands" place everybody was talking about, this "Teth" place that everyone wanted to get to, ten levels before I was supposed to go there. Since I couldn't use a portal, I had to go there overland. Since I was lower level, my aggro range was pretty big and my survivability low. The overland route was very long, the area very big. Dying had some potentially serious consequences (not as bad as EQ, much worse than WoW). It was the most exciting and tense thing I've done in an MMO, and it was a pure explorer experience.

[Amaron]

I'd like to see someone go with a massive procedurally generated world.  Something so large that the entire player base would only fill a small portion of it.  Then try to procedurally distribute neat things all over it.   Put in normal major cities and put all the "content" near them then let the explorers have everything else.

What you're describing is a multiplayer Daggerfall. Intriguing.

Yea that's pretty much it.   You could put all the normal diku crap near the NPC towns then let everyone go crazy with the rest of it.

[Malakili]

I'd like to see someone go with a massive procedurally generated world.  Something so large that the entire player base would only fill a small portion of it.  Then try to procedurally distribute neat things all over it.   Put in normal major cities and put all the "content" near them then let the explorers have everything else.

What you're describing is a multiplayer Daggerfall. Intriguing.

Yea that's pretty much it.   You could put all the normal diku crap near the NPC towns then let everyone go crazy with the rest of it.

And then wait for the tears of the people who don't have the time to go out into the wilderness and find the interesting things there.  There is a reason things are the way they are.  I say if you are going to go for exploration, go all out with it and just limit yourself to a small playerbase who wants it.  I'm not saying no quests/no dungeons/no NPC town, etc etc.  What I am saying is that if you give a game the illusion of being accessible, and even MAKE it accessible in some areas, the parts that AREN'T accessible are going to cause rifts in the community.

[Phred]

Hub questing kills exploration. WoW is a good example of this. When it launched, it was much less linear but became progressively more so. While I enjoyed leveling up through the story line, I did not enjoy it as much on the later expansions as I enjoyed the first times through, because exploring is the most interesting thing about playing mmos.

I've been playing SWToR a bit because hey, free week and one thing that makes me really not enjoy it is the huge expanses they make you run through. Even in the cities. Running through the Senate halls and the palace on Corscant gets so fucking old it made me wish for WoW style quest hubs. WoW would have had 4 different quest areas in the same space SWToR wastes on the Senate. Sure it's impressive the frst time you see it but having to run all the way to the back of it to hand in 4 different quests is just insane. And half of Coruscant is  a no-vehicles zone. WTF? And it's a L10 zone which means originally you didnt even have sprint. You have to wonder that no one ever mentioned how fucking boring that was at a design meeting or qa review.

[Amaron]

And then wait for the tears of the people who don't have the time to go out into the wilderness and find the interesting things there.  

Not every MMO has to be made for everyone.   People who don't want to explore yet still want to see the neat stuff?  Fuck them.   There are lots that just wouldn't give a damn.   The normal diku stuff is there because it's fun too.

[Koyasha]

Although I tend to favor stronger death penalties, I don't think they do much for exploration either.  My early experiences exploring in EQ were indeed made better by fear of death, but later on, once I had gained a solid understanding of the game, the fear of death was less of a factor.  And even further on, there wasn't any fear of death because hey, I tended to twobox a cleric and a friend of mine that I had access to her account had a necromancer, so corpse recovery was a nonissue.  I don't really think it made exploring less fun when it was a nonissue.  I always liked exploring even when I knew I could easily just summon and resurrect my corpse if things went downhill.

[Dark_MadMax]

Adding the "thrill of danger" to exploration depresses the number of people who will explore; the more danger, the fewer people who will do it. That's not "supporting exploration", that's discouraging it.

It maybe so . It like saying - having more complex mechanics and controls depresses the number of people who will play your game. Ergo there sure be no games more complex than angry birds!

 Really risk/reward is  a huge factor. How much exactly there is of danger?   Like other people said there are degrees. - yeah if I risk delevel or permadeath... fck it! But in AC for example I would risk 30-40 minutes of corpse recovery or foreiting the corpse entirely (if it was THAT BAD of an area). Corpse recovery was an adventure of in itself ,which I could get friends help for(another social factor).

[Phred]

[Corpse recovery was an adventure of in itself ,which I could get friends help for(another social factor).

Damn this puts me in mind of exporing lower guk when I was one of the dozen or so people on our server high enough level to survive in there, (45 or so iirc)
Our party had a total wipe out and at the time there was 2 groups who could do the place, that I knew about, and people in one group absolutely hated some people in the other group. Fortunately I was kind of ok with both factions so it fell on me to organize our rescue party. Then one of the guys in my party totally lost it and got into it with a girl in the other party. Was totally embarrassing after they'd just made the effort to rescue our corpses and all.

[Pezzle]

There was a time I was getting paid as a guide for Guk/LGuk.  Having Feign Death really helped the exploring.  It also helped in training more than they could handle on groups of twits.  There is no going back, but I have fond memories of EQ even with all the complete insanity and horrific corpse runs.

One day, after hitting twenty, I decided that exploring runnyeye was a really really great idea.  A mage friend bound me (a Troll SK) inside Rivervale.  Inside runnyeye the obvious happened.  Client crashed and I log back in nude inside Rivervale.  Back then there were corpse rot timers, and my corpse had lots of great stuff, like my Circlet of Shadow.  I died so many times just trying to run through Rivervale because invisibility would drop.. I really was getting the timing down nicely.  I figured out that being killed while zoning did not cause me to lose xp.  A good thing, since there were probably 20-30 deaths that night.

Eventually my mage friend came back on and was trying to drag my corpse out.  He would get swarmed and be forced to run despite his level being much higher.  Eventually I had the bright idea of him just looting my corpse (that is how far back this was).  While the eternal suffering was not enjoyable, the risk and challenge of that kind of exploring is extremely compelling.  Running around in unusual locations, being in places where you REALLY SHOULD NOT BE, that is the stuff.

[apocrypha]

Not every MMO has to be made for everyone.   People who don't want to explore yet still want to see the neat stuff?  Fuck them.   There are lots that just wouldn't give a damn.   The normal diku stuff is there because it's fun too.

This is easy to say from the perspective of a gamer.

From the point of view of a developer trying to convince the parent company/VC to part with $50m to make an MMO? Not so much. Everyone in the business now knows that WoW got its 11m subscribers precisely by making an MMO for everyone, so arguing for a different direction is very much swimming against the tide with the money people.

[Malakili]

On the topic of death penalties - it seems to me that it matters.  Exploration isn't just about wandering around and seeing things in my opinion.  The danger DOES matter I think, there has to be some kind of risk/reward and when the risk is "I waste 5 minutes running back" and nothing else, it just doesn't feel very exciting.  People say risk makes exploration less attractive, but I would say that without risk you don't actually have exploration, you just have sight seeing. 

[Koyasha]

On the topic of death penalties - it seems to me that it matters.  Exploration isn't just about wandering around and seeing things in my opinion.  The danger DOES matter I think, there has to be some kind of risk/reward and when the risk is "I waste 5 minutes running back" and nothing else, it just doesn't feel very exciting.  People say risk makes exploration less attractive, but I would say that without risk you don't actually have exploration, you just have sight seeing. 

A large part of me wants to agree with this, but I'm not convinced for certain this is universally the case.  Doing the whole 'poke your nose into places you're really really not supposed to be' was fun at first, and I can't argue with the fact that the danger of getting instantly killed in such a location was a big part of what made it so exciting.  But at the same time, death wasn't a big issue for me at that point either.  When I did those explorations, we had our necromancer and cleric logged off right in the same zone, so it would take only a few minutes to recover and resurrect our bodies.  Granted, the corpse summoning was expensive, and I was always a massive cheapskate, so I would try everything I could to recover corpses manually, so even the recovery was exciting.  But in the end, I was never in actual danger of losing my corpse.  The only times I was ever in any real potential danger of losing my corpse was when a planar raid group to Fear or Hate suffered a total wipe.  And I will say without hesitation that I never really explored those zones while they were still dangerous.  Only when I was much higher level did I really wander around Fear and Hate and explore, so the real danger that I would actually lose my stuff did indeed keep me from doing any exploration in those places, with the exception of sending Eyes of Zomm or using a bind sight chain.

[Malakili]

I was thinking a bit about this and aside from Minecraft which I and a couple others mentioned on the first place, I think the reason I like DayZ so much is exploration.  You never know if hiking up somewhere will end up with a nice spawn of weapons/ammo or a bunch of useless things.  You never know when a hostile player will pop up.  And if you die you start over.  There are ways to lessen the hurt of death, particularly if you play with a group - but I think this is really the strength of DayZ, and it manages to do it without procedurally generated content for the most part - just (semi) random loot spawns, and mostly by leveraging other players as a way to create a threat.

Granted, the game isn't perfect, and the zombies themselves play altogether too small a roll in DayZ when compared to other players, but when i think about the game it seems like a good example of a game which nails exploration really well from my point of view.

[Dark_MadMax]

This is easy to say from the perspective of a gamer.

From the point of view of a developer trying to convince the parent company/VC to part with $50m to make an MMO? Not so much. Everyone in the business now knows that WoW got its 11m subscribers precisely by making an MMO for everyone, so arguing for a different direction is very much swimming against the tide with the money people.

And those "11m everyone" will go to only one MMO. Unless you out-wow WoW- which is impossible, at best you will get successful clone a-la RIFT.

[apocrypha]

And those "11m everyone" will go to only one MMO. Unless you out-wow WoW- which is impossible, at best you will get successful clone a-la RIFT.

Yeah, we know that, but the suits are always gonna chase that internet dragon.

[Khaldun]

I'm sorry, but Minecraft = end of the stupid argument about whether there are enough people who want a procedurally generated MMO of some kind. Yes, there are. Yes, they will have problems of their own. But the many developers who have claimed for years that no one or hardly anyone wants anything of that sort are just wrong, wrong, wrong and now they have a big fat $$$ in front of them if they care to take notice of it. Most of them are now too busy trying to out-Zynga Zynga to pay any attention.

[UnSub]

Minecraft isn't a MMO though. Just because a lot of people play FPSs hasn't meant that MMOFPSs have really taken off.

And again you aren't paying $60 to play Minecraft. Or a monthly fee. The economic choices you make are different, so the way the game is treated by players is different.

Love is (iirc) a procedurally generated MMO too. It made barely a ripple in the MMO market.

[Ingmar]

There are a lot of social problems you'd have to solve before something like Minecraft would be suitable for an MMO.

[Malakili]

There are a lot of social problems you'd have to solve before something like Minecraft would be suitable for an MMO.

This is basically the problem with almost ANY feature that makes an MMO interesting in the first place.  The degree to which you introduce mechanics to mitigate social problems is practically the same degree to which the game becomes less of an MMO, as far as I am concerned.  This, I would argue, is probably one of the reasons people are associating older games with having exploration they liked.

The more the game structures itself in such a way that "social problems" don't arise, the more predictable the game becomes. And, more or less as I already argued, the more predictable it is, the less exploration makes sense/is interesting.

[Viin]

Kinda skimmed through, so someone may have said this already, but ... I think exploring is more than just discovering zones/hidden places/other worldly things. I think it also is "exploring" systems. For example, tinkering with crafting and magic systems if something I find enjoyable. Experimenting with builds or decks (TSW) is also exploring. That's "exploring" but not in a geographical way.

The regent magic system of Asheron's Call is a good example of a system you can explore through experimentation.

EVE has a great system for creating a unique fitting for a ship to perform a specific role, this is exploration of builds.

Can't think of a great crafting example, but I remember a couple where you might just throw a few items together to see what comes out and discover your own recipes. (Until someone publishes them all, of course).

[SurfD]

Can't think of a great crafting example, but I remember a couple where you might just throw a few items together to see what comes out and discover your own recipes. (Until someone publishes them all, of course).

The asheron's call magic system suffered from this exact problem.  The concept behind advanced spellcasting was an awesome idea, but could never really survive out in the wild, because it was only a matter of time before someone cracked the formula for the spell mechanics and posted the entire list for everyone to use.

[Tebonas]

There is penalty for risk taking, and there is "ouch, the developer just kicked me in the balls, stole my wallet and makes out with my wife while I'm a whimpering heap of pain on the floor"  penalty for risk taking.

They are not equal, and just because you don't want to be kicked in the balls doesn't mean you don't want any penalties.

[Azazel]

(Guk Story)
While the eternal suffering was not enjoyable, the risk and challenge of that kind of exploring is extremely compelling.  Running around in unusual locations, being in places where you REALLY SHOULD NOT BE, that is the stuff.

I did that sort of thing too. It was fun at the time, but I'd never go back to that sort of thing. I just don't have the time or inclination anymore.

[Azazel]

There are a lot of social problems you'd have to solve before something like Minecraft would be suitable for an MMO.

This is basically the problem with almost ANY feature that makes an MMO interesting in the first place.  The degree to which you introduce mechanics to mitigate social problems is practically the same degree to which the game becomes less of an MMO, as far as I am concerned.  This, I would argue, is probably one of the reasons people are associating older games with having exploration they liked.

The more the game structures itself in such a way that "social problems" don't arise, the more predictable the game becomes. And, more or less as I already argued, the more predictable it is, the less exploration makes sense/is interesting.

The problem with this point of view is that with no real consequences and anonymity, people will act like (and are) dicks.

This is old, but it sums it up nicely:


Much of the real world has those same social problems mitigated by the fact that being a dick to other people can get you smacked upside the head, or kicked out of the restaurant, or whatever. On the internet, there are no real consequences to the 14 year old in WoW or Day Z calling (you or I) a goddamned fukin fagot lol u suck. That's just not likely to happen when they interact with others (or you or I) in real life.

[SurfD]

Talking about AC got me interested to see if it is still going.  So I checked, and holy shit. Not only is it still going, it's fucking 12 bucks a month for a sub!?!  How the hell did that happen?  LoTOR goes free to play but fucking AC is still 12 fucking bucks?

[KallDrexx]

I don't know if this really adds to the conversation but I wanted to state this.  I rarely, unless I"m annoyingly stuck, look up guides/maps/etc.. for single player games but when playing an MMO I will not hesitate to look stuff up.  Therefore I tend to have a lot more fun exploring and discovery in single player games than in MMOs. 

[Ingmar]

Talking about AC got me interested to see if it is still going.  So I checked, and holy shit. Not only is it still going, it's fucking 12 bucks a month for a sub!?!  How the hell did that happen?  LoTOR goes free to play but fucking AC is still 12 fucking bucks?

Coverting an MMO to F2P takes money and dev time. I am pretty sure that AC would take a lot of work to convert, it is really old and none of what they might need to convert over was built into it. It probably makes more for them as a legacy sub game than it would F2P once you take the cost of conversion into account.

[Viin]

Can't think of a great crafting example, but I remember a couple where you might just throw a few items together to see what comes out and discover your own recipes. (Until someone publishes them all, of course).

The asheron's call magic system suffered from this exact problem.  The concept behind advanced spellcasting was an awesome idea, but could never really survive out in the wild, because it was only a matter of time before someone cracked the formula for the spell mechanics and posted the entire list for everyone to use.

Yeah, that's the problem with carebear games. People feel like "sharing". You'd be less likely to share if it gave you an edge in a PvP environment (wither it's markets or combat).

[Kail]

Can't think of a great crafting example, but I remember a couple where you might just throw a few items together to see what comes out and discover your own recipes. (Until someone publishes them all, of course).

The asheron's call magic system suffered from this exact problem.  The concept behind advanced spellcasting was an awesome idea, but could never really survive out in the wild, because it was only a matter of time before someone cracked the formula for the spell mechanics and posted the entire list for everyone to use.

Yeah, that's the problem with carebear games. People feel like "sharing". You'd be less likely to share if it gave you an edge in a PvP environment (wither it's markets or combat).

Don't know that this works with static information, though.  It's not a finite resource.  All it takes is one guy who knows a recipie to post it on the internet and it's out forever.  It's not a matter of carebears versus non, people in Warcraft are just as competitive as people in EVE (with regards to different things), and in both games there are a ton of resources out there telling you how to do just about everything in the game.  Information is HARD to control.

For me, I'd say exploration needs a combination of two things:

1) Lack of fast travel, or auto travel, whatever.  There's a strong tendency for games to move away from long trips from point A to point B, so they let you teleport or take a griffon or whatever.  World of Warcraft is massive, but most people don't really get a sense for it because they work their way across it in tiny quest size chunks, and when they need to go far away they just alt-tab out when they jump on a wyvern, or teleport instantly to wherever they want to go.  Skyrim was probably the game that did exploration the best for me recently, but if you just fast traveled from city to city you probably missed about 90% of it.

2) The world needs to make sense.  There is a ton of "video game logic" that gets exposed when you explore, and it kind of defeats the purpose for me.  Rivers which flow to nowhere, verdant jungles which border directly on arid deserts and snowy tundra areas, geography which is riddled with invisible walls and unexplorable areas which make no sense in context.  Animals which don't act like animals would because we need them here to be murdered for a quest, not because this is where their food is or anything.  Wander too far in the wrong direction and you can be sure you'll be raped by something thirty levels higher than you because you're not supposed to be here yet.  Exploration isn't just about seeing random shit, I can get that from Google Image Search, it's about learning about the land and the wildlife, and for most games there isn't anything to learn about because there isn't anything there that makes sense on a level beyond "A developer thought it would look cool to have a mountain there" or "we needed somewhere for the bandits to spawn for part five of this quest".