We need more exploration

On Velocity Overload I have the entire sewers network mapped out. Why? Heck if I know, its been so long that i don't remember why i did it. This includes the abandoned sewer network. I remember how hard it was but i think I was bored.

Shadow Shard is alwasy fun to visit. Sadly, nobody and I mean NOBODY seems to know where it is or how to get there for when I want to torture some poor saps and make them do a grueling Dr.Q TF or what have you.

I like places like the sewers and I'd like to see more closed, dungeon-styled areas.

Something interesting occurred to me the other day, in regards to why I felt I wanted to make this thread and the topic behind it. As some of you may remember, I made a thread about my supposed inability to make characters in THIS world as a creative decision, and to a large extent I'm starting to feel like both topics are sort of interlinked with each other.

It is becoming obvious to me that a lot of posters here, I dare even say most, are on a different page from me when I say "exploration." I never really meant the act of going out in a wide-open world and looking for the hidden things in out-of-the-way locations. Obviously, that is a very legitimate interpretation of "exploration," but I simply lack a better word to describe it. However, view this in a context of someone who enjoys "elseworld" stories much more so than stories set in the here and now. As a matter of fact, that's one of the key reasons I dislike Fantasy settings. They have been done so many times they may as well be the here and now. No longer are they mysterious and wondrous and, dare I say it, even "fantastic." They're status quo.

When I say "exploration," to a large extent I mean something mid-way between hiking and visiting an "outworld" environment that isn't within the direct control of practically anyone. This doesn't have to be something as far removed from reality as the Shadow Shard, really. Things as simple as the sewers, the outskirts of town, even just basic cave complexes are interesting to me in this way. In fact, I really appreciated the old Hazard Zones DESPITE the fact that they were completely pointless and needless. Yes, the new Faultline is a lot better to play in, but with authorities spanning the entire thing, the lack of the deep, impressive cracks and with everything "in control," it is no longer as interesting to actually BE in.

It has always been my hope that the developers could reclaim these zones in terms of content, but NOT in terms of rebuilding them. I've seen a lot of suggestions to lift the fog in Dark Astoria or rebuild Boomtown and so forth. I'd rather that didn't happen. Give people reason to go there, by all means, but don't mess with the theme and feel of the environment. Heavens knows that most of the places we go to already are well within the control of authorities to a large extent, or at the very least consist of a village and outskirts. Take Croatoa, for instance. Yes, the small town is quite helpless, and there are plenty of hills and forests around, but at no point are you really out of sight of the town of Salmacia. Compare that to the Storm Palace, where you are so far down the deep end that not only is FBZ out of sight, but pretty much out of mind, as well.

What I want is a sewer that goes deeper and deeper and deeper, a forest that goes farther and farther and farther, an alien world that goes on and on and on. It doesn't even have to be that big in actual SIZE, so long as the FEEL of being far away from everything and everyone remains palpable.

Here's a theoretical framework, let's say for an elseworld location. You start off in a large, well-entrenched encampment where everything is safe and everyone is in control. You move out to a large, fortified outpost still with all amenities. But as you move farther and farther away, the outposts become smaller and less equipped, eventually being reduced to just a cave with some equipment and a couple of people hoping they aren't discovered. The Shadow Shard is a PERFECT place to make something like this. FBZ and its surroundings are well-entrenched, and the Cascades have a large, well-stocked Mole Point. Getting rid of the cop-out teleporters and replacing them with progressively smaller and less-equipped mole points would go a LONG way towards helping the feel of the zone. Instituting in-zone teleporters might not be a bad idea, as well. Not exactly island-to-island teleporters, but at least to a few select locations on the map might be cool.

Actually, one of the things I've always wanted to see has been an Oranbega-style underground zone similar to the sewer networkd, one which could span in-between the different high-level zones, even going up to the islands like that tunnel from Grandville to the Fab. I don't specifically want to be thrust into the wilderness and held there for long stretches of time and many, many missions, mind you. I tried that and I didn't like it. But as a change of pace, with missions thematically appropriate to being in a wilderness, that could actually be quite atmospheric.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

In an ideal world that's a great idea, Sam.

In the real world, what you're proposing is that the devs spend hours/weeks designing, building, and coding an environment that will be experienced and enjoyed by some extremely small percentage of your player-base.

That's the long and short of why you don't see a whole lot of game environments that exist solely to be "wilderness" areas. The major portion of players don't like the wilderness unless they have a reason to be there, and if they feel FORCED to be there, then they hate it doubly.

You can spend your time, money, and resources on something that 5% of the player-base will enjoy or you can spend it on something else that 90% of the player-base will enjoy.

One of the inherent contradictions of the experience is that if it WAS so popular that 90% of the players were out there trekking around in it, that it would be so crowded that it wouldn't feel like wilderness any more. I daresay that your own experience in the sewers would have been different if you had found a "sewer team" battling around every other corner all the way to Steel Canyon.

Add to that the fact that everyone experiences things differently. My real first experience with "urban wilderness" was being sent to the Jacaranda Vista map, which is the one you called "flooded Boomtown". There was something haunting about that place. It felt so quiet, dead, and far away from the main city that I could almost hear the wind shooshing quietly through the empty streets. I spent a good two hours exploring that map and just hanging around, wondering what hero's statue it was standing sentinel over the place, and just what had happened to cause this horrible disaster in the first place. For that period of time, I really WAS out in the "wilderness" and the feel of walking the dead streets of a dead city was very real.

For most others, I expect that it was just another map full of Fifth/Council to defeat on the way to finishing a story arc.

The question from a game design viewpoint is not "How do we create a wilderness environment?" That's an easy question to answer, and the early reports of the "Canada" and "Desert" environments in CO illustrate what happens when you implement the easy answer - You get boredom and a certain amount of ridicule because eventually people realize that the environment has no reason to exist except as an illusion of there being a greater world.

The wilderness experience requires the player to make a choice to BE isolated and even surrounded by danger. Not the sort of danger that comes from a gangster robbing a bank. It's the sort that comes from bedding down in the dark and hearing noises that you can't explain, or worse, that you know are the sounds of a distant predator. Whether the "wilderness" is a maze of King's Row back alleys, a maze of sewer tunnels, the burnt-out shell of a part of the city that will never be rebuilt, or an actual wild forest, the key ingredient is the willful isolation of the player from her normal environment and resources. The attraction of the wilderness is the chance to prove your self-sufficiency and battle against your environment and come out on top, while SEEING that environment from a perspective different from your normal perspective.

Conversely, it can also be about becoming one with the environment and feeling as if you and the environment together are part of a greater whole. THAT experience is incredibly difficult to program for.

In any case, the payoff of a true "wilderness experience", as opposed to just endless tracts of empty space populated with things to kill, is an expensive one, given that most players are playing in order to be in the "urban" environment with all of the stories, resources, teammates, and conveniences that go along with that environment.

As with everything else that requires a development team to create it, the question ultimately comes down to "how do we justify the expense of creating this experience in comparison to creating that other experience?"

Yeah, exploration is fun. I love when you go into a zone you don't normally go into and found a great waterfall or something.


I even have an adventurer/explorer character, I really should explore more with them

That zone is like the worst bits of CoV magnified 10x....a monotonous, monochrome cityscape of basically identical stuff, extending to the horizon.

Are there more than 10 buildings? I wouldn't swear to it. And yes I did spend my share of time there back in the day mowing 5th column with pals.

I do get the appeal of exploring a cool, well designed zone- I've spent quite a while tooling around the Shadow Shard, which I doubt uses many more design elements than Boomtown (rocks....more rock.....yet more rocks.....) but is assembled in a way that makes it seem much more diverse and interesting.

And we could certainly use more incentives to hang out and explore/patrol the zones we've got- one idea they could lift from Champs is citizens who run up to you with crimes to fight.

While Sam posted an interesting post, and one that reminds me of a few things I've done in CoX myself, I don't think its going to be practical to do exploration in the way that people may be thinking.

What is ironic is that there is so much cityscape in COX to see and there is very little in it that rewards exploration in an intuitive way.

Take exploration badges. People don't actually explore to get them. People consult a website with a list of locations and coordinates and tramp their way to each and every badge spot.

When they nerf hammered street sweeping, the dev team inadvertently caused something to happen to the general zones of CoX. They emptied. Door missions were now worth a truckload more XP and gave less debt. It made no sense to fight crime on the streets or go on patrol, which is ironic since that's what superheroes do.

I don't think they ever looked back at their outdoor environments with a view to making them matter more to the player. It's a shame, because its a large and untapped alternative to regular mission grinding.

We have a huge city with all these buildings and signs of interesting places that you think maybe you'd like to visit, but the doors are closed and nothing interesting is going on. Why?

Why do MMOs consist of worlds that have lots of stuff that looks cool or interesting, but does absolutely nothing?

Champions started with the right idea of having citizens come up to you and give you missions, but from what I understand, those are actually relatively limited and you run out of them after a while.

As a hero/villain I should be able to traverse a zone and stop at places that seem interesting or get involved in a fight that, while it may not itself grant me a huge XP bonus...leads to an interesting clue for a mission or small series of mini missions that I can pursue.

The average joe player won't do like Sam and set goals of exploration for himself. But if with a little effort and exploring of his own...he/she 'stumbles' into a cool mission/situation while traveling around the city, that's something quite different. And if it happens to them once and they get some nice reward or XP from it...they will likely do it again.

I actually have to partly agree on the part about Boomtown. It can be VERY monotonous. To a point, exploring it from the air gives you a greater appreciation of the scale of the zone and its unique topography, specifically when you find the location in Boomtown that the "flooded Boomtown" map has been taken from. It's on a VERY high plateau towards the middle of the zone, and it's actually pretty cool going there. But, yes, to a large extent, it IS monotonous.

But here's the thing - one man's wilderness is another man's wasteland. But there's no reason why BOTH can't be the same thing. In a way that's completely impractical, I actually ENJOY a wilderness. One thing not just this game, but EVERY game I've ever played has lacked is a sense of scale. I've complained about this before, but it always feels to me like the world is too small. Blue-side, I can kind of pretend it's more expansive by looking out the War Walls and imagining a sprawling city beyond, but red-side it's completely impossible. The only two islands that look even remotely realistically big are Cap Au Diable and Port Oaks, and only because they're the same island and have "generic" land in-between that we get to see and know it's there, but not explore and so waste developer hours making it interesting. It's just grassland, but it's THERE!

To a very large extent, the whole game feels like a city from Civilization - one square of land with a few tower blocks representing the ICON of a city, without actually BEING a city. Of course, Fallout 3 demonstrates the sheer limitations of open terrain quite clearly. The game is TINY in comparison to all the other Fallout games, being consigned to, essentially, a small section of a city and its suburbia. It's also CRAMMED with copy-pasted metro tunnels, reused buildings and lots of flat ground to walk across. It's also a PAIN to get around, even if you want to explore. "Say, these hills on the map look suspicious. I wonder what's over there." 15 minutes later, there's only the location of a mission you haven't taken and can't do anything there. Cue the cluster F-bomb.

A truly big world in the way I'm describing is outwardly impossible to make, at least given what I've seen of contemporary games. It's murder on the development team, it costs too much money and it's problematic for the players who don't enjoy exploring and trekking full time. As a one-off game specifically made for the exploration of the wondrous, such as, say, Aquaria, one of the best, most atmospheric games I've ever played. But even that can be a bit overwhelming to replay, knowing the SHEER SCALE of the world.

I'm well aware of the problems, folks. You don't have to keep reminding me. I still believe, however, that we can make zones, locations and missions FEEL more like wilderness and wasteland without BEING inconvenient wilderness and monotonous wasteland. It's a question of theme and design more so than a question of sheer volume or hardline limitations. For instance, shifting my reliance away from hospitals in the city and more on respawn points IN the mission is a big thing for me. The jails in some missions and the EMT trucks in Safeguard missions are a great addition, in my opinion. And, to boot, they're also convenient. In fact, I think it's really cool when the whole team wipes, we all get sent to jail and get to break out together. Oh, sure, there's debt, but there's little in the game that takes you away from your comfort zone of linear progression through the enemy ranks, so I'll take what I get.

I never meant to suggest that vast open tracts of land without enemies or useful objectives was a good idea. This isn't Deus (major points for anyone who knows what I'm talking about and, no, NOT Deus Ex). But, say, a zone STYLED as a wilderness would be really cool, with contacts restricted to the few controlled encampments. Like... The Shadow Shard! Only with an actually POINT to go there. With missions and arcs and interesting stories, not just "Oh, here are the zones! Play them!" Really, there's no reason why we can't have interesting story arcs AND have them take place in a location that looks and feels like a wilderness. In fact, I'd say Nerva's Primeva is a very good example of this.

This is solely about theme.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

When I first started to play I wanted to explore everything, and then I moved from Atlas Park to King's Row. What I love about Atlas Park is that there are so many neat landmarks and features within view of each other, that you can navigate easily without checking the map. Then you reach King's Row where you have a sea of identical buildings (more or less).

Not long after you can handle King's Row the travel powers come, but by then you've got into the bad habit of using the map instead of navigating by sight. Later maps are also bigger, so whatever neat features they have are some distance apart. I'm not keen on big maps for this reason.

There are a number of zones I avoid like the plague unless I have a mission to do there. If I don't know what I want to do I normally fly by Atlas Park to see what's going on under the statue (or look at the new characters arriving and see what people have come up with). Its still one of the most visually pleasing areas (to me).

I don't think they make the best use of space when they design zones. I would love to see a bigger variety. For instance, make part of King's Row into a China Town. All the best cities have one. And what if special events happen at certain times of day? Who wouldn't like to go to Perez Park at midnight and see little furry creatures come out of burrows to do a song and dance? Er...

A suggestion made by myself shortly after CoV launched, which IMO fits into this thread. Essentially zonal badges that require you to go to certain points in that zone... sort of like history badges... but with no set location for the set points.

eg:
Trench Foot
You have successfully explored the Abandoned Sewers
(Markers in normal through routes and junctions, this is to encourage people to explore not look for dead ends.)

or

Highwire Enthusiast
You can navigate the roof tops of Cap Au Diable
(All markers are above ground level in Cap Au Diable and can be found while running from one side to the other (southern half/south of Aeon City).)

Essentially each zone would gain maybe 100 points that work like badge points (with no visible marker) to gain the actual Badge you'd have to pass within badge range of 10-15 of these markers. Ideally picked at random for each character (like detective/broker randomness) but it could just be number found... again nothing should show up in chat to say you have found one.

Then whack an accolade into the idea which gives a nice bonus/power for 5/6/7/8 what have you exploration badges called Explorer.

Well, I had an idea a little while back for a system where you'd check in with the PPD or some mercenary organization to go after a specific enemy group. You'd encounter them doing different things than a normal pass through the zone would reveal, have to prevent escapes, defend objectives, and escort hostages in the overworld map, and get routed to specific points of interest to investigate.

Not as spontaneous as exploration, but I think it'd really help give people who might be interested in exploring the overworld an excuse to go out and to it.

I'll give it another writeup in the S&I forums, I guess.