Not trying to vehemently bash Vanguard, just explaining better what I mean for decent “world design”.

Since people say I’m deliberately picking horrid screenshots to ridicule Vanguard (the truth is that I picked those that illustrate better my point), here’s a good looking one that still shows what I pointed out. A lack of world design. There’s this bumpmap effect applied to all the terrain everywhere but it seems that the textures themselves are random noise patterns with a varied hue.

The lack of “world design” isn’t the fact that there aren’t many objects visible. But that those that there are, like the boulder, the fence and the tents, seem all completely estranged from the environment.

How would it look if there was an at least passable world design? It’s not that hard. The lines (textures) between objects shouldn’t look so definite. The areas around the tents should have probably used a different texture that shows there’s activity in that place and the sand near the fence would surely look different. Since there’s water, a possibility of high tide, along with the fact that the sand is soft, that big boulder would have likely sank more in the sand creating a hollow in the area, maybe even a small pond. And I also doubt that a cliff so close to the water would look like that and the same for the transition between the rock area and the beach.

EDIT: Credit to Jpoku for a much better “reading” of the scene (and this is a very good design lesson):

the connectivity is poor for whatever reason. It just doesn’t feel as alive. The fence, gate’s and tents look like they are about to fall down. The sea creature looks like it has just fallen out of the sky and landed on the ground rather than having led there for ages. Also someone could just swim round that fence. What’s it defending against? No signs of it being a real barricade. WoW here would have supplies behind the fence, strong supports holding it up. On the other side there would be bits of broken wood, swords or corpses (like a fight has happened there so a fence is needed)

Another example. If in the real world you make objects on the terrain invisible, you would still see many evident cues that something WAS there. Now imagine to remove all those objects you see in the screenshot. Well, There would be no sign at all that something was there. The terrain would look uniform.

Vanguard world design is this: a fractal terrain generator on which were then dropped with no real logic a number of trees, rocks and buildings of various type. It’s the opposite of an organic world design.

In general there’s always a glaring clash between the terrain and the objects/models. As if things were photoshopped into the scene. It gives a very “false” feeling (and this is the result half of the art quality of the textures and half the graphic render they coded, which sucks. See Black & White 2 for a terrain render that looks amazing).

Now take these other examples:

1- Transitions. Can you see how in this case the transition between the beach, the grass and then the rock areas is much smoother and organic (dithering aside)? And how the result is a believable, immersive scenery?

2- Detail. Notice how the terrain is painted to have some kind of trailing effect near the wooden planks, as if some water dribbled around them. Imagine to remove these planks and the terrain would still reflect that something was there.

Now go and see if you can find in Vanguard a similar example. WoW can deliver some organic scenery even with an empty landscape. In Vanguard the terrain looks as if it was colored with the airbrush in MS Paint.

Try to walk along the coast in Westfall and you’ll see plenty of wooden planks, barrels, tree trunks, shipwrecks and so on. That’s world design.

Please understand that this isn’t a Vanguard vs WoW. I’m just pointing out one of Vanguard’s flaws and using WoW because it offers descriptive examples of good world design.

And consider that I’m pointing out only one tiny aspect of what I consider world design, just because it was the easiest to explain. I hope it illustrates better the kind of point of view from where my comments were coming.

P.S.
I know very little of “world design” and I doubt I could do a better work, I don’t have any practice with it. But I see something that looks amazing and then something that feels like crap. What I do is just to ask myself why. I try to analyze and dig what I see and try to understand what makes the difference. So I’m trying to learn by myself. I compare things to learn the differences. It’s not simple but I expect that those who actually ARE WORKING in the game industry know these things I’m trying to teach myself.

I’m not at the AGC but this is my rant.

One of the most popular discussions at the moment about Vanguard is the choice of using “unibodies”. It sounds as the most irrelevant detail you could discuss about a game, instead it’s the one between those that will matter more and that will be brought up more often.

What’s a “unibody”? Well, it’s just a fancy term to define the design choice to share the same “body” for each character’s race while only changing the scaling (which is as simple as setting a variable) and the head plugged on that body.

This means that all the playable races in the game will look alike, but it also means that it is much easier to create armors and clothes as they don’t need to be race-specific or tweaked to fit the different models and silhouettes.

Imho the compromise is completely unacceptable and the real, deeper reason is similar to the old debate about the balance between handcrafted and generated content. The reason is only one: not using “unibodies” and “unianimations” would actually force the developers to, you know, DO SOMETHING.

Since there’s nothing new under the sun, I can draw from very old forum posts that I happned to reread recently:

SirBruce: The first panel I went to was “The Right Content Mix” with Starr Long, Rich Vogel, and Jason Durrell. The panel debated what was the right mix of static vs. dynamic content in MMOs

HRose: Oh my god. These guys are able to repeat the same theme for every conference?

They aren’t intelligent enough to realize that “the right mix of static vs. dynamic content” is ALREADY a wrong premise that won’t bring anywhere?

Yeah, like if there’s a “right mix” of doing and not doing your work. Or the right mix between good and bad art. Or the right mix of content and lack of it.

“How can we do the less possible and make money?”

If you START from that premise, you’ll never go anywhere. This is very close to what Rob Pardo wrote and that I quoted. You don’t polish later. You polish from the beginning. It’s a mindset. The “culture of polish” he speaks about and that is the MAIN DIFFERENCE between Blizzard and EVERY OTHER MMORPG STUDIO OUT THERE. Every single one.

Create art and style that is specific to a race. You know, *content*. You know, what the players are supposed to pay for, instead of just a hole with nothing into it if not an excuse to ask for money.

Even Valve with Team Fortress 2 has understood how important is the “typization” of the characters, how important is to have recognizeable silhouettes.

We pay to have lore, to see beautiful locations, the consistence of a fantasy world. Giving each race unique-looking models and animations is part of the same creation process. It is *what we pay for*. It is part of the “value” that the developers are going to sell.

So yes, if each race, and even sex, needs unique models and animations it means that the devs will have to work on that. But, hey. That’s what they are paid for.

If now WoW raised the bar and player’s expectations for every other mmorpgs out there, then I’m HAPPY. Because others developers won’t get away with their horrible design choices. And all those attempts at creating “fun” random generated content will fail horribly.

It’s not so far away from what Lum ranted about:

The primary task of an MMO provider is, again, to provide the MMO.

Yeah. And the secondary task is to provide the content. You CANNOT get away without doing that. You cannot find “shortcuts” because there are no goddamn shortcuts. There is no game that builds itself if not as a stupid, ingenuous dream that many in the industry share.

The better is the content, the more work goes into it, the more the game will be successful. Well deserved success.

As I wrote in a comment there isn’t a single mmorpg out there that I think deserved more than what it got. Nor a mmorpg that deserved less than what it got. WoW is up there, far away, because that gap is a gap of QUALITY. Concrete quality. No PR stuff or brand or whatever. It’s *quality*. Quality, hard work and dedication that paid back.

If mmorpg developers decide to take the shortcuts then the players will see. If you flip the pages of a book and there’s a blank one, you will notice. YOU WON’T GET AWAY WITH THAT.

As in the “emperor’s new clothes” story, the king is naked.

Continue that way. Right along with the generated and player created content. All stupid excuses to find ways to sell a VOID. Tho sell the LACK of something. The “Philosophical Stone” that turns digital rocks into real gold.

About the unibodies and unianimations, this is another very old discussion. So interesting to reread nowadays (and at least acknowledge how what I write long ago stands the test of time):

Raph: The tradeoff is that SWG permits greater animated expressiveness for every race. This is, again, mostly a matter of taste. There are technical challenges both ways as well, of course. In WoW, tying each animation set to each character type means that you have to assume a budget for animations equal to having every animation set on screen. That almost certainly means less animations total in the game. It eats into your skeleton budget, and requires greater animation time, of course, which could have been spent somewhere else. In SWG, you lose distinctiveness per species. This gets spent instead on character customization…

HRose: I like way better WoW approach. I don’t need “fluff”. I feel more important an unique feel of my character than setting the pattern of my beard. The only thing I’d change in WoW is the possibility to set an height. That’s it. Specific animations really give you a different “feel” of the character, imho. More than the control of details that create lag, problems to the netcode and are barely noticeable by anyone aside you.

Raph: Yeah, to me the Tauren walk is the fluff, and the beard matters to me. *shrug*

I’m sure out there you can find someone who believes that WoW’s success is only due to the race-specific /dance emotes. Of course it’s an exaggeration, but even today part of what people are interested about the expansion is the new dance emotes for the two new races. Go again to read what Rob Pardo writes about “polished features”.

SWG didn’t have the unibodies, but it did have the unianimations. And it sucked. Vanguard will have both unibodies and unianimations.

Brad McQuaid: “Given the fact that we’re likely the only other AAA MMOG for the year 2007 means that we can do no less.”

Eheh, come back in a year and tell me I was wrong: “Warhammer will be more successful than Vanguard”.