WORK IN PROGRESS (WILL DELETE WHEN DONE)
I just wanted to start with saying that this is a repost of my previous post that I had up for 9 months then I kinda let it lapse. I wanted to revamp this thread a bit with newer images and rewording things a bit. (This is currently work in progress. I will remove this when I have everything revamped. Going to save a few posts since I did hit the limit on previous posts and wished I saved the first few posts for that reason)
Idea TLDR (yeah its long, sorry but feel free to read this and respond if you do not wish to read the entire thread)
Let’s create a large network of hand placed potential spawn locations. Not all will be active at once, but they would be randomly chosen to become active and spawn something random (based on a spawn table) based on the spawn location’s characteristic (eg. an open field versus a mountain spawning different things). This can be used with current content and future content and can be used to create the illusion of having fully random spawns in the open world. The goal is to make this reasonable within the context of what the New World game engine and server resources. Another goal is to give the devs control of where things spawn and what spawns at these locations. This would promote more open world exploration allowing for random ore spawns, random world boss spawns, and random dynamic event spawns that cannot be mapped out and “solved” by players. So that each trek into the open world feels fresh, new, and in some cases reddit post worthy if you happen to stumble upon something exceedingly rare.
One really helpful piece of feedback I received with the original version of this thread is that one concern would be that if everything is “random” then what if a player wants to go and mine a specific resource. This could be frustrating. So, this will be in addition to static nodes that are currently in the game. So that players that want to gather a specific resource still can do so.
WHY do we need this?
Everyone remembers that first time they logged onto this game and entered the open world of Aeternum. It was freaking magical. In fact I was convinced that the world was more dynamic dynamic than it ended up being just based on how vast the world was and how visually stunning it was and still is. What happened with Aeternum is what happens with most games that utilize a static resource node system, is that it gets “solved” and loses some of that magic over time. Players tend to map out optimal resource paths and a once massive open world shrinks a bit and becomes isolated content loops that never really seem to connect in the same way they did in the beginning. This is not a New World only phenomenon and happens in every single game that doesn’t have some element of randomness or procedurally generated content.
The goal of this thread is to discuss a possible solution to this and do our best to do it in the confines of what hopefully is possible within the technical limitations of New World.
Another goal I have is to make exploration of the Open World something that is not strictly a new player experience but something that can be experienced as end-game content and complements other content in the game. The focus is to make the open world more rewarding but balanced as well.
The Problem We Want to Fix
If you use Turkulon, Rafflebones, or Gleemite meteors spawns as examples its quick before you realize that even the more “random” content in this game is pre-mapped. Here are Gleemite spawns for instance but you can also map out Rafflebone’s and all of the World Boss spawns that have been released since. The same can be done for the other random encounters that are in the game as they always appear at the same locations and over time even they feel static in nature. Finally the corruption breaches as they are always active at any given point make them feel less special when you do encounter them. Also from a developer standpoint, they cannot make them particularly rewarding because they can be farmed over and over because of this.
I wanted to use as many images as I can in this thread and this is one to help illustrate how these things are mapped by the players and “solved.” When you have a map like this it is then easy to start planning out routes between each spawn. The same goes for a great variety of other content which is meant to feel random to the player.
Another thing that a system like this can address is creating rewarding content that cannot be farmed. There are many ways to make rewarding content in . Which is a very difficult line to
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With the above examples, which I think are wonderful starting points, players ended up mapping their locations and creating routes to farm/camp them most efficiently. People eventually learned where to find them, so we went from wandering around exploring Aeternum at night looking for Gleemite spawns, to just following the most efficient routes. The same went for Turkulon where you would open up the resource map and go to these specific locations instead of searching aimlessly and then announcing the location in global when you found one.
What if we added far more potential locations
(instead of 20? 50? Why not 1000 or even 10,000?)
Then made the selection random and less predictable? This would create a pseudorandom network that all current and future content can pull from. Here is an example below. We have a random section of map at the top where you can see all of the potential spawns (I over exaggerated, the real Staten can start smaller of course). The next image is the same image but instead shows an example of only the current active nodes. You can see how you can get a TON of different possible active node combinations from the 1st image. This makes it so each time you go into this area feel different because of the large amount of possible combinations, on top of each node also having a random thing spawn there.
&&&&&Things above this have not been re-worked yet&&& Want to point out that this does come with some initial dev time but also wanted to use an imagine of the current number of hand placed rabbit and wolf spawns in the game or compare with Brimstone sands newly placed mob count to help establish that this may not be that unreasonable. Also point out that this can start small and scale up very easily, just place a smaller amount then go back and place more later. As long as you set up the framework it is easily expandable. Finally pointing out a little math I did on number of combinations and how few nodes you need to create an insane number of possible combinations&&&&&
This is an example of a map containing all of the possible spawn locations. This is essentially the template that is used to create essentially zillions of possible combinations of live maps.
(Here you can see all of the possible spawn locations. Black dots are random locations with “roadside” characteristic, yellow are “waterside,” green are “open field,” red are “abandoned town” characteristic nodes, finally blue are rocky areas. More on these characteristics below. These are simple examples as you can have much not diverse characteristics here such as open field, forest, ancient ruins, abandoned towns, rocky hills, shore, shallow water, roadside, etc. Also these nodes also can be separated into small, medium, and large to account for the size of what spawns there. A simple iron ore node would spawn at a smaller one but you might need a medium one for a world boss or orichalcum meteor.) - need to reword or move this
As you can see this image is an image taken from our previous image by removing some of the nodes. So this would be an example of an active map. This is an incredibly important step to make it so the node locations themselves cannot be solved by the players. Without this step to put it into perspective, we have the gleemite map we have above but what is at each location is random. It is better than knowing what exactly is at each location but it still can be improved upon to prevent people from mapping optimal routes. Note, another option would be to use the original map and have it so spawns are not guaranteed (they did this with rafflebones at one point), which is a potential solution if from a resource/game engine perspective this system does not work.
I also want to point out that this system actually is already in the game. Take a step back and think of the Tempest expedition for a second. How do those bonus chests work? They have 4-5 (or whatever number it is) potential spawn points for each chest then at the beginning of the expedition the game selects which ones the chests spawn at. If you look at player behavior you see that players are altering their runs to check nooks and crannies. It does get solved to some degree as you know where the potential spawns are, but it was a refreshing change that I think is often overlooked.
Here is an example of this same map but you can see the node characteristic types are marked at each node. This dictates which spawn table they use. This is important for player immersion as a rocky area should have more ores and we might see an abandoned caravan on a roadside but would not want to see it on some rocks. What is even cooler is that this can be used as a tool for future content. The developers do not need to go back to hand placing things on the map for events they can just alter the spawn tables.
For instance! (Exciting bonus things for the developers)
The Easter event with the corrupted rabbits was cool but the players eventually found out that it was a reskin of the previously placed rabbit spawns. As a result players really only had a few locations that they could find the rabbits. With this the devs can choose which characteristics make the most sense. Maybe roadsides, forests, and open_grass would be reasonable locations. What of the winter event? Just add presents to the roadside spawns. Future halloween event? Maybe adding glowing jack-o-lanterns to forest spawns. The possibilities are endless. I think it would be a very useful tool for future development and making it so the world feels dynamic and changing. Since you have the physical spawns and the tables separate, you can add new things as the game develops and grows.
Future directions for this could be to nodes to check the server time and see if it is daytime or nighttime and pull from different spawn tables. Perhaps in the future when dynamic weather is added you could check to see if it is raining or sunny and adjust spawns accordingly. Cool right?
Finally here is a mock-up of a potential list of spawns at each location. I made these up and added random numbers for fun, just to really give the feeling of how dynamic this feels.
Finally I wanted to post a few image examples to really help immerse the reader (you) into what this could look like. If you forgive my poor image editing skills and poor attention to perspective (making them bigger and smaller based on distance haha).
&&&&&PAUSE HERE, want to add examples of spawn tables somewhere. EVERYTHING BELOW THIS HAS NOT BEEN REVISITED AND EDITED. MAY BE OUT OF DATE&&&&&
Here is what that same image looks like after the active nodes have been chosen and the inactive ones are hidden. Appreciate that you can make a TON of different images here from the same base image above. This is how we introduce a feeling of randomness while still giving devs the control to hand place nodes. Additionally each node will spawn random things from a spawn table, much like a drop table. This further increases the randomness and allows for rare thing to spawn in these locations. The spawns would follow the node characteristic drop pool. So rocky spawn areas in blue would most likely spawn ore but could also spawn other things such as chests. While roadside may not spawn ores but more likely to spawn mobs. See below for more information on characteristics and spawn tables.
As you can see. The more nodes we start with the greater the feeling of randomness you can create. Compare this to Gleemite where players mapped out where to go. In this situation they would still be very rare, but you would have to explore for them. The other point is that these are generic nodes (compared with Gleemite potential spawn nodes, Rafflebones, Turkulon, etc) meaning there is no way to predict what we be at these locations. Finally each of them would have characteristics based on where they were placed. The ones along the paths, inside abandoned houses, out in open fields, on cliffsides, on mountains, etc would have these characteristics so when a random event pool is made you can essentially have it so each characteristic has its own pool with significant overlap so that they do not feel like specific nodes and therefore can be mapped. This also gives control to devs to prevent ore from spawning in houses, make it so ore is more likely on mountains, treasure map more likely in houses, etc.
To bring it together, instead of having separate Gleemite spawn locations and Turkulon spawn locations we now have nodes that spawn either of them (plus more things!). Players no longer can create efficient routes or camp spawns. Now you explore Aeternum and get rewarded for doing so because it really does feel random.
You could have the following things that can
spawn randomly at any of these 1000+ nodes:
-Mobs
-Chests (loot is less random because chest is random, uncommon iron/steel ingot chests, have rare schematic chests, ultra rare asmo chests)
-Starmetal/Orichalcum meteors
-Abandoned caravans on roads
-Stranded travelers with escort missions back to nearest settlement
-World bosses
-Resource nodes
-Treasure maps
-Rafflebones/Turkulon/Stinky
-Other ideas
Additional Details
1: Nodes will need to have labels associated with them in code (programmers feel free to correct me, I’m a noob). Each one will need to have at least the following: territory, level difficulty, GS difficulty, characteristic, … (additional ideas go here)
Potential characteristics: Roadside, Cliffside, Rocky area, open planes, forested area, river side, corrupted, beach area, caves, abandoned house, abandoned forge, abandoned kitchen… (additional ideas go here)
These characteristics would also modify what spawns at that location. Anything that is appropriate to spawn in that location should be able to spawn so for instance you might see more ore nodes spawning in rocky areas and cliff side characteristic nodes. Another example is having specific random things spawn inside abandoned buildings you see around Aeternum. The purpose of this is to improve immersion into the world but also provide some skill in terms of knowing where to look for specific things.
What I want to avoid though is to have just random ore nodes (static nodes that always spawn ore, but the ore type is random). Each node should be able to spawn pretty much anything. This system helps with immersion by making things feel more in place most of the time, but also prevent things that don’t make sense. As said before it also gives more control to the devs. Additionally it saves time in the long run as you can easily code in the random presents on the roadsides for Christmas events by having them only spawn at places with roadside characteristic. Abandoned caravans would naturally spawn at roadsides. During Halloween you could have jack-o’-lanterns spawn at night in forests. You get the idea. It removes the need to hand place specific spawns with each and every update. Instead you just add the new content to what is essentially a spawn table.
Level difficulty also can be important and make it so content can be focused at certain levels or even GS (after 60 of course, otherwise it is labeled as null?). Despite this being a characteristic I also want to avoid this meaning that all high level content will only be in high level areas. The purpose of this is to open up exploration everywhere. We still want high level world bosses spawning in EF, we might just not want them everywhere in EF. So you might see level 60 or 625 GS random nodes in EF (even though it’s a low level area) but these nodes might not be near common low level questing areas. They also can just as easily spawn a random chests or iron ore as I described above, but it has the potential to spawn crazy stuff as well.
2: Nodes will have to have both a coordinate and a small associated area associated with them. This would be stored in the characteristics. We would have small and medium initially, but eventually large could be added in the future. This helps outline a safe area so we don’t have issues where a larger randomized node/dynamic event spawns in a place it should not.
A small one would allow for a range of random things to spawn including mob spawns, uncomplicated bosses, resource nodes, treasure maps, chest spawns, …
A medium one would open up more complicated boss fights, caravan dynamic events, …
A larger one could potentially be miniature invasions, a fight between two enemy types that sporadically happens, an ambush on a caravan you find in the wild and need to defend, and epic level world boss fights.
The rationale for this is to allow these spots to have a diverse amount of things to spawn in them. An ore, a tree another, a chest, and different mobs may all have different sizes but if you have them spawn at the main coordinate and already know that the 5m? 10m? around it is clear and won’t interfere with the spawn/break immersion for the player, so you have less potential issues. It let’s future things years from now be added safely knowing which size of node you need to use.
3: Not all nodes are active at once. We will have more nodes than we have things spawned. This is fundamentally how the pseudorandom system operates. Please see consideration section for discussion.
Please see the video below in the comments by @Fapamara describing this idea in Unity on a smaller scale. Which is really cool seeing that this is something that has been done already on a smaller scale.
4: Some active nodes create spawns at global cooldown (a chest gets placed in the world) while others are designated as active and has a random event primed (meteor events, Rafflebones, etc) that only become active when a player steps into that area. This prevents meteors from falling at 5am at global cooldown time (or whenever a new ones spawns during the day) and instead only spawns when a player is present and able to see the amazing display. The sound effect <3. The crashing of trees. Etc. Otherwise if a meteor fell at global spawn time and no one was around to see it knock down all of the trees, did it make a sound? The meteor ore would then stay in the area for a few hours then auto despawn if <50% of the ore remains in the ground after that time. To prevent what happened with Gleemite where a player would miss a single shard and it would prevent any future spawns at that location. I also added Rafflebones here which would be unique compared with other mob spawns because there is a timer associated with them.
5: The compass could have meaning again! I know developers purposely did not create a minimap because they wanted to avoid breaking immersion. Well with a random system like this you really can’t have a minimap and it brings back relevance to the compass as well (as people can just look up the static spawns anyways). A really cool idea but perhaps outside of the scope of this post would be to create an exploration/tracking skill that would then allow players to track these dynamic events, chests, etc. This does a few things as it forces the hardcore and completionist players into the open world (although ideally this is intended to promote exploration anyways as it will now feel rewarding). You would then gain xp reach time you interact with something that spawned at one of these random nodes, the rarer the more xp. Ideally I would love to see this as a really difficult skill to train. Make it 10x the investment as fishing (not kidding) because many people won’t be grinding this skill as it essentially rewards open world play. It’s something you might see maxed when you hit 300-500 hours playing naturally. If it is like skinning (can be maxed in like 1-2 hours?) then it feels pointless and there isn’t any gratification from maxing it.
6: Day and Night specific spawns. Would have to discuss this in the context of how resource nodes spawn and respawn. If there is a system where they change with the day/night cycle then this would be a really cool addition. We already had it with Gleemite spawns already. Gleemite for instance literally had me waiting for nighttime, being like ugh why is night shorter than daytime in this game, etc. All of that was a good thing haha. It literally gave nighttime a meaning in the game. Love this.
Considerations
1: The up front work is pretty massive. This is intended to be an investment. The upfront work makes future content quicker to develop as you don’t need to hand place specific nodes (planning presents along the road for the holiday event). It also creates an intensely rewarding experience that I feel is strongly in line with the vision for this game. The developers want us to explore the beautiful open world. This would be a system that will be entirely unique when compared to other MMOs and to create an experience that truly gives a player a new experience each time they go into the open would. It rewards exploration. Regardless I do want to acknowledge that this is a ton of work.
2: Static nodes will not go away. This will be in addition to them. There is a balance that needs to be made between giving people consistent resource gathering routes and rewarding exploration and open world content. If it’s too random then people get frustrated but if it’s too static then it gets boring and people find the most efficient routes and ignore all of the rest, which isolates the open world into gathering routes.
3: Not all nodes would be active at once. I think this is important because lag should be considered when developing this idea. It also is necessary for the pseudorandom effect)* Also balancing the frequency of more server resource intensive events is important as well. They would not only be more rare and less likely to occur but there would be a world cap for the possible number of these events that could be spawned at once. Just to prevent that 0.001% chance of a server crash from multiple of them randomly spawning despite being a rare event.
4: Rotating spawns. A potential issue that could come up is that players are going to look only for the rare and exciting spawns and ignore the low level stuff. If you run through this in your head, by the end of a day most of the nodes will turn into less desirable nodes over time unless people are gathering the less desirable ones at the same time. I hope that makes sense. We also don’t want them randomly flipping throughout the day. Imagine seeing a super rare 0.001% chest spawn in the distance only to see it disappear in front of your eyes because you happened upon it at the wrong time. This also breaks immersion as you will constantly see things changing around you (or does it? Aeternum is constantly changing, the dead come back to life from Azoth). As a result we can piggyback on the upcoming global cooldown system they just created. Have all nodes change at 5am every morning. This could create a potential problem though as hardcore players may wait for this moment to rush around the map looking for the rare nodes. Again, not a bad thing because you literally just got the entire hardcore playerbase overnight to explore Aeternum! That’s awesome! You also could have it so it also resets at 7pm or 8pm (use your AGS metrics to determine the best time) to include more casual players in the hunt as well. I imagine the new global cooldown system would allow for a second time to be added that is exclusive to this system. Another potential fix that could be explored is to have it so rare and uncommon nodes don’t refresh into something else until someone interacts with it (5% or 10% and below rarity cutoff?). Then you can have everything else cycle every so often.
5: Active and Inactive nodes (continued). How will these be handled? We know that we can’t have all of the nodes active at once otherwise lag and server stress will be an issue. Also the system depends on having both! One fix is to have the active and inactive nodes selected at global cooldown time. The game selects the 5% that will be active and 95% that will be inactive and then only those are used for the day (one idea, less desirable). This removed some of the random feel as you can then technically chart out where the nodes are for the day and run them. Again this would change every day so still gives a fresh new feel every day. Another idea would be to have it so active and inactive will constantly swap throughout the day (I think this is better). You set the active nodes at beginning of the day but when a node is exhausted it becomes inactive. This then gives a single credit to the server to activate a currently inactive node which is chosen at random. This makes it so it can’t ever really be mapped.
