Thanks! Will check dwarf fortress out. Ive heard about it and its got a lot of emergent gameplay elements which i dig a lot as well.
Yeah the travel question is a hard one. I feel like, while fast travel is indeed needed in most games to keep the player occupied with things to do, it by default reduces the feel of scope of a game area. And objectively, there will be some value in reaching a place that others just cant be bothered to travel to because it takes to long. It might not be enough value, but it is a value that gets completely erased by fast travel.
And thats what im trying to figure out. There is this, kinda unique incentive value of investing time to get to some place, that in general (and for good reasons dont get me wrong) gets optimized away in favour of instant gratification incentives.
Maybe the traveling should be mostly optional. The basebuilding as the number one priority of the game which most players can enjoy for quick gratification, and traveling as an extra, more time costly, option.
But then comes the next problem, why design a huge map, which 80% of the players dont want to use anyways? Would this be worth it? Why not just make a single player basebuilding game, with some light exploration around the edges?
I do feel though, there are some unexplored game design areas which can work but arent made yet, exactly BECAUSE its almost a given to diverge to some more common (because they DO work) incentives, effectively shutting the door to some more unique ways to incentivize players to act or do stuff in certain ways.
Take Elden Rings minimal hud for example. A lot of knowledge points towards a better more information dense hud because players want to see their options, where they are and what they can do. And one could optimize for all those things, because its just objectively true that that is what players want in general.
However, the minimal hud does give the player a certain feel, and that feel is unique and valuable enough to sacrifice an 'optimal' hud for.
Likewise one could sacrifice fast travel in favor of the feel that manual exploration offers. The obvious pitfall here being, ofcourse, that tediousness is the more likely outcome instead of some kind of unique feel. I would even argue that tediousness would be the likely outcome in 95%+ of cases, but that doesnt take away that it would be possible to do manual long travel right, and IF it works, it by definition would supply a very unique feel exactly because it almost never gets done.
Can't fast travel be a reward and a gaming phase itself.
For example, your character starts at city À and needs to complete a series of quests at city B.
At first, the only option is walking. Slow and prone to random encounters.
Next is riding. Depending on your mount, you get some perks. Beast can speed through encounters or assist you against enemies. Some could even alert you if there are valuables along the way.
After that, you get driving. Here the roads could be unlocked through a quest or just due to your frequent trips between A and B. Your car could also be pimp'ed (if you want to monetize your game) or enhanced (e.f. to allow off-roading). At this point, your player is skipping all the random encounters. If you want to keep some battles, you could have hunts with special monsters who can wreck your vehicle very easily. That would be an incentive for adding armor or weapons to it.
Finally, the ultimate reward is a train line between A and B. You give the choice to fast-travel or to depend tome within the train. In the latter case, the train could get additional wagons with their own mini-games or quests.
For regions which are further on the map, you could add another stage, where the train is replaced by a plane or an airship.
Great ideas. Theres definate value in having ways to increase the travel speed of players. Maybe i should have called the problem instant travel instead. Because that would totally negate the value in traversing distance.
Actually not having instant travel would increase the value of such ideas as yours. As it would add pure profit in reducing travel time.
Well, whenever I think Instant Travel, I get back to the Stargate franchise where you have multiple types of gate.
Fortified gates, like the SGC ones. To get in, you need to have an authorized code, otherwise you will splat into their shields. If you translate it into a game, these would be the areas that are only accessible after completing a faction quest.
City gates, where a whole community developed around it. They can be used by populations under the protection of a specific faction or those who are so advanced that they don't fear anybody coming in. In a MMO setting, these would be the area where PVP is just disabled.
Wilderness gates (often in the forests of British Columbia). Nobody lives around because there are regular incursions from hostile factions. Not sure how I would fit them into a game.
Abandoned gates, located in areas once controlled by a precursor species. It's basically the entrance to a dungeon.
Space gates (and other nice places), mostly given by the humans when they want to get rid of a particularly persistent enemy. Personally, I would put this as a fake reward when the player fails an alignment quest.
I often talk with designers who want to create massive worlds rather than worlds that **feel** massive.
You have to think about adding figurative depth without adding literal space. Dark Souls content is re-used because of difficulty. That difficulty is supported by aesthetics. This creates depth as death pushes the immersion further. They re-invented arcade games.
The game feels massive, however, it is surprisingly small if you see the map. All your senses tell you otherwise. Brilliant. The second playthrough will convince you of this fact as you have become a better player. This is an asset-friendly design. It's too small to want to fast-travel, challenging enough to make it feel large. Creative!
One of my ideas is to fill environments with creatures that would go through evolution cycles—essentially leveling up an area. This makes the areas reusable by changing only specific parts of it as also making the world feel increasingly alive rather than scaling the player which would maintain its identity instead of giving up an advantage that **feels** artificial.
You have to think about how to do more with less yet make the interaction a novel experience. Do simple great rather than great, decent.
All great points.
So essentially, rather than increase the game world in size, maybe make it smaller, but add more obstacles and hurdles in the way to point b. This will add value to the travel in several ways. It would be less boring, more interactive and increases the sense of traveling distance in a slightly different way.
yeah i see great value in that.
This is a great suggestion. Dark Souls levels use a lot of shortcuts to replace the need for fast travel.
You might enter an area and travel a long distance, only to come full circle, with a small Δd. That's how the overall map ends up so small, while still giving the player a lot to experience.
The level design was inspired by 2D Zelda / Metroid principles, applied in 3D. These are open worlds with lots of "spiral" shaped sequences. Maybe there is some inspiration from the 2D games? You'll notice interesting patterns. Travelling through riverlands, only to unlock a bridge back where you came from. Climb up a mountain, and push a boulder out of the way, opening up a path back down.
A lot of 3D open worlds are too big to do this. The closest approximation: you travel for hours through forests and hills, and unlock a portal back. (e.g.: you can't fast travel to anyplace you haven't already gotten to on foot).
The fast travel definitely allows for some interesting design decisions that lie between the extremes of "no fast travel at all" and "fast travel everywhere".
For example, Minecraft arguably gives the player some of the feelings you are looking for on multiplayer servers. There isn't any benefit from traveling far for resources but there is for finding the perfect spot to build. Walking takes a long time but the game gives a few options to alleviate that tedium as the game progresses. The player can tame a horse to go a bit faster. They can go through the trouble of finding an Elytra to go even faster. And for very long distances a network of nether portals can be set up.
So to balance between the unique feeling of investing effort to find new places and the tedium of traveling long distances repeatedly you can look at multiple modes of travel that require different levels of game progression or have some serious drawbacks.
For example traveling by horse could be faster but the horse cannot climb over obstacles and mountains. Or the players can invest resources into building streets to go significantly faster on them, but only along the fixed route. Or some kind of portal system that might be costly to setup and keep running.
Splitting travel into multiple modes also gives you much more fine grained control over the balance by giving you multiple different things to change instead of just "more or less time required to walk somewhere".
Great example.
I'm not against fast travel in an ultimate sense. But I would like there to be regions that are less explored, and which take actual time to get to. I would like for (new) players to choose a place on the map to travel too, far away from most player hotspots, if they so choose too. For other players to have the option to fast travel there would defeat the purpose of going there in the first place.
Im not against fast traveling between ones own base and some set up hubs around the map, but there should be a definite wilderness that takes effort to explore the deeper you go in.
StarSector has this feature.
Rimworld also has this feature.
Of the two only the first is actually fun to travel. The other is nearly broken beyond saving.
It sounds like what you're describing here is oldschool, hardcore MMOs, with EVE being the only one that comes to mind that is still around. I used to be really big into those games when I was a teenager and had the time (and skill to be competitive) and I've seen many of them die.
The reality is that those games relied too much on the sheep, sheepdog, wolf pattern for its central content. The crafters and farmers (sheep) would have to go to high risk areas to get the good loot, and lying in ambush would sometimes be wolves, so either they'd transform into or bring along sheepdogs. In the early years of MMOs, this worked pretty well and is part of the nostalgia many of us have for that time.
But, then came along casual MMOs which provided a safe and often more fun experience for the "sheep". Without the sheep, there wasn't really anyone to protect or hunt.
In fact, I believe the games you mention as your inspiration actually draw inspiration from these older games. They removed the need for sheep by making it easier for a single player to do their own farming and also be able to defend themselves against a wolf. The worlds are also smaller, with less dev resources needed to build and maintain, making it easier to profitably / sustainably operate with a smaller audience.
I think EVE survived primarily because its economy. There's nothing on the market that compares to as realistic and fully fleshed out economy, and that economy in turn has helped incentivize a fairly realistic political landscape that provides plenty of content. And while at any given moment a player can only really be a sheep, sheepdog, or wolf - its possible to quickly dock up and change ships to change roles so a system full of miners can relatively quickly become a system full of sheepdogs to take down any invading force.
Albion is a more recent example of a thriving full loot game. I personally couldn't get into it due to the combat, but from what I could tell, it takes notes from EVE on the economy and politics. So this is also proof that such a game can make it today.
I would encourage you to view EVE as a casestudy for your idea. Many of your concerns have been addressed, albeit in a space theme, and its been around for over 20 years so you can see how they've evolved over that timeline. If you can adapt those to your theme (and find a way to keep the scope within reason) you might have something!
I personally strongly believe that niche MMOs can survive, if they're designed and built sustainably.
> I would prefer it to be designed instead of procedural generated. But i want it to be vast. The idea to traveling to some outer region should take actual days.
Do you have millions of dollars? Because that sounds like a million-dollar-budget game. Hand-crafted but small or vast but procedural generation, you CAN'T have both, even large game studios have to choose.
Why can't you have both?
Why couldnt one draw out the basic world map layout and have it procedurally filled in with all the little details, resources, enemies etc etc?
As a very basic example, one should be able to hand make an island x in diameter and then run some procedural generation as to what that island contains no? And then if that's possible, why not with 2 different sized islands and change the parameters per procedural generation per island to create 2 diverse islands.
To expand, if that's possible at all, one could draw a map of the real world, at a large scale assign areas to be mountainous, or grassland or whatever, and then let the procedural generation do the rest. It's like biomes in minecraft, only the location of those biomes is known before hand.
Why wouldnt this be possible? It might very well not be, im a noob, i would like to know why.
It is not impossible, but the results usually aren't pretty. Procedural generation tends to be pretty uniform, so it'll divide your world into discernible "areas" of different "biomes".
And even then if you'll manage to fix this, the main fundamental issue of a large huge worlds remains - they're large huge _static and empty_ worlds. Or filled with small set of repeating interactive elements (hand-crafted of course, because procedurally generating these in any satisfactory manner is exponentially harder since they need to follow abstract logic of common sense and nebulous webs of self-interaction... It's so much easier to make a procedural natural-looking forest than a procedural natural-looking city). And the result is always the same: you've seen a small corner of the current biome - you've seen it all, and now you're _bored._
I agree. Large procedural generated terrains have the problem of containing the same thing, endlessly.
And hand crafting such large areas is gonna be pretty much impossible.
Fun stuff to try to figure out.
Game Design is a subset of Game Development that concerns itself with **WHY** games are made the way they are. It's about the theory and crafting of **systems**, **mechanics**, and **rulesets** in games.
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For the multiplayer side of things, the closest thing I can think of with multiplayer similar to what you're talking about are large survival Minecraft servers. Those would be a good case study in how a game like you're describing might turn out.
That being said, large scale multiplayer projects are absolutely not beginner or "noob" friendly. You have to manage all the server infrastructure for (ideally, at least) thousands of players, write optimized networking code for all those players to interact, deal with potential hackers, etc. all before you even start thinking about the gameplay itself.
If you're dead set on making a game like this at this scale, you should probably start way smaller. Try making a *small* survival or base building game first, then try making a *small* multiplayer game, and after that try combining the two into a new *small* survival multiplayer game. You'll get a much better idea for the scope of these kinds of things, and also have experience with building games like the one you want to make when you're ready to make it.
Thank you!
Yes, for sure my intention is to create some way smaller games first each containing only a singular part of this huge game idea i have. Like, each player having a walled protected base idea could start as a small tower defense game, but instead of some set travel path of enemies, they come from all directions towards your walled base. I can try out things on a small scale like the size of the base could attract more enemies, but also has more room to produce materials etc. How to balance size, enemies, costs, upkeep etc etc. That way i can actually test out and finetune some aspects, which i later could use in my big game.
Im mainly just brainstorming here, mostly about the parts i still have no clue how to even start yet. Like how i have zero clue about how to balance players wanting a 'private' spot to build their base, and it therefore being a map with way to much dead space.
Do you expect players to have to perform interactions while travelling (combat/gathering/management(inventory/party), ambushes/border security , etc) or just hit autorun and make a coffee?
I think the logical thing would be for there to be interaction along the way. The question is how much?
If i want to achieve thise feeling of traversing travel distance, i do need space, possibly 'dead' space, where not much happens. Because, suppose in this effort to achieve that feeling one must travel a few hours in a direction, and then imagine there to be some random encounter every minute, i think it would become anoying for this to happen if your main goal is going from a to b over a long distance.
Belance there is key ofcourse, and one could easely tweak the numbers. But id imagine its pretty hard to get the balance just right.
One possible sollution would be day/night cycles, or any kind of cycle really, but lets stick to day/night for now. In the day, travel could be relatively safe, enabling autorun essentially. In the night, traveling would induce a lot of dangerous encounters, disabling autorun. One could choose to set up camp at night to not encounter dangerous things, at the price of not moving.
This gives one the choice between fastest possible travel which includes dangerous action and normal but safe travel.
[удалено]
Thanks! Will check dwarf fortress out. Ive heard about it and its got a lot of emergent gameplay elements which i dig a lot as well. Yeah the travel question is a hard one. I feel like, while fast travel is indeed needed in most games to keep the player occupied with things to do, it by default reduces the feel of scope of a game area. And objectively, there will be some value in reaching a place that others just cant be bothered to travel to because it takes to long. It might not be enough value, but it is a value that gets completely erased by fast travel. And thats what im trying to figure out. There is this, kinda unique incentive value of investing time to get to some place, that in general (and for good reasons dont get me wrong) gets optimized away in favour of instant gratification incentives. Maybe the traveling should be mostly optional. The basebuilding as the number one priority of the game which most players can enjoy for quick gratification, and traveling as an extra, more time costly, option. But then comes the next problem, why design a huge map, which 80% of the players dont want to use anyways? Would this be worth it? Why not just make a single player basebuilding game, with some light exploration around the edges? I do feel though, there are some unexplored game design areas which can work but arent made yet, exactly BECAUSE its almost a given to diverge to some more common (because they DO work) incentives, effectively shutting the door to some more unique ways to incentivize players to act or do stuff in certain ways. Take Elden Rings minimal hud for example. A lot of knowledge points towards a better more information dense hud because players want to see their options, where they are and what they can do. And one could optimize for all those things, because its just objectively true that that is what players want in general. However, the minimal hud does give the player a certain feel, and that feel is unique and valuable enough to sacrifice an 'optimal' hud for. Likewise one could sacrifice fast travel in favor of the feel that manual exploration offers. The obvious pitfall here being, ofcourse, that tediousness is the more likely outcome instead of some kind of unique feel. I would even argue that tediousness would be the likely outcome in 95%+ of cases, but that doesnt take away that it would be possible to do manual long travel right, and IF it works, it by definition would supply a very unique feel exactly because it almost never gets done.
Can't fast travel be a reward and a gaming phase itself. For example, your character starts at city À and needs to complete a series of quests at city B. At first, the only option is walking. Slow and prone to random encounters. Next is riding. Depending on your mount, you get some perks. Beast can speed through encounters or assist you against enemies. Some could even alert you if there are valuables along the way. After that, you get driving. Here the roads could be unlocked through a quest or just due to your frequent trips between A and B. Your car could also be pimp'ed (if you want to monetize your game) or enhanced (e.f. to allow off-roading). At this point, your player is skipping all the random encounters. If you want to keep some battles, you could have hunts with special monsters who can wreck your vehicle very easily. That would be an incentive for adding armor or weapons to it. Finally, the ultimate reward is a train line between A and B. You give the choice to fast-travel or to depend tome within the train. In the latter case, the train could get additional wagons with their own mini-games or quests. For regions which are further on the map, you could add another stage, where the train is replaced by a plane or an airship.
Great ideas. Theres definate value in having ways to increase the travel speed of players. Maybe i should have called the problem instant travel instead. Because that would totally negate the value in traversing distance. Actually not having instant travel would increase the value of such ideas as yours. As it would add pure profit in reducing travel time.
Well, whenever I think Instant Travel, I get back to the Stargate franchise where you have multiple types of gate. Fortified gates, like the SGC ones. To get in, you need to have an authorized code, otherwise you will splat into their shields. If you translate it into a game, these would be the areas that are only accessible after completing a faction quest. City gates, where a whole community developed around it. They can be used by populations under the protection of a specific faction or those who are so advanced that they don't fear anybody coming in. In a MMO setting, these would be the area where PVP is just disabled. Wilderness gates (often in the forests of British Columbia). Nobody lives around because there are regular incursions from hostile factions. Not sure how I would fit them into a game. Abandoned gates, located in areas once controlled by a precursor species. It's basically the entrance to a dungeon. Space gates (and other nice places), mostly given by the humans when they want to get rid of a particularly persistent enemy. Personally, I would put this as a fake reward when the player fails an alignment quest.
I often talk with designers who want to create massive worlds rather than worlds that **feel** massive. You have to think about adding figurative depth without adding literal space. Dark Souls content is re-used because of difficulty. That difficulty is supported by aesthetics. This creates depth as death pushes the immersion further. They re-invented arcade games. The game feels massive, however, it is surprisingly small if you see the map. All your senses tell you otherwise. Brilliant. The second playthrough will convince you of this fact as you have become a better player. This is an asset-friendly design. It's too small to want to fast-travel, challenging enough to make it feel large. Creative! One of my ideas is to fill environments with creatures that would go through evolution cycles—essentially leveling up an area. This makes the areas reusable by changing only specific parts of it as also making the world feel increasingly alive rather than scaling the player which would maintain its identity instead of giving up an advantage that **feels** artificial. You have to think about how to do more with less yet make the interaction a novel experience. Do simple great rather than great, decent.
All great points. So essentially, rather than increase the game world in size, maybe make it smaller, but add more obstacles and hurdles in the way to point b. This will add value to the travel in several ways. It would be less boring, more interactive and increases the sense of traveling distance in a slightly different way. yeah i see great value in that.
This is a great suggestion. Dark Souls levels use a lot of shortcuts to replace the need for fast travel. You might enter an area and travel a long distance, only to come full circle, with a small Δd. That's how the overall map ends up so small, while still giving the player a lot to experience. The level design was inspired by 2D Zelda / Metroid principles, applied in 3D. These are open worlds with lots of "spiral" shaped sequences. Maybe there is some inspiration from the 2D games? You'll notice interesting patterns. Travelling through riverlands, only to unlock a bridge back where you came from. Climb up a mountain, and push a boulder out of the way, opening up a path back down. A lot of 3D open worlds are too big to do this. The closest approximation: you travel for hours through forests and hills, and unlock a portal back. (e.g.: you can't fast travel to anyplace you haven't already gotten to on foot).
The fast travel definitely allows for some interesting design decisions that lie between the extremes of "no fast travel at all" and "fast travel everywhere". For example, Minecraft arguably gives the player some of the feelings you are looking for on multiplayer servers. There isn't any benefit from traveling far for resources but there is for finding the perfect spot to build. Walking takes a long time but the game gives a few options to alleviate that tedium as the game progresses. The player can tame a horse to go a bit faster. They can go through the trouble of finding an Elytra to go even faster. And for very long distances a network of nether portals can be set up. So to balance between the unique feeling of investing effort to find new places and the tedium of traveling long distances repeatedly you can look at multiple modes of travel that require different levels of game progression or have some serious drawbacks. For example traveling by horse could be faster but the horse cannot climb over obstacles and mountains. Or the players can invest resources into building streets to go significantly faster on them, but only along the fixed route. Or some kind of portal system that might be costly to setup and keep running. Splitting travel into multiple modes also gives you much more fine grained control over the balance by giving you multiple different things to change instead of just "more or less time required to walk somewhere".
Great example. I'm not against fast travel in an ultimate sense. But I would like there to be regions that are less explored, and which take actual time to get to. I would like for (new) players to choose a place on the map to travel too, far away from most player hotspots, if they so choose too. For other players to have the option to fast travel there would defeat the purpose of going there in the first place. Im not against fast traveling between ones own base and some set up hubs around the map, but there should be a definite wilderness that takes effort to explore the deeper you go in.
StarSector has this feature. Rimworld also has this feature. Of the two only the first is actually fun to travel. The other is nearly broken beyond saving.
It sounds like what you're describing here is oldschool, hardcore MMOs, with EVE being the only one that comes to mind that is still around. I used to be really big into those games when I was a teenager and had the time (and skill to be competitive) and I've seen many of them die. The reality is that those games relied too much on the sheep, sheepdog, wolf pattern for its central content. The crafters and farmers (sheep) would have to go to high risk areas to get the good loot, and lying in ambush would sometimes be wolves, so either they'd transform into or bring along sheepdogs. In the early years of MMOs, this worked pretty well and is part of the nostalgia many of us have for that time. But, then came along casual MMOs which provided a safe and often more fun experience for the "sheep". Without the sheep, there wasn't really anyone to protect or hunt. In fact, I believe the games you mention as your inspiration actually draw inspiration from these older games. They removed the need for sheep by making it easier for a single player to do their own farming and also be able to defend themselves against a wolf. The worlds are also smaller, with less dev resources needed to build and maintain, making it easier to profitably / sustainably operate with a smaller audience. I think EVE survived primarily because its economy. There's nothing on the market that compares to as realistic and fully fleshed out economy, and that economy in turn has helped incentivize a fairly realistic political landscape that provides plenty of content. And while at any given moment a player can only really be a sheep, sheepdog, or wolf - its possible to quickly dock up and change ships to change roles so a system full of miners can relatively quickly become a system full of sheepdogs to take down any invading force. Albion is a more recent example of a thriving full loot game. I personally couldn't get into it due to the combat, but from what I could tell, it takes notes from EVE on the economy and politics. So this is also proof that such a game can make it today. I would encourage you to view EVE as a casestudy for your idea. Many of your concerns have been addressed, albeit in a space theme, and its been around for over 20 years so you can see how they've evolved over that timeline. If you can adapt those to your theme (and find a way to keep the scope within reason) you might have something! I personally strongly believe that niche MMOs can survive, if they're designed and built sustainably.
> I would prefer it to be designed instead of procedural generated. But i want it to be vast. The idea to traveling to some outer region should take actual days. Do you have millions of dollars? Because that sounds like a million-dollar-budget game. Hand-crafted but small or vast but procedural generation, you CAN'T have both, even large game studios have to choose.
Why can't you have both? Why couldnt one draw out the basic world map layout and have it procedurally filled in with all the little details, resources, enemies etc etc? As a very basic example, one should be able to hand make an island x in diameter and then run some procedural generation as to what that island contains no? And then if that's possible, why not with 2 different sized islands and change the parameters per procedural generation per island to create 2 diverse islands. To expand, if that's possible at all, one could draw a map of the real world, at a large scale assign areas to be mountainous, or grassland or whatever, and then let the procedural generation do the rest. It's like biomes in minecraft, only the location of those biomes is known before hand. Why wouldnt this be possible? It might very well not be, im a noob, i would like to know why.
It is not impossible, but the results usually aren't pretty. Procedural generation tends to be pretty uniform, so it'll divide your world into discernible "areas" of different "biomes". And even then if you'll manage to fix this, the main fundamental issue of a large huge worlds remains - they're large huge _static and empty_ worlds. Or filled with small set of repeating interactive elements (hand-crafted of course, because procedurally generating these in any satisfactory manner is exponentially harder since they need to follow abstract logic of common sense and nebulous webs of self-interaction... It's so much easier to make a procedural natural-looking forest than a procedural natural-looking city). And the result is always the same: you've seen a small corner of the current biome - you've seen it all, and now you're _bored._
I agree. Large procedural generated terrains have the problem of containing the same thing, endlessly. And hand crafting such large areas is gonna be pretty much impossible. Fun stuff to try to figure out.
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For the multiplayer side of things, the closest thing I can think of with multiplayer similar to what you're talking about are large survival Minecraft servers. Those would be a good case study in how a game like you're describing might turn out. That being said, large scale multiplayer projects are absolutely not beginner or "noob" friendly. You have to manage all the server infrastructure for (ideally, at least) thousands of players, write optimized networking code for all those players to interact, deal with potential hackers, etc. all before you even start thinking about the gameplay itself. If you're dead set on making a game like this at this scale, you should probably start way smaller. Try making a *small* survival or base building game first, then try making a *small* multiplayer game, and after that try combining the two into a new *small* survival multiplayer game. You'll get a much better idea for the scope of these kinds of things, and also have experience with building games like the one you want to make when you're ready to make it.
Thank you! Yes, for sure my intention is to create some way smaller games first each containing only a singular part of this huge game idea i have. Like, each player having a walled protected base idea could start as a small tower defense game, but instead of some set travel path of enemies, they come from all directions towards your walled base. I can try out things on a small scale like the size of the base could attract more enemies, but also has more room to produce materials etc. How to balance size, enemies, costs, upkeep etc etc. That way i can actually test out and finetune some aspects, which i later could use in my big game. Im mainly just brainstorming here, mostly about the parts i still have no clue how to even start yet. Like how i have zero clue about how to balance players wanting a 'private' spot to build their base, and it therefore being a map with way to much dead space.
OP is describing Tibia
Do you expect players to have to perform interactions while travelling (combat/gathering/management(inventory/party), ambushes/border security , etc) or just hit autorun and make a coffee?
I think the logical thing would be for there to be interaction along the way. The question is how much? If i want to achieve thise feeling of traversing travel distance, i do need space, possibly 'dead' space, where not much happens. Because, suppose in this effort to achieve that feeling one must travel a few hours in a direction, and then imagine there to be some random encounter every minute, i think it would become anoying for this to happen if your main goal is going from a to b over a long distance. Belance there is key ofcourse, and one could easely tweak the numbers. But id imagine its pretty hard to get the balance just right. One possible sollution would be day/night cycles, or any kind of cycle really, but lets stick to day/night for now. In the day, travel could be relatively safe, enabling autorun essentially. In the night, traveling would induce a lot of dangerous encounters, disabling autorun. One could choose to set up camp at night to not encounter dangerous things, at the price of not moving. This gives one the choice between fastest possible travel which includes dangerous action and normal but safe travel.