I see this a lot in open-world adventure games especially (I’m guilty of this too). The developer plans the game to have a massive world with all of these landmarks and features, and little by little the world is created. Then the players all start to be isolated from each other, the game might as well be singleplayer at this point, and it loses it’s appeal to the players who joined when the game was still small. We developers don’t want to sacrifice the fantastical worlds we’ve planned out, so it becomes draining to think we can’t have both the player interaction and the big world at the same time. I had to deal with this problem in my own games, so I hope this post can save you from making the same mistake.
Understand that this can be a MAJOR problem for a game. Directly losing players from your efforts in building an epic fantasy world is not a good situation to be in. It feels like you’re swimming upstream and going nowhere.
The best moments I can remember in games are the times when many players are very close together, and actively engaging with each other. This is lost when the game becomes too big.
Before we go into the solutions, why do you actually want a big world in your game in the first place?
If you know that you want the world for the purpose of exploration, adventure or survival, then the below solutions are relevant. If, instead you find that your whole appeal of having this big world is that you find it cool or exciting, then ask yourself this: Do I actually need to let the players explore this world?
You may find that you’d be perfectly happy as a developer to just build the world, and then only let players access specific areas that are important and interesting, keeping the distant lands and mountains there purely for the visual aspect (along with actually getting to create the world you had planned). You can go extreme with this and basically strip the now inaccessible parts of the world of their detail so you can keep the performance high. Focus on making the parts of the game that you truly want to make, don’t make a big world and then cause an obligatory need to add other features and mechanics that you originally didn’t even think about or want in the game, just so that your massive world can stop feeling so boring. Keep it simple.
Fix 1: Smaller world / Segregated world
Either make the world small enough that players can easily interact with each other (this is pretty self explanatory), or separate and divide so only the most vital areas are available. Arcane Odyssey did this well by having an ocean world with many islands for players to travel between, this cut out the unnecessary wilderness and forests that World of Magic had (the problem wasn’t solved completely since Arcane Odyssey still has too big of a world, with islands that are far too large. Ultimately the problem still exists in the game).
Another option is to split each “region” of the world into a separate server/place, so that players can cross a border in the world and be sent to another server. This should be avoided for the most part, since it’s jarring to the player (especially on land worlds), and having to manage multiple places adds unnecessary difficulty to the already hard development process.
Fix 2: Bigger servers
This can work, especially if the game previously had very small servers, however it has drawbacks since increasing the player count will also lower the overall performance of the game. Unless you have well optimized player characters, this doesn’t entirely solve the problem. Especially since the world is likely getting bigger with each update, and we all know the pain of the game getting progressively slower with each increase in world size. If we’re gonna increase player count and world size together, the performance will likely get extremely low. Not ideal.
If you have any other solutions or ideas, please comment them below.