Achieving the Sublime

I'll throw in my feelings on this as the Devil's Advocate. Expect me to argue against everything, not because I genuinely dislike these ideas, but because I may have a unique perspective that allows me to help others refine some aspects of this, maybe even into something that might be easier to implement.

Basic Philosophical Error of Kant
It's pointed out in the video already, that understanding, and math, allows us to surpass a lot of the related feelings of this. The video then goes into a discussion that humans cannot understand certain things because they are too large, but this isn't true. The building blocks of consciousness allow some, in fact, many, to take items of what seem to be near infinite complexity, and reduce them down with astonishing rapidity.

Chess is the basic example. Chess itself has so many variations as to be a true game still rather than a solved game, but a chess master does not look at any naturally or even contrived scenario in a chess game and feel this. They can rapidly 'reverse engineer' how it came into being.

Basic Design Philosophy Error of Game Grandeur: Scale and Scope
In short, a player only experiences these things once. Even in games that can generate random vistas like Minecraft, you quickly 'get used to it'. The size and scale are not representative to all or even most players, because we as players experience these things as abstractions, due to a number of factors. To make anything bigger or more 'impactful' only works once. In fact, in games, grandeur is better applied in the opposite direction. To make the tiny things.

Basic Design Philosophy Error of Game Dynamism: Reactive Modeling
Reactively modeled systems, where A leads to B, and the viewer is able to intuit the event, can be very immersive if the one experiencing the situation has to not only intuit A, but also find and verify A. This leads to the feeling of exploration found in earlier science, in the realm of Newton and so on, and at the current cutting edge of physics and astrophysics. Unfortunately, in games, 'wonder' is harder to maintain in this case because of the simplicity required to give the player the appreciation. In order for it to be found, or understood, by enough players for them to enjoy it, it must generally, by nature, be easy enough that it soon becomes a known, and therefore the gate is time.

So I posit, from this, that the suggestions given, fall into all these traps, and could be improved significantly with more attention paid to the 'errors'. (again, Devil's Advocate, I love the ideas themselves).

Scale, Scope and Reactive Models are fun, immersive, breathtaking.

But they're Awesome/Beautiful, not Erhabenheit.

For that in games, you need something else (let me know if to just say what the Advocate's stance on what that 'something else' is).

This thread is interesting, but I don't want to derail it, so @Nerror , let me know if this isn't the path you want to entertain and I'll get out of the way.

Single big impactful things are examples of Spectacle rather than Sublime . Games should have them. They're good. They're also expensive, usually single shot, and when they're not, it's too easy to see 'the reused function'.

Sublime is achieved by creating something uncontrollable, obfuscated enough to appear random, and for some, at least at the beginning, Kant's correct concept, 'distance'.

Rather than the volcano erupting being the important part, 'the Elder Dragon of Fire appearing to fly out of it and go land on top of difficult-to-access terrain, nearby, looking down at us'. Make this happen under some set of conditions and people build theories, but they can control neither the dragon nor the appearance of the dragon (not to say you shouldn't be able to go fight it, but the terrain should give the Dragon a big advantage compared to its normal appearances).

For those who test the Alpha, a similar effect could be achieved just by having the Elder Dragon of Frost land on the beach north of Drythorne and walk around. For spectacle you could have it freeze some of the ocean and walk on it. It does this 'randomly' and sometimes leaves before anyone can gather enough strong players to fight it.

Any sufficiently complex independent series of values multiplied together can substitute for randomness while hinting, and still cause the feeling.

Size isn't the real point either, but 'scope' relative to some expectation. If you have a 'Termite nest' dungeon, and the termites sometimes swarm out of it and appear in the countryside near a node, you could set their spawn radius based on:

Current Weather * Current Season * Number of Freeholds * Number of days since someone killed the Queen Termite boss

This creates a shifting spawn radius for the beetles with just 'random numbers that were already going to be in the game' with known values. And sets up a situation where the game can set an event where if the value reaches a certain high number, the termites swarm all the way to the Node and are everywhere and are too high level and all the low level players have to stay inside. For them, it's 'an overwhelming force' but you could make it so that they don't attack the actual Node.

If that number isn't locked so that 'this can't happen while the Queen was defeated the day before', players can't control it. There would be just some value of Freeholds around node + Middle of Autumn + Windy/Hot weather that causes the swarm to happen even when the Queen has only been defeated a day ago, confusing players and leaving them with that feeling of 'I can't control this, we have to watch out for it'.

You could leave the Queen alone, wait for the weather to change, and defeat the ones near town. You could push into the dungeon and hope that killing the Queen will push them back (you might get unlucky and some other factor make them hyperaggressive). But you don't know what will be enough. Two more players adding Freeholds, and the weather only changing a little, might mean you log in 12 hours later and find that the swarm is still there and you 'don't know why'.

This sort of thing is what Advocate will put forth as the true Digital Sublime , where the algorithms create a Spectacle for you, but your lack of understanding of how to control it, and relative powerlessness to prevent or end the event itself, leaves you with this feeling. In this case, 'dread' is not necessarily everyone's experience, but unpredictability can still leave you with it.

"If we kill a lot of these, will it maybe trigger an attack on the Node itself?"

MMOs are uniquely positioned to give these experiences because they can have so many moving parts, beyond the control or understanding of the players, and some aggregate parts that you can understand but not control. In games, we don't need the feeling of 'I have no power here', it technically isn't a positive for most players. Only the feeling of 'this is beyond my control, all I can do is respond with my limited knowledge and ability to this overwhelming event'.

I used creatures like the Termites here because they're often cheaper to code than 'world shaking events', in my experience.

The key to the Sublime in games is 'Why?', not 'Wow!' The latter helps, but I advocate that it is just a component, and that therefore, Kant is mostly wrong, 'because science', and any suggestions as to adding a Spectacle that is either completely random, or controlled by only one or two factors, will result in much less longevity to the feeling, across the playerbase.