Dev Discussion #31 - Environments

A couple of key factors contribute to games feeling realistic and immersive, for me.

Clear art direction

I find games with a distinct, consistent visual style to be more interesting and "alive", regardless of whether their chosen art style is a "realistic" one.

AoC's environment art team have done a great job on this so far - the environments I've seen in the alpha are well-executed and visually striking. The biomes seem to have a clear visual identity, with restrained and deliberately chosen dominant colors. I particularly like the assets in use in the jungle areas - the trees feel massive and vividly detailed, and the use of orange and purple flowers helps break up the green and add points of visual contrast.

Well-implemented lighting and tone-mapping

This point is a bit more technical, but in my view both an important and a sometimes-neglected part of visual realism in games.

Tone-mapping, the process of converting the representation of lighting used internally by game engines back into something which can be displayed in the limited color-space monitors can output, has some unintuitive pitfalls, which can result in games looking overly saturated or having excessively high contrast, depending on the color correction settings used.

This is another area which I think AoC has done well on so far - levels of contrast between light and dark areas seem natural, and there's a good level of ambient light in interior scenes.

Ambient audio design

A varied, complex set of ambient background sounds also helps a lot with my immersion. Being able to hear things like buzzing insects, birds chirping, and rustling leaves, makes a significant impact on how "real" a scene feels.

Points of interest in the world

By "points of interest", I mean areas where some distinctive, unique assets have been used to create a landmark. This might be something like a half-buried shipwreck in a river inlet, or a forest clearing containing rune-etched standing stones. These can imply a backstory for an area, and add a greater sense of depth and history to a game's world.

Here's some that are relatively small in scope but big in impact:

1. Different shoes ("Feet" armor slot) having different sounds when walking, and different sounds for terrain types. This is especially notable for the contrast between a heavily armored Tank and a Rogue, feeling the difference in the way you and those around you walk adds a lot.
2. On a similar point to 1, ambient noises in the world in general, like buzzing insects, shifting branches, rushing rivers and crashing waves go a long way to helping the world feel more real. This applies to enemies as well - right now the sound design for enemies once they've engaged you is really good (I love the bears!), but "idle" sounds like their footsteps or occasional grunts/roars would be very good for this purpose as well.
3. Having a handful of NPCs that travel between nodes or are present in different places at different times is helpful in feeling like these are breathing, organic towns where people actually live. In a lot of MMOs, townspeople tend to stay within their assigned area, even those that are specifically designated as "travelers" or "flighty" by their storyline, which makes their story appear flat. When such NPCs migrate based on their own internal triggers, it makes their story more relevant to a player's interaction with the world. A similar thing can be done with itinerant shopkeeps that travel between different towns selling rare things; having such an NPC in a certain node for a limited period of time gives motivation for players to travel and helps the world feel more connected.
4. Day/night cycle and weather, especially different overall weather patterns in different parts of the map (e.g. heat waves with hazing in the desert, monsoons near the jungle, and so on). These weather patterns should also change the soundscape, for example branches and insects will get drowned out by the rain.
5. NPCs reacting to events that occurred in their immediate vicinity, whether quest or node evolution related. People talking about how this town was just a crossroads a little while ago after the transition is a great way to keep the world feeling like it's changing.
6. Longer respawn timers and more randomized spawn points for non-boss enemies would help a lot to making them feel like a natural part of the environment, as well as making the feeling of "having cleared out an area" or defeating a powerful opponent more prevalent. Right now respawn timers are quite low, and enemies respawn in the exact same spot, which can get pretty jarring when you've defeated something strong and fought it at its spawn spot or close enough to it that you'll get aggro'd while resting up after defeating the enemy. This ends up feeling like you didn't actually have any impact in the area despite the effort you put in, because it'll restore itself to the original state too quickly. With longer timers you can have a party feel like they're interacting with a world that ebbs and flows rather than a queue of monsters that keep reappearing.