Ashes Terrain Topography and Cohesion

For me, the most important part of level/setting design is environmental storytelling. As I'm exploring, I want the things around me - whether great or small - to inform the 'backstory' of a given area relative to our perspective as players.

Let's use Metroid as an example:





https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/metroid/images/1/1e/Torvus_Bog.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20230521011448

The first two are some art for an area in Metroid Prime 2 - the third is an actual ingame screenshot of the same space, which the image share function didn't want to directly post. Figured I'd add all three since the perspective in each is a bit different.

The idea here is that this was once an industrial facility in a forested area, but the region was rapidly flooded after some drastic environmental shifts (a meteor impact about 50 years prior). By the time you explore it, the civilization who lived here has largely abandoned the area, leaving nature to slowly reclaim it.

Metroid Prime 2 is full of environmental storytelling like this - an area that was once verdant plains got scorched into a desert from the same meteor, there's ruined structures all around, and all in all you can feel the story-beats of the area without anyone needing to tell you anything.

The Metroid Prime series (particularly the first two games) rely on this type of environmental storytelling a lot. There's a lot of written lore you can find throughout its biomes, mind you, but all of it aligns with what you're already seeing all around you. Whether it's ancient lore from when a given area was inhabited, or more recent stuff detailing what led to things being abandoned, it all adds to the total picture.

For an engaging environment, I think it's important to think of the story of a given area first and then build your features AROUND that. Give players a sense of what happened, show them enough that they can extrapolate and theorize and make conjectures - and then have the deeper lore available for those who want to look.

The ruined structures in that artwork are a good example of "big dramatic features" I suppose, but the entire AREA they're in informs that "this was once a forest but now it's a flash-flooded bog"; there's evidence that the environment is still adapting to the new water levels everywhere. The cohesiveness is what matters the most.

As for biome-specific gameplay stuff - it's fine to let that just be emergent, in my opinion. For example, in the flooded forest, it's hard to move around and navigate a lot of the time simply because a lot of the places you can go are knee or waist-deep, lol. Finding equipment and other means to navigate the area more smoothly is as much of a challenge as hostile wildlife, since the whole area's going through some very rapid changes (on the environmental timescale, anyway). I would say, let biome-specific gameplay be emergent from all the other parts of an area rather than trying very hard to build an area around a specific gameplay mechanic. Worlds and environments are emergent things, and the difficulties we, as living things, have with them are emergent too.

UDPCast for my group and related people:

Yes, I know you're gonna want to discuss @Ace1234 's great post above, and I know at least some of you will absolutely derail this thread if you do, so plz wait for me to make a related Splinter Topic, if only for the sake of future Archives.

(to Ace, not saying at all that shouldn't be here, because that is absolutely what Vaknar 'asked for' and a great use of ChatGPT, I'm just getting ahead of a specific thing)

EDIT: Splinter created.
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/67736/splinter-topic-narrative-design-hell-is-other-people

We have not received permission from Aszkalon to share the quoted post.

I again really suggest that you let go of the basis you have for that feeling, because you're not going to be able to help Intrepid as much otherwise. (yes, I'm about to preach at you)

Ashes is absolutely 'inferior to decades-old games' in nearly every aspect, and will remain so until they are pushed past those games.

Your concern shifting to worry is a 'you' problem because you're just having an uncomfortable truth revealed to you, but I hope that you can accept it and continue to be a strong supporter of this game when it finally settles in that Intrepid has never shown us anything that is conceptually superior to older games, it just offers what all ambitious projects of this game design era offer:

"We can do it again . We can do it better ."

tl;dr stop worrying and start actually learning about other games.

EDIT: Found a better way to express this, but will leave the previous for 'disclosure' or whatever.

MMORPG developers are often fairly ordinary people asked to do an extraordinary thing. Every time someone with low standards accepts less than that extraordinary thing and makes those Devs feel like they're doing great just for the basic stuff, literally everyone in the situation suffers. Don't go assuming that 'oh, the Devs know that what they are doing is only average'. I have watched enough interviews and managed enough developers to [promise you that most of them don't. There's just not enough time in life for most people to know (including you). But therefore you gotta 'listen'.

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In order to maintain your position, you would first have to accept that we had a game that was built with every intended principle Ashes had, but at a different zoom level. Fortunately we had such a game, it was Alpha-1 and it was located on Alpha Island and it was one of the best Alpha's of an mmo I have ever played from an art direction standpoint.

Let me bring this to the core topic at hand. My favorite example of a design that incorporates some of OP's suggestions while still remaining the level of flatness Ashes tends to have (I got receipts later in the post) is Zi'tah and Boyahda Tree in FFXI. FFXI depending on where you go has very flat terrain. There are definitely inclines, but due to the limitations of player pathing and level design sharper inclines were reserved for splitting up areas. The way they make this interesting is by incorporating 2 fantastical elements, mob design, point of visual interest design, and lighting SO MUCH LIGHTING.

fantastical element 'something is bigger than average'


fantastical element 'nature is your bridge'


mob design 'nature is alive'



Point of visual interest 'make it stick out and glow' (as above so below)



I cannot overstate how flat these zones are, they are some of the flattest in the game but you never feel it because there is just enough variance that your visual field almost never has to think about it for TOO long.

In Ashes Alpha-1 I experienced this MANY times, particularly in the jungle, mountains, and caves. I almost never experienced these same design principles in Alpha-2 by contrast due to how much further apart things seemed to be and how much more artificial the over all terrain design felt. But if you ever play Ashes at max zoom I'll say that you definitely notice this issue /less/.

fantastical element 'something is bigger than average'




mob design 'nature is alive'







Point of visual interest 'make it stick out and glow'



And just some random other screenshots from Alpha-1 era AoC that I think directly counter some of the points in OP






There is definitely some truth to what they were saying even in Alpha-1 to be clear


But over ALL the art direction definitely spoke a lot more to the types of design elements both big and small that tied together the game by a lot.

So why do I think you are logically correct and spiritually wrong? What Azherae said is true, max zoom matters for game design. We live in an era of streamers for starters. But we also live in a game that is for those 'try hards'. Not getting ganked in open world is core gameplay. Ashes HAS DONE BETTER. The problem YOU are complaining about is the max distance, not 'the capability of Intrepid'. However, it is almost impossible without a ton of work to shift design direction from the new zoom level back to the old one. Where as the design tricks above are still definitely possible in Alpha-2.

@Vaknar Irt your question relative to 'biome gameplay' I'll just relink a related thread on that topic as I think it is somewhat separate from this topic. https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/52513/underrealm-weather-and-magical-storms

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So, the core problem with these sort of environments in MMOs is that they're reliant on large, complex assets which need to be hand-crafted for vistas like this.

This isn't a major issue for single-player games, because developers can generally control the route a player takes into a location, and therefore both optimize the performance of areas, and only fully build out parts of the environment which the player can directly access. Developers will also generally have longer to spend on polishing any given area, because (aside from a few outliers) they're not trying to create a giant world map.







However, in open-world MMOs, players can generally approach any location from any direction, which makes optimization much harder, and means devs generally have to make every location fully navigable. You can't just have a low-poly city off in the distance in an MMO, because players are going to expect that they'll be able to actually visit it.





This isn't to say those sorts of landscapes are impossible in an MMO, just that it's a tradeoff between dev time, performance, and quality. More unique assets use up VRAM, cost more render time, and require more work from artists.

Throne and Liberty is a good example of what's possible in a modern MMO. It has zones with a lot of visual interest, verticality, and variation in terrain topography. However, it does so at the cost of having overall smaller zones than I believe Ashes is aiming for, with more hand-crafted details packed into smaller physical areas.



I do think that there's room for Ashes to have more complex terrain with more variation in altitude. It's just important to temper expectations a bit, as the sorts of landscapes from your post represent a significant investment of development time and effort. I'm also not sure how well that kind of stylized high fantasy aesthetic would suit Ashes, as I understand it to be aiming for something a bit more grounded.

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Well I'll clarify then very directly:
What I was trying to say is you need very different design principles to build at different max zoom levels for players to feel comfortable. The tricks to make it feel right, however, tend to have overlap. Distance matters how much detail your eyes/brain need to comprehend and feel comfortable. It also effects how big things need to be in order to look properly at scale. This isn't a linear thing either. I think @GrandSerpent can explain that part better than me since she actually does blender stuff, but generally the size and scale of empty spaces and changes in terrain look differently depending on the 'common'/'max' distance. I hope that helps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ9RU7pznTs

Expanding on what @JustVine said, for design reasons, games are often not built at a realistic scale (it's harder to accurately position your character from a third person perspective than it would be in real life, so you need to give the player extra space to move around).

How a game's environment feels also varies considerably based on how zoomed out the camera is. Here are a couple of examples, again from DS3:



From the default over-the-shoulder perspective, this environment feels about right.



However, if we zoom out, the character suddenly appears tiny relative to other objects in the scene, and the area starts to feel bare and empty. There's also more visible texture tiling, and the foliage assets don't hold up as well.





Another good example of an area which needs to be fairly large for a boss fight. If you zoom out, the visuals don't work nearly as well, and there's very obvious texturing tiling.

How far you can zoom the camera out also has some significant impacts on area design. Here's a location which looks fairly normal from an over-the-shoulder perspective, but would break completely if you zoomed the camera out as far as Ashes allows you to:





Of course, these are all issues which can be worked around. Games with a zoomed-out, top-down camera perspective can certainly work well (see e.g. Path of Exile), but generally this requires a different approach to environment art than over-the-shoulder or 1st-person perspective games. They also require that you build environments at a different scale which can accommodate the camera perspective.

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Actually I think the biggest cause of the issues you might be getting at was when they expanded the map size beyond the original plan. So they had to, I think, 'artificially' (for lack of a better word) extend the map which changed the scale of a lot of the terrain. So they DID make 'everything bigger' just not the rest of the assets (because that would defeat the purpose of changing the world size I'd wager.) So really you'd want the map to shrink, but again I'm not really sure that is possible. It'd probably be easier to make more 'interesting' open spaces through design tricks designed to grab and guide your attention like I mentioned above. You could make CERTAIN assets look bigger though that is true.

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I think what makes a landmark or a zone memorable in general is intentionality in landmarks and connection to an overarching world lore. When a zone doesn't feel memorable, it's usually because of lacking this connective tissue. I feel like when a game tries too hard to be too big or too "realistic", that you lose some of the intent, and then you stop remembering places you've just gone through.

I'm going to try and explain something similar to what @Ace1234 did, but using existing examples from a game 20 years ago, which should show that this kind of thing is possible.

I really like Ro'Maeve in Final Fantasy XI. It's a zone that manages to do a lot of things by playing a set of specific tricks, all of which come together to make a very memorable place.

Lore Connection

The first part is that Ro'Maeve is tied directly into the storyline of the ancient original civilization of Vana'diel. You have these alien Cermet (think concrete/ceramic) spires popping out of the forest straight up, clearly ancient and broken down but still far beyond the current technology used by any of the nations. Not only that, but the zone changes outright during the full moon, glowing and allowing a different path through it that leads to the Hall of the Gods, a pivotal part of the Zilart storyline. None of this is peppered by cutscenes or even much explanation, the world and the story itself make you feel these strange things, and you pick up the scraps later, making your own concept of the world, confused as any adventurer here should be.

Features

Ro'Maeve uses asymmetry due to its ruined nature to guide you through it. When this place was new, maybe it would have been extra confusing to navigate, but by using the ways the ruins break in specific ways in certain places, you can find your way around. It doesn't have many huge notable features at first - mostly just stairs, and the occasional big pillar - until you see the central fountain, the Moon Gates and, when past them, the entrance to the Hall of the Gods that makes you feel like something important is going to happen as you scale the stairs to what looks like an enormous building. Everything is huge, many levels higher than character height, compared to the buildings you encounter in towns that have usually low ceilings or where it's easy to whip your camera near their tops, as opposed to here where you run into the walls. And the beautiful fountain right at the center of it makes it all come together. What's memorable here is the contrasts, of symmetry and asymmetry, of these huge buildings of high technology ruined, and the multiple elevation levels making it feel like it is a much bigger place than it probably is in terms of the actual distance you walk. The biggest success here is the fact that it peppers you with small landmarks so you can remember where you are, allowing the bigger landmarks to be more of an exploratory reward. A collapsed column here or there is a small landmark, and the huge fountain structure is a bigger one - both allow you to create mental markets of more of the zone rather than making them feel samey, without spending that much effort on the smaller parts.

Biome-specific gameplay

This ties back in to the lore connection, which is that only here does the full moon change the area and allow you to pass, among other strange and specific spawn conditions that are unique to this area. I think that focusing on making unique events related to the cross of time or weather and a specific biome make for even more memorable gameplay here.

I'll also propose a counter here of biome-UNspecific gameplay with Dark Ixion. Dark Ixion shows up in a pretty wide range of zones whenever it pleases, and it accentuates the biomes it spawns in a lot. The big hill on West Sarutabaruta (S) is something you learn to recognize as a safe place to relax and take a break from the Campaign battles that happen at the bottom of the hill, as it's rare that the Yagudo come down from this side, but when Ixion is wandering it now it becomes memorable for an entirely different reason. Having a large boss come down and change a former safe haven into something different, or even just having something come out of hiding like the Three-Star monsters that shows up in a specific place with unique/distinct gameplay can also make you think of that part of the zone as a landmark, because it's where the thing shows up.

The weakness that Ashes has right now is that the POIs fail one or more of these checks, and it makes me miss a lot of the stuff in Alpha 1. I feel like I remember the pirate camps in the mountains way up north, or the river crabs, a lot more than I remember any area in Alpha 2 outside of the area around any given node or Lionhold, and even the area around Lionhold is often confusing and doesn't stick as well because the terrain is not variable or there aren't as many of these small landmarks. I hope that you can take this example and rethink how you address what a smaller-scale version of a "point of interest" is. I'm going to post a video of someone wandering Ro'Maeve, and I suggest you turn off the sound and replace it with the music that plays here as it adds to the atmosphere, and their old FRAPS recording doesn't convey that as well.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Wlzc_yWIXR8

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hm_zg9KxDBw

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Work. In. Progress.

That's not even remotely what it will look like in the future.

Yes I'm going into overprotective manager mode now because seriously they keep saying this...

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Steven literally said that they are going to replace entire mountains , come on!

If you're tired of all this, it's technically on you, just don't go around spreading ideas like 'Oh it's the same shit" or "they don't listen to feedback". If the feelings aren't good right now, sure, fine, but at least pay attention to it when they tell you 'we're working on it and this part is early'.