CCP Case Study: On the problems of scale

Rambling a bit about someone else's upcoming difficulty.

EVE Online has a new feature in the works called Walking In Stations (WIS). It will actually be a backport of an engine they are developing for another game, specifically WhiteWolf's World of Darkness. The basic idea is that players will be able to get out of their ships and walk around as full bodied avatars in one of the stations in-game. It will not be an FPS, but instead something closer to second life.. you walk around, you talk, emote, and that is about it. They will probably expose some kind of store functionality, which really means taking the existing market controls and given them an agent front end. So no new gameplay. From the sounds of it, it will probably be very close in functionality to those virtual meetings packages that no one uses beyond the first two weeks, only with much prettier graphics.

Now, one of the problems they will probably encounter is one of the classic issues sci-fi games (and movies/tv) run into. What to do with scale.

Sci-Fi has a bad habit of making everything really really big. You see it in most movies/shows/games. There are even these wonderful image files out there that show how big things are in comparison to real world objects like famous building and air craft carriers. The usual result is that even small ships are bigger then the biggest thing we have built today because, well, big is really impressive and futury. But it poses a problem when you actually try to interact with it.

Agent or actor, at some point you have to create assets to present the viewer. If you are on a multi-mile long space dreadnaught that requires thousands of people and untold rooms and corridors, you somehow have to communicate this to the player. There are generally three ways to do this:

(1) Lots of repetitive auto generated content. Got 100km of corridors? Let the player walk around 100km of corridors. They all look the same and the only real cost is changing the {x,y,z} coordinate of the avatar. Add nearly identical shops every once in a while and backfill with NPCs, ideally with lots of canned dialog and motion to give the illusion of a bustling metropolis. This is generally the approach that sandbox games take (with varying degrees of custom content depending on your art budget).

(2) Limit the player's motion and include lots of huge background images and occasional giant rooms. Sure you only have two rooms for all the players, but look out the window at that immense city scape! This lets you concentrate your assets in a small area and make them fairly rich. It also allows you to concentrate your players in a small area so they interact with each other, minimizing the need for NPC clutter.

(3) Let players create content. This takes elements form (1), specifically lots of blank real-estate and (2) players concentrating assets into 'switched on' areas. Second Life does this to significant success. This lets the players participate, fills the space potentially with LOTS of content, but takes artistic control away from the company which CCP might not like.

Now, what could CCP do? (3) is unlikely. They will not even allow players to add aesthetic structures to POSes (Player Owned Starbase)(which NPCs do all the time, resulting in really cool looking places to visit or mission in), so if they will not allow that then i can not see them releasing artistic control on this level. (1) is unlikely due to, well, CCP built a huge universe including thousands of stations that are probably hundreds of cubic kilometers each.

My guess is that they will do (2). Probably some type of tram-system where you can go between multiple disconnected locations, each with a fairly rich (but identical between different stations) area that players can wander between. Both the tram and the rooms will likely have awe-inspiring vistas that can not be interacted with. They will probably consider connecting areas like hallways or malls but drop them as they run into scale issues. One of the problems is that stations can have either a handful of people (0-5) or hundreds at a time (Jita might have 1000+ people in it for instance) and thus any solution they put together will have to support either extreme without making these huge stations feel empty or cluttered.. since 0-1000 player avatars SHOULD be little more then a drop in the bucket.

How would I have approached it? I admit, I am a big proponent of (3), but I don't care about artistic control too much. I also would have made stations (and ships) fairly small things, with the idea that space is big and cold and lonely.