One small point: Im curious to why you think having a huge map requires so much of the servers? It is just data in a database after all, that is streamed to the client and interpreted and turned into assets (or something like that, im a dev but not primarily on games...). Storage space on the server is hardly a bottleneck these days.

Actually I would think a small map would be way harder to deal with, since so many things would be interconnected and needed to be updated and synchronized. More people would be in the same spots at once etc.

Towns will also have NPC so I dont think there will be empty areas, not sure. But as far as needing a resource and not having a PC to gather it or process it, again I think the NPC will be able to pick up there, if Im understanding it correctly. We will be able to hire the NPC for jobs just like PC. Im new to this and still learning things. As far as size the numbers I remember were 64x64..?? Theres lots of time before release, I think as more ppl get intrested, population wont be an issue by release ( yes I have HIGH hopes for this) But like I said Im still in the learning phase, so like you I have questions.

As far as it being a lonely game, I would think that you will see small remote villages being - well - actually really small and with only rare occational visitors.

And we will see wilderness and desert being - well - wild and deserted.

Which might not be for everyone, but for me this is actually a selling point which adds to immersion. The real world used to be like that too, small enclaves of civilisation on a huge and largely unexplored planet :)

As far as game economy goes, I think NPCs will have to fill the gaps to avoid unbalance. Either through player coordination of NPCs or through some game mechanic.

Which could mean that in a town where noone bother to work as farmers, there might still be NPCs doing the work - but their crops and produce may be of inferior quality to the neighbouring town where a few players have taken the time to master the art of agriculture.

I still don't see how having a big world needs to be problem, there are lots of ways to partition and scale the load. Server space is really a none issue, it is the amount of data you need to keep in sync at the same time which is the issue.

If different parts of the server infrastrcuture updates different data for different users at the same time, this scales linearly into the heavens. If many users need to be in perfect sync (because they are close in proximity), it doesn't scale well at all.

Huge populations might be an issue however, but only as far as they lump together in smaller spaces.

EDIT: Think of it like this, they probably have different "servers" or rather microservices handling different aspects of the system. One of these might be a service that keeps track of player made structures in one area. To scale this service up to handle a huge world and a growing population, they most likely have some kind of grid or cell-system that partitions the work further. In other words they can split the tasks both by function and by location, making it possible to have a huge amount of small high performant services, that can autoscale amazon-like as long as they don't have to communicate too much with each other. Modern backends don't really work in the context of "servers" anymore, it is more about resource pools and small scalable workers.

Or they could be doing something else entirely, but my point is, a huge map is not a show stopper in theory at least.

Lets hit all these questions one at a time. And forgive me if I lack sources for my apparent fact dropping, I will edit post as I find said sources, and well if I remember...

First, size. The size is comparable to "2,000 skyrims". Now you all are dropping 64x64 and whatnot and frankly I am not on the same page as you. What I know is that if I was to cross skyrim, a game that allows me to ignore fatigue, hunger, thirst, and shelter and go from one corner of the map to the other it would take me like 30 min to an hour. In Elyria you don't get to ignore these factors, or bandits, or the fact that you can't keep sprinting or shouting your way across the map, and one skyrim trip very well may take as a ballpark 4 hours. Sounds reasonable, ardous but doable. Now you want to cross multiple skyrims, and weather effects you so you need to get new clothes, and your caravan was only going to the next town so you have to find another, and well everything adds up.

Edit So after finding more information I revisited this question to address server intent from SbS. Source Around the 11 min mark they discuss how their server will handle the large map and the short of it is they will have multiple small pocket instances that are linked together on the server side so that you can travel around the world seamlessly, but as it stands everyone exists in smaller instances that help reduce system costs.

Population Density! Ok so first thing here is the number I am aware of is 200,000 and not 100,000. This may just be community members, but if we launched Tomorrow, I have to say I feel it would closer to 2 than 1. And after we find out how amazing it is during Alphas and Betas, I imagine 2 will turn into 3, 4, or even 5. Second, the distribution isn't 100% even through the servers so in Oceania for example, they know the population is going to be less and they made it more of an archipelago than one big continent to force the issue. All this aside, at launch it will be Extremely difficult to exist outside of a village due to the hunger and thirst aspects of the game. You do not vanish when you log off, and in a city you auto-eat. In the wild out on your own you have to provide enough food for both online and offline use. This will naturally gear players towards cities where other players reside. This and the fact that during character creation it will start you as either an existing npc, who live in villages, or as a ward of the state, who live in villages, it basically forces you to start in civilization next to other players.

As far as player choice factoring into game economy I only have 2 main points. One, npcs still have jobs. So if every player wants to be a blacksmith then the other essential jobs will be filled by npcs until someone comes and fills it. Second, and I feel more importantly, if everyone in a community wants to be a blacksmith than yes there will be a lack of resources. And extreme lack of resources. Which is filled by an extreme influx of mercantilism as the demand in this city for raw ores is much higher than the city next door with one blacksmith, so guess who the mines are going to send their resources too based on supply and demand economics.

Third is disguises. My only real comment on disguises is kind of a real world example as I do not know the exact difficulty for people trying to uncover your disguise vs your ability to disguise yourself. That is, the family always being able to recognize you aspect makes sense. We are not talking latex face masks and a maxed out disguise stat that makes you an A list actor. I know for a fact that if you see someone that is extremely close to you, you can recognize them simply by the way they walk, the way they speak, the way they react, regardless of what they are wearing, doing, saying. In the game when you simply have a change of clothes, maybe a wig, maybe some contacts, you being identified by your or your targets family is extremely realistic. Maybe later you research latex and you are a grandmaster at disguise, first ever to fool your own family!! but not at launch.

TLDR The map is huge, the population will be dense, the economy is great, and my grandmother always know I stole the cookie.

On population density and loneliness, the population density in the early Middle Ages was probably between 25 and 40 people per square mile, and medieval density was never above 120 people per square mile. This game starts out in early Middle Ages, so the population density should be between 10-15 per square km.

This won’t be that lonely because the population should be clustered in and near settlements, with large stretches of wild and unpopulated land between them.

Posted By Viktoriusiii at 8:28 PM - Sun Oct 07 2018

A lot of guesswork... But at least there will be npcs filling gaps.

About the disguise:

If i have a hoodie and a facemask, the only other way to identify me is by my voice.

Im not talking about impersonating someone. But to hide your face and hair.

To me, it makes 0 sense that anyone would recognize me like that.

The only way to take on a 2nd personality would be living as an outcast. But if noone knows me anyways, i wont need a disguise.

Well... if you wear a hoodie and a face mask and dont talk, then others can still see via your body-language, who you are, if they know you well. My ex-gf could tell who's who hundreds of meters away, because she could read their movement behaviour.

And even if people wont know you, they'll know you are hiding something. If some crime happens, you'd be on their list of people to search and ask. Sure. They'd only know things like how big you are and how you smell... but thats more than nothing. And an animal that can smell it might be able to tell you were there or not.

>Posted By Viktoriusiii at

Hey there. I hope you can overlook the negative tone. It simply sounds outlandish and dreamy/unrealistic to me, my questions are nontheless honest, since I WANT this game to work out.

Hey, no problem. The community can get a bad rep for being disparaging to posts that aren't "positive" but I think it more has to do with people complaining rather than explaining their worries, akin to saying "this is stupid" vs "this appears to be stupid and this is why I think so....

Questions: While I do realize, that the game won't be the absolute dreamgame (because then it would have 7.000.000 different versions :D), there are some features, that I simply can't see EVER working out and I'd like some explanation on what I'm missing:

Please explain a bit more. Do you mean working from a technical or a social standpoint? Technical being dev's side and social dealing with the psychology of how players operate according to your views.

1. huge world. how huge? "you wont be able to traverse it in a lifetime" is probably an overstatement, but even a map that would take you 2RL days to travel by foot is kinda unrealistic. Not only because of the INSANE server requirements that would take, but also because there won't be enough players to populate it.

Lets say the map will be 30x20km (which is pretty small when you think about that in the real world) Then it would be 600km² which would be 1 1/2 times of what Wow did. And those servers are massive. But that game has -very limited ai (only fight and walk from a to b) -low nature items -fight,quest,talk system. Thats basically it. (at least when looking at the base game)

I simply cannot see, not even with procedurally generation (like most huge games like minecraft and nomans sky do it) a world for an mmo, that is bigger then 50x50. Which is insanely big, but isn't anywhere close to "continent sized".

This is the technical stuff it appears. I am not a professional in the field, but I do know that server capacities are constantly growing and the creation of a single "server" can be created with multiple servers responsible for certain sections of the land.

Last I heard the size of the starting area would be the size of the Vermont with speculation being that the addition of the other continents leading to an even larger size.

Another point is populationdensity. Yes I understand that there will be npcs. But lets say, there will be 100.000 players on launch (insanely high number, when going by steam numbers) those are divided by 4 servers. Even if cities/villages are the hubpoints for players to meet, on a map this large would make the world not only empty, but insanely hard to process. lets go with the "big map" of 30x30km thats 900km² which means with an average of 25000 players (remember this is generous) this means 27 people per km² which is comparable to countries like sweden and other low density countries.

So EITHER size will be handled differently, or this will become a very lonely game. AM I MISSING SOMETHING?

You are missing that not all areas need to be processed or used at a time. Civilizations tend to have a network of densely populated areas which are then connected by roads. When studying demographics, scientists use the average rather than the median or mode for population density because it simplifies it. Reality isn't like that as you may find several thousand people in a city but only a couple people in the surrounding wilderness and the average would lead to an error in data representation.

The servers do not need to process the full load if there are no players in the area. The game could just process it as if were an empty space depending on its importance to the surrounding ecology.

I would argue that it isn't lonely because there are means by which to congregate along with other players. I would actually argue that its EVEN MORE social than typical game because you need to put in more effort in order to be in constant contact with players (you can interact with NPCs but that is probably not what you are looking for).

Next question: how do you think, player choice will factor into the game economy? In reality, people were forced to work a certain job, or they would die. "Quitting the game" wasn't really an option. So then there will be villages where there are 5 hunters and no butcher, 3 cartographers, but no farmers and so on and so forth. YES trade is important and this will be nice, once it is implemented. But you don't seem to see the problem this will cause. The game economy has to run, otherwise everyone will suffer.

Yes role-play is important and everything. But think about this: You are a blacksmith. You lack materials. In a "normal" mmo, you go to the market and get it.

In this mmo, if there is no resource, you don't have anything to do and have to look for other work. And while most of you here in this forum will have no problem doing this. But a lot of players will. And while I personally like this more "realistic" worldbuilding, it will no doubt reduce fun/player numbers, if what you want to do can't be done within a week or so.

How is this supposed to be counteracted? People aren't "forced" to play (SAO-Style), therefore if something won't work for a longer time with no outlook of change, people will stop playing. Will there be npcs "filling the gaps"? Or something else?

This would take a lot to answer because its economics.... But I will give it a shot? Player density will be defined as ONLY human players, so OPCs and NPCs will not count. Though, I will state that Caspian has assured people that any hole in the labor market or service industry would be satisfied by NPCs should it become necessary.

Trade will already be in existence by the time of full launch as at launch prior generations would have already formed the foundations for the network. Remember, a town can't exist without input and output, so someone who is entrepreneurial can take advantage of that flow to make a lot of money, potentially.

As for you blacksmith example, people who were in that situation either moved or changed profession. The best blacksmiths will be in the capitol of a kingdom as monarchs will want them handy as well as would want to poach from competitors. If you are in the bottom rungs of this market, then you would move to somewhere else and attempt to be a big fish in a small pond. Personally, I would be more worried about currency exchange rates, tariffs, and etc. screwing you over.

I don't care about player numbers. I care about player retention. I would rather have 10000 players who would stay the whole 10 years rather than 50000 players who steadily drop off... The devs are using the approach of "we are making a game we think is fun and we hope you enjoy it with us" instead of the whole "you should play and your friends and your family because you guys might like this feature/that feature." If I am playing a game, then I'm playing the game and not its features.

Last one (more of a hope): Can you revamp disguises? LOOK before you say anything. It is just a very small detail:

Once you have a disguise: (hood/clothes; mask) You should not be able to be found out. Not even your family.

IM NOT TALKING ABOUT IMPERSONATING

If I were to put up a Guy Fawkes mask, nobody will recognize me, if I change my voice. Not even my mother/best friend. Especially if I have different clothes.

The only way to "get the real personality" is by unmasking the person and getting someone who knows him to verify that personality.

I really dislike this "there is always a chance" thing. It COMPLETLY ruins every form of vigilanty. If I were a hunter. And I would take the personality of a vigilanty who saves people from bandits. People would someday find out who I am... And then the bandits also know, making my disguise completly useless. As long as I have a good disguise, I should not be found out. Period.

Doesn't that sound better? Rather then random chance ruining every aspect of your roleplay, make it dependant on the people who want to find out the truth. Follow the masked figure... knock her out and remove the clothes make her strip the disguise by force...

not just some random chance of interacting.

Maybe if you only have a hood and no mask or no hood but a mask... there can be a chance... But if you have both, there shouldn't be a chance. Not even 0.1% Because it ruins the roleplay of that player

The way disguises work is that you are "someone" and not "noone." In terms of logic, there is no such thing as "nobody" as there will always be characteristics by which someone can be identified with. If you were to get a Guy Fawkes mask and nobody else has one, then it won't take as much as you think. It depends on the competence of the government, but an efficient government could track down all sellers they know of and force them to reveal contacts depending on the scale of trouble Guy Fawkes is creating. Languages, nuances, and other markers exist. If you speak broken neran, then odds are you aren't neran.

I believe you're misconstruing your disguise failing with your identity being revealed. Your disguise can be seen through without anyone knowing who "you" are. Does that make sense? Everyone will know who "Guy Fawkes, Notorious Underwear Thief" and look for the mask, but they won't know the identity of the individual under the mask.

This is actually a mechanic designed to create "notoriety levels". Lets say you have an old disguise, a newer disguise, and a brand new disguise. Old disguise may have dropped in notoriety depending on how much time passed and what the crime was, but it could also have gone up. The newer disguise would have a rating closer to its original "notoriety level" as there would be less time for changes to happen. The brand new disguise would have none.