This was asked on the Steam Community, I’m posting my reply here because I think it would be interesting for discussion:
This is what we anticipate the core play loop of Oort Online to be, it’s what we’re building towards it right now. It’s quite any other voxel game (that I can think of).
Start on a new world with no equipment
Survive against the environment and creatures
Gather basic resources, build tools and a basic shelter
Search for and gather Oort Shards, unique to the world you’re on
Craft a Beacon using Oort Shards
Place your Beacon and build a place to call home and store your items
Find your friends or other players and build a shared Beacon space
Share items, resources and collaborate on creations with your friends
Search for the unique Titan of your world
Get killed by the Titan (you’re not powerful enough yet!)
Mine and gather for the best equipment available for your Tier 1 world
Return to the Titan with your friends. Defeat it and get your revenge!
Harvest the defeated Titan carcass for Rift Shards
Open a Portal to a new Tier 2 world using the Rift Shards
Travel through the Portal with your friends to the new world with new creatures, flora, and resources
New world is further away than the first, it’s more exotic and more dangerous
(Return to top of this list and work your way down again, increasing the Tier each time)
Travel as deep as you can into the Oort Online universe, discovering new worlds, creatures, Titans, real players and uncover the history of The Oort, and what happened…
I would be down with a tier style gameplay like that. It would stop us from reaching that MC endgame issue (but also make this game too addicting lol). I like the idea of tiered worlds, but would we all just be living in the houses that we built on tier 1 worlds, or would we move every time? I’d like to have a personal island where I could put my sweet housing and just be able to warp to whichever tiers I’ve unlocked. Though I suppose it would make things too easy if that were the case…
Can you make it so you spawn at the capital every time you go 1 level up, and at every capital there would be a shrine which allows you to switch between the floors you have unlocked going to the other shrines.
also this ties greatly into my oort art online idea (so glad james took the time to listen to me ramble >.<)
but how would you do this? surely there wont be a single world for every player. and how would it work? is it like 5 tier 1 worlds then you go up to 5 tier 2 worlds and so on?
I love the concept that has been laid out here, but I have a few questions about how such a system would be implemented.
This implies that there will be only one Titan per world (or at least only one per Tier 1 world). It also seems to imply that this Titan would have to be instanced. (I’m sure there are ways to implement this system without instanced Titans, but I would think that instancing would be the easiest solution.) Are these assumptions correct?
‘‘In massively multiplayer online games, an instance is a special area, typically a dungeon, that generates a new copy of the location for each group, or for certain number of players, that enters the area.[1] Instancing, the general term for the use of this technique,[1] addresses several problems encountered by players in the shared spaces of virtual worlds. It is not widely known when instances were first used in this genre, however The Realm Online (1996) is sometimes credited as introducing the concept’’
in short, to get to a titan you go through a loading screen and end in the room, when you leave the room the it resets so you can do the exact same thing again
I don’t really like that concept In my opinion it would be cooler if you would just stumble across a titan while mining or exploring. Or fighting the titans to enter the oort temple they are guarding
Exactly what @Zouls said, except that it does not always require a loading screen. I’ve never implemented a system like this myself, but WoW added non-loading-screen instances (for the first time to my knowledge) in Mists of Pandaria. The system works just like normal loading screen instances, except there is no loading screen. People just disappear as they enter the instance. The instances they have done this way seem to be smaller than dungeons or raids though. I don’t know the limitations of such a system, but it is an alternative to the loading-screen way of doing things.
tl;dr: WoW recently did small-ish instancing without loading screens, but I’m not sure of the limitations of such a system.
there is still a transition from current to other version. so there is one, a really small one, usually showed as a 1 sec freeze. also things like eso is instanced, completing quests could affect a big part of the area so if you had completed a quest and your friend hadnt then you wouldnt be able to see eachother even when standing on the same spot.
I feel like we are splitting hairs here but yes I’ll agree there must be some sort of “loading of data” otherwise it would be extremely memory intensive to be able to switch between the world spaces at will. However, they seem to have gotten really good at making it less and less noticeable.
My only point in making that post was to say that there doesn’t have to be some ugly loading screen (no matter how good the game art is ) that we all sit there and watch for 30 seconds. Unless of course there are technical limitations of which I am unaware (which is completely possible).
@ben Thanks for the info! It is great to hear that there will be multiple Titans per world! Is there any chance that you will divulge any more info in terms of instancing Titan encounters?!?
To be clear: we haven’t made any decisions about whether Titans would be instanced. Our preference is that they won’t be instanced and that you’ll encounter them within a Titan Biome, of which a world may have a few, or many. That’s currently what we’re favouring, not a commitment.
Instancing is a bit of an apology within MMOs, we’d rather players had to search for a Titan and have an epic battle, than wait in a queue or on a loading screen to fight in and instanced area where it felt detached from the main game with no consequence from the main world. It’s going to be a really big job, and we’re still in the thought stages on it so that could very well change.
i suggested making a system with 100 skills and each titan would spawn with any combination of 5. that way every fight feels unique. but that must be near impossible to make i imagine.
@ben Thanks so much for being open about all of this kind of stuff. I fully expected to receive a response on the order of: “we haven’t decided yet, can’t really give any info”, etc.
The reality is much more informative! I agree that instancing is bad because of how easily it can pull people out of the immersive experience that you are trying to provide. I mentioned in another thread here the “world-event” style encounters that GW2 had and I wonder if this is something like the idea that you guys are going for?
In any case, I wish you all the best of luck in pulling off a non-instanced MMO boss system that is fun and accessible for most players (not necessarily the super causal but that’s another discussion), because if you do it well, it will likely provide some very fun and engaging gameplay! I’m not saying it can’t be done, but like you said, it’s going to be a really big job.
In my opinion it would be cooler if you would just stumble across a titan while mining or exploring. Or fighting the titans to enter the oort temple they are guarding
).
but yes I’ll agree there must be some sort of “loading of data” otherwise it would be extremely memory intensive to be able to switch between the world spaces at will. However, they seem to have gotten really good at making it less and less noticeable.
) that we all sit there and watch for 30 seconds. Unless of course there are technical limitations of which I am unaware (which is completely possible).