What makes a great open worldspace?

[kibblesticks]

My question to all the gamers and modders out there is; What makes a Worldspace great?

 

What makes you continue exploring the Wasteland after the main quest? What sights make your jaw drop? What are the most memorable exploration moments from open world games?

 

So I'm on a modding team at the moment. We're building Mars. Or more specifically, a crater on the surface of Mars. The planned features are; desolate wasteland, city-sized domes and a large jungle (we have a lore-friendly explanation for that one). The link's in my sig.

 

Aside from greatly helping us out with our own design, I'm geniunely interested in people's opinions on this. Any comments at all are useful, the more in depth the better.

[XG96X]

Why don't we work togheter and help each other XD

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/578872-project-whitesnake/ (see it)

 

anyway ...

 

Great worldspace for me is when any place have his own caratteristic different from the other place...

if you know what i mean ... (sorry my bad english, i'm italian XD)

[Jeux]

Not being able to tell that the developers used resources (or design patterns) used in the last worldspace/area. Make every piece of land different from the last.

[djmystro]

Always the same for me - detail clusters.

I like to explore the Worlspace like it was a (mildly) cluttered interior with broken shacks hiding half-submerged crates and rusty ammo boxes. Stuble across the remains of a campsite and I figure it should have empty bottles and junk lying around. Stuff to find at the end of the day. Only needs to be 2 12 Gauge rounds left on a shelf amidst a pile of crap or bullet cases/shell hulls at the scene of a battle so at least I feel like there is/was life in an area.

Angel Park added pretty much everything I wanted in a worldspace but most of it was in interiors. Apart from a few bits here and there I unfortunately never had the time to fully clutter the exterior (looks fine though and there are interiors dotted everywhere).

Back with FO3 there were certain environments such as Minefield Houses, Drainage Chambers, the museum of technology and others where upon exploring, the location itself tells a story without notes or NPCs just in the clutter and skeletons that lie around. Those were in many ways my favorite aspects of playing originally because I liked the atmosphere so much. Not sure how practical that is for exterior worldspaces given that if you drop too much in it'll crash or cause performance issues though OWB & LR certainly dd a great job with the exteriors. Dead Money had a Great exterior too coz in many ways it was like one big huge maze-like linked interior which made combat more interesting.

The Honest Herats worldspace I could not stand beacuse there was notthing worthwhile to find (the the tiny interiors could have been made in hours). The landscape looked good but was painfully repetitive for a lack of man-made objects and lootable materials (other than flowers).

Hopefully that's of some help.

[kibblesticks]

This is really useful, thanks fellas :thumbsup: So originality and story-telling are big pluses.

[avianrave]

I'll drop my $.02,

 

Static object LOD genrerated with the G.E.C.K. can be quite limited. When generating static object LOD, you are limited to a texture palate limit of 1024x0124. This means that you are limited to a limited amount of area on which your LOD can use textures from. If you use a lot of LOD object, you either have to make sure they use the same textures, or you will have to downscale the texture, to make the textures fit.