I know this is too much text but I'll say it anyway. I pictured more advanced game worlds about 20 years ago and they never showed up. Hardware limitations is a bad excuse because smart devs can make almost anything work. But especially with RPGs, I have pictured more realistic worlds. The 'aggro range' is like 20 feet or something in most games, so enemies are completely blind to you unless you step within that tiny range. It is like all enemies are just hanging around in little groups, waiting to be approached by the player and engaged. This is Nintendo shit that was excusable in the 90s but isn't anymore. I want like to see that change so that characters and mobs in the game have a real visible distance like in real life. So if something sees you from miles away, it might come for you. Again, STALKER was not far off that. A squadron of soldiers could run down a hill and through some trees, into a big complex building, up several flights of stairs and then shoot you while the ones at the back provide covering fire. Why are there no RPGs that work like that?
I imagine RPG game worlds being bigger and more spread out to accommodate it. Similar to Dark Age of Camelot. So you are heading north and you will need to run several miles to reach where you want to be. You run up and down hills and plains, maybe there is a forest you will need to cut through. Then imagine a group of bandits see you from 1 mile away. You don't even know they are there, but they spot you on the horizon. So they start rushing towards you on an intercept course. Maybe they have horses or run speed spells so can catch you. And their attack should be at full range too, maybe the rangers and mages stay far back, like 500 feet away so they are just little figures on a distant hill. Then the warriors/rogues keep coming at you, and once the fight starts, arrows and magic missiles start flying at you from far away as the melee guys hack you. I have already played battles similar to that in a game, but it was an encounter you have to run into to start. Not one that can move and come after you. I have played games where enemies can spot you from far away and come charging at you too. I just haven't seen the two things put together.
A pack of wolves might be able to smell you from miles away too, and follow the scent and once they get a view of you, they should come for you. And enemies should be able to set up an ambush too. Again, I've run into an ambush in a game before where a lone bandit stands on a road and then as you approach a bunch of archers and mages step out from the trees. But if you can pack that up into a 'group' and then have the group able to wander and predict the path of a target, the game AI should be able to set up ambushes for you. In the Arma games a similar thing happens. On a 40 square mile map you can order a squadron of 50 AI soldiers to get in vehicles and come to you 20 miles away, along roads and cross country, over hills, weaving through fences and houses, they will make it to you. Yet a small pack of wolves in an RPG can't even hunt you down. Yet.
I really want to see this paired with more elaborate gameplay too. For example if you get into a battle with warriors hacking at you, rogue stabbing you in the back, and an enemy shaman and wizard are 800 feet away on a distant hill, raining poison and fire down on you. Again I've played stuff similar to this, and it is winnable because the magic you have is powerful. For example you can click a spell that instantly stuns everything around you, then you can put the warriors/rogue to sleep. Then you can target one of the distant enemies and use an ability/spell that teleports you directly behind them. I've played stuff similar to that, but just smaller distances, and again the enemies are mostly standing around rather than wandering. When I was reading about Darkfall, they talked about how a pack of orcs might wander the land looking for people to beat up. And it might come across a village of elves, and wipe out the entire village, and then claim the village for its own. So the world is truly dynamic, you find a village and have no idea who inhabits it. And I think they even had it so a pack of wandering wolves might come across a squad of wandering orcs and they would fight each other. I am still waiting for a game to work more like this. It seems like gamers and devs both forgot how to imagine game worlds that could resemble the real world. They are so conditioned into only thinking in terms of games. OMG U CANT DO DAT IT WOULD BE TO OP! OMG NO WAY A GROUP OF ENEMIES THAT CAN GO ANYWHERE? DAT WOULD BE WAY UNFAIR! People can only think in terms of WoW or Skyrim. There are buffalo or whatever in the Serengeti that migrate 100 miles south in the winter to avoid the snow. In 2019 we should have had games that think on a similar scale.
And any technical problem has a solution. For huge worlds it could be a mix of procedurally generated landscapes, but with pre-designed locations blended in. Made by a good dev you could have a world 100 times the size of Skyrim yet just as good looking if not better, and with many interesting locations. There could be entire regions that are hand crafted, dungeons, forests, deserts, etc, and have those areas joined together by procedural areas. Then improve the AI to wander in packs and hunt. I am bored being able to do anything and go anywhere at level 1. I want to start as a small fish in a huge world, with a lot of places I can't even think about going or I would get 1 shot by a puma, let alone a cyclops or giant. Give me something to work towards over the course of weeks or months. Huge distances in games also needn't be a chore, a Bard in Everquest could run as fast as a car at top speed in GTA. You can run over plains and deserts at 50 mph, it makes travelling fun and exciting and it makes distances no problem. You can also teleport to various wizard spires or druid rings in the world. A mixture of both and you could have huge worlds that are not too big to handle.
If all enemies have real visual range, as soon as you step foot in a dungeon the first room will attack you. That's fine. And you can't even peak your head in the dining room or maybe 50 hungry and angry kobolds will have their lunch interrupted and come straight for you. But in Everquest a Wizard had a spell called Eye of Zomm that was a magic eye that you could control and see out of, yet nobody could see it. So you could scout up ahead without danger, you could plan where to go next, see exactly what is up ahead and then kill the eye and you are back in your character. Then you use invisibility to go through that room and find another angle. An Enchanter or Bard could put 20 enemies to sleep in one go. A lot of characters had a harmony/pacify spell that would kind of daze a target, so you cast it on several enemies and then pull the eighth enemy and it will come at you alone while its buddies stay dazed. There is really no excuse to not have huge games, massive worlds, elaborate AI. I think we could have had it by now if gamers stopped making billionaires out of companies like Ubisoft, Bethesda, Rockstar, Activision, etc... They have massive budgets and spend it all on the exact same games we have played before, just updated graphics and a new skin, and they can sell 20 million copies. Millions of dollars spent on licencing 80s and 90s hit songs for the radio station. All that money could be spent on developing AI and you could have gangs robbing banks, thugs holding up gun stores, a serial killer on the loose, etc.. It could be just like a real city, but instead we get an xbox gamey version of a city which only looks like a city on the surface. The graphics make it look so real. The characters and AI make it look no better than a 2d game from 30 years ago. I think games will evolve into mind blowing things eventually. I think it will take indie game audiences to grow (and tech to improve) to the point that some small company can develop huge realistic game worlds with advanced AI. Once one of those outsells 20 million copies for a fraction of the GTA budget, things will change. But at this rate I don't see it happening in my lifetime. I think I'll have to suffer through watching GTA 12 and Elder Scrolls 15 being just as bland in 20 years as it is today.
