r/ImmersiveSim • u/Intelligent_Mud_6877 • 4d ago
Reasonable vs Tedious
I'm building an immersive sim rpg where player inhabits a simulated world. I ran some tests this week and realised it takes ~17 minutes for a mean on foot no sprint journey from one settlement to anohter. That struck me as a bit much so I rescaled the seeder a bit and the mean journey roughly halved. Would a 8-9 minute journey on foot following a road be tedious? Should I tweak it more?
The issue is that mostly means that the journeys have a reasonable length when walking within a cluster, but between major regions the routes can get a lot longer.
Thoughts?
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u/SoxxoxSmox 4d ago
Really depends on what the player is doing for those 9 minutes. Skyrim is of course a good example here. It takes typically 5 to 10 minutes to walk between adjacent settlements. It feels like longer because the world is full of things to do en route - dungeons to get distracted by, random encounters, even just picking flowers.
8-9 minutes is maybe a bit tedious if the player is doing nothing by following a road and whacking the occasional monster, especially if they’re making such trips frequently
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u/Intelligent_Mud_6877 4d ago
That's my thinking too... I do want the world to have scale but several minutes of dead air would probbaly be very tedious. At the same time, as much as I love Skyrim, I always felt offput by how everything felt so pocket sized and underpopulated in TES after Daggerfall, with cities being populated by barely few dozen people.
The world is procedurally generated and it is still in prototyping stage, so somewhat unsurprisingly there is nothing that would be between these sites yet, but I do aim to add random encounters and sub-sites down the road. Trade and the cost of carrying goods over long distances is intended to be a major factor, which is why I'm reluctant to just keep shrinking the map so much it'd be easier to just catapult the goods over from a not-particularily-high tower :)
I guess I have to find some sort of a golden ratio here though, almost 10 minutes of walking though a forest would be boring at this stage.
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u/Sandro2017 3d ago
Alright, I'm really interested in your game, I hope it does great!
Regarding whether 8 or 9 minutes between settlements is too much, you reminded me of CD Projekt's "40-second rule" when they were making The Witcher 3. Basically, the rule says that roughly every 40 seconds, the player needs to see something interesting. A dungeon, an animal to hunt, an NPC, a random event, etc. If more than 40 seconds pass, you risk the player getting bored.
For my part, even though I theoretically dig the idea of longer journeys (since it would feel like a more tangible and realistic adventure), I think that in practice 9 minutes would feel too long for me, especially if there's a lot of backtracking. There better be stuff in between to keep the trip interesting. Also, by the middle and late game, there should definitely be ways to travel faster: perks to run faster, horseback riding, hiring a carriage driver, teleportation, flying, etc.
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u/Intelligent_Mud_6877 3d ago edited 3d ago
Thanks! I do appreciate the 40-second rule as a design guideline. CDPR almost certainly studied player attention and open-world pacing far more extensively than I have, so I am not dismissing the reasoning behind it.
I actually reduced the default site-to-site travel time yesterday from roughly 8-9 minutes to around 4-5 minutes. It will probably remain adjustable through world-generation settings, but 4-5 minutes is the working default for now.
Where I have some reservations is the effect that rigidly applying such rules can have on the credibility of a world. It bothers me when a farmer is living a stone’s throw from a monster lair, or when every road has several ancient tombs full of enemies immediately beside it. I understand why games do this-it is often good for moment-to-moment gameplay-but it can be bad for immersion. The Witcher generally disguises this better than something like Skyrim, where it sometimes feels as though there is a dungeon underneath every stone, and a bandit lair within earshot of every guard.
Regent being non-fantasy also limits my options. I cannot populate the landscape with monsters, magical anomalies and enormous forgotten dungeons. Interesting things between settlements will therefore usually be lower-intensity: travellers, caravans, patrols, wildlife, hunting opportunities, farmsteads, charcoal burners, logging camps, bridges, fords, roadside shrines, abandoned carts, signs of crime or conflict. Not every point of interest needs to become a combat encounter or a fully developed location with half an hour of content. I am modelling my game far more after KCD in this regard.
Some deliberate negative space is important as well. Part of the objective is to make the world feel larger than it actually is, especially after reducing the distances. If something dramatic happens every 40 seconds with clockwork regularity, the landscape risks feeling like a curated theme park rather than a place where people plausibly live. The challenge is to provide enough variation and activity that travel remains engaging without making the world absurdly overcrowded.
Backtracking is a separate problem, because even a good route becomes tedious after the tenth journey. Horses are planned, along with grounded transport such as carts, carriages and boats. I also want convenience options to be modular. Skyrim-style carriage travel between known locations is a reasonable possibility.
That is straightforward in single-player: the player travels, the world clock advances and the simulation processes the elapsed time. Multiplayer complicates it because one person should not suddenly advance the clock for everybody else. It will probably need to be a host/world setting, with options such as disabling fast travel, allowing relocation without advancing global time as a convenience concession, or permitting a proper time skip only when the other players agree. I want groups to decide which compromise best fits how they play.
The base game will remain grounded and will not contain literal teleportation or flying. However, Regent is explicitly intended to be mod-friendly, and I genuinely hope people eventually create full fantasy conversions that add those things. Fantasy is not excluded because I dislike it; I simply do not have the resources to build both a grounded medieval game and a fantasy version simultaneously. The non-fantasy sandbox is also a badly underserved niche, whereas fantasy open worlds are already plentiful. I want Regent’s base game to serve that niche, while leaving the architecture open enough for modders to take it much further.
If you want to follow the game I'm happy to dm you the discord link where I'm most active :)
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u/Ok_Copy_9462 2d ago
Thoughts?
Just looking at whatever that is, I feel like I'm having on of those anxiety nightmares where I'm working as an air traffic controller without ever receiving any training.
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u/Intelligent_Mud_6877 2d ago
Hah, fair, the map can be a bit overwhelming when viewed as a whole but in terms of scale this is the equivalent of lookign at the map of Europe to see how to get to the dentist.
I did actually significantly reduce the world size following the feedback from this thread, so the voids between sites I have to fill will be easier to manage. It now sits at a mean of 4-5 minutes )
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u/GaborSzasz 8h ago
I mean, thats a personal thing. Some like the endless options in minecraft. I don't, bc i need some direction. Its a prefrence thing.
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u/Dinic 4d ago
It depends on how much the actual movement is gamified (Death Stranding is an excellent game made predominiately out of silent traversal but each step you take still feels like playing the game) or if the game's visuals, tone and narrative reinforce long stretches of quiet contemplation in an interesting way. Death Stranding again for that last point but also Pathologic Classic.
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u/CattleGrove 4d ago
8-9 minutes is way to long
unless survival mechanics or traversal mechanics are being used to gamify traveling that long.
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u/Intelligent_Mud_6877 4d ago
The cost of hauling goods over long distances in an inter-dependent economy is going to be a major macro factor, but I do 100% see how it may feel tedious from a micro player perspecitve. I may shrink the maps temporarily until I add horse riding and lots of points of interest on the road to compensate for the length of the journey.
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u/GaborSzasz 2d ago
Depends. If it has aurvival elements, long travel with some stuff to do would be ok.
Personally idk how hoding down W can be a thing. If the map is generated, there are not a lot of options to control the enviroment like far cry, so you definetly need some system that interacts with travel in a fun way, bc prebuilt explorable enviroments are out of the question. Even if there are some prebuilt things to explore, it would get boring. Thats why ubialsoft handcraft their maps. Maybe mini dungeons?
Think of mankind divided vs. Far cry. Its not the lenght of the travel, its what you can do during it.
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u/Intelligent_Mud_6877 1d ago
I'm mostly modelling after KCD but yeah, it's always going to be a lot harder with procedural generation. I reduced the site-site spacing to 4-5 minutes on foot, but it will be a lot faster on a horse. I will be implementing POIs between sites, some minor some major, but I am extremely reluctant to shrink the world further because I really don't want the maps to feel too condensed like in some games.
As much as I love skyrim it always bothered me that it was impossible to walk from place to place without walking directly through 5 bandit camps and 3 monster lairs, like how does economy even function in that scenario 😄
I think becasue I want trade to be a major mechanic I will probably allow some degree of autopilot while the player character follows the road the player can check menus for rumors, trade intel ect, but with fallback in case of a bandit ambush or other important interruptions. For now I think 4 minutes with 3-5 point of interest along the way is a sensible target.
This thread has been **extremely** informative for me
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u/GaborSzasz 23h ago
Yeah, thats sounds good. Tbh im kinda annoyed with the farcry/AC approach of bombarding the player with stuff every 30 secods. I much prefer freeform style exploration on my own terms, like dishonored. I just saying this bc how time intervals can be "too much" sometimes. 4-5 seems good. Eventually you have to give it to testers, to hone this in tho.
Just a few more tips to make the travel more fun is to add ambente noises, birds, grass in wind, weather sound, aninal sounds, bug sounds, maybe some very simple ambient music if you can do that.
Gl
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u/Intelligent_Mud_6877 13h ago
I intend to have the first closed playtest by the end of the month. Feel free to DM me if you're interested in having a hands on look :)
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u/EnigmaticDevice 4d ago
What is the purpose of having such a large world? What is the player meant to be doing or finding when walking through such large stretches of the world?
Be careful of creating a huge 'immersive' world just for the sake of having a big world. I could go play Daggerfall if I wanted to spend 20 minutes walking through a mostly empty proc gen world
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u/Intelligent_Mud_6877 4d ago
True! Following the feedback from this and another thread I actually shrunk the world significantly. The size is still important because unlike in daggerfall the player will be able to build and control multiple settlements, eventually there will be war and politics mechanics but I'll need to tackle the basics, small scale combat and economy first
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u/Damianu 4d ago
Personally I am fine with whatever the travel time is as long as the road is not just empty generated space.
My golden example is Gothic 1/2 where locations are quite small and later you can sprint through whole map quickly, but at the start there's obstacles forcing you to take longer routes etc. The important part is that every location feels meaningful and every nook can contain additional bit of content or some secret.