Art style and immersion

I'm making a game where immersion is important, and I keep struggling specifically with the terrain. Being the most noticeable thing in game I feel if I can make it work then the rest will fall into place. The game is in the mmo genre.

Content wise going with a faceted look makes it much easier to create interesting topography. But I don't want a faceted look in other areas necessarily. Character models for instance will be stylized but not faceted. Structures will be something in between also.

So I thought that by going for a softer form of low poly might make it all work. Be able to mix in stylized yet non faceted elements. I'm using Delaunay triangulation with a planar mapped surface shader and a global color map. Texturing I haven't played with much yet, a global normal map might look good or not, haven't gotten there.

The pic below has zero polish, not even a good color map it's a starting point. I wanted to show something to give some context of what the starting point looks like.

The strategy is focus on lighting, good color, skies, and the right use of fog and LOD for good depth. I'm fairly confident I can make it very visually appealing, immersive not so sure yet. Low poly is not a popular style for mmo's. The ones that get close have all gone the smooth terrain route, and I'm thinking likely for some of the same reasons I'm struggling with.

The thing is I don't have a lot of choice. I'm doubling down on features that require a faceted look to come in at the costs I will need to make it work. A smaller set of maps will comprise the core world, and every player gets their own entirely procedurally generated map.

Now when say procedurally generated, I have the start of a modular point based system where a map is comprised of modular mesh components. The focus there is every component has gameplay value, there is zero random topography all the modular parts are hand crafted. The procedural part is in the placement and scaling of those parts. Even the core world is made up of the modular parts, they are just hand placed with a bit of extra fiddling.

 

I'm not sure pleasing visuals directly equals immersion. I think immersion comes from having to pay close attention to the game, for starters, and also from the game really delivering a concentrated theme that players want to believe they are a part of.

So, about players paying close attention -- let them discover important things in the world by looking. Special mushroom with magical powers? Make it a little bit hard to find, always growing on the shade side of trees or in corners of your rocky outcrops there. A lot of games make important things just glow so that player can't miss it, but I don't think games that do this are usually in the immersive category.

Systems depend on each other. If collecting mushrooms isn't worth the time/benefit, it's just a chore that gets ignored. If finding the mushrooms is boring -- i.e. no emergent gameplay ever happens while looking for magic mushrooms or they are just stupid easy to find, or way too hard to find -- then player is going to be annoyed, not immersed.

But if scouting around the terrain to find goodies is enjoyable because its a little bit challenging for a big reward, and you dial in the looks so that wherever player goes, there's something new to see, then it's easier to get lost in the world. If player has to do a little bit of planning for any scouting adventures -- whether its survival based stuff or just making sure you got the right weapons for enemy types common to a particular area -- then you are giving player the ability to formulate their own quest, which IMO is about as immersive as games get. Then your mind is truly in the game world.

 

I wasn't thinking so much that pleasing is what makes for good immersion. More about the specific low poly style. It is some degree more separated from realism, and I think that does have an impact on immersion for third/first person rpg's generally. I wish I could quantify that better.

 

Can you elaborate?

Along the lines of what BIGTIMEMASTER wrote, immersion is related to suspension of disbelief, which requires internal consistency. It's possible to be deeply immersed in a text game, or a stick figure game like West of Loathing. On the other hand, you can have generally AAA visuals but be knocked out of immersion by something jarring like every single NPC talking about taking arrows to the knee, or even a single bad texture that reminds you that the game is just an imperfect poly blitter and not a gateway to another world. Different art styles for terrain, structures, and characters raises a few red flags, but the proof is seeing it in action.

 

As to the features I was referring to, that's mostly about how maps are composed. I need quite a lot of maps, some of the core mechanics are at scale and consume a large amount of resources.

So I thought ok I could just do regular procedural generation. Which is basically try to create mostly realistic topography of some type that looks good, which is the extent of what most everyone is doing. I didn't want that so I came up with the idea of maps are 100% strategic. Every part has a purpose and those parts are modular and the entire map is rated on a point system based on those parts. So what matters for instance is if say a set of mountains has defensive value, or if it has a lake and a river feeding to the bay. Terraces for example have even stronger strategic value.

So what a map looks like is a base terrain usually fairly flat or rolling hills. And then the modular parts are kind of like points of interest around the map. What's in between those are also strategic. It could be fertile land you can farm, it could be barren rock mostly.


Creating maps like this becomes somewhat easier with faceted terrain, because a lot of finer details just don't show up and don't have to be tweaked. Much larger margin for error when it comes to procedural placement and blending of stuff. So I don't need faceted but it would lower costs I think by a fair amount.

 

Faceted vs. blended polys really seems like an artistic choice above all else. Which is fine, if that's what you want. Although personally I find it to be the least organic-looking style. For me, it's the one style that hinders immersion in an environment that's otherwise intended to be organic (e.g., with living characters and creatures).

 

I don’t find visuals affect my immersion that much. I can get just as immersed in Zelda 1 as I can Breath of the Wild. Halo 1 feels way more immersive than Halo 4. Immersion is about gameplay to me: is the fun organic or does it feel like an arcade? Both are fine, the new DOOM has an arcade feel and isn’t very immersive but still fun as hell. It’s graphics were great too, so it’s not about it’s look.

I think your terrain looks really cool, I’m wondering how well it scales because it looks like a lot of polys, do you have some LOD system?

 

Poly count is several times more then standard terrain, but that's still not that bad really for a PC. I can also vary the triangle count over the terrain so flat areas have far less. LOD I care about mostly for a sense of depth, so it looks different at range. But the delaunay triangulation makes LOD a pain, on it's own it's impossible for seams not to either have gaps or to overlap. So I have to do some extra work there.