AC2 was RE: [MUD-Dev] Total Annilation of Downtime

[Damion Schubert]

From: Brian Hook

> The terrain is gorgeous.  Absolutely beautiful.  Fantastic art
> everywhere, it runs well on a low end system.  The interiors are
> decent as well.
 
> But there's not enough of it.  Contrast this with EQ, which has
> significantly cruder technology.  But the variety of places you
> could visit in EQ, even just at launch, was much greater.  AC2 is
> a vast world, but every location has a distinct sameness to it.
> You have rolling hills and some mountains and water.  Sometimes
> it's greenish land, sometimes it's brownish, sometimes it tannish,
> but it still ends up feeling the same.

This was actually my takeaway from the EverQuest/Asheron's Call
competition as well.  One of our toughest struggles when trying to
make UO2 was trying to make interesting places to go using a
heightfield engine.  EverQuest, despite having a comparatively crude
engine and using relatively few polys to describe their levels,
ended up making more distinctive places to visit.

I felt compelled to visit all of the areas in EQ, just to see what
they were.  In AC, I quickly felt like 'see one place, seen 'em
all'.  Given the fact I was in the middle of experiencing the same
problem making UO2, it instilled quite a bit of panic at the time.

--d

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