Gaming Uber Alles, Year Three

The Age of the World-Builders

"In a world this big, it can be tough to really be honest with yourself. You have to play it like a player," Pagliarulo says. "I forget sometimes that people spend so much time in our games."

A complete run-through of Oblivion, depending on your class and which quests you accept, can take up to 200 hours to complete. That means players can spend the equivalent of a week's vacation staring at a screen, learning the geography, laws, politics, religions and shopping areas in a virtual world. And that's just a single-player game.

In MMOGs such as World of Warcraft or Age of Conan, players spend thousands of hours exploring the game world. In these games, however, you make friends with other users, bringing real people into your virtual world and thereby making it seem all the more realistic.

"Being able to play games with a friend - or thousands of them - is the largest evolutionary step in the last decade in my opinion," says Shane Hensley, Studio Head of Superstition Studios and project lead on City of Heroes and City of Villains.

MMOGs, far more than single-player games, must provide a world in which players truly feel their characters belong. Since the dawn of the MMOG, players have created communities, guilds and even entire cities - as was the case in Ultima Online, where users created towns from the ground up, complete with their own laws. Now, games such as World of Warcraft must provide vast gathering places where players can talk to each other and find new allies.

"Having an Atlas Park (City of Heroes) or Undercity (World of Warcraft) is critical in not only getting people together," says Hensley, but also "letting higher-level players show off their hard-earned loot."

The need for places for players to comfortably socialize "factors into every single scene or zone or dungeon of an MMOG," says Destin Bales, content director at EA Mythic.

"You dive into the world and believe that you're living a robust, consistent world. When a world's been built well, you kind of forget that it's been built. You don't see how it's been constructed; it just feels like a real space," says Greg Grimsby, Art Director at EA Mythic. Grimsby, who with Bales is working on an upcoming fantasy MMOG, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, explains that much of the time spent in massively multiplayer games is a "meta experience." Players aren't constantly fighting; in fact, much of the time they're just hanging out. It's that comfort to enjoy the game you're not playing and just watch the sunrise that really highlights the reality and the weight of the virtual world.

But what's next? I asked each of the world-builders what they thought was the next great innovation that would advance the industry. The Bethesda team focus on players' emotional response toward NPCs; Hensley says episodic content; and the EA Mythic crew note that a changing world would be the keys to the future, but all those answers boil down to one thing: detail.