Hi Guys,
Wondering if you could all give me the best hints, tutorials or advice on the below?
I am looking at creating an open world RPG game (not sure on the specifics yet). I want it too look like the below?
Any chance you could give me some advice on the best ways to do this?
Please let me know!!
Luke
A lot of money and a Team of 100+ experienced people is the short answer
For now you can look into landscape, level of detail, billboarding, level streaming, fooliage system, volumetric fog/cloud rendering
Hi thanks for the answer!
The top photo was made by one individual! So maybe it is possible without a team? Obviously there is setbacks,problems and would take a lot of time? But time isn’t my issue!
Have you got any ideas/tuts of how to do all of that? Quick references? Examples?
Use world machine + the landscape tool to create such detailed and realistic landscapes. Also make sure that you use level streaming to get a better performance: https://docs.unrealengine/latest/INT/Engine/LevelStreaming/index.html
More important stuff:
-use good LOD’s
-not too complex materials
-low poly meshes
-plan your level carefully
-add stuff that blocks the view of the player
-use culling
Well this is only a landscape. You have to think about all the other stuff you need for an rpg like gameplay and so on. So making an RPG with decent gameplay/content and environmental graphics like this would take ages alone.
Anyway.
Go to unreal docs and look the things up I told you in my previous post.
You can take a look at the landscape mountain content example which you can download from the learning tab and maybe also the the kite demo
Also the video how the kite demo was made could be a good starting point.
Kite demo
How Kite demo was made
Hi,
Thanks for your answers! I saw a good creator tool on the Released section of the forums that will allow you to create a landscape while inside UE4? I tried to use WM but didn’t/couldnt get a feel with it! Maybe ill sit down and have another go 
Ill watch how it was made and jot it down for future uses!
Luke
To get the detail from that your are going to need to learn how to use World Machine and get a license for it. That is just for the terrain and texture placement maps. After that you will need some really good foliage to put in the world, The Open World Assets are really nice and are from Epic them selves. When choosing Foliage assets you want to make sure they have LOD’s if not you will be rendering trees that look amazing 1000m away. When in that case you would want a dumbed down version of that mesh with fewer ploys. All in short, you are not going to need a team of 100+ people but if you don’t have one plan to be working on the game for a very long time. Open world game are the most time consuming game for development out there. Even the systems in these games can get very complex. My suggestions: Learn the Editor first, Don’t be afraid to cough up some cash, Learn C++, and get ready to spend a long time working on that game.
Open world game design poses some quite significant problems. With a corridor shooter your environments are narrow and tightly focused, so you can stage content more easily and don’t need so much of it.
With an open world the challenge is to fill it with enough content (quests, dungeons, enemies etc.) to avoid having loads of empty, useless space. That’s going to be a LOT of unique content even though you will likely reuse assets as much as possible (cave A is just a mirrored version of cave B for example). Don’t forget also the challenge of reusing content without the player realising that this dungeon is just like that other dungeon they explored a few days ago. This is why many games use procedurally generated dungeons to ensure randomness, but even in games like Diablo 3 it’s pretty obvious the computer is just clicking prefabs together.
You will also need to take into consideration the fact that the player is more free to tackle content in whatever order they choose, so think about the difficulty curve and how you ensure players stay challenged as they progress without having too many walls blocking off content that’s too advanced.
In all, an open world RPG is a serious amount of work, even if your world is fairly modest compared to, say, Skyrim or Witcher 3.
Good luck anyway, but be prepared for a mountain of work!
this advice helped me thank you very much
If he has the talent, and time. He can do it by himself!
Be clever is the key to this. An RPG doesn’t need leveling, equipment, gear, or even enemies. With some clever approaches and focus on your own strengths you can make a game solo… but if you try to create a AAA traditional MMORPG experience you’re sorta dooming yourself.
I don’t see why every one says the time thing, with all of the resources available i dont think it would take him 5 or 10 years if he was serious about it. plus all the assetts you can buy the blueprints and etc. a couple people could have a nice open world game in a few years.
There’s also nothing saying that a 1-person team has to remain that way. Getting started on a project is a great way to get others interested and involved. And I think a 1-person team could easily create a prototype or vertical slice that could show off the potential of the game and attract the team-members needed to complete the project.
Play The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt and play VERY close attention to all details.
You don’t have to copy it though.
Cod allwayd base the core mechanics on the d20 system which is “open source” no
That is actually a great point bro
Agreed. Its hard to get others interested in a project if there is nothing to show.
