I always thought that the old Runescape(not the new hd version),had rubbish graphix, but it is stil very popular!

Runescape?! What are you talking about :P.
www.mystonline.com

RuneScape, a game I started playing when there was only one server/world.

Well I personally have to say that level design has "terrains" in the definition. Good terrain design allows good level design to be used.

so, what is good level design?

1. short walks. let the player have action, adventure, or whatever because he is playing a _game_, not a landscape simulator.
2. few repetiton, it's no good sign if you have already seen that corridor once. and there's another one that looks exactly the same. bah.
3. revisit places from different angles/in different states. e.g., you crawl under a room in a vent shaft, see a lot of guards, then enter the room and know where they are.
4. connected rooms. you see a door that's closed, have to make a detour, and can open the door from the other side, so the level is "connected" and not just a long corridor with some rooms or a plane with buildings.
5. multiple levels (height). don't forget that you are in a 3 dimensional space. i dont only want to go left and right, but also jump, use elevators, ladders, crawlspaces, sewers etc.
6. nice, yet unseen architecture.
7. central map objects like a reactor core, a prison, a bridge, or whatever.

terrains certainly fail in 1, 3, 4, 5.

your first one is dumb. short walks??? you can still have action while walking, makes no sense to say a vast area has less action.

it can be. but that's reality: do a job in stalker/oblivion/gothic3 in level/town xyz and run all the way back to your boss, which can take 10 minutes and even more, depending on the game.

get a job in quake4 (shutdown terminal/gun/xyz), and a door opens where you can see your squad and regroup, so there is no traveling back over hill and dale.

I think terrains, as in the vast modern plains with some hills here and there is vastly overrated content anyways. At least in most games.

Did I enjoy running through some hills, seeing a lot of the same trees nearly all the time in Oblivion? Well.. it had it's charms as there was sóme design to it, but I think the level design could have been a lot better still.

I definitely prefer real hardcore 'level-designed' games like Tombraider, God of War, Max Payne and so on.

Do games really have to have huge terrains now, just because hardware can handle it now? I don't know..



Excellent point. When it comes to scenery it can be nice to look at, but when it comes to gameplay... there's so much pointless travel in some games nowadays. In fact, nowadays developers think of 'clever' ways to make this more bearable, like adding horses or teleports.. But the sheer irony of that is of course that the vast size of the terrains then suddenly becomes even less important to the game.

Cheers

"Max Payne"

The enjoyable thing about max payne is that every part of the game had some purpose, and you could see what it was used for in day to day life before the story took place. A very functional type of design.

Jedi Outcast has ingenious level design as well. I recently started playing it again. No terrains whatsoever, only blocks and models. Everything is connected and you visit places sometimes more than 4 times on your path and thinking: "Ooooh, thís is how the building looks like". Taking a long walk killing imperial guards and stormtroopers, open a door and you're back at the start, but achieving that shortcut makes everything very clear and easy.

So in that context, I totaly agree terrains killed that aspect of gameplay.
A combination is still the best though.

This is not true. Did somebody play the game "Overlord"? It uses terrain (and indoors as well) but does exactly what Joozey desribes in the last post: You walk a certain path to kill some enemies and to find a magic object. At the end you lower a bridge and you stand exactly where you started this path just to go on to the next adventure. Very cleverly done.