Maps FAR too small!

[Hayaku]

I am sorry to have to take the time to point this out... but the current design decision not to "break immersion" by forcing resets when leaving the flight zone is doing the exact opposite... breaking immersion and my enjoyment of the game with it :(

9 times out of 10, I glance over the game boundaries by a few meters, attempt to turn back and have the timer run out before even being able to orient myself correctly and even locate where the game boundary is or was. Other times, I simply race to get back inside the flight zone so frantically I crash into something or overshoot it and find myself yet again outside the boundary.

Once, I put on the biggest props/battery combo I could design and simply raced to the edge of the map to see how bit it was. It was huge!!!!! So much space!!! And all wasted because I was in perpetual fear of having my immersion broken by accidentally wandering outside a very minuscule subset of it and triggering a frustrating reset.

This has been the biggest criticism I have of the game, and indeed, the single biggest criticism I have heard form others I have shared it with. It gets to the point where I actually dread playing it, for the risk of frustration is so ever present that I feel I might destroy my own mood by giving it a go. Especially since it is actually so much fun outside of this issue.

Please, please, please, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make artificial boundaries/invisible walls a user definable option or at the very least, an ini tweak. All I want to do is to fly around freely and absorb myself within the game. This is how I learn to fly at my most efficient, when I am relaxed and intensely transfixed. The boundary resets totally destroy this, and in my opinion, are both counter-productive and narrow-mindedly prescriptive about what "immersion" is and how it is or is not broken from player to player.

Thanks for listening.

[DropBear]

Now that I've learned where the boundaries are it doesn't matter so much to me, but allowing only a few seconds for us to turn about and get back in the zone seems a bit harsh. Perhaps the timer could be a little more forgiving when leaving the designated area. Several times I have been headed back into the area, in fact only a couple feet away, but no - time's up!

[spawny]

TLDR however i agree maps are small. There should be an option to unlock but that means additional terrain needs to be added.

[Boof69]

The maps are consistent with real life rf ranges. The flyable limits are detailed as well as an acceptable distance beyond to maintain a believable environment. Creating more detailed terrain can easily push the average computer beyond it's limits. Rather than inflating the simulator with a few huge maps (which isn't consistent with rl) there are multiple locations of realistic size. I can attest that everything you can do in rl with your quad can be done in Liftoff within the borders of its maps.

[Hayaku]

No way they are consistent with RF ranges. I regularly fly my 180 beyond 3km LOS, and many others push theirs as far as 6 or 7. By my estimates the range in game is around 1km and hardly any more.

Besides which, I am not asking for more rendering I am only asking that the reset counter is disabled, because there is so much unused map that I want to fly around already that I simply cannot for fear of not being able to get back in time.

[Boof69]

You can fly line of sight 3km? Wow!

[LuGus Studios]

Hi Hayaku,

Thanks for sharing your point of view. While I don't really think this is the single biggest criticism from the community, we have indeed seen this being suggested a couple of times.
We will likely create some bigger environments in the future, but there's always going to be a limit as Boof69 explained.

Other games use invisible walls, or put you on islands, easy but effective! Personally we don't enjoy those tricks and instead want to provide an immersive experience, by designing a world outside the fly zone, and giving the levels a sense of place. The outside zone is a zone you should not fly in, but can do so for a short time instead of restricting you would an invisible wall.

So, why did we design so much worldspace outside the fly area? You can fly 27m per second, so giving the player 5 seconds to fly outside the map means we have to design the level more than 100 meter outside the fly zone. In order to not show the borders, this means the actual edge of the environments has to be even further. Currently the actual edge of the environment is about 3 times further as the edge of the flyzone in all directions. These areas outside the flyzone are not designed to be explored and only look good from one side.

Liftoff is not an open world game. We design our levels to be both performance friendly and enjoyable to explore. They should be more than big enough to do everything you would do in real-life with a race quad.

[Hayaku]

Unfortunately I don't find this explanation satisfactory....

In my "real-life race" quad I routinely range considerably further than the area that liftoff allows, and to be completely honest the constant anxiety of finding myself drifting outside of the flight area and my subsequent failure to even re-orient myself within the allowable time, let alone make my way back, has actually broken my immersion such that I simply no longer play this game.

Which is a shame; it would be a 5 second update to make this an ini hackable option for players like myself... But it seems your explanation for not providing this flexibility essentially comes down to "we decide what constitutes an immersive experience, not you" and any evidence I provide to indicate you are, in this instance, actually contravening your own design goals... is somehow dismissed as not being valid.

If this cannot be changed in future updates, I'm sad to say, I don't think I will ever play this game again, and find myself feeling that my money has been wasted. I sincerely respect your rationale and design philosophy, however in this instance you would create an extremely happy player by allowing me the flexibility to play the game the way I want to, which is stress free and happy.

Please reconsider :)

[coryshad]

What if instead of the timer, or even bigger maps, the video went more and more static. That Would be like real life, and wouldn't interrupt immersion because as it gets harder to see you would naturally head back just like in real life.

I guess it wouldn't work for people with slower computers because I think on the lowest settings, video artifacts are turned off. But it would be my perfect world solution 🤔

[Kasper]

Originally posted by Hayaku:

Unfortunately I don't find this explanation satisfactory....
But it seems your explanation for not providing this flexibility essentially comes down to "we decide what constitutes an immersive experience, not you" and any evidence I provide to indicate you are, in this instance, actually contravening your own design goals... is somehow dismissed as not being valid.

If it really bothers you this much, maybe this indeed isn't the simulator for you. Thanks for trying it regardlessly.

That said, actually by far the most relevant reason for limiting map size is that the game wouldn't be universally playable anymore if we made maps bigger. Design choices are never made because developers think they're smarter than their players or because they like to get on their nerves. Fact is: when the choice is between bigger maps or generally playable maps, the latter gets our preference.

[LuGus Studios]

Originally posted by coryshad:

What if instead of the timer, or even bigger maps, the video went more and more static. That Would be like real life, and wouldn't interrupt immersion because as it gets harder to see you would naturally head back just like in real life.

I guess it wouldn't work for people with slower computers because I think on the lowest settings, video artifacts are turned off. But it would be my perfect world solution 🤔

That's something we've tried and experimented with. On paper this sounds like a great idea but in practise having a quick transition between fly area and outside area looks very strange and is more annoying than enjoyable. It makes you instantly blind whenever you get near the border. Again keeping in mind you can fly 27m per second, this means if we make the noise transition happen within an area of 10 meters around the border (and thats a lot of space) you'll get completely blinded in less than halve a second of time.

Trust me, part of developing a game is trying out as many things as possible, and eventually going for the best option. Challenges like how to deal with borders are things we worked and experimented on for weeks.

[sensei]

I also encounter forced maps limits & maps size highly annoying to the point that I regret having spent money on this simulator.

[LuGus Studios]

As a developer we try to make as many people happy as possible. In a perfect world you would have products that satisfy everyone, in reality as a developer you have to accept there's always going to be people who are not happy. While we try to limit this as much as possible, we also have peace with this reality. Its a matter of opinion and preferences.

Whenever you reach technical and practice limitations during game development you know that some players won't mind the results of these limitations while others do. When a level environment has borders you know that, no matter how big you really make the environments, it will always annoy some players. If we we make our environments twice as big I can guarantee you that we'll still get the same (rare) complains about this from time to time.

At the end of the day, we as developers know and appreciate the fact that we do our best to provide the best solutions to every challenge. We've actively pushed the limits on how big we can make environments by making each new environment bigger than the last one. I'm also happy about the fact that complaints about the environment size or not that common, a couple of remarks every few weeks or months. Compared to reports of players not able to run the game as a result of us pushing the limits is far bigger matter and more concerning to us.
The players who bought Liftoff to do virtual drone racing have more than enough space to fly in Liftoff, those who are more into exploring and hope for an open world game will be disappointed.

I don't think there's a real need to further discuss this, I can't think of any difference in result a continuation of the conversation can bring. I will end with a quote I've used many times on these forums:

Originally posted by Blizzard designer:

We always try to educate the community as to the trade-offs. Nothing comes for free. There's usually a reason why we made a decision that we made and it wasn't because we were looking to upset people or anything like that. There's usually some very difficult trade-offs to be made that led to the decision in the first place.

Thanks for understanding! :)