I love this game, and there any many aspects of it that will be improved on over time. But there are a few things that are specifically related to immersion that I believe might be going unnoticed.
[Five Immersion Flaws]
Load screen between every zone can feel a little stale and isolating.
Lack of terrain/environment scale in many area’s, making the world feel smaller than it is.
Most events lack story and progression, you can easily wind up on repeat if you stay in a single zone too long.
It is very easy to ignore everyone around you in a sense. Even though you often help others, you rarely communicate in a meaningful way.
Personal story doesn’t feel so personal second time around.
[Five Possible Solutions]
Animate the load screen art, similar to the concept art cinematics except a single cycle. Making load screens more entertaining to watch.
Raise the height of the clouds and sky (claustrophobically low sometimes). Decrease player and npc size slightly.
Add more directional events, progressing the player from one end of the map to the other. Though this will could itself with time and an expansion.
This will somewhat solve itself with time as the community continues to build. An aiding solution would be to make it easier for players to group together for content e.g; LFG system similar to Aion.
Add some class specific story archs to make things more unique. e.g; @lvl15 Meet your class specific Friend/Mentor do something with them relating to the chosen class. @lvl30 Meet him again for continued training or a little class specific adventure. And so fourth.
I love this game, and there any many aspects of it that will be improved on over time. But there are a few things that are specifically related to immersion that I believe might be going unnoticed.
[Five Immersion Flaws]
Load screen between every zone can feel a little stale and isolating.
Lack of terrain/environment scale in many area’s, making the world feel smaller than it is.
Most events lack story and progression, you can easily wind up on repeat if you stay in a single zone too long.
It is very easy to ignore everyone around you in a sense. Even though you often help others, you rarely communicate in a meaningful way.
Personal story doesn’t feel so personal second time around.
[Five Possible Solutions]
Animate the load screen art, similar to the concept art cinematics except a single cycle. Making load screens more entertaining to watch.
Raise the height of the clouds and sky (claustrophobically low sometimes). Decrease player and npc size slightly.
Add more directional events, progressing the player from one end of the map to the other. Though this will could itself with time and an expansion.
This will somewhat solve itself with time as the community continues to build. An aiding solution would be to make it easier for players to group together for content e.g; LFG system similar to Aion.
Add some class specific story archs to make things more unique. e.g; @lvl15 Meet your class specific Friend/Mentor do something with them relating to the chosen class. @lvl30 Meet him again for continued training or a little class specific adventure. And so fourth.
Just idea’s really, I want this game to go far!
1.) great idea, I’d love to see much more of the animated concept art. What are the artists doing at the moment? Not much of this in the latest updates.
2.) Raise the hight of the clouds? I don’t get it. Isn’t it quite realistic at the moment? I never noticed a problem here
3.) absolutely agree, most events need more storytelling imho. Some of them have quite decent small stories to tell.
4.) can you elaborate? Not everyone has played Aion.
This is an interesting subject, because you are very correct. It does break immersion to see such a broad interface. Even though it is artistic and matches the GW2 theme. It can be overbearing when you want to enjoy the scenery. And having the UI completely turned off can be a little daunting in combat.
1.) great idea, I’d love to see much more of the animated concept art. What are the artists doing at the moment? Not much of this in the latest updates.
2.) Raise the hight of the clouds? I don’t get it. Isn’t it quite realistic at the moment? I never noticed a problem here
3.) absolutely agree, most events need more storytelling imho. Some of them have quite decent small stories to tell.
4.) can you elaborate? Not everyone has played Aion.
quite interesting read
Probably quite a lot, many of them will have moved onto other projects or even moved to another studio. Artists are somewhat temporary in the entertainment industry. But it would be great never the less!
It is quite realistic, and works fine in area’s with good terrain scale. It could be cloud specifically, some area’s have a very low cloud layer, and it makes the sky look like you can almost touch it. For me some zones feel quite claustrophobic because of it. Some issues with visuals seem to be solving themselves with time I’ve noticed so maybe they’ll fix it in time.
You may have hit the nail on the head with two words there. Small stories. We don’t see a lot of it occuring in GW2 yet. We have one big story that we are a part of, but no real small side stories, they always feel like the are part of the main arch. Even though we have plenty of little books and interesting events and bits and bobs out in the world, they lack that ‘hook’ that comes from the dialogue cinematic’s. Wouldn’t it be great to have some open up before or after a big event chain?
How it works in Aion; there is a LFG window you can open up (Comparable to perhaps the SPvP match list you see when you want to join a random game.). People can post that they are looking for or creating a party/group for a particular instance or difficult task that might require a group, and other players can click to whisper or apply to join that party/group. You still need to communicate and travel to the dungeon/event but it just gives you cleaner format to find a group. It also has a feature which automatically sends out a global chat message informing the chat channel that you are looking and has the click’able apply for group button attached.
I feel like I should mention that the FOV change helped fix a lot of scale issues in the world. But it wouldn’t hurt for some zones to be played with more literally
