Guild Wars 2

we get now in the game a lot of loading screens: entering Cities, Teleporting, entering instances. All these break immersion. Seeing a picture all the time becomes boring and non-innovative. I know there can be SDDs to shorten the loading times, but this is hardware solution not a game design.

I suggest to create a mini zone which will load fast and while the character is crossing this zone, the next big zone will load. This will apply for when you enter a zone by foot

When teleporting to a zone, an animation of “taking off” and “landing” would do just fine and will have enough time to load.

Picture loading screens should stay only when entering an instanced zone. It will “tell” the players that they are entering a private zone because all other transitions will not have this

I remember one of the firsts GTA games had a lot of loading screen, but later they added sort of “bridges” to connect the zones and those replaced the loading screen giving the player a continuous feel of the world. Of course, while the player was crossing that bridge, the next zone was loading slowly but the effect was not noticed.

I’m fine with the loading screens, personally. I’d rather resources went to much more necessary things.

Sounds good and it would be really nice to have a truly open world..

Cinder.4865:

I’m fine with the loading screens, personally. I’d rather resources went to much more necessary things.

I have to agree with this. While your suggestion is a sound one OP, there’s simply too many other issues that need a look at first. Definitely not your fault and i would recommend you to suggest this when many of the primary issues are dealt with.

Though I admit i say that from an idealistic point of view. I dont know if it’s possible to deal with many of the issues Anet is going through, i have no experience in game design or programming (as of yet) and im sure a few primary issues would take months to fix. However, as a fellow player (doesn’t mean much, i know lol), I’d ask that you keep this in mind for the future and bring it up when GW2 is more settled and stable.

That’s a neat suggestion but probably not one that’s viable. There are lots of technical issues involved with trying to make this happen and streaming levels as opposed to throwing up a loading screen. It would probably take them weeks or months to implement if they started now and put the majority of their effort into that (if the engine and there game structure can support it at all). They have already announced some November update so i doubt if they’re going to drop that to start working on this anytime soon unless it becomes a major issue. Honestly, its something that would be nice, but is a resources sink and they are unlikely to do it.

You got my vote op. /+1 vote.
Maybe a mini game for the loading screen?
All in all, something more captivating and engaging than an art piece as the loading screen would be lovely.

Personally I like the idea, but I remember hearing that Bioware tried that in Mass Effect with the elevators and a lot of people hated it.

In that case it might be that people didn’t realise they were loading screens and the alternative was staring at a static image, but then they got a lot fewer complaints when they brought back normal loading screens in the other games.