Guild Wars 2

Most of my possible suggestions have already been made, but I have to echo this one problem in particular (and offer a possible solution):

Invisible enemies:
This re-occurring problem is just the fact that enemies, and even enemy names, are not displayed if they are further away and there are too many standing near you. I understand the need for optimization in rendering, so I propose this solution:

“Vanilla” character models instead of invisible models (and perhaps a toggle under Options).

I believe this would be pretty simple to implement, and for the broader good of gameplay, when it comes to large-scale engagements. You already have a massive draw distance for terrain, so why would it be so hard to draw characters?

The basic idea: it’s been long known that using a cookie cutter saves time. Your graphics processor is the same way. If you have to render completely individualized models for every unique character, that’s a whole lot of time your processor spends trying to animate, on the fly, all of these VERY different models, because it simply doesn’t have the option to do it any other way. The game is using exactly what the players have created… unique characters.

The basic solution: 5 basic character models, one for each race, to use to render anyone that is not within a certain draw distance. Previously invisible enemies would appear as one of these base models (the cookie cutter models) up until a certain point when your computer can actually handle drawing their unique shapes. Heavy, meduim, and light characters… since we get mostly the same character creation options, should still be relatively easy to parse down to one basic “vanilla” shape. When it comes to animating unique skins/models, I assume it will still be seamless the way it draws things up close, skill effects and all, but for gameplay, we’d actually be able to make out the fact that there is a large enemy force behind what you’re currently looking at, instead of just an empty field. At a certain point, most likely closer than it is currently, players would be drawn in their unique models (and subsequently dropped back to vanilla if they move out of range), to achieve the artistic feeling of fighting a unique combined force. Similar to atmospheric perspective, characters would be somewhat obscured due to distance anyways, so why in the world would we care that someone has brown fur instead of white, or is 3 feet taller than the average norn???

I hereby respectfully submit my suggestion to actually draw enemies in the distance, in a basic way, rather than allowing them to be invisible (not scheduled to be drawn at all). In other games it’s more than possible, you just have to start thinking about “is this important” when it comes to rendering all of the very different characters out there, and start thinking along the lines of “When does detail become important”? A link to what I’m talking about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_detail_%28programming%29