Guild Wars 2

I’m gonna try to keep this post short, so here goes. I think that making the world seamless would make the game much better.

Many times I have been out exploring, completely immersed in the incredible gameworld, then I come to the dreaded blue portal. running into these things in a world that is otherwise so immersive really hurt my experience.

I am not suggesting changing map layouts in any way. I am only hoping that the blue portal transition areas can be removed. Yes, I understand this is a technical challenge, but I think it would be well worth it in terms of making players experience’s much more engaging.

Thanks for your time.

I posted something on a similar thread: the transition between zones shouln’t be done with a lifeless concept art picture loading screen but through a mini-zone. In reality the mini-zone will load faster then the full zone and while the player will travel through that mini-zone, the big zone will load.

The mini-zones can be designed differently to fit the context: bridges, catacombs, seas, rivers.
Also, the mni-zones can have mini-games in them like: simple jumping puzzles, braking a blockade (door, gate, wall, branches, trees) walking on narrow ledges

That is an interesting idea Ronah, but that would require devs to make all those inbetween zones. What I’m suggesting is purely a technical issue. Just the ability for the game to load adjacent zones before you enter them so you can waltz right in.
I hate to bring up WoW, but I think that was one of the biggest things they got right, a completely seamless world, cities included.

the reason why the game has zones is because each is it’s own instance so it would be pretty challenging to have it seamless

This would also destroy “Main” chat and exploration.

Just pretend portals are the borders, and the load times are to check your paperwork to let you pass.

In terms of your point Enemy,
They just need to make sure you have no reason to sit on the edge of maps, for example leaving some “dead space” where no mobs or gathering nodes spawn near where the portals currently are. That would ensure you weren’t going back and forth accidentally while fighting or gathering or what-not.
Also, they could just display a big banner saying what zone you switched to, and even overlay the exploration info about what vistas, skill points, etc, you have like they display on the loading screen.
And in terms of your point mojo,
I know it would be difficult. I didn’t say it would be easy to slap together. I was just saying that in my opinion it would add enough to the game for it to be worth the devs time.

i like the concept art

that would require restructuring the entire game, plus it would just add to lag and performance issues, as your PC tries to load things that it may not even use (you may be passing close by the transition zone, but don’t really plan on moving to it).

please people, let’s make realistic suggestions, not ask for ANet to scratch the current game and make a new one.

One, the game engine already cannot render most people in populated areas. Trying to render LA because I’m walking by is a bad idea.
Two, the servers can’t really handle a full, constant world.
Three, the game engine is already horribly inefficient when it comes to draw distance.
Four, I just tested a few loading screens, and they took a rough average of 1.5 seconds. If it takes longer than 1.5 seconds on average to walk through the dead space zone, it’s actually slower than the loading screens for me.
Five, I could probably chain some mobs, then stealth, and cause ’em to run into town and kill lowbies in most cities.
Six, What if I use a leap, or sprint? If I cover the ground faster than it can load, will I just be stopped and told to wait while it loads as I hit an invisible wall?
Seven, If there is no invisible wall, wouldn’t that mean loading and rendering whole other zones from significantly farther away? What if I don’t want that lag while I’m in combat?

I could keep coming up with reasons, but my fingers are tired.

I honestly do not think it require an entire restructuring. It would be a bit of work, sure, but not like making an entire new game…

And Nels, how are you getting 1.5 second loading screens? I’m running a homemade build that I’m pretty proud of and my loads are rarely shorter than 7 seconds.

The remainder of your problems seem to be either performance related or very specific problems that are kinda silly.

In terms of the performance, sure, it would require some optimization, so maybe this is a project for further down the line. But let me remind you that nearly all modern MMO’s have this functionality, so yes, it is possible without having an unplayable lag fest.

Have you noticed that mobs give up and stop following you after a while? (so no you would not be able to bring them into low lvl areas…)
And there would not be an invisible wall. The system just needs to allot itself enough time to load it in the background.

You want to tackle WoW?? You AT LEAST have to be on par with it. WoW had loading screens only between continents, while everything else was seamless in the open world. And while we were told that the world of Tyria will be way bigger than that of WoW, it sure feels smaller. I look at the map and think to myself “oh man I gotta walk all the way up there”, but the trip actually doesn’t last long at all. The world of WoW, while having much worse graphics, feels better somehow. GW2 just failed hard on anything and everything it tried to do.

jollyjolly.3516:

I honestly do not think it require an entire restructuring. It would be a bit of work, sure, but not like making an entire new game…

And Nels, how are you getting 1.5 second loading screens? I’m running a homemade build that I’m pretty proud of and my loads are rarely shorter than 7 seconds.

The remainder of your problems seem to be either performance related or very specific problems that are kinda silly.

In terms of the performance, sure, it would require some optimization, so maybe this is a project for further down the line. But let me remind you that nearly all modern MMO’s have this functionality, so yes, it is possible without having an unplayable lag fest.

Have you noticed that mobs give up and stop following you after a while? (so no you would not be able to bring them into low lvl areas…)
And there would not be an invisible wall. The system just needs to allot itself enough time to load it in the background.

It takes you 7 seconds in the foreground to load a zone. That would mean, if it sucked up 50% of your bandwidth in the background, it would take 14 seconds. If it only took 10% of your resources, as to not be noticed, it would take 70 seconds to load. Now, I know for a fact that I can walk across a large number of zone borders in 70 seconds. There’s a reason WoW has absolutely terrible graphics, and very few, fixed point teleports, most of which have loading screens. For WoW to be continuous, it needs to render areas that you are nowhere near. That’s pretty simple in a game that was drawn by elementary school kids who managed not to eat their crayons long enough to scribble some elves. In a game like GW2, which is significantly more demanding on the average enthusiasts system, this becomes an issue.

As for the problems that are specific cases, I can think of three cities of the six in the game that have borders to zones of level 20 or higher, and if you know how to do it, you can train enemies for quite some time without them turning around. If you’re really good, you can get them stuck on their way back, at which point, they make their current location their new “home” and you can start the pull all over again. Guardians pushing npcs into wierd places was bad enough, and a great sign of how badly people like to do silly things to make other people’s day less fun. Don’t give them more ways to do it.

As to your first point, I will concede that in the game’s current state, my hopes and dreams may not be plausible. But hopefully with time, optimization and (RL) dev experience, this may come about. One thing to note though is that the times you mentioned could be compensated for by increasing the loading time when logging in or waypointing.

As for your second point, being able to push an NPC that far is quite simply a bug. I am fairly confident manipulating mob spawn points and locations is not something Anet wants their players to do, so if this was released and that became an actual problem, it would get patched relatively quickly.

Because something like this would require so much work, there would have to be an overwhelming amount of player interest. I guess that’s mostly what I was gauging in posting this. Unfortunately, not many seem to share my enthusiasm. I suppose only time will tell if some of the technical barriers involved can be removed.

(Nice description of blizz artists btw, gave me a good chuckle)

Raging Bull.5048:

You want to tackle WoW?? You AT LEAST have to be on par with it. WoW had loading screens only between continents, while everything else was seamless in the open world. And while we were told that the world of Tyria will be way bigger than that of WoW, it sure feels smaller. I look at the map and think to myself “oh man I gotta walk all the way up there”, but the trip actually doesn’t last long at all. The world of WoW, while having much worse graphics, feels better somehow. GW2 just failed hard on anything and everything it tried to do.

WoW runs on a potato, and has far less detail than GW2. of course they can make it seamless. anyone can make a long area of nothing pass for a loading screen.

jollyjolly.3516:

I honestly do not think it require an entire restructuring. It would be a bit of work, sure, but not like making an entire new game…

you have no idea the hell that is to restructure even simpler mechanics, much less change the level design of most of the game (all those mountains would have to go somewhere, right?), design new zones to be used as transitions (individually), and implement dynamic loading.

hell, dynamic loading alone would make this a bigger effort than needed.

this is one of those design choices that must be made before you start working on the level design, and that you must stick to that decision until the end, or start from scratch.

I must agree that this is the biggest design mistake that ArenaNet has made. I have no idea why ArenaNet choose to work with the instances. I would love to hear why ArenaNet made that choice and if they now also agree that it was a mistake. It’s just not from this time.

A lot of the bugs or ‘problems’ people have ingame are related to this choice. For example, not seeing playing information (from players in a group) when you are not in the same zone, only being able to enter the dungeon when you are in the same zone, problems with the number of people in the a zone. They try to fix this by not showing all players and that solution has a lot of problems at this moment. Well a lot of the problems are related to that choice.

A lot of the problems can be solved inside this instance based system but the solutions will not all be very pretty and getting rid of the portals in this system is so much work that it would make more just getting rid of the instance based system at all. However this is so much work.. I would lie if I said it would be rebuilding the game but it would come pretty close.

So I don;t think they will change that any time soon even do I would love to see the change.

It was just one big mistake made when the game was still in the design state.

@Devata

I was not a mistake, it was intentional. It’s currently impossible or extrememly difficult to both have a single instanced world and have the level of detail that GW2 has at the same time…unless everyone owns high-end comps. The hardware requirement for this would be pricy, and ANet specifically wanted this game to not require high-end machines to play it. Additionally, the programming nightmare on ANet’s end for this is no easy fix, but rather an overhaul of the game engine. Imagine a DE that cascades out over the entire world…you think that would be easy for the server to handle? How is this not understood? Other games can get away with it because of inferior graphics and therefore a lower taxing of the system. I’m not sure how a 10-second load destroys people’s gaming experience, but not only has it been a pretty standard mechanic of MMO’s for years, it’s a rediculously tiny price to pay for good visuals.

Raging Bull.5048:

You want to tackle WoW?? You AT LEAST have to be on par with it. WoW had loading screens only between continents, while everything else was seamless in the open world. And while we were told that the world of Tyria will be way bigger than that of WoW, it sure feels smaller. I look at the map and think to myself “oh man I gotta walk all the way up there”, but the trip actually doesn’t last long at all. The world of WoW, while having much worse graphics, feels better somehow. GW2 just failed hard on anything and everything it tried to do.

Perhaps when WoW doesn’t have to takes it’s servers down several hours every tuesday for maintenance, and even longer for patches, with days of instability to follow, you may start to have a point.

Obsidian.1328:

@Devata

I was not a mistake, it was intentional. It’s currently impossible or extrememly difficult to both have a single instanced world and have the level of detail that GW2 has at the same time…unless everyone owns high-end comps. The hardware requirement for this would be pricy, and ANet specifically wanted this game to not require high-end machines to play it. Additionally, the programming nightmare on ANet’s end for this is no easy fix, but rather an overhaul of the game engine. Imagine a DE that cascades out over the entire world…you think that would be easy for the server to handle? How is this not understood? Other games can get away with it because of inferior graphics and therefore a lower taxing of the system. I’m not sure how a 10-second load destroys people’s gaming experience, but not only has it been a pretty standard mechanic of MMO’s for years, it’s a rediculously tiny price to pay for good visuals.

(I must first say that all I will say here is based on what I see ingame. I can be wrong how some of the things work in the back-end but I can only base my view on there back-end on what I see ingame.)

This is simply incorrect.

Lets me first say something about the ‘mistake’. Yes it was a intentional decision but you can do something intentional and it might then be a mistake. You can even argue about if it was a mistake. But in my view this intentional decision was a big mistake.

Now about the graphics.

It has almost nothing to do with graphics and performance, it might even have a positive effect on the performance with this graphics.

What now basically happens is that you load one whole map with low or no textures. It might even mean (don’t have to! But looking at some other problems I think it might be the case) that only one server can handle one map at a time.

So when you enter a zone it starts loading the whole map into the memory. So even if you only visited 10% of the whole map the rest has been in your memory using up space for nothing.

When you walk somewhere bases on your location higher quality textures and effects are being loaded or shown / calculated including information about players.

While being in the map the whole time you are also getting information about what happening on the map. I don’t know how much, they can limit that a lot.

The alternative is that the whole map is on you hard drive and when you start the game you load a part of the map around your char into the memory. How much really depends on your settings.

When you walk a part of the area behind you gets removed from the memory and a part in frond of you gets loaded in. So you are wasting less memory. You only get information about players that are in this same area you are in and this area is smaller then one whole map.

In addition you might get information from players in a group or when an event start this triggers (in the software) an event that send a message to you saying, there is an event ongoing.

Additional information like higher textures, effects and so on can all loaded in when you get close to something (like now is already the case in GW2). So it could really less demanding for your PC.

I also see this on my notebook. I can play Crysis on that pretty nice (not high settings) and a lot of other MMO’s will also look very nice on it with acceptable framerates. Now I know you can’t really compare a game like Crysis with an MMO but I just say this to stress the fact that the notebook is able to handle good graphics.

When playing GW2 on it I can only play it with the lowest settings and the graphics are terrible. Those other MMO’s look much better on it and you would expect that yeah you had to go for lower settings but the game would then at least about the same as one of those other MMO’s. The number of polygons might be an addition problem here.

So having an other system would not mean have higher demands for the PC, it might even mean that you have lower demands or you have better performance / graphics with the current demands.

I agree that GW2 on lowest graphics looks worse than most 3-5 year old F2P MMOs
And you are right, loading portions from the map only when you travel is much faster then loading a full map.

Mojo.8431:

the reason why the game has zones is because each is it’s own instance so it would be pretty challenging to have it seamless

^This

and it makes it easier for the devs to add or remove content in a flash. Also I am sure it makes it easier to fix things in the zones that may be bugged.

Ronah.2869:

I agree that GW2 on lowest graphics looks worse than most 3-5 year old F2P MMOs
And you are right, loading portions from the map only when you travel is much faster then loading a full map.

you have just no idea how loading works, do you?

BrunoBRS.5178:

you have just no idea how loading works, do you?

No i cant say i do, but perhaps, you could explain it to us?

Ronah.2869:

BrunoBRS.5178:

you have just no idea how loading works, do you?

No i cant say i do, but perhaps, you could explain it to us?

let me try to, in the simplest terms possible.

your computer has a storage area where it keeps the map data (among a ton of other things). putting new info on that storage and cleaning old info takes some time, which is commonly known as “loading”.

with static instances, you load the map data there once, and the cache won’t have to worry about that anymore, only storing data of players going by and stuff like that. this creates a smooth gameplay experience with short pauses to replace the map when you load a new instance.

with dynamic loading, the game not only has to load the general area you’re at, but it has to guess where you’re potentially going, and start loading that area before you get to it. this causes a lot of going back and forth in the cache without that information actually being used, which means you’ll get, for example, temporary stutters when travelling near these transition areas, not to mention the memory usage would spike. you might have noticed it when playing open world games and going really fast through the world (sometimes even freezing the game to finish loading an area).

that’s the gist of it, in very raw terms.

now that’s not to say GW2 doesn’t use dynamic loading, because that would require a lot of memory, but the loading screen prepares your computer to go through the area smoothly, and loads all the minor stuff as you get close to it. games powered by the unreal engine tend to do that with textures, for example (which sometimes cause that awful texture pop-in effect in games like borderlands).

adding dynamic loading times would raise the system requirements, reduce the smoothness of the experience, and actually cause longer load times when using waypoints, not to mention all the dead zones would take you more time to go through than just loading through a gate.

an example of a game that uses dynamic loading and tries to guess which path you’re taking are the Metroid Prime games.

if you’ve played, you’ve undoubtely noticed that sometimes, a door will take forever to open. that’s the game’s way of keeping you from moving while it finishes loading the area behind it, and it’s a very smart use of the tech. however, that kind of thing isn’t acceptable in an MMO, where they can’t just freeze your character in place while you wait for something to load.

Thanks for the infos. I didn’t know all this. You are right then. Better some loading screens from time to time than a game freeze in the middle of a run off from a mob due to hardware issues

@BrunoBRS
You are partly right.

You are correct that going to a waypoint will be faster.. as long as the waypoint is on the same map that is. If the waypoint is on another map it will take longer.

It is also correct that you have the software has to guess where you’re potentially going but there are some smart ways to do that that will not be very intensive for the machine. Or even better, it is not really necessary to do the guessing part at all. If you load in enough area around you (so some more then you need, this also depends on the system requirements) you can load the additional information when you need it.

It will indeed cost some extra performance to load it in, then again you are already doing that with textures and so on. But at the same time you are winning performance because you don’t have to load in the whole map, besides if you have enough space you can load in a bigger area meaning the possible problems you describe get less.

another game using this technique and that most people here are aware of is WoW.

Anyway, it’s simply not true that it would be so much more demanding that you need to have lower graphics.

Don’t forget, GW2 already does most of what you say (load in extra information surrounding your area, you then need to add the map data to that)

I never played the Metroid Prime games so I do not know what you are talking about but if a door keeps you from getting to an area that means they are (at that point) NOT using the system where you load everything in your area but they are (at that point) using a system as GW2 has. Like the portal lets you wait to load the other area. So maybe they mix the two techniques (something you see a lot, dungeons will always be loaded in) but having to wait (at a door or something) somewhere for an area to load is what you see when you use a technique like in GW2 not when you only load the surrounding area.

It is true that when you have low settings and you go fast you might be stuck for a while. In GW2 you will not get stuck but it takes longer to load the higher textures and people and all that additional information. People with lower settings can fix a lot of that by lowering the view distance.

This is probably also limited by the game engine. As you might know, GW2 runs on a (heavily) modified GW(1) engine. GW1 had everything instanced aswell, so for seamless zones they might have to rewrite half the engine, and possibly half of the game too.

I think that’s too much work for a relatively small thing.

It is an awful lot of work. I don’t argue about that. And while I would hope they tackle it I have my doubts because like somebody already said. This is one of those things you choose at the beginning and then you are basically stuck with it.

If they would tackle it, they it will be in an expansion, not in a patch.

However I would not call it a “relatively small thing”. It’s a huge thing, it’s not just about seamless zones. A lot of the problems we are seeing now are because of the system they use now. This option also restricts you in a lot of ways. A lot of those things you will be able to fix but it will not be nice fixes.

Flying over an area from one map to another will be near to impossible, but even something simple as letting a dynamic event go true multiple maps is much more of a problem now then it would be with the other system. It would also be able to tackle some of the performance related problems we see.

I will take an example of one of those “not so nice.. but heey it works” solutions.. or really work-arounds. (working around this system)

Remember the Halloween jumping puzzle. That loaded pretty fast, going to the start of the puzzle and then jumping in the tower. It had to because else it would be unplayable but if it all were instances it would load way slower.

What they did was loading in a map with 3 buildings. The waiting area with the clock in frond of you, but that was not the clock you would jump on. That was behind you so you could not see it. And the tower where the chest was, was also another area in the map. You now simply got teleported to the area already loaded (because it was in the same map).

So that sort of solutions you have to use to prevent loading times when you can’t use them.