Guild Wars 2

The way I see I think the portal zoning mechanic as opposed to one big seamless world has killed some of this game potential.
One reason why I see this is because now they can never create very huge future dynamic events and limit them all to be confined to the zone their in, I can imagine something huge like some evil army all the way in the shiverpeak mountains shooting siege weapons at queensdale or something but events cannot affect beyond a portal.

Another reason is because it has issued a blow to the exploration, to travel to brand new zone you have never seen before instead of traversing a huge open mountain or swimming through a river or something everyone just has to find the portal that leads to that new zone, you cannot get to a new zone anyway you can find that is possible you just have to walk through a portal and get through a loading screen.

I do not see why they had to continue using this same portal mechanic from GW1, I don’t think it was graphical or technical issue since I have seen other mmos with good graphics that use a seamless world.
They could have at least let us walk out of a city without a load screen, if an mmo made in 2004 allows it dont see why an mmo made in 2012 could not have.

I really miss the huge open world in LOTRO but for some reason even though GW2 is a step back for me in this regard (more like EQ from years ago) I still enjoy the game. Having said that, I agree…the waypoint and portal system definitely takes something away from immersion and potential. Not so much that I’d complain about it myself but it sure would be nice to see Tyria as one big open expanse where you could walk from one end to the other without a single loading screen.

It worries me now this game may become outdated or obsolete sooner than expected for the sole reason of portals. as new mmo’s will start to utilize open worlds this may become the only modern mmo with portal zoning.

BioFringe.7945:

I really miss the huge open world in LOTRO but for some reason even though GW2 is a step back for me in this regard (more like EQ from years ago) I still enjoy the game. Having said that, I agree…the waypoint and portal system definitely takes something away from immersion and potential. Not so much that I’d complain about it myself but it sure would be nice to see Tyria as one big open expanse where you could walk from one end to the other without a single loading screen.

yea if WoW could do it in 2004 I see no reason why gw2 could not have done it in 2012.

there is events that goes trough diffrent zones ^^

Portals everywhere and huge loading screens for EVERYTHING, even using a waypoint in the same city, i dont think this can be ‘fixed’ (aka do a good optimization/changes) now but i would love to know why was this done this way, prolly to make lower end computers run but as said above other mmo with same graphical power had no issues so thats a bit of a poor reason imo.

sonicwhip.9052:

yea if WoW could do it in 2004 I see no reason why gw2 could not have done it in 2012.

WoW did have portal zoning, there was just less of it and it was disguised through stuff like taking boats across continents.

^^ True but LOTRO came out in 2007 and had very little zoning. You could literally walk the entire land mass from one end to the other without zoning once.

The only portals you had to cross were dungeon ones, and continent ones. Rather than that you could explore the WHOLE freaking world without a single loading screen.

Here all i see is, start the game, loading screen, appear at a long loading screen lion’s arch, use a waypoint to another part of LA, another loading screen. Waypoint to another map, loading screen, walk to another map, loading screen!

In wow it would be like, loading screen, appear at orgrimmar, take a fly path, arrive at your location, move to next zone, done.

hharry.1967:

Here all i see is, start the game, loading screen, appear at a long loading screen lion’s arch, use a waypoint to another part of LA, another loading screen. Waypoint to another map, loading screen, walk to another map, loading screen!

In wow it would be like, loading screen, appear at orgrimmar, take a fly path, arrive at your location, move to next zone, done.

To be fair, that’s because you’re comparing waypoints to flight paths, which aren’t really comparable. Yeah you don’t get a loading screen with the flight path, but it still takes much longer to get to your destination. A better comparison to using waypoints would be your hearthstone or a mage portal, which, from what I remember, gives you a loading screen even if you’re using it to quickly get from one side of Stormwind to the other.

As for the heavy use of mapping rather than having a seamless world, when asked about how they can maintain MMOs with no sub fee Anet has talked about how they make certain decisions that makes upkeep for their games relatively inexpensive. It may have been from their pre-release FAQ, if that’s even around anymore. I always figured that having separate maps rather than a seamless world was one of those decisions/compromises they had to make. It could also be part of their desire to keep the minimum system requirements low. Of course, I don’t know anything about IT and I could be talking out of my butt here.

sonicwhip.9052:

It worries me now this game may become outdated or obsolete sooner than expected for the sole reason of portals. as new mmo’s will start to utilize open worlds this may become the only modern mmo with portal zoning.

This game is really pretty, the art team is amazing, and I am sure credit goes out to some programmers ect, but this game is a HUGE step backwards.

sonicwhip.9052:

The way I see I think the portal zoning mechanic as opposed to one big seamless world has killed some of this game potential.
One reason why I see this is because now they can never create very huge future dynamic events and limit them all to be confined to the zone their in, I can imagine something huge like some evil army all the way in the shiverpeak mountains shooting siege weapons at queensdale or something but events cannot affect beyond a portal.

Another reason is because it has issued a blow to the exploration, to travel to brand new zone you have never seen before instead of traversing a huge open mountain or swimming through a river or something everyone just has to find the portal that leads to that new zone, you cannot get to a new zone anyway you can find that is possible you just have to walk through a portal and get through a loading screen.

I do not see why they had to continue using this same portal mechanic from GW1, I don’t think it was graphical or technical issue since I have seen other mmos with good graphics that use a seamless world.

I agree. It’s not a complete step forward, as one would expect. The technology is there, to have a seamless world. Personally, it’s disappointment to not see even moving ships coming from ports. In many ways, the illusion of an active world is cheapened by such a shortcoming.

I think this is something they can definitely improve on, not so much cross zone but just within the map. For example, why can we walk to a place on the map without a loading screen but if we waypoint to a zone on the same map we have a loading screen? I’m sure we all know by now that if we are close enough to a waypoint and we use it, we don’t get a loading screen but after a certain distance we automatically get one. The limit of portal ability is also the same distance as a non loading screened waypoint.

Load time is based on your systems ability to render everything around you. So when you are running the game is rendering objects as they enter your vision. When you teleport to a waypoint near you there is no loading screen because you already have all of the environment loaded. Teleporting far away causes the need to load an entire new environment which takes time based on your system’s speed. The seemless world vs instanced world was probably designed that way to cut costs.

Also haw to do with the info that DE,s pump out

Nappychappy.7046:

sonicwhip.9052:

It worries me now this game may become outdated or obsolete sooner than expected for the sole reason of portals. as new mmo’s will start to utilize open worlds this may become the only modern mmo with portal zoning.

This game is really pretty, the art team is amazing, and I am sure credit goes out to some programmers ect, but this game is a HUGE step backwards.

I think thats only true if the game you looking for is some kinda online fanticy world life simulater.

Another loading screen, you in are LA, move from overflow to your real world, LOADING SCREEN BANG! but you didnt move any pixel at all =/

It’s weird because it nearly looks as if it loaded EVERYTHING again when you move from overflow to ur real world, theres no caching at all.

Spencer.1386:

Load time is based on your systems ability to render everything around you. So when you are running the game is rendering objects as they enter your vision.

I run on a low spec machine, and I feel that this isn’t the case.

In certain maps/areas, it feels like it is rendering everything, not just what is in my “vision” but rather drawing objects over that which is not in my viewport.

Two such places that come to mind are Arah and the Ascalon Fractal. Those places give me video lag grief.
Related to the number of mobs/npcs also perhaps? ie. drawing all of them even though I cannot see them, but environment closer is drawn over them?

Honestly I wonder sometimes if players have ever played a mmorpg before. All mmos are seperated by “zones”…Some games do have larger maps but for example you arnt going to have some army attacking from Outlands in WoW to the human main city.

How exactly do portals ruin exploration? I’ve seen mulitple users post this and it makes no sense…You have to find the portal (aka walk there) to unlock it, and with the lack of mounts I for one wouldn’t want to walk to every location in the world. Also again all large scale mmos have a form of portal/recall/travel route form of fast travel…its a convenience so you dont have to spend a hour getting to a quest area which would make no sense…

There is A LOT more to consider than just what ‘another mmo did in 2004’ and considering how GW2 actually plays out, I think ‘Zones’ was the best approach.

But look at why it could be useful:
-The way landscape changes from area to area
-Zone Events & Zone Announcements
-Zone Level Range (GW2 is VERY mmo-noob friendly, and having the map say “1-17” is nice)
-Map Completion (POI, Task, etc)
-Ability to load up more unique content in a consolidated area
-Overflow Server Areas
-Performance for out of date systems
-Level Sync… (I don’t know what goes into this, but it’s often overlooked as something that is really clever from an MMO perspective)

Dealing with the loading screens imo is a minimal part of the game. I guess no one here is a fan of ANY Playstation console, cause the loading for that is HORRENDOUS. lol

However, when all is said and done – I’m happy with the final product and how interactive the world is, and if it took ‘zones’ to get us here, so be it, it is a BILLION TIMES better than the wretched ‘phasing’ system used by that mmo from 2004.. ugh.

Trickfully.1830:

there is events that goes trough diffrent zones ^^

what events travel through the portals?? Is it just those escort events which I would not call dynamic since they repeat every few minutes regardless of zone.
I have never noticed any events going through more than one zone.

I agree you can’t compare waypoints, and hearthstones, and boats, and flight points. But you can compare walking directly out Stormwind’s front gate into the forest, turning left and walking straight through the forest to lake country without ever seeing a loading screen. In GW2, this type of travel would result in 2 loading screens to get out of the city and then walking into the next zone. Now, maybe the reason is because there’s too much visual data in GW2 to pre-load in the background, but it’d be nice if our persistent world didn’t have the same portals in & out that instanced GW had.

Seras.5702:

I agree you can’t compare waypoints, and hearthstones, and boats, and flight points. But you can compare walking directly out Stormwind’s front gate into the forest, turning left and walking straight through the forest to lake country without ever seeing a loading screen. In GW2, this type of travel would result in 2 loading screens to get out of the city and then walking into the next zone. Now, maybe the reason is because there’s too much visual data in GW2 to pre-load in the background, but it’d be nice if our persistent world didn’t have the same portals in & out that instanced GW had.

I believe(correct me if I’m wrong) Tera Online a game with equally good graphics has one big open world and also Blade and Soul.

If you want one of the first examples of a seamless world take a look at asherons call. turbine actually pioneered this form of game world back in the early 90’s and it was awesome...

MistyMountains.3751:

Honestly I wonder sometimes if players have ever played a mmorpg before. All mmos are seperated by “zones”…Some games do have larger maps but for example you arnt going to have some army attacking from Outlands in WoW to the human main city.

How exactly do portals ruin exploration? I’ve seen mulitple users post this and it makes no sense…You have to find the portal (aka walk there) to unlock it, and with the lack of mounts I for one wouldn’t want to walk to every location in the world. Also again all large scale mmos have a form of portal/recall/travel route form of fast travel…its a convenience so you dont have to spend a hour getting to a quest area which would make no sense…

believe it or not but portals have been one huge immersion killer for in this game. in a game like wow you could at least walk the entire continent with no portals. and I even have to admit the loading screens for intercontinental travel in wow are much shorter than a loading screen here to get from overflow to normal.

This this this. It’s one of the biggest reasons I left. Any game that has laoding screens back to back and 25 seconds long each time just kills immersion for me. Drove me so crazy I upgraded my comp, threw in an 6gb/s SSD with top of the line pretty much everything, cept stayed i5 instead of i7 and it’s still remarkably slow and constantly happening . I just came back after a couple months break and this is the first thing that stood out. Seems a petty thing but after a few back to back loads immediately after coming back I’m ready to hang it up again…

No.

This is quite fine as it is.

Loading screens is a seperation of servers. They appear only cause the entire zone is loaded at once (which is useful for such things as Dynamic Events). WoW, Tera, and other games that have a streamless world isnt actually streamless. WoW and games like it are computational heavy throughout the entire game (meaning great way to fry a processor and graphics card). As your walking through their worlds data for the region that you are in is rendered. If you have a slow computer or internet connection you are actually able to beat the rendering process and fall through the world (not pretty site). GW2 to keep the cost down but the graphics up splits the world so that its all rendered before you enter it hence the loading screens. Its not a step backward but rather a step to minimize overhead costs. If GW2 was to become like a WoW with a streamless world it would cause a massive amount of overhead cost which a large number of systems would not be able to handle. Imagine trying to render WvWvW constantly on top of the already high overhead cost of spell effects during zerg battles. No computer would be able to handle the WvWvW fights if it was a streamless zone.

Tera and WoW forums are plagued by the opposite of this forum, slow rendering. If a Gw2 server lags or has a minor issue it is not noticable if your already in the zone cause its already rendered and calculated. In WoW if there is an issue you notice it immidately and it appears in their forums quite often.

If you want to see a game that uses a seamless world but a terrible rendering algorithm look at Perfect World. You can cross several locations before rendering has caught up with you.

Also have to note Look at the number of down times (server down times due to anything) between GW1, GW2, and WoW. The ratios suggest that WoW has been down a lot longer then GW1 or GW2. I believe if i read correctly that GW1 total down time is only like 3 days or something close that. This is due to less stress on the servers overall from batch rendering rather than overhead rendering.

Suddenflame makes very valid and reasonable points. Yet, I still miss it…with all the rendering issues and more frequent / longer downtimes. If I had to choose I’d pick a seamless world.

I understand the reasoning better but in the end (more myself) I prefer the greater immersion while in game than having less immersion more reliably.

BioFringe.7945:

Suddenflame makes very valid and reasonable points. Yet, I still miss it…with all the rendering issues and more frequent / longer downtimes. If I had to choose I’d pick a seamless world.

I understand the reasoning better but in the end (more myself) I prefer the greater immersion while in game than having less immersion more reliably.

players care about the immersion and companies care about providing a reliable service that they dont have to repair 24/7 lol in Anet’s case they wouldn’t be able to afford to having to constantly replace servers cause they got overloaded and fired lol. WoW and Tera can afford it cause they are subscription based along with secret world. Perfect World is free but has kittenty rendering to compensate. It all depends on how much you want to pay. (SWOTR i am not sure if they have loading screens or not but if they do i would be a bit surpised unless they expected to fail hard)