Guild Wars 2

For me it looks strange that every map is instanced, bordered by high mountains and have small gateways to go in/out. This destroys the continent feeling, like for example WoW have where you can go to other zones from anywhere you liked (except if it was mountain area, you could also swim around all map. As its now i cant relate to world since they look just like big dungeons and not vivid world.

If maps were more conected and not instanced (like WoW), they could make invasions from other maps if enemy npc take there too much control.

So i am interested why Anet choose to have this design of maps?

*sorry for comparing to wow, but havent played much other mmos.

This was my first reaction looking at the GW2 map aswell. The block styled layout feels weird and unrealistic. It also makes it that much harder to remember certain zones because none of them have a distinct shape.

There’s 2 parts of this that are very clunky and old-fashioned.

The instanced zones. Clunky, but something I can live with. I wish there were more areas where you could go between zones — they don’t all have to have a waypoint. But if you imagine that there’s only 2 roads to get from Georgia to Alabama, for example, it’s just stupid.

The part that I find really unfun and very old-fashioned is the clunky block-shaped maps with lots of non-traversable parts. You often have to walk a mile to get to a point that’s only 50 yards away because of arbitrarily unclimbable slopes, invisible walls and maze-like structures. Making travel take a long time in a game doesn’t make it fun, just makes it take longer. It feels like a way of trying to disguise a lack of content.

what is the lack of content? the portals are a definite meta gaming however to say its a lack of content is a little facetious. Other than being completely open..its all there, the game never pretends to be a sandbox RPG, if the lack of content is simply that you can not go from one world to the other without walking through a designated portal every now and then, well so be it. I just dont see the issue, its design is just an amped up version of GW 1…this is not WoW..if you want WoW, go play PoM..its GW 2, if you want to know why its lore and style doesnt fit your version of a new WoW..its because its nothing like WoW.

I didn’t say there IS a lack of content, but that the design is something that feels like they’re disguising a lack of content. How much content, how much variety, that’s up to you to judge. Do you feel like you’re doing the same thing over and over?

I came not from WoW, but Rift, where they used a lot less of the maze-map structure. There is a zone that’s like a GW zone with lots of unclimbable walls, but you can skip it, too. I like the GW setting better, but I respect Rift’s designers for being more conscientious about map design — specifically on the principle that map barriers should facilitate enjoyment of the content, not stymie it.

Believe me, it was a LOT worse in GW1, and we didn’t have the option to jump over obstacles there. I guess I have the opposite reaction to the others in this thread so far; I find the GW2 map much easier to move around in, overall, than the GW1 map.

For myself I will always prefer the non instanced seamless enviroment to the instanced one... Turbine does this very well, in fact i think there the people who invented the concept of seamless world design with asherons call. correct me if im wrong...

For me instanced mmo feels like a step back, im not sure on the difficulty but surely in this day and age with the tech we have, we can have seamless enviroments from world to dungeon to space to wherever?

Anyway.... to cut a long story short its not game breaking for me and im suprised at how open it does feel considering...

They are promoting exploring, but for me those vistas and various points are not that.

As said in first post about swiming:
when i was leveling a human in westfall (vanilla), i got bored, so i looked on map and there was big blackness so i began to wonder whats there. I decided to swim from westfall upward and "cheat the game* – not going on usual road and interested what to find ahead. I swim till Menethil harbour kitten those high lvl murlocks!!!1!) and that was first wow effect i got from explorin, hmm humans, so far away, they have nice lookin walls, why do they need walls, whats their story? + first time saw ships ….. hmm where do they take you? Whats between elvyn and menethil? Than i took the ship and gone to unknow, over to the kalimdor. There it landed by huge castle (theramore) surrounded by creepy area – again one more wow moment. Whats beyond creepy area? Or what happened there, what is hidding in dark?

Well that was one of my exploring endeveours. At that time i wasnt interested much in lore (tho played warcraf3), but from that moment i kept wondering, what other epic stuff can i find in those dark spots? What secrets and wonderfull places or epic story does this world have? And later i also bought (w3 frozen throne) and got realy pulled into lore and imersive world that represent it.

We all can agree its not gamebreaking and much better than gw1, but for me open world has some more +.
(and gw2 is much better game than WoW, i liked wow just for lore past vanilla – tho didnt last long since they butchered it :p -> dont tell me to go play crap MoP)

While it’s not entirely distracting nor even game-breaking for me, I do notice the zone-breakup. And when I notice it, I really notice it and it makes me wonder why the decion was made to make the world this way. I came from LOTRO and often when I’m exploring zones here in GW2, I am reminded how awesome it was to be able to travel seamlessly from the middle of Bree to the middle of Hobbiton without a zone or from Bree to Rivendell.

GW2 feels big on many levels, but at the same time, the zone blocking and walled-in feeling of each area does erode the “big” feeling a little – especially when you notice it.

On the other hand, Middle-Earth feels massive and is made to feel even more so by the overall lack of zoning and area walls. I’m not limited to only going by one or two paths into the next zone – I don’t even have to be on a path!

The saving grace, I suppose, is that the zones themselves don’t feel too stifling when you’re actually in them. At least it’s not a bunch of copy-paste terrain cough FFXIV cough. But zooming out on the map and seeing the neat little graph-paper zoning makes me sigh sometimes :(

You can’t really compare WoW with its cheap and low quality landscapes with the detail rich enviroments of GW2. It is trivial to create a world like WoW, there is probably more detail and data in one GW2 zone than in the entire WoW combined.

This leads to technical problems, you have a very densly detailed world, and the engine as we know has already huge problems with loading models on time. Instanced, preloaded zones are precisely the way to reduce such problems. As far as I have seen GW2 does not rely solely on a simple heightmap terrain model, like WoW and LOTRO (who both have open worlds), but instead relies heavily on 3D models with very detailed texturing (the fantastic mountains for example) – this is no mere texture splatting.

Now, heightmap based terrains are perfect for streaming from the HD, cheap and easy on the framerate, but the downside is, they look really awful for the most part (as demonstrated by WoW). Although you could stream GW2 zones in theory, I predict the fps drop would be so severe, you’d have to double the minimal requirements. Not to mention it would mean even less time to load player/NPC models, because background threads would be busy with loading the terrain models = more invisible players, monsters AND mountains

In other words, currently, unless you use one of the power engines such as CryEngine, and want stunning graphics, forget open worlds in MMO’s (that need to cater to as many people as possible).

What zerospin said.

We all dream of an uninstanced MMO with superb graphics but realistically that is not possible with the current technology without incurring in serious issues.