Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing GW2 for over 2 years and unfortunately, I have observed many, many invisible walls inserted in the various maps just to stop you from crossing a certain point. I explore a lot and sometimes go into places that many players won’t go. However, many invisible walls has been placed in the areas that are easy to reach, especially by gliding. Even on the maps designed for the expansion. And I don’t mean the borders of the map when you glide very high and go over some moutians/treetops.

It breaks me out of the “immersion”, (as much as I can immerse in an MMO), but still. I hate that feeling.

I really like games that have maps designed in a way that feels natural, so you encounter “natural” boundaries that keep you away from places you shouldn’t go (or not yet).
Dragon Age is pretty good at that, for example.

I love GW2 as a whole, but I’ve always considered invisible walls to be the last resort in map-making and a cheap and/or lazy way of design! Honestly, every time I run into invisible wall I feels it’s soooo LAME. The only explanation I try to think of is that the team has little time and lot of pressure so they decided to make maps fast and just place these walls as a cheap and easy way to finish the design quickly. But it still feels very lame and unprofessional to me ;p

Esp that I saw an interview with ANet where I heard sth like “We probably have the most talented people here”. Ugh… not the map makers, I guess…

It would help if you could give some examples of which invisible walls you encountered that you think should be removed.

Thanks for suggestion. I may prepare a list and come back with a new thread. Though I’m not sure if there’s a point in doing that since I don’t think any of the walls would be removed.

Ya anet uses invisible walls liberally. I used to not like it but there is something to appreciate about hard coding “there is nothing here for you ever”. The other thing it does is hide a lot of ugly that is even more immersion breaking than the invisible wall itself. A lot of terrain items are hollow and open on the backside and so when you build a map’s terrain it naturally concludes opened up on the outside. Invisible walls makes it unnecessary to fill that in to look right, saving time.

ANet’s devs love their invisible walls. It got especially bad when gliding in Central Tyria became active. Some maps aren’t so bad but others like Frostgorge Sound that they are especially bad in. There are areas where there is sufficient terrain blocks yet the put invisible walls in place so you can’t even go up to the rock wall that would block you anyway. I can think of a couple of places where they are kind of obstructions.

I guess invisible walls are better than those horrible death walls on the HoT maps. Hit them and your dead.

What I would do instead of invisible walls and death walls is fear walls. When a player ventures to close to the edge of the maps it would give the player a message about some horrible sound and the character runs from it with a fear condition. If they don’t want players gliding out of the map then just put no gliding zones around the map borders.

Another thing they could do is if a player was good enough to break out of the map they could just have them hit a portal wall that drops them on the next map in roughly the same location they should be on that map if there is one in that direction. That would give more of an illusion of a continuous world.

The only zone that I remember has lots of invisible walls is Fireheart Rise. I’ve never had an issue with walls in any other zone in the game

A few months I got stuck on a ledge in Dessa Plateau, I want to say it in the southern region of the spider nest cavern, but I don’t recall exactly. I was on the outside legdge and had glided/gliding in from the west I believe, I could see the ground below, but couldn’t glide or jump off that ledgw.

When I first started playing the game, sometime in 2012, I got stuck in Kessex Hills behind Barnaby’s Watch POI trying to jump (not glide) up the rock wall there. I haven’t tried that again since, but with gliding now I’ll have to test to see if the wall or whatever object that stuck me at the time is still there.

Tekoneiric.6817:

ANet’s devs love their invisible walls.

You bet! but do we love them? ;p

Tekoneiric.6817:

Another thing they could do is if a player was good enough to break out of the map they could just have them hit a portal wall that drops them on the next map in roughly the same location they should be on that map if there is one in that direction. That would give more of an illusion of a continuous world.

Great idea! Yeah, the same as it is solved in Rata Sum if you glide too low/close to the base of the city! That would really give an impression of continuous world more than just rubbing your face into something you cannot even see ;]

Avelione.6075:

Great idea! Yeah, the same as it is solved in Rata Sum if you glide too low/close to the base of the city! That would really give an impression of continuous world more than just rubbing your face into something you cannot even see ;]

The Rata Sum thing is funny but I really wish they would just allow players to explore that lower area of the city. There are too many maps with areas that aren’t reachable and some only reachable in a story instance unless you map breakout. There is a large cave on Silverwastes that is part of the story instance for LWS2 and on Dry Top there is the area from LWS2 that is only part of the story instance. There is also a huge cavern like gap under the NE part of the map that could easily be built out into something playable. I’ve wondered if they have some sort of polygon limit on the engine.

Imagine if GW2 had some sort of player generated map system like older first person shooters. I loved the map editing/building capability on Unreal and the first Red Faction. ANet could do player linked maps as part of the Fractals or players could generate a portal scroll to send to friends in the game. They could be linked to guilds halls too.

So you’re upset that there are invisible walls when trying to glide over a mountain, for example?

So, 99.9% of this game you don’t or wouldn’t normally be trying to break out of the map. Each map is its own instance, it’s not one continuous map separated by physical boundaries like mountains, and crossing said mountains puts you in that map. It’s just not like that. Each map is it’s own personal instance. If you’re wondering what the invisible wall is, it’s something along the lines of valve’s source sdk’s Player Clip. A good example is the picture of the fence in that link. You wouldn’t want players getting caught on every little nook and sharp edge of the fence. So the map creator placed a “player clip” aka invisible wall over the entire fence making it one smooth texture for the player to run into. More frustrating than ‘breaking immersion’ is when you’re trying to tactically retreat in a first person shooter and getting caught on the edge of a sharp brush. Between zones there is probably a large player clip preventing the player from falling out of the zone. Sure, it’s ‘immersion breaking’, but it stops you from falling out of the map and potentially crashing the client.

tl;dr invisible walls are there for a reason.

UnitedChaos.8364:

So you’re upset that there are invisible walls when trying to glide over a mountain, for example?

So, 99.9% of this game you don’t or wouldn’t normally be trying to break out of the map. Each map is its own instance, it’s not one continuous map separated by physical boundaries like mountains, and crossing said mountains puts you in that map. It’s just not like that. Each map is it’s own personal instance. If you’re wondering what the invisible wall is, it’s something along the lines of valve’s source sdk’s Player Clip. A good example is the picture of the fence in that link. You wouldn’t want players getting caught on every little nook and sharp edge of the fence. So the map creator placed a “player clip” aka invisible wall over the entire fence making it one smooth texture for the player to run into. More frustrating than ‘breaking immersion’ is when you’re trying to tactically retreat in a first person shooter and getting caught on the edge of a sharp brush. Between zones there is probably a large player clip preventing the player from falling out of the zone. Sure, it’s ‘immersion breaking’, but it stops you from falling out of the map and potentially crashing the client.

tl;dr invisible walls are there for a reason.

Yes, we know that it’s map based instances and not one continuous world. The point of the original post was that invisible walls breaks immersion; the illusion that you are in a seamless world.

There are plenty of games that don’t use invisible walls. They place the collision boundary at the texture point. There are plenty of creative ways to avoid invisible walls and still keep the player confined to the map. Invisible walls are a sloppy way of blocking players.

I’d love for GW2 to have fewer invisible walls too. I love to break maps and see what’s behind the limits of where we’re “allowed” to go. Jumping over ledges, or gliding to strategic places is fun for many. but finding invisible walls after a long time getting to a place, feels cheap.

Eh, compared to a fair amount of other games, GW2 isn’t so bad with its Walls. Try BnS some time, the walls there are terrible.