Guild Wars 2

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I have been active in these forums for a while helping to give feedback on items that I think are lacking. However after some time you keep repeating yourself in many threads on the symptoms of some underlaying problems.

Anet recently ask for feedback so I will give my feedback in this way and hope they will try to look at this with an open mind.
Even if it turns out they will do nothing with this advise I am happy knowing I did participate in these forums doing my duty reporting what in my eyes where the problems.

So in order to stop (or at least lower) participating in all those threads I decided to make 3 threads that all have one of the underlaying problems I think are the reason for all the problems we see in the game.

These problems result into many things (like gold-grind and so on) but in the end mainly boils down to frustrating (like making people rage) and boring game-play.

For me most problems seem to come from the following 3 underlaying problems:

1 A focus on micro-transaction / cash shop / gem-store to generate the main income in stead of for example focusing on regular expansions as a main source for income.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/A-focus-on-micro-transactions/first#post3316908

2 Wanting to do thinks different as other MMO’s simply for the sake of doing it different and even being stubborn about it, having a sort of tunnel vision towards the current sometimes flawed solution in stead of also looking at proven working solutions.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Problem-of-being-different-for-the-sake-of-it/first#post3316917

3 A so called quick-and-dirty (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick-and-dirty) way of doing (developing) things.

This thread will be about the quick-and-dirty way of doing things. It’s useful to read the term on wiki to get an idea of what I am talking about but basically it’s going for the easy solution in favor of the harder but better solution.

Let me also state that quick-and-dirty is not always perse bad. The name sounds very negative but in reality every developer uses it one in a while. The problem is when a quick-and-dirty is not being improved later or and when it becomes the way of doing things.

There are many aspects in the game where this way of working is really noticeable.

Think about invisible walls. Personally I hate them. It’s like developers cheating. Same for non-existing objects (so objects without collision-detection). They are in many ways game breaking and simply annoying when you try to jump somewhere but it’s not possible because there is an invisible wall in the way or the item you jump on is not really there making you fall to your death.

They also take you right out of the immersion of the game. However when you as game-designer want to close of an area they is the harder way, make sure nobody can get there by making the ground higher of putting a fence in the way and so on, and there is a easy way. Just throw in an invisible wall and be done with it.

Another example can be the instanced based maps. Once again, it takes away a lot from the game. No walking into a new zone, something that tents to really stick to your memory. No a loading screen and then being thrown in a new instance. Suddenly you party members get’s black in the party screen and it simply does make the world not feel like a really big open world. Because it isn’t.
Now some people say.. well I love the fact that you don’t need to get into a que before getting into a game but that they have overflows and you need instanced maps for that.

That is however not true. It would be more complicated (for example, you should know in what ‘overflow’ you are from the surrounding maps).. so the instanced map is the easy solution. But even with one big open world you can have overflows depending on the map.

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Last example, making bosses harder by increasing the HP in stead of improving the AI.

Something that almost always comes with the quick-and-dirty method is that fixing bugs or changing things will be much harder. That might partly explains why many bugs take so long to solve and when solving you suddenly see some new strange bugs come in.

An example of this mechanism can be shown using SAB. When SAB was released one of the developers (don’t have a link) told something about the development. One of the things was that they had to use a lot of ‘tricks’ to make it work. For example when falling you get into combat (bad design imo) and so slow down. If designed very good you should easily be able to turn this of. However apparently it’s really embedded deep in the code because when they made SAB they could not turn it off in stead they had to implement a speed-boost to you when you got into combat from falling. (People noticed that.)

However now imagine that at some point Anet does indeed decides to change that in the core. Then they forget about SAB and suddenly there is a new bug in SAB where you speed up after a fall. It’s this sort of problems you will see later.

Many of the bugs or ‘strange’ behavior might be related to this.

Why for example is it still not possible to clear an area but do the mobs keep spawning way to fast? Something thats almost everywhere in the game and should be an easy fix. Or is this also not as an easy fix as it should be? (I don’t know)

Some for enemies getting out of combat in the middle of a fight and not getting back in combat when hitting them but first running back to there spawn-place.

Even the fact that mini’s are always standing in one place when you are not moving might be related to the quick-and-dirty development.

It also concerns many elements that make the world feel less free and more controlling. Making a system more dynamic, free and open is harder then closing everything off because the last results in less unexpected behaviour you also have to deal with. The way you tame pets is an example of this (not dynamic meaning you might also tame beast the developers did not planned on you taming but also less free) just as invisible walls obviously. I am sure more people somehow did feel this games seem less free then some other mmo’s.

Devata.6589:

Think about invisible walls. Personally I hate them. It’s like developers cheating. Same for non-existing objects (so object without collision-detection). They are in many ways game breaking and simply annoying when you try to jump somewhere but it’s not possible because there is an invisible wall in the way or the item you jump on is not really there making you fall to your death.

They also take you right out of the immersion of the game. However when you as game-designer want to close of an area they is the harder way, make sure nobody can get there by making the ground higher of putting a fence in the way and so on, and there is a easy way. Just throw in an invisible wall and be done with it.

I think invisible walls are a good thing. Otherwise big steep hills would be everywhere and that would look awful. And if you just dont implement something to go behind maps everyone would think “man, thats ugly”. So i dont think you can really call this quick and dirty. Rather its just the best solution.

One thing i agree with you however is the AI. With new bosses they dont use high Hp that much anymore, but just introduce some complicated mechanic. At first this seems hard, but in the end it will always result in the same tactics aslong as the AI remains as bad.
For example: Why are ranged enemies never trying to get out of meleerange and never evade AoEs? Why have some npc the ability to dodge, but dodge randomly instead of dodging big attacks? They are not human, use that fact. The AI is also one of the reasons no roles exist. If NPCs would start evading and moving more intelligently control would be a new key role in order to be able to dmg them. This would also make support better, as killing and stacking would be less effective and now supports are needed to survive.
AI is a Key Problem in GW2 right now and i hope they will fix it someday. It would massivly improve the game!

One the idea of invisible walls, I don’t think of them so much as an easy answer to the problem of getting to places you’re not supposed to be. Honestly, I think they’re a necessity, and most if not all games use them… some more than others.

I also think the zone instancing is fine as it is. It eases the load on servers, and there’s a nice break to let you know that you have exited one level of area and entered another.

As far as the AI goes, I also can’t think of a game that didn’t use the “more HPs to make bosses more difficult.” AI (artificial intelligence) is just that… artificial. There would be no way to write code complex enough to allow a game-controlled creature to act even half as intelligent as a player-controlled creature. There are too many variables with which to deal. They can add a few parts to make them feel more sentient, but in the end, it almost has to be more hit points. Like I said, it’s too many factors.

Kaireno.3824:

Devata.6589:

Think about invisible walls. Personally I hate them. It’s like developers cheating. Same for non-existing objects (so object without collision-detection). They are in many ways game breaking and simply annoying when you try to jump somewhere but it’s not possible because there is an invisible wall in the way or the item you jump on is not really there making you fall to your death.

They also take you right out of the immersion of the game. However when you as game-designer want to close of an area they is the harder way, make sure nobody can get there by making the ground higher of putting a fence in the way and so on, and there is a easy way. Just throw in an invisible wall and be done with it.

I think invisible walls are a good thing. Otherwise big steep hills would be everywhere and that would look awful. And if you just dont implement something to go behind maps everyone would think “man, thats ugly”. So i dont think you can really call this quick and dirty. Rather its just the best solution.

If invisible walls would only be there on the edges of the map I could agree partly but thats not the case. They are on many many more places.

Why would I then only partly agree. Because like I said in the post, not making an real open world but instanced maps is also part of quick and dirty. When you would work with an real open world then not every map would have an edge and so need an invisible wall. Of course, even one big open world has outer edges (4) and yes in that case, and only in that case I would say they are okey to place at those outer edges.

But it’s really the fact that they are being used so much that I refer to it as ‘quick and dirty’. “Oow somebody should not get there. Then we put an invisible wall before it.” Easy solution but nut a real neat solution.

TChalla.7146:

One the idea of invisible walls, I don’t think of them so much as an easy answer to the problem of getting to places you’re not supposed to be. Honestly, I think they’re a necessity, and most if not all games use them… some more than others.

I also think the zone instancing is fine as it is. It eases the load on servers, and there’s a nice break to let you know that you have exited one level of area and entered another.

Yeah and if you would use the invisible walls to only close off the outer edges of the maps thats fine. It’s the fact that they are being used so extremely much. Like you say, some games use it more and some less (some pretty much, not at all). GW2 uses it a lot.

Not sure how a zone eases the load on servers a lot. It really depends on the implementation and you are the first person I see that calls it “a nice break”. I really miss it, it takes away a huge part of the immersion. Like I did try to explain in my first post. Most memories (like locations / exploration) I have from other MMO’s is when you walk from one area to another. Now that part is a loading screen remembering you again you are not in some fantasy world but in a game. But it’s good to know some people see it as a nice break.

Problem with better AI is the logical choice for an AI boss who is outnumbered 50 to 1 is to run away. And as funny it would be the first time to see a boss being chased by 50 players across the map to his lair, if he succeeds getting there and unspawning you end up with 50 ticked off players wanting loot.

Now if it’s a group of intelligent critters, I don’t expect this from say Dolyaks, to use squad cover/retreat tactics or attempt to encircle or flank a player or small group of players. That would be impressive. Except you do realize you need to multiply the CPU cost of executing that AI across all current encounters and that may result in the need to amp up the server’s CPU power requirements. That’s why scripted attacks, simple state machines and large hit point pools are generally used in their place. Those require trivial amounts of CPU power and still provide a “challenging” encounter.

I can’t say I’ve ever found an invisible wall in this game. Steep inclines, death inducing drops and Asura force fields yes, but a straight up invisible wall (well at sea yes and you can’t throw yourself off the pale tree). And some cases of invisible walls in games are simply used to keep players from repeatedly dying due to their own ineptitude of using the controls.

As for a zone free world. That’s not all that easy to accomplish. Most MMO development tools assume that each “area” can be walled off so an instance of that area can run inside it’s own dedicated server. This isn’t a nice single player RPG where you can have that kind of open world because there isn’t anyone still in the area you are leaving from. Also the large load times in this game is a result of their choice in making the world as beautiful and complex as it is. Thus needing a dump of the previous zone 3D data and a fetch of the zone 3D data you are entering. There was no need to standardize on trees, shrubs, rocks, ect. between adjacent areas of the world. Each lead artist for that zone could start from scratch and craft a truly unique landscape. Sure NPC critters are pretty fixed with a pallet shift between certain areas but the landscape in the Shiverpeak Mountains is very different than what you find on the plains of Ascalon. So big data dump followed by a long disk intensive load of new zone data.

Behellagh.1468:

Problem with better AI is the logical choice for an AI boss who is outnumbered 50 to 1 is to run away. And as funny it would be the first time to see a boss being chased by 50 players across the map to his lair, if he succeeds getting there and unspawning you end up with 50 ticked off players wanting loot.

Now if it’s a group of intelligent critters, I don’t expect this from say Dolyaks, to use squad cover/retreat tactics or attempt to encircle or flank a player or small group of players. That would be impressive. Except you do realize you need to multiply the CPU cost of executing that AI across all current encounters and that may result in the need to amp up the server’s CPU power requirements. That’s why scripted attacks, simple state machines and large hit point pools are generally used in their place. Those require trivial amounts of CPU power and still provide a “challenging” encounter.

I can’t say I’ve ever found an invisible wall in this game. Steep inclines, death inducing drops and Asura force fields yes, but a straight up invisible wall (well at sea yes and you can’t throw yourself off the pale tree). And some cases of invisible walls in games are simply used to keep players from repeatedly dying due to their own ineptitude of using the controls.

As for a zone free world. That’s not all that easy to accomplish. Most MMO development tools assume that each “area” can be walled off so an instance of that area can run inside it’s own dedicated server. This isn’t a nice single player RPG where you can have that kind of open world because there isn’t anyone still in the area you are leaving from. Also the large load times in this game is a result of their choice in making the world as beautiful and complex as it is. Thus needing a dump of the previous zone 3D data and a fetch of the zone 3D data you are entering. There was no need to standardize on trees, shrubs, rocks, ect. between adjacent areas of the world. Each lead artist for that zone could start from scratch and craft a truly unique landscape. Sure NPC critters are pretty fixed with a pallet shift between certain areas but the landscape in the Shiverpeak Mountains is very different than what you find on the plains of Ascalon. So big data dump followed by a long disk intensive load of new zone data.

Not sure how you did not notice all the invisible walls. I see them a lot but I am a person who like to jump on everything. If you always stay to the path you might not see them so much. Maybe thats the difference. But trust me there are a lot of them

About the other things. Yes they are hard. I never said it would be easy. Quick and Dirty means you go for the easy solution in stead of the harder but better solution.

Besides you act like if only single player games have an open world. Most MMO’s these days (and for the last + 10 years) have open worlds. You then simply load in an area surrounding your location and when moving you dub something that gets further away and load in something that gets closer. Difference now is that you load in the whole map at one time while with the other mechanic (I think it’s named streaming) you are loading in constantly in the background. Meaning you only have to load if you would portal to a completely new area but for as long as you just moving along you would never see an loading screen also if you move from one area to the next.

Devata.6589:

Something that almost always come with the quick-and-dirty method is that fixing bugs or changing thinks will be much harder. That might partly explains why many bugs take so long to solve and when solving you suddenly see some new strange bugs come in.

An example of this mechanism can be shown using SAB. When SAB was released one of the developers (don’t have a link) told something about the development. One of the thinks was that they had to use a lot of ‘tricks’ to make it work. For example when falling you get into combat (bad design imo) and so slow down. If designed very good you should easily be able to turn this of. However apparently it’s really embedded deep in the code because when they made SAB they could not turn it off in stead they had to implement a speed-boost to you when you got into combat from falling. (People noticed that.)

I think you’re confusing “quick and dirty” with evolving requirements. SAB was a new thing that probably wasn’t in the original design requirements. So, yeah there’s some kludgy stuff that you have to do to bend an existing architecture to handle something new that you didn’t anticipate, but that doesn’t mean the design was bad.

There is a point in every software’s design when you have to make the decision to either making it really flexible and extensible, or just get it done. I’m terrible at software design because I can’t stop abstracting my object hierarchy until I have a class named “Universe” at the root, and then start thinking about whether that’s really a singleton or not…

In my development world, quick and dirty means churning. You tried to get something fixed really quickly, but it didn’t work and 16 iterations later you would have been better off taking longer and just doing it right in the first place. I don’t see that happening in GW2. Almost all of the changes have been really thoughtful in my opinion, with plenty of consideration given to how changes impact other parts of a really complex piece of software.

Just look at the revamp of the magic find system. They took MF off off of gear, figured out how to fairly adjust the existing gear, and added in a system for boosting your account wide magic find that turned previously worthless items into something of value. I was impressed that such a major change was possible in the time frame they did it in – to me that speaks to a really well thought out architecture.

Devata.6589:

Another example can be the instanced based maps. Once again, it takes way a lot from the game. No walking into a new zone, something that tents to really stick to your memory. No a loading screen and then being thrown in a new instance. Suddenly you party members get black in the party screen and it simply does make the world not feel like a really big open world. Because it isn’t.
Now some people say.. well I love the fact that you don’t need to get into a que before getting into a game but that they have overflows and you need instanced maps for that.

This is also not an example of “quick and dirty”. This is a technical design trade-off. I modded a game called Dungeon Siege and one of the really cool things Gas Powered Games did is come up with a way of defining their maps so that there were no loading screens. It was super cool – until you wanted to teleport somewhere. It was unbelievably complicated to get that working correctly. It was also really hard to transition the lighting of different areas in a smooth way.

Just because you would have preferred a different design decision be made, doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the design decision that was made. It’s really hard as an end user to really understand all of the trade-offs that caused a particular decision to be made because sometimes you have to have a deep understanding of how all the other systems impacted by that decision work. It’s not always obvious by looking at the surface of things.

Pandemoniac.4739:

Devata.6589:

Something that almost always come with the quick-and-dirty method is that fixing bugs or changing thinks will be much harder. That might partly explains why many bugs take so long to solve and when solving you suddenly see some new strange bugs come in.

An example of this mechanism can be shown using SAB. When SAB was released one of the developers (don’t have a link) told something about the development. One of the thinks was that they had to use a lot of ‘tricks’ to make it work. For example when falling you get into combat (bad design imo) and so slow down. If designed very good you should easily be able to turn this of. However apparently it’s really embedded deep in the code because when they made SAB they could not turn it off in stead they had to implement a speed-boost to you when you got into combat from falling. (People noticed that.)

I think you’re confusing “quick and dirty” with evolving requirements. SAB was a new thing that probably wasn’t in the original design requirements. So, yeah there’s some kludgy stuff that you have to do to bend an existing architecture to handle something new that you didn’t anticipate, but that doesn’t mean the design was bad.

There is a point in every software’s design when you have to make the decision to either making it really flexible and extensible, or just get it done. I’m terrible at software design because I can’t stop abstracting my object hierarchy until I have a class named “Universe” at the root, and then start thinking about whether that’s really a singleton or not…

In my development world, quick and dirty means churning. You tried to get something fixed really quickly, but it didn’t work and 16 iterations later you would have been better off taking longer and just doing it right in the first place. I don’t see that happening in GW2. Almost all of the changes have been really thoughtful in my opinion, with plenty of consideration given to how changes impact other parts of a really complex piece of software.

Just look at the revamp of the magic find system. They took MF off off of gear, figured out how to fairly adjust the existing gear, and added in a system for boosting your account wide magic find that turned previously worthless items into something of value. I was impressed that such a major change was possible in the time frame they did it in – to me that speaks to a really well thought out architecture.

You can make a system that is very flexible and extensible. I use the SAB example because it did show something about there core that you normally can’t see. In this case how hard it was (well not really possible at all) to just turn of the fact that you start walking slower when taking fall damage / when in combat. That shows the system is not very flexible. Yes SAB was a new thing that probably wasn’t in the original design requirements. But so is every bug and that means so are many bug-fixes or other changes. The more flexible the easier to change thinks you did not original design.

Yeah I have the same and what I am saying here is that they did not took it far enough.

Where did you see difficulties with the MF change? They removed a stat (variable change) then added a function to it (that part I see as a bugger change but in the end it’s till just adding an function to a class) and made it account-bound (variable change). Then they added a stat to the account (variable). Personally I don’t see where a non-flexible system would be a problem there but I might be missing something.

Anyway, I think we do understand each other just the difference is that imo they did not go far enough with there flexible and in your opinion they did. If we take the example of the core.

Pandemoniac.4739:

Devata.6589:

Another example can be the instanced based maps. Once again, it takes way a lot from the game. No walking into a new zone, something that tents to really stick to your memory. No a loading screen and then being thrown in a new instance. Suddenly you party members get black in the party screen and it simply does make the world not feel like a really big open world. Because it isn’t.
Now some people say.. well I love the fact that you don’t need to get into a que before getting into a game but that they have overflows and you need instanced maps for that.

This is also not an example of “quick and dirty”. This is a technical design trade-off. I modded a game called Dungeon Siege and one of the really cool things Gas Powered Games did is come up with a way of defining their maps so that there were no loading screens. It was super cool – until you wanted to teleport somewhere. It was unbelievably complicated to get that working correctly. It was also really hard to transition the lighting of different areas in a smooth way.

Just because you would have preferred a different design decision be made, doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the design decision that was made. It’s really hard as an end user to really understand all of the trade-offs that caused a particular decision to be made because sometimes you have to have a deep understanding of how all the other systems impacted by that decision work. It’s not always obvious by looking at the surface of things.

It’s for sure a design trade-off or better a design choice but if you go for the ‘easy’ solution then it gets close to quick and dirty imo. But you are correct. The open world vs instanced zones is the weakest example because you could indeed also see it as just an design choice.

What Gas Powered Games did was then also to much based on one idea. Many mmos with an open world do have some form of teleportation so they always allow both systems to work. I think we both agree thats harder then only make one of the two work. So when you only build 1 thats the ‘easy’ solution.

But you are right, it is the weakest example because indeed you could see it as just a design choice.

Devata.6589:

It’s for sure a design trade-off or better a design choice but if you go for the ‘easy’ solution then it gets close to quick and dirty imo.

I’m probably getting a little pedantic, but just because it is a popular design doesn’t mean it’s an easy solution.

I think what it comes down to is that your vision for the perfect MMO is different from the developer’s vision and when you talk about something in theory, your vision doesn’t have to get compromised by conflicting requirements.

Maybe ANet would have liked to have a continuous world, but it was more important to be able to patch the game on the fly so that they didn’t need scheduled maintenance day. Maybe putting you into combat when you take falling damage wasn’t their first choice, but separating falling damage from other types of damage was time consuming and added a bunch of risky code so someone decided that the value added wasn’t worth the effort.

It’s not really fair to criticise the quality of the design without understanding more about why the developers made the decisions they made. From my perspective and compared to other games I pre-ordered and played at launch, the underlying architecture of GW2 is solid.

As someone who has been involved as a developer on some very complex systems (although not games), I know that as an end user of other developer’s software that I only see the tip of the iceberg. Something that might be easy if it was designed the way I would have designed it, could be incredibly difficult in someone else’s design. That doesn’t make my design better in all aspects though – it just means we had different requirements or different priorities.

I would like to add something to the idea that there are games that have an actual fully ‘open world’ … There is NO game that has this! Absolutely none that I know off! Not even single player ones…

What there is though, is carefully crafted ways, to hide that you cross a boundary. And if your computer is somewhat oldish, you will almost always notice where this happens due to even the slightest hiccup or lag spike. (and yes my computer tends to lack behind as my financial situation does too) …

Does this mean that making the game ‘load screen gated’ is the Q&D way of doing things? I don’t know … What I do know is that the ‘open world lie’ uses a lot of Q&D solutions to make you think that you are in an open entirely open world.

They use low quality textures and a lot of recycling of these textures to reduce loading times by as much as possible, they use ‘sub sections’ which are basically really tiny maps that load ultimately fast and a trigger in this space to start loading up the next big area (like caves, or mountain tops, or small valleys, etc.). While you are in this tiny map you feel like you are in the ‘open’ world, but you are not, and once you pass 1/3 in the programming will assume you will move on, dumps the previous assets and starts loading the map you are about to enter.

So which is the Q&D here? I am not sure, but I am sure that truly open world games are a big myth. And it’s basically a design decision to do it one way or the other, which then has implications for the rest of your game. (as reply 1 to this issue explained a bit more about as to how this choice pans out for GW2)

In that regards, I think in any place that there is a hidden wall they at least tried to fix it in a way that you don’t hurt your nose. This is most obvious in water maps, where a current will push you back. In other places it’s usually steep hills, obvious gates or other things.

And for the maps being instances they are (in my views) very well designed and of very high visual standard. As opposed to some of the ‘truly open world’ (cough) worlds I been on…

The AI is somewhat agree upon, it seems as though every creature is controlled by the same AI and displays the same behaviour. I personally hope they will have a chance to diversify this, as it feels like a clear programming feature that could benefit a lot more games than just GW2.

And in this regard I am looking more at NCSoft in general. Having a large database of AI for creature behaviour could benefit all games made by NCSoft, and reduce the workload of any game in this respect, even if it were just as a point of reference/solutions for entirely new programming…

Another place I sometimes feel Q&D is used, is in the Store items. I elaborated on that in the thread you made about that, in the example of the hairstyles.

I view just putting those in the Store is a Q&D solution, where as creating a barbershop and having people change their hair for gold, to ‘then’ add the hairstyles as an unlock to the barbershop in the store would have been the better solution, and more value adding to the game as a whole.

Some other features in this regard (aka store items) seem to have this same feel to them, to me at least…

So Q&D, yes in some areas, but in general I think Anet strives for a high quality in their game and thus Q&D isn’t always on the front of their solutions. In my views of course

Arghore.8340:

I would like to add something to the idea that there are games that have an actual fully ‘open world’ … There is NO game that has this! Absolutely none that I know off! Not even single player ones…

What there is though, is carefully crafted ways, to hide that you cross a boundary. And if your computer is somewhat oldish, you will almost always notice where this happens due to even the slightest hiccup or lag spike. (and yes my computer tends to lack behind as my financial situation does too) …

Does this mean that making the game ‘load screen gated’ is the Q&D way of doing things? I don’t know … What I do know is that the ‘open world lie’ uses a lot of Q&D solutions to make you think that you are in an open entirely open world.

They use low quality textures and a lot of recycling of these textures to reduce loading times by as much as possible, they use ‘sub sections’ which are basically really tiny maps that load ultimately fast and a trigger in this space to start loading up the next big area (like caves, or mountain tops, or small valleys, etc.). While you are in this tiny map you feel like you are in the ‘open’ world, but you are not, and once you pass 1/3 in the programming will assume you will move on, dumps the previous assets and starts loading the map you are about to enter.

So which is the Q&D here? I am not sure, but I am sure that truly open world games are a big myth. And it’s basically a design decision to do it one way or the other, which then has implications for the rest of your game. (as reply 1 to this issue explained a bit more about as to how this choice pans out for GW2)

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In that regards, I think in any place that there is a hidden wall they at least tried to fix it in a way that you don’t hurt your nose. This is most obvious in water maps, where a current will push you back. In other places it’s usually steep hills, obvious gates or other things.

And for the maps being instances they are (in my views) very well designed and of very high visual standard. As opposed to some of the ‘truly open world’ (cough) worlds I been on…

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snap

Of course it is not really an open world, but then again it’s not really a world. I am of course talking about the way it is presented to you. Indeed there will no game where the whole world will be loaded into your ramm at once. But you do understand what I am referring to. It giving you the feel of an open world, no portals at the edge of a map with loading screens and so on.

All those portals and loading screens are just not very immersing and I still feel like an easier way out.

About the invisible walls not being in your face. I have to disagree. Now I am a person that always jumps up everything I see. I guess that if you stay on the road you are less likely yo run into one however I even know some invisible walls in such locations. I also like to jump over railings and then it turns out there is an invisible wall and the invisible walls runs longer then the railing does meaning there is indeed an invisible wall where you do hurt your nose.

I at some point started recording invisible walls and visible non-existing object (object without hit-detection) because I did run in to them so often. A quick brouwse in my video files shows that I already recorded about 70 of those (Most of them recorded in a period of 2 months playing). And I did not went and search them to record them. It are just invisible walls I happed to run into.
Something simple as a well (first video I did see) has a invisible wall over it. Another is indeed a slope but not a steep slope and I really don’t see and good reason to close of that little area.

I might put all the video’s together at some point and upload it to YouTube but thats a lot of work so we will see. But trust me, there are a lot of invisible walls in places there are not needed at all and it’s very frustrating every time you run into one or fall off an object without hit-detection. Reminds you every time “this is a game” and a game should not remind you of that.