Guild Wars 2

I am having a “discussion” with a friend about “invisible walls” vs “loading screen portals”. He says he understands why there are “invisible walls” in certain areas. He doesn’t get why the Devs haven’t made “loading screen portals” in areas like between Bloodtide Coast and Claw Island. He thinks that he should be able to get to Claw Island from Bloodtide Coast, at any point of the ocean connections where we currently get the “tides pushed you back” text. It should be one huge “loading screen portal”. We also talked about the area outside of The Grove and Southsun Cove. He thinks he should be able to reach The Grove area via Southsun Cove. Or any areas like that. I tried to tell him there isn’t content there, and that there is only one entrance and exit to The Grove. Apparently, when he sees one of these “invisible walls”, he gets kittened it’s not a loading screen.

He is used to games such as the Elder Scrolls series, where it is open world. So I explained the difference between Single Player and MMO games to him. After we got past that, he said he wants to be able to go over mountains (like in Skyrim) if he wants to and should get a “loading screen” once he reaches the other zone. He says he is fine with “loading screens” as long as he can go wherever he wants. He thinks he should be able to do this. He claims it’s simple coding/programming/fill-in-the-blank way to do it. Like a program such as World Edit, where you can make “invisible walls” or make “loading screen portals”. He references YouTube material of people using World Edit on Counter Strike to show how easy it is. He thinks the Devs are just lazy. I tried to explain how it isn’t a big deal and that he is nit-picking (which he denies).

My questions to the Devs are these:

Is it really that simple? Is there a reason that Guild Wars 2 wasn’t designed this way? What would be required to make it this way? Are programs, like World Edit, not compatible with Guild Wars 2? Is there something preventing you from being able to do this? Or is it just not something you feel like doing?

Thanks in advance for taking time to read and/or reply to this, as I know you are all busy with the HoT release.

Firstly it’s not an MMO/Single-player game split. There are numerous single-player games that don’t have an open world and numerous MMOs that do. It’s simply a different way of designing a virtual world, both have pros and cons and different developers make different choices.

Secondly I’m not sure about GW2 specifically but I know in some games this would be extremely difficult to do. The code to ensure a person exists a map at a specific point and ends up at the matching point on an adjacent map can be extremely difficult to get right. It’s not too bad if you’re just matching up a few specific points (and can cheat slightly – I don’t know if you’ve noticed but you always appear on the same spot when you go through a portal – walk through backwards at an angle right on the edge and you’ll appear in the same place as if you ran through the exact middle) but matching every point on the edge of a map to it’s equivalent on another map would be a huge amount of work.

Enabling players to go to areas which don’t currently exist in the game (like the Dominion of Winds between LA, The Grove and Southsun) would be even more work because they’d have to actually build the maps. And being that it’s GW2 and they don’t do big empty areas they’d also have to make events and map completion elements and NPCs and jumping puzzles and everything else to fill that space.

I’d love to be able to explore the entire map, either as a true open-world or as a series of separate maps, but I don’t think we can expect it to happen any time soon, if it ever does.

this would also present the challenge of leveling problems. there would be no ditinction as to whether you were going into a higher area and thus would likely run into higher level mobs and get killed alot. Which brings me to the next issue of trolling, as npc’s can follow you for some distance if you are under level, other higher level players would troll newbs by dragging higher mobs into lower areas. Granted this could be prevented if current boundaries were just turned into big portals i guess.

Probably has to do with how much data is used per zone, where having to load two zones at the same time to facilitate a seamless transition might be too much for their puny and weak 32 bit client architecture.

I know…think it was AoC that had the same set up, but people whines so much they actually integrated a connected world that would load if you say, swam across a lake connecting two zones rather than going to the road portal between areas.

I will say, this game has the longest load screens of any modern game ive played. I really should stick the game on my SSD

The only time I’ve had issues loading a screen is LA, and that’s regularly. I’m assuming it is because of all the people that are usually in it. Aside from that, it’s usually quick loads and I don’t have a loading screen until I waypoint or go into a new area.

It doesn’t have to be seamless, just have a portal to transition into the next area. I couldn’t think of a reason for Anet to do that since they would have to make the whole map for it. It makes sense that it would be a lot of work to make exact spawning locations when you walk through it anywhere. I was just hoping for an easy way to explain it to him that Anet has their reasons. He says he talked to them already, and said that they just said it’d be too much work but didn’t elaborate beyond that. Which led to his “It’s easy, they are just lazy” comment.