Guild Wars 2

Start with two maps, say Queensdale and Kessex (for example) and merge them into a single, seamless map.

Build new things in the area that is currently a ‘divider’ (like new dungeons, mini dungeons, etc.)

Slowly use ‘smudge’ to soften these dividers, so they are not straight lines anymore.

Repeat this process bit by bit until the entire world is a single, seamless map.

Ya cuz that wouldn’t need a whole new game engine to run ~.~.

I don’t understand people that have immersion problems just because the maps are square. Its like they’ve never played any game before, ever.

This is how maps have always been in games, and for good reason.

Say hello to Major Lag for me. I won’t be able to even type in the game if they do something like that, much less use any skills.

Not everyone has wonderful internet. I live out in the country, about 20 miles from the nearest city of 100k people. My connection can drop down to zero bars of 2G or even 1 bar of 1X. My standard good playing connection is 1 or 2 bars of 3G. Having the maps as one giant zone with everyone in there would royally mess up everyone who doesn’t have satellite or 4G.

what could really cause problems is if you train a mob from level 80 areas to a level 65 area lol

classic EQ, the giants.. my god, when one of those got pulled 2 far..it was chaos

unfortunately this isn’t yet possible in current technology, even though there are games that ‘claim’ a seamless world, they are in fact not! They just use clever ways to disguise that they are not, some doing a better job at it than others… f/e:

- WoW, used small gateways or large viewpoints to disguise crossing a loading point, in other places there was basically a big portal…

- Mortal Online, if you have anything but a beast of a computer you will notice lag spikes when you cross from one section to the next, they also use corridors, and while you can see beyond corridors, you can not see players in that corridor ‘on the other side’ of the loading, so they just pop up (same as wow basically)

- Rift, also used mountains to keep maps apart, but they used them to also disguise crossing them, as an ‘far view’ of your surroundings was quickly loaded, it felt like seamless, as far as crossing roads, the same ‘thunnel’ or corridor approach was taken, so that on initial loading you didn’t have to load up a lot of details and models.

All these worlds are said to be ‘seamless’ but they are not, they just disguise where the seems are… And almost any game has to function like that, or normal computers just cant handle them…

Only exceptions, ‘MineCraft’, which uses (from what I can tell) a different technology, as it only renders the world ‘in view’, while keeping the rest to simple coordinates. The low resolution helps there as well to keep resource usage low. Also not a true multiplayer, from what I understand, as in it’s multiplayer there are still limits to what can be handled, so perhaps ‘coop’ game is best to describe it.

The other would be Far Cry, I’m not sure how that handles worlds/maps, but I’m also not sure if it actually has a multi player environment, besides ‘coop’ 30-player or so maps. Also needs a pretty decent computer, just for playing the actual single player game (from memory, might be ok in recent computer terms). But seeing I hardly know this game & engine it’s hard for me to be definitive…

So yeah, while that would be really cool, and Anet could have used a different approach as to handling zone crossing, using this approach they were able to spend more attention to detail elsewhere (as you have to design each zone crossing specifically to create a smooth experience). Also sticking to the way they did it in GW1 sort of gives this GW vibe to it, I certainly don’t mind

Personally I hope the whole MineCraft approach to loading worlds (at least if I understand it right) will eventually make it’s way into MMO design, as loading the world based upon your location in the world makes for a truly open world experience. Seeing that it isn’t yet, might be a bit of a clue as to how hard that is to accomplish when your world consist out of more complicated artefacts than just squares.

Maybe with a quantum computer this would be possible, lol.
I think the reason why we have loading screens and instances is because the hardware isn’t there yet. Sure, some singleplayer games are almost fully open word (like Skyrim), but I don’t think it’s possible to do this with MMO’s at this moment.

As far as actual software engineer time, this suggestion would be literally at the bottom of my list of preferred things to work on. The top?

1. FX slider so I can see all the beautiful art during combats.
2. A fix to the condition issues in large-scale PvE content.

What is the obsession with singular worlds?

Even games that appear to have huge, seamless open worlds actually split them into separate maps and only load they one you’re in. If you’ve ever been playing a game like Skyrim and found it randomly froze for a second as you were going down the road chances are it’s because you crossed between maps and it had to load the new one.

I know of one exception, the Creatures series, which had to have everything in the game running all together for the games core mechanics to function. But even for the time (late 90’s and early 2000’s) they had relatively small maps and could be very resource intensive with lots of characters.

So I think it could be done without causing huge lag problems. The problem is that it probably requires a different game engine and changing the entire engine after a game is released is virtually impossible. It would be a huge amount of work for relatively little benefit.

Hannelore.8153:

I don’t understand people that have immersion problems just because the maps are square. Its like they’ve never played any game before, ever.

This is how maps have always been in games, and for good reason.

I’m one of the people who has a problem with it and part of the reason is because I’ve played other games and therefore seen it handled better. The actual maps are always a cuboid but they use a combination of more ‘wasted’ space around the edges of individual maps with an uneven inside edge and ‘overlapping’ maps to hide it.

Instead of having a perfectly straight north-south mountain range following the real edge of the map they can make a more realistic one that goes slightly diagonally. It means making a corner of the map inaccessible, but if that’s a problem they can make the map on the other side overlap and include that corner in that map.

Dragon Age is a good example of this. Their maps are also built inside cuboid spaces, meaning the absolute boundaries are square. But the space within that which you explore and which appears on your map isn’t and it creates the illusion that they’re more realistic, organically shaped spaces.

Having said that the way I think about it the shape of the terrain and how many noticeable loading screens/transition points they have are two totally separate issues and I’m not sure what the shape of the map has to do with this topic.

@Danikat.8537
He complained about the dividers being “straight lines”. Well not complain, but suggested that it be covered up/obfuscated when merging.

In theory that would indeed improve immersion factor but if the world of Tyria to be one giant room then it would demand a ton of bandwidth just to make sure everything gets loaded. I’d also imagine that there would be constant pop up of environment stuff like trees as you walk forward or something.

poisonality.8972:

what could really cause problems is if you train a mob from level 80 areas to a level 65 area lol

classic EQ, the giants.. my god, when one of those got pulled 2 far..it was chaos

I remember once upon a time in WoW, me and some other alliance pulled the Elite T-Rex from Un’goro Crater all the way to Crossroads (Level 60 was max at the time, so this was eons ago), and it wrecked havoc for a good hour or two before the horde finally killed it and drove us out of the crossroads. It was pretty awesome.

GenoUnknown.7504:

poisonality.8972:

what could really cause problems is if you train a mob from level 80 areas to a level 65 area lol

classic EQ, the giants.. my god, when one of those got pulled 2 far..it was chaos

I remember once upon a time in WoW, me and some other alliance pulled the Elite T-Rex from Un’goro Crater all the way to Crossroads (Level 60 was max at the time, so this was eons ago), and it wrecked havoc for a good hour or two before the horde finally killed it and drove us out of the crossroads. It was pretty awesome.

And everyone has great memories of it happening

This is not a bad thing.

In CO one of the player run dueling tournaments involved pulling a world boss into the desired area so that the players had to contend with the boss as well as their actual opponent. Sorry bout the tangent but the above posts brought it all back.

By the way Skyrim functions like MineCraft. It isn’t actually seamless, merely that seams in the overworld are too far from your character for you to see it. You can change how much you load at any time by changing the GridsToLoad variable.

It’s entirely possible for this to happen in future, but maybe not just yet.

poisonality.8972:

what could really cause problems is if you train a mob from level 80 areas to a level 65 area lol

classic EQ, the giants.. my god, when one of those got pulled 2 far..it was chaos

I remember a friend of mine telling me a story from WoW when they dragged a dragon that spawned in a grove in Dark Shire to the gates of storm wind. I heared it was carnage.

Davey.7029:

Maybe with a quantum computer this would be possible, lol.
I think the reason why we have loading screens and instances is because the hardware isn’t there yet. Sure, some singleplayer games are almost fully open word (like Skyrim), but I don’t think it’s possible to do this with MMO’s at this moment.

Errr… WoW did this 10 years ago. Yes, it was seemless with ‘corridors leading to a new map usually, but at the point of Burning Crusade (2006) they made it possible with flying mounts to cross borders of different maps direclty. You could fly over the whole areas within 10 minutes! And there are other MMOs which use this technology too. They ’hide’ the unloaded areas far behind the viewing distance. With a good computer and max details you usually won’t see that.

Guild Wars has of course much more advanced graphics which makes this harder. But let’s face it: they have even problems to handle just a couple of 100 players in one map while other games have limit caps in the thousands for the huge maps (note: WoW has not even loading screens for their towns like Orgrimmar where usually a hundred an more players are around.

I assume anet decided this to reduce server costs.

It was one of my first let-downs when I first heard that GW2 won’t have seamless maps. It kills immersion. Also different times in differnet maps, different weather etc. There is a lot of work to do. Other games do this much better.

Edit: reading further in this thread I am shocked that many people don’t know that there are MMOs out there doing this. No, there are no lags, no laoding screens and the maps are usually 15 times as big as one GW2 map. Yes, graphics aren’t that good ofc. but most of those MMOs are 5-10 years older.

My first MMO was Lineage 2 .. it also had a world with no loading screens, but i
always had to put down all my graphics settings when i knew i came near the
next town .. else i got a dia-show for the next minutes .. so that was infact the
loading screen

Second MMO (and the one i played the longest) was EQ2 .. it also had loading screens
and Zones had a 100 player maximum, else we got new instances. Personally i never
had a problem with that.

Later .. RIFT worked really great without loading screens and without noticing any
loading times at all .. however i think that something like that will produce a lot of
extra traffic in the background.

In the end for me it would be “nice to have” something like in Rift, but i don’t really
have a problem with the loading screens.

Ahh .. and of course that system wouldn’t work at all with multiple instances of zones
so no Megaserver and also no Overflows.

I’m nut sure why the drive to constantly WoW-ize GW2 with things like non-instanced worlds, world bosses, etc.

Rukh.9287:

I’m nut sure why the drive to constantly WoW-ize GW2 with things like non-instanced worlds, world bosses, etc.

That has really nothing to do with WoW. Lineage 2 for example was released long time
before WoW.

ipan.4356:

GenoUnknown.7504:

poisonality.8972:

what could really cause problems is if you train a mob from level 80 areas to a level 65 area lol

classic EQ, the giants.. my god, when one of those got pulled 2 far..it was chaos

I remember once upon a time in WoW, me and some other alliance pulled the Elite T-Rex from Un’goro Crater all the way to Crossroads (Level 60 was max at the time, so this was eons ago), and it wrecked havoc for a good hour or two before the horde finally killed it and drove us out of the crossroads. It was pretty awesome.

And everyone has great memories of it happening

This is not a bad thing.

They were great memories, but this is Guild Wars 2. I think the instanced maps are fine. Besides, with the Megaserver, I doubt all the maps being converted into a big open world would be any more or less seamless. Megaserver would probably just make it even harder to do and cause more problems than there needs to be.

I honestly don’t think that is possible…altho i would love to have that. The game isn’t built for that. It would mean building it from 0 almost.

I’d like to be able to login and not have to wait 3-months for everything to render thanks. So I vote:

“HELL NO”

The first MMO i played was Silkroad Online. It was released a few months before WoW if i remember correctly. That game had no instanced maps. The whole world was open, except between continents, there was a loading screen. Same with WoW.
Had no effect on lag or anything. So it shouldnt be impossible for ANet to implement this, but like others have mentioned.. it’s probably to reduce costs etc, and i guess instanced maps has its technical advantages. Also, im sure they have higher priorities right now.

A lot of issues stand against this idea.

First you’d have to get rid of the fact that currently for each zone there are multiple instances at the same time. If at a zone border ppl are not transferred to the same instance as you (since it is filled up with players) they’d mysteriously vanish into a different instance – no good. But the instances are there for capacity reasons; I am quite sure there is no easy way out of this problem. I personally don’t want to run around with 1000+ players all doing Tequatl at the same time. It is already too much right now.

Secondly, map completion currently is rewarded per zone. I personally do not want to do without those rewards, so this has to be solved, too.

Third, a lot of other things are currently bound to map completion of a zone, iirc some traits are now. This has to be solved as well.

Fourth, even if the zones were merged they would still consist of rectangular areas reminding of their original design, because the cannot be completely redone. I am also quite sure that there may be alignment problems, since in the current implementation nobody needed to take care of such issues. It is a simple question of effort and reward. How much would it cost to do all this starting at where we are now and how much of that would it pay back?

ugdup.2371:

The first MMO i played was Silkroad Online. It was released a few months before WoW if i remember correctly. That game had no instanced maps. The whole world was open, except between continents, there was a loading screen. Same with WoW.
Had no effect on lag or anything. So it shouldnt be impossible for ANet to implement this, but like others have mentioned.. it’s probably to reduce costs etc, and i guess instanced maps has its technical advantages. Also, im sure they have higher priorities right now.

But is was a teeny tiny map. Also there were loading screens, it just made a stutter-start on your PC.

WoW had loading screens. When you flew – all that underneath the pretty video was a loading screen.

I prefer a singular world too. But it’s too late and too small of an annoyance to worry about.

@ProtoGunner, while I understand your admiration, like I said earlier, some games are just better at hiding their ‘loading’ then others. And yes, WoW did a real good job at this, but! technologically it’s still a bunch of instances glued together and loaded separately… sure there were no ‘loading screens’, but that is because they used really low resource area’s (like a narrow cave system f/e) as a ‘loading screen’, so you didn’t experience that loading (persee) while going through the world.

Also, and some (like those on older computers) may know this about GW2 as well… it does have a render distance. So GW2 is actually more of a hybrid, while it loads a basic map and a lot of information with it, a great deal of the actual stuff in that map are not rendered unless you get close. I personally think this is pretty clever, as it allows the game to run on a really wide spectrum of computers, while offering a decent quality experience on each respected spec. Doing it this way also gives them the opportunity to put resource usage elsewhere, as well as keep their bandwidth and server-resources low, reducing cost for an essentially FtP game…

This is not remotely technically possible.

They COULD use tricks that other games use to simulate this, but they are a “gimick” to make you think the world is continuous when it’s not. Basically passes you thru an hidden ’instanced" area WHILE the next zone loads in the background.

Now I would give much for some variation in the loading screens….