Guild Wars 2

So, I have been thinking recently about how certain content (such as dungeons and WvW) feels like it is lacking something. For a while I thought maybe it is lacking tougher mobs/mechanics in dungeons or lacking more objectives in WvW. And while these things would likely improve those areas of the game, I cannot help feel that even with those things there would still be something missing. And that lacking something, in my opinion, is solid characters.

What I mean by this is players, and NPC’s, not being able to stand inside each other. In other words not being able to occupy the same space. If players and NPCs were made solid, I believe it would improve the game in the following ways:

- It will provide a more natural limit to how many players can be effected by aoe fields, without needing an arbitrary number to limit things.
– It means you cannot get a silly amounts of players all standing on one spot (a totally ludicrous sight in my opinion), which in turn would force other tactics to be developed in WvW and dungeons. Currently the ‘all stack on one spot for might’ tactic beats most content. If players were forced to spread out, this stacking tactic would be reduced in potency and players would have to learn new ways to tackle content. More coordination would be required between groups and it would reduce the effectiveness of blobbing.
– It makes player characters feel more solid, instead of feeling like ghosts. This is only really an aesthetics thing, but I think this change would improve the overall immersion for some, myself included.
– It would naturally limit how many melee attackers can reach and attack a target, as they would have to move around other attackers to get to a free spot that is in range. It would also remove the need to program AI to space out around the player, as they would naturally do this because of the need to path around other mobs. Not only that, but tanky players can use tactics such as body blocking to protect the back line and control the movement of foes.

To me the biggest advantage from this change would be an increase in tactical options, in all game modes. Things like body blocking (which we used to have in GW1) and natural stacking limits (forcing seperate stacking groups, and encouraging parties to form up for different roles and to coordinate more with each other) would increase the challenge and provide more ways to battle each other, and the mobs.

Now I know this suggestion comes with its own problems, such as high resource costs to implement and players griefing others, by blocking them into one spot. However, I feel the pay off would be more than worth it. And regarding the potential griefing, I have seen games resolve this by implementing a kind of squeeze past mechanic, preventing players from blocking each other in.

So, how I think this should work is as follows:

- You can move past other players (visibly), by performing a kind of squeeze past animation. Or perhaps a mutual squeeze past animation both players perform, making it appear like you are both moving out of each others way. In reality the player model moves through the other player, much like it does now but with the below additions. This will prevent players from blocking you in place. Of course, you will not be able to move past enemies, this will only allow you to pass allied characters.
- If the player stops in a spot where there is no room (it is already occupied by another player/NPC), after a very brief pause the player will be moved to the nearest free spot. They can still move past other players, even squeezing into a crowd, but cannot force someone out of their spot. You would still, for example, be able to squeeze past players to get to, and talk to, an NPC, but once you stop you will be moved back to a free spot.
– All talk and ‘keep menu open’ ranges, for all vendors, would need to be increased to prevent crowded locations making it difficult to speak to surrounded vendors. To be honest though, I have not yet seen an NPC surround by so many players that this would be a problem, but it wouldn’t hurt to add this to ensure this doesn’t become a problem.

I understand it would likely take a lot of effort and resources to implement this, especially the animations and the squeeze past mechanic. But I feel the game as a whole would improve because of it, and for that reason I feel it would be worth doing.

Anyway, that’s my suggestion. Let me know what you think. Do you think it would improve the game, or cause too many problems? Do you have a better or simpler suggestion for implementing this? I’d be interested to see what other people think about this.

Right now the way that most MMOs do collisions, and I’m assuming GW2 is no different, is to let your own computer figure out where the walls are based on the level files in your client, and then every so often send a little notification to the server saying “Here is where the player went, is that ok?” and the server goes “Yup, looks legit” or “Nah, I think he’s more over here”. This is why you experience warping when you have lag, that’s the server correcting where you are after not receiving updates for a while.

This is a very good system because it allows you to have mostly lag free and highly responsive movement that isn’t impacted by your latency, all while keeping the amount of network traffic required extremely low. The issue is that once you add collisions with other players this doesn’t work anymore, because your client can’t check whether or not you’ve run into another player until after the server has told you where that other player is. Your collision now depends on the verification process of all other players in the game, which means that anyone’s lag is now your problem. Even if nobody lags the fact that the server has to talk back and forth between people to make the collisions happen instead of just giving an occasional thumbs up to what you’re doing and showing an approximation of that on other peoples screens means a huge amount more network traffic. In a game without collisions you’d never even notice if the character you’re looking at does everything half a second later than the actual player inputs the actions, in a game with collisions however that kind of delay would immediately cause issues.

So in short, there are very specific technical reasons why characters don’t have collisions that unfortunately override any concerns on whether or not it would be mechanically beneficial to the game.