Guild Wars 2

This is a bit of a far-aside post. A few friends got Dragon Age this week. I’ve been watching them playing and playing a bit myself. For those that haven’t played, much of what I will describe will be familiar from Guild Wars 1, Dark Age of Camelot, and Everquest in particular.

If you’ve played Guild wars 2 and found yourself wondering why every zone feels a bit like a fishbowl you’ve probably credited to the zone borders on all sides made of massive high walls.
This is immersion breaking, but it’s hard to define why. Sometimes it’s because I just want to get on top of that awesome something. Sometime’s it’s because I could get on top of it, but when I get there I find myself staring at the fishbowl, the walls that make the zone.
After much thinking about it my general conclusion has always been, “It feels cheap.” Guild Wars 1 was somewhat relieved of this problem because water was not able to be swam in, effectively making it a barrier. This allowed a wide range of aesthetic displays using water we rarely see in Guild Wars 2. There was also the lack of jumping, making it possible for a ledge or object to be a barrier as well. Thus, zones were fairly simple and yet incredibly scenic giving how many “enchanted isles” are out there.
“Enchanted Isle” is a concept, by the way. You’ve probably heard of it from college level writing classes. It’s the idea that something able to be viewed, but not reached becomes a thing which invokes and brews imaginations. Tolkien came up with this idea and movies use it constantly. What cannot be approached can be imagined. The imaginations of the viewer (especially a mass audience) will always exceed the limited descriptions of a writer. The same is true in making games. The created world is always more limited than the potential imaginations of its eventual occupants.
For me, I always felt that part of the ‘cheap’ feeling of zone borders was the unwillingness of current generation games (those who don’t have sandbox environments) to admit the zone is over. This wasn’t the case with earlier MMOs. As you approached a zone border you would still see a continuous landscape that would eventually disappear by a mesh object of some sort that imposed an ever deepening ‘fog’. Yet, until the fog grew to dense you’d still see trees and distant things to keep your imagination flowing. The current generation of games, including Skyrim, use this border concept. The imagination hits it… and stops… you’re reminded your in a game. Rather like the giant Tengu wall spanning Caledon Forest.

Dragon Age has finally took innovations, years in limbo, and included all of them in one game. The zone border ends because there you can see that fog line approaching. When you can actually approach the fog your character puts up their hands as if not fighting a hard wind. Eventually they barely move forward at all and you are forced to turn around. In some cases it turns you around on your own.

Psychologically this has the effect of making the world feel ceaseless and vast, but also it makes the game designers feel self-conscious of the technically limitations imposed while cleverly informing us of it through an aesthetic.

Guild Wars 2 uses these innovations only sparingly. We have them in Water regions where going too far delivers a message saying something about strong currents and being turned back. In WoW it is strong winds while flying or (I forget the term, but…) exhaustion while swimming. The innovation for maps in that they are surrounded by more map, convincing the player there really is something more, without destroying immersion with abrupt ‘stops’ in the terrain that shouldn’t be there. To save on resource loads/processing power there’s this wall of fog that blurs out and eventually stops vision from ‘beyond’ the map of the playable area. This informs helps keep immersion continuous while also informing the player, "Yes, we know the world ends there, but we were cleverly masked it without interrupting your immersion.

Within the zone itself you can climb on or delve in to practically anything. If you can’t find a way to ‘jump puzzle’ your way to it then you really can’t go there, but those are rare occurrences. Dry Top started to swing this way, but Silverwastes was mostly fishbowl, stuck on the ground looking up going ‘sigh’. Having that ‘surround’ to the region as Dragon Age did would remove the incentive to have ‘flatworlds’ with very little going on at diverse elevations (like Dry Top) and… I think… really boost the appeal of the game as a whole.

What does anyone else think? Do you think new maps could use this feature?

I believe this is a good idea., I’ve always enjoyed a map more whenever there is the illusion that the map might go on for miles and miles, even though it doesn’t.

Silverwastes does feel like a fishbowl, perhaps more than any other map So does Dry Top, but it manages to avoid it for the most part by being clever, and a canyon. Canyons are boxed in by design. Plus it’s pretty :P

Silverwastes doesn’t have that feeling. It has left me wondering how it will connect to the next maps, if it will at all. From what I can see, it may well not, and forever be just another isolated (wide) pseudo-canyon map, with only one entrance to it through Brisbane. Thus giving it that “fishbowl” feel.

What I would like to see is the illusion of the next map, when we reach a map border. A low rez version in the distance, a tease at faraway lands.

That might bring on the added immersion that you’re talking about.

i completely disagree.. i think queen jennah and her henchmen should put up gates and guards all over tyria and not even let us peak outside.. because y’know, there’s dangerous and dark stuff out there!

seriously though, i think gw2 does a good job with the environments.. i actually lived in a town arranged much like lornar’s pass, two completely parallel mountains.. they do well with the environmental effects too.. i used to trebuchet things in wvw and sometimes a snowstorm would cut down visibility.. not the exact topic we are talking about here but they have options and it’s really just how they want to arrange tyria..

mostly every mmo out there is an amalgamation of things.. some detail their maps better, some are crazy fun and immersive but you can’t even jump.. i died on one today and it ported me to the nearest town, on top of a canyon -__- it would have taken me all day to get down until i realized there was no falling damage..

as i said, i personally don’t mind the layout of tyria.. or did you have something specific in mind? i could also mention mounts and travel how some games will take you quite a distance before a loading screen and you see spectacular views of functioning aspects of the open world.. arena net has nothing even close to this especially outside instances.. maybe the budget and tech will eventually support corrupted dragoons and vast deep sea environments..

’gunna end rant before i make a metroid reference.. having the best battlesuit tech in the galaxy but needing upgrades to -__- get to things.. space planets are rough, likewise.. tyria is kind of a grittier mmo style.. ’imagine’ what a well placed ladder would do to a jumping puzzle, sometimes immersion is what we choose to make of it

“Sometimes immersion is what we choose to make of it.”

Absolutely! It’s most often the case someone saying, “’Imagine’ what a well placed ladder would do to a jumping puzzle,” is just being a snarky kitten. I agree with you on that point Cheshirefox. There’s only just so far to take things.

Mostly I imagine not using the same trick everywhere. And my usual complaint with this game… if has been done before and works, not doing it isn’t novelty. Where I’d disagree is this is about maps, not mounts. A ladder ‘would’ be a heck of a thing if we could do it. “Hehehe, I just cut off twenty minutes of this puzzle! It’s like a portable Mesmer slave only it never complains about having to go ahead of me!”

I’d imagine using this to break up the visible challenge of a single direction with region borders. Right now we have the option of a ‘wall’ that’s almost entirely some sort of terrain. This could really change the game in a beautiful way. The only major limit I could see to doing it is how zone borders are laid out at some meta level. For instance, in some games I’ve modeled in you can’t make a map larger than a certain size (measured in meters). So to make one of these ‘surrounds’ you have to set a physical border (using some visible wall or what have you) many meters short of that. That means cutting down on the overall potential size of your map. To put that in perspective, if Guild Wars 2 has the same limitations then putting up a surround could require cutting off as much as a 1/5th of the overall map from use other than as candy for the eyes.

It’s more of a technology things. They need to divide the maps/players/bandwidth.

If not that they need to cap the maps so players themself wont’ get hit by 0 FPS.

People are always compairing single players game to mmorpg. And many of those great SRPG game company actually made mmorpg. And the same things happened, it get dumped down, because of techonology.

Much simple if everything is run on one computer(SRPG) compare to a network of servers and clients.

I wish there was some way all of these types of comments could be organized in a catalog, titled something like “State of the Art: Games Today”. I agree to some extent. Having played EQ 1, Dark Age of Camelot, or even WoW I’m entirely against the idea of having ‘click the dialog sentence to get more dialog sentence". It’s unnecessary, but this feels like an argument against Pavlov’s Dog. The industry has trained people, “Press buttons to have ‘think’,” and now ‘think’ is gone and everything is just ‘dog’. I don’t like this approach and feel it really is aggression against humanity. I mean that with all my heart. People should not be discarded so, but novelty has not been formulated yet.

You need to consider combat as well as movement in these areas. There could easily be glitches if player movement and enemy movement starts suffering unusual effects. GW2 also has big movement skills that need to be considered as well.

I have never noticed the map shape while actually being in it, you don’t normally have the ability to walk straight over to anywhere in the zone.