Guild Wars 2

I very rarely post in these forums, but I have begun lurking more frequently so forgive me or delete if it has been asked before, but I have a question about gliders. Will they be usable only in the new maps, or will we be able to deploy them in all of the maps currently available?

new maps would break old ones

Linken.6345:

new maps would break old ones

Welp, that doesn’t answer my question in the least, but thanks for playing…

Kenji.6031:

Linken.6345:

new maps would break old ones

Welp, that doesn’t answer my question in the least, but thanks for playing…

What I think Linken was trying to say is that gliders will only be available in the new maps because being able to use the gliders in the old maps would break those old maps. Although Anet did say that this will be the case for now implying that there is a chance it might change in the future (though I don’t think that’s likely).

the new maps have been designed with gliders in mind. current maps have not been designed with gliders in mind.

im going to have to use World Of Warcraft as an example here. purely because it relates to this subject.

in the expansion cataclysim they remade the entire “old world” content. this allowed them to add flying to the “old world”.
now the “old world” was made for vanilla wow and all the maps was designed to be seen from the ground looking up. with the exception of the flight path system. u took a set route over the world that was designed for that.
so because all the zones was made to be seen from the group up they was not full fleshed out maps.

example. during the public test server for the cataclysm patch there was a bug that let players fly in the old world on our flying mounts. after we reached a certain height we hit the sky box (this gives the visual affects for the sky) and we could see how the map was made. unfinished and only the visible sides was created. the rest was just empty textureless low res landscape, or empty holes in the world.

TL:DR

the current zones are not designed for gliders and does not support them in both map textures or map engie physics to synergise with the glider system.

the new zone is a vertical map instead of being a horizontal map (curse shore, silver wastes etc), the new WvW maps are also a vertical map (it goes up and has high ledges / forts, normal WvW maps are spread out over larger land masses).