Guild Wars 2

This has been bugging me for a while now, how did tyria as a whole become nearly covered in mountains that are conveniently box shaped, surely there were better ways of separating zones from each other? This may be mainly be my nostalgia talking but i really don’t remember any of these mountain ranges in guild wars.

Most zones in GW1 had those mountains too, but at different places. It’s just Anet’s way of fencing in the zones, in lore, those hills don’t exist.

Obviously the ‘Earth Element’ in Guild Wars leans towards rectangular/square shapes.

Consider the fact that Asura’s draw out the arcane power in stone, unsurprisingly their design is almost always square shaped.

Melandru is the Goddess of Earth and Stone and is said to have terraformed much of the planet. So can we really consider it a coincidences that these mountains have formed distinct, rectangular shapes around much of Tyria? I think not.

All those Eles, man. They have an affinity for squares.

This didn’t start bothing me until I began to do Map Completion.

Now, I can barely open my map without cringing haha.

Its all part of the Asura’s long term plans for world domination. They secretly have shifted the landscape into boxy shapes because it give the landscape a stronger geomagical matrix.

I agree that it can be a bit jarring on occasion. But I really can’t think of a decent alternative. You could have non square shaped zones, but that would actually get very very confusing.

Those aren’t mountains, they’re spiky hills.

When the world was changing the tectonic plates underneath was moving and they all crashed into each other, which created that “square” spiky hills you see.

BuddhaKeks.4857:

Most zones in GW1 had those mountains too, but at different places. It’s just Anet’s way of fencing in the zones, in lore, those hills don’t exist.

This.

Alternative explanation: Primordus did it.

At least Anet was good enough to make use of the Great Northern Wall by having that as a zone boundary for three zones.

From an immersion point of view this bother me greatly, and they could have avoided it more. You can have plateaus with a guaranteed death drop as a zone border for example, or large lakes with the “strong current” solutionswe have in the oceans. using the mountains method in almost every case is a lazy solution. Since they went that way though they could at least havve made some mountains broader to have some non-square zones. I hope this aspect of world design improves in the future.

As a tangent to this, does anyone feel lost shores doesnt look right on the map? The isle is just too big and oddly colored to look like it belongs there.

I dunno. I think a lake with a strong enough current to prevent me from crossing it when I could clearly see the other side would be more immersion breaking than a mountain in the way.

And the death drop thing wouldn’t work as a zone border. The point is to funnel people into the portals to go from zone to zone. If you have a cliff, you can hop down, die, use an Orb of Rez, and then… what? There’s no portal and no more zone. Invisible wall time?

I’ve thought of the whole deathdrops thing too, but the issue with that comes from the revive orbs. Folks have used them in Rata Sum to explore the supposed-to-be-unexplorable areas beneath the cube (falling off the cube, landing on ground, using orb at right time to revive self).

And even then, with all the exploits there already are via dropping or jumping up ledges, you can bet that will be exploited – though pointless it may be, generally.

Plus, it’ll just be changing a large hill/small mountain for a canyon. Wouldn’t that be equally immersion breaking?

As to the lake bit with strong current – go to Drakkars Spurs in Frostgorge Sound, you get strong current in the north with land right there feet from you. Or in Southsun Cove, go towards Morgan’s Spiral in Caledon – ocean current. Between Sparkfy Fen and Straits of Devastation there’s a water gap – ocean current.

What would be preferable would be larger portals between zones, rather than narrow passage ways. Or maybe more structures to block passages – like how they use the Great Northern Wall, or Vigil Keep.

I honestly don’t know why they don’t just let us cross from one zone to another at any point, and just hit us with a load screen when we’ve gone a few feet into the next map. Just have the borders of the map display a little shimmering fog that serves as a warning; “here be loading screen! turn back if ye are still working on the map you’re in!”.

I don’t know enough about game design to know if that’s possible. Or feasible, I suppose. Portals seem easy, since you enter it, loading screen, then you’re loaded in one location – the other side of the portal. Where you entered Portal A is meaningless, you’re always loaded in the same position at Portal B.

But if you do it that way, DaMunky, you’d have to have the game track exactly where they exited the zone to have them loaded in the exact same spot in the other zone. Seems like it’d require more resources.

As a computer programmer myself, I can tell you this would be pretty easy to do, from a technical standpoint. All they do is put invisible fences in a certain distance from where the map ends, and when you pass by those they load the next map. They are already doing this for Personal Story instances. The only difference is they’d be loading a new map as opposed to the-one-you’re-already-in-with-different-parameters.

As for tracking what point you were when you left the previous zone, that’s just a single number in the system. (Doesn’t even need to be a full x,y coordinate, since they know one of your coordinates is equal to the border of the map.)

The REAL reason they are using all these mountains is they want a greater degree of control as far as choke points and routing players along predetermined paths goes. But it’s definitely a game design issue, not a technical limitation issue.

At any rate, my personal feelings are they could have taken a more open approach to designing the map.