Guild Wars 2

So, geographically, most dungeons make sense. The Ruined City of Arah has some minor problems between story mode and explorable, Honor of the Waves is slightly bigger than it should… But overall, all of them are fine.

Except Twilight Arbor.

Since the first time I got into that place, I’ve tried to reason that, somehow, the entire place was underground. The light above? Er, light-emitting plants or just holes to the surface!

The entrance doesn’t match where the dungeon starts, either. Some of the light-holes (like the latest Aetherblade “airport”) match mountain zones in the surface.

What’s your opinion?

Personally, one thing I’ve hated a lot from other games is how dungeons didn’t match the real world, and I would love to see some “holes” indicating Twilight Arbor is underground.

Twilight Arbor. Sorrow’s Embrace, Crucible of Eternity, and Honor of the Winds all don’t properly scale to the world map’s distancing.

SE’s placements for some thing has an opening of snow in the ceiling over a lake in Timberline Falls. CoE should be fully underneath the Infinity Coil Reactor in Mount Maelstrom but the Experiment Green Lab (which should be underneath Zone Green by theory) is beneath the Nonmoa Lake in Timberline. HotW you mentioned.

Twilight Arbor’s the same, really. The internal scaling doesn’t match the external one.

But keep in mind that the world is much better than the open world scaling indicates. It shouldn’t be possible to run from the western edge of Rata Sumto the eastern edge of Fields of Ruin without gates or waypoints in only a couple hours – lorewise. The open world is scaled down – just as it was in GW1, though less so than in GW1 – for reasonable gameplayability.

Those dungeon instances where the internal dungeon is larger than the external dungeon is merely a case of different size scalings.

Side note: those “mountain zones in the surface” probably don’t exist in lore unless there’s something within them. They act as zone borders primarily. Lorewise they don’t exist. Though to explain the Aetherblade airship dock… they have utilized Inquest tech to make holograms over their airship docks. See the Gendarran Fields JP.

Side note 2: What issue is there between Arah story and exp? I don’t recall one.

Still, SE and CoE are underground, so even if they make those “mistakes”, you could say they’re deeper than that. In the case of the light ceiling in SE, well, I forgot about that, but in the end they are small problems.

TA is huge, and there’s no way it could fit in the current map if not underground. It’s not that it doesn’t fit well, it’s that it doesn’t fit at all.

As for Arah, in story mode, when the flying part begins and there’s some giants and whatever, that conflicts with what’s there on explorable mode, but it’s not too big.

The solutions are not worth the effort to fix this problem really. You would be looking at
- vertical dungeons – not good for a skill system working on a horizontal plane
- small dungeons – not fun
- extremely wide open world – a waste of game resources
- dungeons to have as much world map space as cities – more unrealistic than before

The vertical dungeons can work in the game rather well actually. See Honor of the Waves – 3 (iirc) levels stacked on top of each other.

The only explanation you can really only use is that the dungeon and open world space scalings aren’t the same – that there’s more space for TA than you’d think via the open world map, lorewise. It’s a mechanics vs. lore situation, mixed in with some suspension of disbelief.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Twilight Arbor. Sorrow’s Embrace, Crucible of Eternity, and Honor of the Winds all don’t properly scale to the world map’s distancing.

Those dungeon instances where the internal dungeon is larger than the external dungeon is merely a case of different size scalings.
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To get an idea of the scaling, you just have to go to HOTW P2. There you can see the coast, which is really far away. The distance is huge, you wouldn’t get there within seconds, its more likely that it would take you at least 10 minutes to get there.

I disagree. The distance is greater than it is in the overworld, but it still doesn’t look like it’d take more than a minute or so to cross.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

The vertical dungeons can work in the game rather well actually. See Honor of the Waves – 3 (iirc) levels stacked on top of each other.

The only explanation you can really only use is that the dungeon and open world space scalings aren’t the same – that there’s more space for TA than you’d think via the open world map, lorewise. It’s a mechanics vs. lore situation, mixed in with some suspension of disbelief.

I think this is pretty much it.

In Ghosts of Ascalon, for instance, the trip from Ebonhawke to Ascalon was a matter of days despite taking a more direct route than is currently possible for players to take., It also involved relatively little hostile contact except in known areas of extreme danger (such as the Dragonbrand and the city itself). By comparison, if you so chose you could run from Ebonhawke to Ascalon in a matter of minutes, but in so running you’d probably have to dodge attacks by hostile wildlife and sapients on multiple occasions during the run.

The game world has, essentially, compressed what is within a given space – the key locations are there, but closer together than they really are according to the lore, which also, incidentally, means that dangerous animals (especially predators) are found in greater concentrations than you would expect in real life. Dungeons, however, can be expected to be filled with the requisite amount of danger without needing to compress space in that manner, so while the general game world is compressed, the insides of dungeons are probably they actual size these locations are supposed to be.

(It’s been a while, but I think the Queen’s Pavilion was also quite a bit larger on the inside than on the outside…)

Yeah, the Crown Pavilion was indeed larger – about the size of half of DR if not more – than the outside appearance.