Guild Wars 2

The new city looks decent. But now it looks like any city in any other game. When I first entered Divinity’s Reach, I wandered around in it for an hour. I never saw another city in an online game that was as intricate, beautiful, and 3-dimensional. It’s hard to describe the feeling, but DR was so robust and filled with life (people, sounds, etc…), it was hard to take in all at once.

I was expecting more with Lion’s Arch., This was Arenanet’s chance to one-up Divinity’s Reach and blow the gaming world away again.

So here’s what you do:
Scarlett comes back from the beyond, she trashes the place again. And this time, we get a Lion’s Arch so “over the top” that it appears in non-gaming news articles.

How about a chance to visit vendors in GW1 pre-searing and buy GW1 gear…and maybe stuff from Nicholas the Traveler?

Apologies Kaimick, I misunderstood your point.

A couple of people are close to the way the hunts worked. It didn’t matter if you knew a spot, you had to have that particular treasure map (instance of it) with you to dig.

And to the guy dissing UO, realize that not everyone necessarily shares your taste. I have never found another game with as much to do as UO.

One of my favorite parts of Ultima Online was the implementation of treasure hunts. The hunts were so much fun in UO that they took on a life of their own.

I won’t go into too much detail but the basic idea is that monsters sometimes dropped treasure maps. These maps had to be read by someone with a sufficient Cartography skill.

Then the person would travel to the picture they saw on the map and start digging. Digging required a sufficient mining skill or you would never find the exact spot on the ground.

Once the person found the exact spot a treasure chest would pop up and some monsters would appear to defend the chest. Again, the level of the monsters depended on the level of the chest.

To open the chest, someone had to have the lock-picking skill of the required level.

The chests had money, jewels, weapons, and armor of random quality.

The cool thing about the treasure maps is the secondary market it created. I created a character with all of the required treasure-hunting skills and I spent months maxxing out the skills. Not everyone wanted to do that so people would pay me to read their maps for them, or they would pay me to pick the lock on the chests for them. Some people simply sold their unread maps to others who took a chance on what they would find.

Can we get something like this?

The biggest reason the dragons don’t roam the countryside is a technical limitation:

Traditionally, developers “lock” their rendering code to a minimum frame rate (let’s say 33 frames/sec) to guarantee that everyone gets the same play experience with different machines. This is why large characters and monsters seem to animate slower than small ones; they have to use a predetermined formula that adjusts the rendering speed based on the size of the object, so that they always “know” the minimum frame rate.

To achieve this, a particular frame can be discarded from your graphics card’s renderer if your machine is falling behind the server’s instruction to render the next frame. Fast machines will do “extra” processing, or process an additional frame making it look smoother. This is how different machines see the same minimum frame rate.

Now the problem. The most expensive operations for a graphics card in terms of time and memory usage, is the culling and removal of hidden surfaces as well as the management of the textures used to display a player’s gear while they run around. This is because every player has different gear and textures that have to be stored and moved in memory from one place called a back-buffer to another place called a rendering surface. If everyone had 1 piece of gear with 1 texture then that would be great. Then the renderer only needs to keep 1 copy of the mesh and texture in memory and simply spit out transformed copies to the correct x,y, and z locations.

If something as massive as Claw of Jormag suddenly moved and there were 50 people on the other side of him, your machine would have to suddenly retrieve and render meshes and textures for all of these new objects and your frame rate would drop to something stupid, like 1 frame/sec, because the card has to get the list of textures and meshes, their x,y and z coordinates, then present that to the rendering surface, wait for the CPU to check the state of the other variables tracked during the game, then, push all of that location data out to everyone in real time.

This is compounded by the fact that those 50 people are moving in front of, and behind one another too, making more instructions to cull unseen surfaces. Remember, the server also has to continually talk with the client to update the data about the game and send updates back to everyone in real time. This has to be done on top of rendering what you see. Graphics data is not sent across the Internet, just the instruction to render it, but it is still a very resource intensive process when one server has to do this for everyone on the server in real time.

Sorry for the long explanation, but that is why you aren’t going to see a big dragon running around, unless they are in an instance, like personal story mode, because then the game only has to account for a handful of people.

One final observation. I have noticed that parts of the dragons move as I described, like the main body, but that the wings move fast. I believe they are animating the smaller parts of the dragons as separate objects so that they appear to move quickly, which is quite clever. If you pay close attention to Claw of Jormag when he is shot down, the wingless blob that flies through the air is not the same blob he turns into when he gets up; they are using a low-polygon mesh to send him through the air and presenting a detailed one for the final stage of the fight.