Guild Wars 2

Zietlogik.6208:

Is there a chance that there will be a graphical update in the future to change the ways some of the weather effects and lighting work?

Currently they are 2 things that seems very “locked-in” and not dynamic, in a world that is supposed to feel alive.

It will be raining here, but not there, weather never really changes, and when it does it seems to be limited to either a light rain, or no rain.

And lighting just seems awkward all in all, there are no real sunset or sunrise settings unless they are in areas where the entire sky changes suddenly to be that way (near Shadow Behemoth for example)

Shadows do not extend or retract based on where the sun / light sources are, the colors never change when the sun sets and rises (there is no orange, or other color hues)

it more or less goes from dark, into light, back into dark. And the dark isn’t dark, it is just grey, a bright grey during the night in most areas.

I don’t know these types of little things just bother me when I notice them so easily.

I TOTALY AGREE WITH YOU! And I hope one of the devs will see this post. This has been bothering me quite a lot as well! Seasons may be too much to ask in the first place, but for the sun to move over the sky, from morning to evening, and also move the shadows from trees, houses, us players etc..
This will help the game feel more realistic and like “a living world” as they inteded this game to be. I find it so easy to get bored while playing with the same weather and atmosphere.

I’ve also realised that the skies on the sky is just a flat image floating over us, and not a circular image (that the world is inside of) like in other games.
I also think they should increase the draw distance for us with more powerful machines. They already have made it good for lower end machines. If they just create less and boring zerging content, they may not need to tweak down bits in these environments everytime, which makes it easier for them to create more “good looking content”.

Now we know that Mordremoth is the new villain and is probably lockated near Maguuma/Magus Falls. I’m just trying to picture how these areas will look like. What kind of atmospheres it will have, how wide the landscape will be, and what kind of creatures will live there.
For me, environments play a big factor in a game; graphics, lightning-effects, environment sound effects, etc.

Up until now we have mostly got medium sized areas that are boarded with mountains. This looks wierd for me, and I don’t think I am the only one either. But I believe Guild Wars 2’s engine works that way, that they cannot have to wide areas loaded in “one world”, as we can call it. Each area in Gw2 are in seperate worlds. You can see this by doing map breaking, for instance Mount Maelstrom (which I find one of the easiest ones to mapbreak). If you stand on top of these boarding mountains, you can see that there is nothing on the other side of the border, though the map shows Timberline Falls.
This is probably done like this to prevent the servers from being unstable. Although there are a lot of MMOs that have an open world. World of Warcraft and Lotro for instance, and I believe that Gw2’s engine can handle bigger areas than the ones we have now, especially areas with less environment objects, like trees.

If we’re getting new permanent areas like the ones we have now, it is of course most likely that most of them are going to be thick jungles with less mountains and viewpoints where we can see landscapes from kilometers away. Although if we get the Maguuma Wastes, which has less trees and environment objects, maybe the engine can handle these areas to have a larger area than the other locations. This would also require an increased draw distance for us to see everything far away in the distance.

Since the thick jungle areas probably cannot be that big, I’m at least hoping that they do not make them rectangular like every other map, and instead make them more realistic with circular and bent boarders, etc…

I find it kind of difficult to describe, but how do you wish the upcoming areas to look like?