Can this work? Fully instanced game, but not really instanced...

Buttermilch

Hey guys (and girls)!

 

I just came up with an idea to make a vast world with a feeling to it being "huge". But in order to make it happen, I'd need every zone to be an instance... let me get into detail with this:

 

The world is based around a map. On this map you'd have all the zones displayed as icons: Citys, danger zones, dungeons, hunting sites and so on. These zones (or icons) are connected to their neighboring zones. So you can travel on this map from zone to zone and decide wether you want to enter the zone you are at or not.

There is just one instance of each zone, so the whole world is live, but doesn't have seemless borders any more like in Ultima Online. Any time you wanted to change the zone, you would need to enter the map (and maybe you had to be at a particular spot on your current zone to be able to enter the map / traveling feature).

I just think you can give players the feeling of a very huge world that ranges over several contintents by this. In addition, you could "close" not-so-important zones and make them invisible when there are just few players online (and thus making the world artificially smaller).

When the game gives out expansions, the devs can add in new zones wherever they want without needing to change the original game.

 

What do you think? Would it break your immersion or is this feature a possibility?

Leucrotta

Tons of mmo's work already like that, Aion for instance, except "closing" a zone which i dont really get what you mean with that.

If a zone isnt important it shouldnt be in the game

Buttermilch

Originally posted by Leucrotta

Tons of mmo's work already like that, Aion for instance, except "closing" a zone which i dont really get what you mean with that.

If a zone isnt important it shouldnt be in the game

Okay.. imagine you had 10 zones in one country of the game, which are just for hunting / adventuring.

If there are few players online, you could shut down half of those zones temporarily down. Players who have quests in a shut down zone might still be able to enter it as long as they have quests in it.

Precusor

I think GW2 will be like that.

Hyanmen

I'm not sure if I understand your point.

So, the point of this system is to make the world flexible as in it would adjust with the number of players online? Is that all there is to it? What is the purpose of making these zones "instances"?

Gajari

Originally posted by Hyanmen

I'm not sure if I understand your point.

So, the point of this system is to make the world flexible as in it would adjust with the number of players online? Is that all there is to it? What is the purpose of making these zones "instances"?

Easier to throw up a message before you zone in saying the area is temporarily unavailable should it be closed down?

More work to close off an area in an open world.... a blockade with guards? Giant goddamn forcefield for no reason? Giant, fast, impossible to kill worm monster that goes around eating people and spitting them into other areas for some reason? The grand caves in and you fall into a magical cannon in the abyss that shoots you out into another area?

All perfect suggestions, btw. Let's do those.

Also instancing is cheaper than open world, so building a game from the ground up to be expecting such a small amount of people you won't be affording any luxuries. 

Buttermilch

Originally posted by Hyanmen

I'm not sure if I understand your point.

So, the point of this system is to make the world flexible as in it would adjust with the number of players online? Is that all there is to it? What is the purpose of making these zones "instances"?

They are not actual instances. Just used the term to better describe that they are stand-alone "maps" with artificial borders.

And yes... the whole system is supposed to provide flexibility. With such a system you could also add random-generated areas for dynamic quests... ;-)

Banlisted

Original Everquest... enough said but  they dont "close" any zones because whats the point of adding them in the first place if your just going to shut them down when people arent on, its supposed to be a "virtual world" taking places out when people arent on doesnt make sense to me.. is it your idea of making travel easier or something by just cutting out a zone for a little while during the day?

Daywolf

Sure it has merit, good points and bad.

Good point is you could balance your servers better to take up the slack on other more populated servers (dynamic load balance). Of course you will still need a full amount of servers to take care of peek times. I guess you save energy in the end.



Downside is it is not persistent. Each time the area shuts down, it’ll either save the positional data of mobs or just reset them each time. If you have patrolling mobs in the zone, like EQ had lots of those for example, then they would be out of a persistent state; as they were frozen or reset so their path would not be correct if you left and returned five minutes later. In some ways, that could be used as an exploit, I mean if the zone is designed to have a few high level mobs doing long patrols, players could reset them so to know their position and take another rout to their destination. Most likely it would be a reset, I think restarting the zone would be quicker than loading saved data, but depends.



And of course expect to have long load waits, servers don’t restart/switch and initiate data so quickly. 

Not saying it’s bad, but it does have downsides, especially the load times.

I’d rather be forced to run through the zones, myself Makes the world seem much bigger.