In WOW you can take your personal flying mount and can fly all over every Azeroth continent (that's 10 to 20 zones) without EVER seeing a loading screens.
I can land with my mount on ANY mountain top on any City roof on that continent without ever seeing a loading screen.
That's called true 3D design without fake 2 D borders PER ZONE and BACKGROUND loading in a seamless world.
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It is wonderful to prepare your raid on Ogrimmar while you see the enemy capitol at your feet lying 100 meters deep under you ... It is impressive and an example of how seamless open worlds should function in real mmorpg's ... in the FUTURE.
However you turn it... ONLY having "loading graphics screens" to access every zone you need to go to is cheap and rather lazy programming.
Hopping through portals and loading screens as the ONLY way to advance in a world is just proof that GW2 is subpar to what we have in WOW already for years now.
Stop denying.
To do that you have to have low graphics, cartoonish graphics. WoW will run on almost any crap system. You are going to have some zoning, in a game world as graphically well drawn as this. At least until hardware and software tech increase dramatically. Personally I love how LotRO looks in comparison to WoW or most any other game world out there. That said any large group of players together causes even a high end systems graphics frame rates to drop rather fast.
So basically if you want what your talking about with the graphics of say AoC, LotrO, Rift or GWII, you are going to have to wait a long time for the tech to catch up. Otherwise you will have to deal with zoning, which is indeed different from instancing. B asically you can't have WoW like load in the back ground zoning without having to deal with lower end graphical resource limitations that WoW is at this time.
Someone talked about the old muds, one thing that you do have to consider is that even the big ones like Simutronics Gemstone III/IV and Dragonrealms did "have" zoning. Also a lot of "load on" demand resource code work as well. So while they could and did deal with upwards of 2,000 to 3,000 characters in the game world(server equivalent), if a few hundred were all in one location, you did get command lag. Hell the old days of Gemstone III running on the GEnie servers before they bought their own first servers would be amusing when we got over 100 players in the game. It would or could at times become like molasses, the only thing you could do is chat, game commands pretty much stopped. End of history lesson on that subject.
To be fair, I haven't been able to delve much into it. But at least the system seems ripe to make people work together and form an economy. It's honestly though, the least interesting part of the beta for me.
Will crafting and or gathering be required to make any kind of money in this game? Will we be dependent on crafters for the best gear or will they just offer options from the stuff that can drop as well?
I hate crafting, but so many games make it a requirement in order to either make money or get decent gear that never seems to drop otherwise.
probably not. Crafted gear is the same as dungeon/karma/pvp gear. it just looks different. So you can do whatever you want and get best gear in game. But if you want a specific look you will have to do specific activities. There is cookikng which I doubt will be mandatory.
Ps. If some people zones bother THAT much then you can stick to WoW. gW2 won;t remove zones. This is the truth and no amount of complaining will change that.
You guys spent "copious amounts of time" on this game and still couldn't come up with 5 points of decent criticism? Seriously?
2 out your 5 criticism aren't even actually beta comments, 2 of them are extremely vague and the 5th one is teleporting which is pretty much the only valid point.
You've gotta stop with this softball bullshit and hire some people who will actually write CRITICISM about the games - good & bad. We have enough fanbois on here, we need some journalism.
"Id rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
- Raph Koster
Tried: AO,EQ,EQ2,DAoC,SWG,AA,SB,HZ,CoX,PS,GA,TR,IV,GnH,EVE, PP,DnL,WAR,MxO,SWG,FE,VG,AoC,DDO,LoTRO,Rift,TOR,Aion,Tera,TSW,GW2,DCUO,CO,STO Favourites: AO,SWG,EVE,TR,LoTRO,TSW,EQ2, Firefall Currently Playing: ESO
You've gotta stop with this softball bullshit and hire some people who will actually write CRITICISM about the games - good & bad. We have enough fanbois on here, we need some journalism.
Ever think what they wrote was the only criticism(s) they had?
Only "other" type of writer you are looking for is someone biased.
Someone who comes out and says "I don't like level based Themepark games, but they asked me to play and write about GW2 so...."
Indeed, the entire numbers of criticisms across the entire internet from people who played are nitpicks about WvW, Crafting isn't as innovative as the rest of the game (so it's only 'just better' than any other game) and that performance isn't all that optimised yet, but is still more than playable and most importantly, very very pretty. It's not like ToR where it runs like crap and looks like it too.
Seriously, when they're the biggest criticisms (remember ToR had seeping implied criticisms of 'it's WoW again') are those, GW2 is going to be the closest to perfect this genre has seen.
So yeah... there are Asuran Gates in Cties (for a nominal fee) & map travel between Waypoints - once you've disco'd them. There's even "Call of the Hero" type travel available for players to quickly join Guildmates or groups elsewhere. And Tyria does have zones.... Huge event-filled zones with content, aggro mobs, & pitfalls aplenty!
Fast Travel options are in game for Player convenience, but nothing to stop someone from hoofiing it across three zones if they choose... other than time! My own personal view is that true immersion is not simply the lack of zones in an MMO, it's the quality & challenge of what is actually in each zone that counts to me! GW2 promises to have loads of both anywhere ya go.
Not arsed about the state of crafting either - Crafters will be able to produce marketable goods from the gitgo, and even be able to disco new items during the crafting process. Even if crafting is a bit ho-hum atm, I'm glad Anet's Devs concentrated their efforts in creating the world and game in such a fashion that their efforts resulted in so many gaming site reporters/analysts simply could not find serious flaws or negatives to talk about!!
Really? The only thing they could come up with? They're professionals, I highly doubt that.
Imagine if our political correspondents could only come up with, "The presiden'ts suit was gray and purchased at JC Penney's. Not bad, but we'd have wanted to see him in blue. Meanwhile his opponents had frothy mochas at Starbucks if you can believe that!" And the publics response to that was, "Maybe those are the only relevant political topics they could come up with."
Is it really so threatening to cricitcally discuss an upcoming releases strengths *and* weaknesses? Why do we so strongly reject that sort of examination?
As I wrote this article, I really couldn't. There wasn't anything that seemed bad beyond what I mentioned here. It'll take a whole lot longer than this weekend to find the game's holes. Now, two days later, I'm ruminating on some more shortcomings: one of which is the downed/death mechanic and it's potential annoyances... but ANet is already fixing my problems with it if their blog is true.
In short, the kind of stuff I've found so far to be cirtical about is so minor I can't even put it to words. Stuff like, "I don't like some of the tails or horns on Charr" seemed not worth noting to me. Instead I focused on the game as a whole, and so far... there's just very little not to like. Give it time though, I'm sure as we play more and delve further into such a massive game, we'll find pieces that don't work.
Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
Really? The only thing they could come up with? They're professionals, I highly doubt that.
Imagine if our political correspondents could only come up with, "The presiden'ts suit was gray and purchased at JC Penney's. Not bad, but we'd have wanted to see him in blue. Meanwhile his opponents had frothy mochas at Starbucks if you can believe that!" And the publics response to that was, "Maybe those are the only relevant political topics they could come up with."
Is it really so threatening to cricitcally discuss an upcoming releases strengths *and* weaknesses? Why do we so strongly reject that sort of examination?
As I wrote this article, I really couldn't. There wasn't anything that seemed bad beyond what I mentioned here. It'll take a whole lot longer than this weekend to find the game's holes. Now, two days later, I'm ruminating on some more shortcomings: one of which is the downed/death mechanic and it's potential annoyances... but ANet is already fixing my problems with it if their blog is true.
In short, the kind of stuff I've found so far to be cirtical about is so minor I can't even put it to words. Stuff like, "I don't like some of the tails or horns on Charr" seemed not worth noting to me. Instead I focused on the game as a whole, and so far... there's just very little not to like. Give it time though, I'm sure as we play more and delve further into such a massive game, we'll find pieces that don't work.
Exactly.
And besides, political correspondents do actually come up with that kind of cr*p because they don't have any integrity.
I don't think the writers at MMORPG.com are lacking in integrity.
I don’t regard the original Guild Wars as a true massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Connecting instanced adventuring areas together via persistent staging areas seems more like a standard online game with graphical meeting areas replacing text-based multiplayer lobbies. It’s a great game, no doubt; it just didn’t fit the formula.Guild Wars 2 does. It’s a large, persistent world with hundreds of characters running about all at once, killing things, fulfilling quest objects, and discovering what’s happened to Tyria in the 250 years since the original game.
It's good that they're digging up old game mechanics like RvR and pretending they're new, but why did they have to stick with instant teleports and instances? If they're trying to make a world sim thats the best way to ruin it.
The only criticism I can think of comes from the more "meta-MMO" perspective, and it's very slight and particular.
Solo farming appears to be hampered by game design. This is probably intentional, although it's still disappointing (to me.) The way this game's mechanics work (side-kicking and downgrading characters to match the content level) will be prohibitive toward solo "farming" lower-level content, whether that be for materials or income or just for "esses" and "gees." That's part of the fun of crafting - figuring out where the best resources might be and gathering materials. I'm thinking of my days sharding blues and purples in WoW.
Secondly, using the same observation, soloing dungeons will be nigh impossible if one is automatically downscaled to the content level. This was another favorite pasttime of mine: "rare item" farming and such.
I'm wondering why is it that only blizzard can make a truly seemless world? For me, this was one of the most impressive parts of WoW, that you could go from one end of the world to another without zoning once. Why is it that more games don't also do this?
It's not truly seamless, evidenced by the fact that you go to a loadscreen if you get teleported any significant distance. It's just that the loading of resources is very well done, and those resources are teeny-tiny now, given the age of the game and the speed of modern machines.
If you're talking about wow, there's no loading screen throughout the whole of kalimdor or eastern kingdom except instances. If a game 7 years ago can do it, I really wonder what's wrong with the games now.
At this rate daoc did it in 01. There ya go. Its a design choice.
IS there a need to make one zone conected to the other... I think some of the reason is immersion. You have to design another 3rd enviroment for the transistion from the ... wooded zone temprate to the sub tropical one that is a bit of both. Or you can just glue them together all odd like. (a lot of effort for a little benefit.) Some people favor it. I personally feel they should have connected them. ITs pretty simpleto do.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
I'm wondering why is it that only blizzard can make a truly seemless world? For me, this was one of the most impressive parts of WoW, that you could go from one end of the world to another without zoning once. Why is it that more games don't also do this?
It's not truly seamless, evidenced by the fact that you go to a loadscreen if you get teleported any significant distance. It's just that the loading of resources is very well done, and those resources are teeny-tiny now, given the age of the game and the speed of modern machines.
If you're talking about wow, there's no loading screen throughout the whole of kalimdor or eastern kingdom except instances. If a game 7 years ago can do it, I really wonder what's wrong with the games now.
At this rate daoc did it in 01. There ya go. Its a design choice. IS there a need to make one zone conected to the other... I think some of the reason is immersion. You have to design another 3rd enviroment for the transistion from the ... wooded zone temprate to the sub tropical one that is a bit of both. Or you can just glue them together all odd like. (a lot of effort for a little benefit.) Some people favor it. I personally feel they should have connected them. ITs pretty simpleto do.
It's not that simple. The game engine and server engine really have to be designed from the ground up to support this kind of dynamic transition. Obviously, Guild Wars programmers decided their time and effort were better spent elsewhere and I happen to agree.
The first few times you go from zone to zone, you will go through this transition. in WoW, that means going through a tunnel or flying the connected routes. After that, since the game has teleports, you are almost NEVER going to travel between zones through a transition area, you are going to be teleporting around very quickly. So it's a lot of work to develop the tech to support smooth zone transitions for the one or two times players actually make use of them.
Since teleports were a design feature, and since the game makes heavy use of them any way, doing this extra work doesn't really seem worth it to me.
And teleports as a design feature, as with other things like instant mail, no tagged critters and automatic participation in quests, all emphasize gameplay over immersion*. They may seem a bit funny from a world standpoint, but help players get into and out of gameplay faster. It's what GW2 is about. As someone who really prefers immersion I still can see the value in the choices they made her.
Zones just make more sense here for the game they are creating from a technical and design standpoint. They can control the population and dynamic events much easier when the zones are walled in, and with teleports instead of freeform mounts as the primary fast travel mechanism, players wouldn't be seeing those smooth transitions between zones often anyway.
*(I suppose the non tagged mobs help immersion and gameplay, but the main reason they were added was not for the purpose of enhancing immersion)
What does all this whinning about immersion have to do with PvP? Because thats what GW2 is centered on.
If your a player who likes those kinds of games, then your in the wrong place, simple as that. If your one of those players expecting EVERY game to cater to your style, then you see a therapist and possibly get a catscan.
I've had to wait years for an MMO like this, why harras us?
You dont see me on the TERA forums explaining over and over again how Im not going to play that game, its very immature. If your not going to play, and you cant stand the mechanics, then why repeat yourselves?
I completely agree with people's disdane for zoning. I hate it. I don't care if the zone itself is bigger than the entire world of Azeroth, I love the feel of a seamless world. In DAoC, you could literally point your character in one direction and go until you hit a mountain or the end of the world. It made it feel like a true world and not some fancy cubby hole system where you are supposed to level from 1-10 here, 11-20 here, 21-30 here, and then you go, okay, nice. I pretty much finished that zone and no need to ever go back. Now, on to the next zone. Yes, I get it. In a seamless world mobs get harder as you leave the starting areas but that still feels better than checking off each zone as I progress in levels.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still buying the game. And I know more than a seamless world, you need content and innovation to keep me hooked. Rift was a seamless world and that game only held my attention for 2 weeks. One thing I will say is my favorite MMO of all time is DAoC and even DAoC did not have open world PvP. In your home world you could not be attacked. It was not until you left the safety there and headed into the Frontiers that you could PvP. With the exception of the best dungeon ever, Darkness Falls. So, GW2 is a lot like that in that your "open world" pvp is in a huge "frontier" if you please. You can PvE there and PvP there just like DAoC.
I do get why they do the zones from a technical stand point, I just hate it.
It's not really "instanced". It's a HUGE freaking world. But you do have to "zone" to go from one map to the next.
how about that loading time between those zones??......2 seconds, 5 seconds, 30 seconds, 2hours? how is that....in SWTOR you dont even feel most zoning, you just walk in and BAM.....thats it.
If i have to wait 2 minutes between zones i would get bored realy fast tough.
The bad: Horrid overuse of partical effects in the gaming world. Click to target interface.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
I know you have to find some bads but let's be honest, your bads are not of comparable quality.
5) Not being able to play in the Asura area is a "closed Beta limitation". Open beta will still come.
4) Also, teleport is only good. What's the point of traveling in a game if you have seen it already for a few times? It's a waste of time and players don't like it. Arenanet has done its homework. Besides, like you say it is a good game to play different characters, so this makes my point even stronger.
3) What do you expect, fast travel without loading? Even airplanes take time to land .
2) I'm not playing World of Tradeskills, I'm playing a storyline. Crafting is actually quite bad in an rpg, it doesn't belong there in a vast environment (does a hero craft much of its own stuff? Not at all.). Crafting somehow got assumed to be important but it really isn't.
2) I'm not playing World of Tradeskills, I'm playing a storyline. Crafting is actually quite bad in an rpg, it doesn't belong there in a vast environment (does a hero craft much of its own stuff? Not at all.). Crafting somehow got assumed to be important but it really isn't.
Wow, really? Ok you might want to reconsider what an immersive game world is all about. A vibrant market and crafting system are indeed a part of that. Crafting, shop and home ownership, guilds, guild buildings, systems that support all those are indeed important. They are not important to you, doesn't mean squat and your assumptiion that they aren't important is a flawed one. Quite bad? Ouch, your whole statement boggles my mind. Words fail me really on how I can break down your statement.
I want to say that maybe you are the one playing the wrong genre of gaming, but even that is too simple of a statement. Ah well, I can just hope that your mind set doesn't become the majority mindset on what makes a good mmo-rpg. To many bad tweaks have come down the pipe line in the last few years from players who should be playing "other" genre of gaming that have effected the mmo-rpg genre badly.
Does tab-targetting do a blind three-sixty round robin, or does it do something more intuitive to the human animal like the frontal conal view prioritized by distance?
Just great more zones, and numbered zones, and jumping and seeignl oad screens. This is what was awful about GW1, bloody destoyed AOC, and now this so called next gen mmo has to have zoned copys of areas. While GW2 does look absolutely fantastic, this a negative for me, and I was really hoping they were not going to go this route. Sorry if anyone disagrees, but this absolutely destroys any actually postive for me. There are alot of postives doubt, but a huge huge negative is the numbered and zones areas.
Like somone said this is why world of warcraft feels amazing, no zoned areas, people in areas all together. This is why for me even nearly 10 years on it feels more of a world than any game for me. Yeha there might be alot of emphasis on going to citys atm, but where ever you want you can meet peopel, and not have to keep woundering where people are etc I dont want have to be zoning every time, and loading acreens galore to go to areas of the world all the time.
Personally, I don't find the zoning in GW1 too offensive. Would I rather have a seamless world? Sure. But it's not so objectionable it's a game breaker given the size of GW1 zones and the stuff to do/discover there.
That's not what "destroyed AoC". What destroyed AoC was being flat out unfinished in key infrastructure areas such as Mail, Auction House, 1/2 finished crafting, too many quests bugged. And yes, there were problems at times with proper zoning, but not between map areas as I recall, but rather syncing up to party member instances within a zone (e.g. there were multiple instances of a given zone running, so when you formed a party you'd all have to sync to the same instance of it).
Also note WoW makes / made some minor use of instancing when WoTLK released. Remember the one quest in Northrend (forget name) where Tyrion Fordring was in that base-camp? Auto-instanced players based on if they'd done that quest or not. If you had, the landscape was changed, if you hadn't it was the pre-battle setup for the mission. You'd see peeps on your radar as dots, right next to you, but not visible to you . . . . different instance. The point here is that instancing provides options for manipulation of content presentation to an entire population of players who may all be at different stages of progression.
Note I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your instinctive touch/feel assessment of a seamless world. I prefer that as well and played WoW for five years, LOTRO for two. AoC for a bit. Several others. But I've found I don't object to the zoned approach as much as I thought I would. At least to the point it's not a game breaker.
I thought I remember something being said about GW2 not being 100% zoned like GW1. That there was some areas, or area that's common and seamless? Apologies, vague recollection here. Anyone have a quick cliff-notes version description of the world / city structure? What's zoned, what's not?
Comments
Does the PC version support gamepads?
To do that you have to have low graphics, cartoonish graphics. WoW will run on almost any crap system. You are going to have some zoning, in a game world as graphically well drawn as this. At least until hardware and software tech increase dramatically. Personally I love how LotRO looks in comparison to WoW or most any other game world out there. That said any large group of players together causes even a high end systems graphics frame rates to drop rather fast.
So basically if you want what your talking about with the graphics of say AoC, LotrO, Rift or GWII, you are going to have to wait a long time for the tech to catch up. Otherwise you will have to deal with zoning, which is indeed different from instancing. B asically you can't have WoW like load in the back ground zoning without having to deal with lower end graphical resource limitations that WoW is at this time.
Someone talked about the old muds, one thing that you do have to consider is that even the big ones like Simutronics Gemstone III/IV and Dragonrealms did "have" zoning. Also a lot of "load on" demand resource code work as well. So while they could and did deal with upwards of 2,000 to 3,000 characters in the game world(server equivalent), if a few hundred were all in one location, you did get command lag. Hell the old days of Gemstone III running on the GEnie servers before they bought their own first servers would be amusing when we got over 100 players in the game. It would or could at times become like molasses, the only thing you could do is chat, game commands pretty much stopped. End of history lesson on that subject.
probably not. Crafted gear is the same as dungeon/karma/pvp gear. it just looks different. So you can do whatever you want and get best gear in game. But if you want a specific look you will have to do specific activities. There is cookikng which I doubt will be mandatory.
Ps. If some people zones bother THAT much then you can stick to WoW. gW2 won;t remove zones. This is the truth and no amount of complaining will change that.
As long as it has instances to travel through various areas it bother me a lot.
I like wow that had no instanced zones through areas.
Thats gonna be the big problem of gw 2
You guys spent "copious amounts of time" on this game and still couldn't come up with 5 points of decent criticism? Seriously?
2 out your 5 criticism aren't even actually beta comments, 2 of them are extremely vague and the 5th one is teleporting which is pretty much the only valid point.
You've gotta stop with this softball bullshit and hire some people who will actually write CRITICISM about the games - good & bad. We have enough fanbois on here, we need some journalism.
"Id rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
- Raph Koster
Tried: AO,EQ,EQ2,DAoC,SWG,AA,SB,HZ,CoX,PS,GA,TR,IV,GnH,EVE, PP,DnL,WAR,MxO,SWG,FE,VG,AoC,DDO,LoTRO,Rift,TOR,Aion,Tera,TSW,GW2,DCUO,CO,STO
Favourites: AO,SWG,EVE,TR,LoTRO,TSW,EQ2, Firefall
Currently Playing: ESO
Ever think what they wrote was the only criticism(s) they had?
Only "other" type of writer you are looking for is someone biased.
Someone who comes out and says "I don't like level based Themepark games, but they asked me to play and write about GW2 so...."
Indeed, the entire numbers of criticisms across the entire internet from people who played are nitpicks about WvW, Crafting isn't as innovative as the rest of the game (so it's only 'just better' than any other game) and that performance isn't all that optimised yet, but is still more than playable and most importantly, very very pretty. It's not like ToR where it runs like crap and looks like it too.
Seriously, when they're the biggest criticisms (remember ToR had seeping implied criticisms of 'it's WoW again') are those, GW2 is going to be the closest to perfect this genre has seen.
So yeah... there are Asuran Gates in Cties (for a nominal fee) & map travel between Waypoints - once you've disco'd them. There's even "Call of the Hero" type travel available for players to quickly join Guildmates or groups elsewhere. And Tyria does have zones.... Huge event-filled zones with content, aggro mobs, & pitfalls aplenty!
Fast Travel options are in game for Player convenience, but nothing to stop someone from hoofiing it across three zones if they choose... other than time! My own personal view is that true immersion is not simply the lack of zones in an MMO, it's the quality & challenge of what is actually in each zone that counts to me! GW2 promises to have loads of both anywhere ya go.
Not arsed about the state of crafting either - Crafters will be able to produce marketable goods from the gitgo, and even be able to disco new items during the crafting process. Even if crafting is a bit ho-hum atm, I'm glad Anet's Devs concentrated their efforts in creating the world and game in such a fashion that their efforts resulted in so many gaming site reporters/analysts simply could not find serious flaws or negatives to talk about!!
As I wrote this article, I really couldn't. There wasn't anything that seemed bad beyond what I mentioned here. It'll take a whole lot longer than this weekend to find the game's holes. Now, two days later, I'm ruminating on some more shortcomings: one of which is the downed/death mechanic and it's potential annoyances... but ANet is already fixing my problems with it if their blog is true.
In short, the kind of stuff I've found so far to be cirtical about is so minor I can't even put it to words. Stuff like, "I don't like some of the tails or horns on Charr" seemed not worth noting to me. Instead I focused on the game as a whole, and so far... there's just very little not to like. Give it time though, I'm sure as we play more and delve further into such a massive game, we'll find pieces that don't work.
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Exactly.
And besides, political correspondents do actually come up with that kind of cr*p because they don't have any integrity.
I don't think the writers at MMORPG.com are lacking in integrity.
I don’t regard the original Guild Wars as a true massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Connecting instanced adventuring areas together via persistent staging areas seems more like a standard online game with graphical meeting areas replacing text-based multiplayer lobbies. It’s a great game, no doubt; it just didn’t fit the formula. Guild Wars 2 does. It’s a large, persistent world with hundreds of characters running about all at once, killing things, fulfilling quest objects, and discovering what’s happened to Tyria in the 250 years since the original game.
Hooray, zoning and instancing.
It's good that they're digging up old game mechanics like RvR and pretending they're new, but why did they have to stick with instant teleports and instances? If they're trying to make a world sim thats the best way to ruin it.
The only criticism I can think of comes from the more "meta-MMO" perspective, and it's very slight and particular.
Solo farming appears to be hampered by game design. This is probably intentional, although it's still disappointing (to me.) The way this game's mechanics work (side-kicking and downgrading characters to match the content level) will be prohibitive toward solo "farming" lower-level content, whether that be for materials or income or just for "esses" and "gees." That's part of the fun of crafting - figuring out where the best resources might be and gathering materials. I'm thinking of my days sharding blues and purples in WoW.
Secondly, using the same observation, soloing dungeons will be nigh impossible if one is automatically downscaled to the content level. This was another favorite pasttime of mine: "rare item" farming and such.
Re: SWTOR
"Remember, remember - Kakk says 'December.'"
At this rate daoc did it in 01. There ya go. Its a design choice.
IS there a need to make one zone conected to the other... I think some of the reason is immersion. You have to design another 3rd enviroment for the transistion from the ... wooded zone temprate to the sub tropical one that is a bit of both. Or you can just glue them together all odd like. (a lot of effort for a little benefit.) Some people favor it. I personally feel they should have connected them. ITs pretty simpleto do.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
It's not that simple. The game engine and server engine really have to be designed from the ground up to support this kind of dynamic transition. Obviously, Guild Wars programmers decided their time and effort were better spent elsewhere and I happen to agree.
The first few times you go from zone to zone, you will go through this transition. in WoW, that means going through a tunnel or flying the connected routes. After that, since the game has teleports, you are almost NEVER going to travel between zones through a transition area, you are going to be teleporting around very quickly. So it's a lot of work to develop the tech to support smooth zone transitions for the one or two times players actually make use of them.
Since teleports were a design feature, and since the game makes heavy use of them any way, doing this extra work doesn't really seem worth it to me.
And teleports as a design feature, as with other things like instant mail, no tagged critters and automatic participation in quests, all emphasize gameplay over immersion*. They may seem a bit funny from a world standpoint, but help players get into and out of gameplay faster. It's what GW2 is about. As someone who really prefers immersion I still can see the value in the choices they made her.
Zones just make more sense here for the game they are creating from a technical and design standpoint. They can control the population and dynamic events much easier when the zones are walled in, and with teleports instead of freeform mounts as the primary fast travel mechanism, players wouldn't be seeing those smooth transitions between zones often anyway.
*(I suppose the non tagged mobs help immersion and gameplay, but the main reason they were added was not for the purpose of enhancing immersion)
What does all this whinning about immersion have to do with PvP? Because thats what GW2 is centered on.
If your a player who likes those kinds of games, then your in the wrong place, simple as that. If your one of those players expecting EVERY game to cater to your style, then you see a therapist and possibly get a catscan.
I've had to wait years for an MMO like this, why harras us?
You dont see me on the TERA forums explaining over and over again how Im not going to play that game, its very immature. If your not going to play, and you cant stand the mechanics, then why repeat yourselves?
I completely agree with people's disdane for zoning. I hate it. I don't care if the zone itself is bigger than the entire world of Azeroth, I love the feel of a seamless world. In DAoC, you could literally point your character in one direction and go until you hit a mountain or the end of the world. It made it feel like a true world and not some fancy cubby hole system where you are supposed to level from 1-10 here, 11-20 here, 21-30 here, and then you go, okay, nice. I pretty much finished that zone and no need to ever go back. Now, on to the next zone. Yes, I get it. In a seamless world mobs get harder as you leave the starting areas but that still feels better than checking off each zone as I progress in levels.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still buying the game. And I know more than a seamless world, you need content and innovation to keep me hooked. Rift was a seamless world and that game only held my attention for 2 weeks. One thing I will say is my favorite MMO of all time is DAoC and even DAoC did not have open world PvP. In your home world you could not be attacked. It was not until you left the safety there and headed into the Frontiers that you could PvP. With the exception of the best dungeon ever, Darkness Falls. So, GW2 is a lot like that in that your "open world" pvp is in a huge "frontier" if you please. You can PvE there and PvP there just like DAoC.
I do get why they do the zones from a technical stand point, I just hate it.
how about that loading time between those zones??......2 seconds, 5 seconds, 30 seconds, 2hours? how is that....in SWTOR you dont even feel most zoning, you just walk in and BAM.....thats it.
If i have to wait 2 minutes between zones i would get bored realy fast tough.
The good: Beautifully designed cities.
The bad: Horrid overuse of partical effects in the gaming world. Click to target interface.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
"in SWTOR you dont even feel most zoning, you just walk in and BAM.....thats it."
In ToR you had to wait nearly 60 seconds in some of the bigger zones and I have a very fast pc with extremely fast internet.
Can't comment too much other than to say this has grabbed my attention/// prorbaly play this till archeage
It sucks being a hardcore player at heart but a casual player in availability. ~NightCloak
I know you have to find some bads but let's be honest, your bads are not of comparable quality.
5) Not being able to play in the Asura area is a "closed Beta limitation". Open beta will still come.
4) Also, teleport is only good. What's the point of traveling in a game if you have seen it already for a few times? It's a waste of time and players don't like it. Arenanet has done its homework. Besides, like you say it is a good game to play different characters, so this makes my point even stronger.
3) What do you expect, fast travel without loading? Even airplanes take time to land
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2) I'm not playing World of Tradeskills, I'm playing a storyline. Crafting is actually quite bad in an rpg, it doesn't belong there in a vast environment (does a hero craft much of its own stuff? Not at all.). Crafting somehow got assumed to be important but it really isn't.
1) Yeah well, that explains your flawed bads
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Wow, really? Ok you might want to reconsider what an immersive game world is all about. A vibrant market and crafting system are indeed a part of that. Crafting, shop and home ownership, guilds, guild buildings, systems that support all those are indeed important. They are not important to you, doesn't mean squat and your assumptiion that they aren't important is a flawed one. Quite bad? Ouch, your whole statement boggles my mind. Words fail me really on how I can break down your statement.
I want to say that maybe you are the one playing the wrong genre of gaming, but even that is too simple of a statement. Ah well, I can just hope that your mind set doesn't become the majority mindset on what makes a good mmo-rpg. To many bad tweaks have come down the pipe line in the last few years from players who should be playing "other" genre of gaming that have effected the mmo-rpg genre badly.
How was combat, and specifically targetting?
Does tab-targetting do a blind three-sixty round robin, or does it do something more intuitive to the human animal like the frontal conal view prioritized by distance?
Thanks for the article.
Wherever you go, there you are.
Personally, I don't find the zoning in GW1 too offensive. Would I rather have a seamless world? Sure. But it's not so objectionable it's a game breaker given the size of GW1 zones and the stuff to do/discover there.
That's not what "destroyed AoC". What destroyed AoC was being flat out unfinished in key infrastructure areas such as Mail, Auction House, 1/2 finished crafting, too many quests bugged. And yes, there were problems at times with proper zoning, but not between map areas as I recall, but rather syncing up to party member instances within a zone (e.g. there were multiple instances of a given zone running, so when you formed a party you'd all have to sync to the same instance of it).
Also note WoW makes / made some minor use of instancing when WoTLK released. Remember the one quest in Northrend (forget name) where Tyrion Fordring was in that base-camp? Auto-instanced players based on if they'd done that quest or not. If you had, the landscape was changed, if you hadn't it was the pre-battle setup for the mission. You'd see peeps on your radar as dots, right next to you, but not visible to you . . . . different instance. The point here is that instancing provides options for manipulation of content presentation to an entire population of players who may all be at different stages of progression.
Note I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your instinctive touch/feel assessment of a seamless world. I prefer that as well and played WoW for five years, LOTRO for two. AoC for a bit. Several others. But I've found I don't object to the zoned approach as much as I thought I would. At least to the point it's not a game breaker.
I thought I remember something being said about GW2 not being 100% zoned like GW1. That there was some areas, or area that's common and seamless? Apologies, vague recollection here. Anyone have a quick cliff-notes version description of the world / city structure? What's zoned, what's not?
Wherever you go, there you are.