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Why no seamless world ?
aSynchro
Member UncommonPosts: 194
in Guild Wars 2
ANet are without a doubt skilled coders & designers, so it puzzle me that they kinda choose to have loading screen between zones: why not a seamless world like WoW, Terra etc. ?
Is it because of some kind of limitations with the dynamic events or something ?
Comments
i personally think its done this way so mobs dont cross over into major cities :P
Is TERA seamless?
I got the impression they just hid their zones behind pegasus warping. I only played up to 22 though... can you walk to all the locations on foot with no load screens?
WoW isn't actually seamless. It just loads zones in the background.
I'm guessing it's because GW2 is so big and complex and they want a lot of players playing together (with different internet connections) so... yea... technical limitations and all that.
Besides, the GW2 zones are pretty huge.
Personally I believe its a optimization decission - its like sharding, in WoW you'd have Eastern Kingdoms, Kalimdor, Northrend, Outlands which most likely functions as some sort of shard, it should be possible for them to free up some lag that way - even though they got zone shadring as well if it gets over populated etc.
But in theory they should be able to host a larger population of players per server this way, without having all to much lag on the players end.
Yeah even though i dislike Tera it is seamless.
Jeez, just because you see loading screens when you're teleporting around does not mean it's heavily zoned... When you walk around the game loads content in the background, just like in WoW. And just like in wow, when you jump locations there is a loding screen to catch up with streamed content....
The zones are bigger than WoW's Barrens and much more filled with content. So, I don't see what's the big deal. The only difference is that in WoW you fly around so the content gets loaded in the background while you fly, while in GW2 you teleport and watch a short loading screen - just like when you're taking a ship in WoW or teleporting. Personally I prefer teleports with 5 sec loading screens to 10 minutes long fiddle-my-thumbs flights.
This is misconception
Neither WOW (or TERA) has seamles world.
For example when you going from zone to zone - lets take quite obvious Dun Morogh to Loch Modan
You are passing trough a lenghty tunnel.
Now what happens while you pass trough it, is that the game actually loads next zone.
It cleverly hides the loading screen, by putting you in not-interactive area ( tunnel in this case).
Other games that really do not have loading screens between zones - like Vanguard for example.
Still load zone when you pass certain boundaries - and if server latency is bad. You sometimes freeze while loading is happening.
In any case - let say that you are standing on one side of border - you will not see mob, or players on other , until server loads it.
So you see. Its just a case of
1. How big is the zone - before server has to load next map ( and GW2 zones are huge , just as WoW)
2. Do they hide loading or not
Your not really going to get the best and a factual reply here, the only people that can give you that answer is the Anet Devs. Every answer here is going to be assumptions and flaming between the fanbois of xxx MMO and the othe fanbois from the other xxx MMO.
Well considering that the dude who did the network engine for GW2 is the same dude who did it for WoW, I'd say it's a fair assumption that these two games do share some features in that regard.
The problem is that ppl don't even understand what seamless is.
I'm sure you can run for 50 minutes in tyria without seeing a loadscreen, but if u teleport somewhere u gonna get a short loading screen
"I am not a robot. I am a unicorn."
Don't think that theory is valid seeing as you can fly from one end of a continent to the other without any visual distortions..
Speculation; as the user comes closer to the end of a zone, they use dynamic streaming to impliment the next zone behind the far cliping plane.
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What you said makes no sense, the tunnels are not for that purpose which is why they are only in a couple zones. Not to mention you can travel with flying mounts seamlessly.
People believe what they see. For an average joe, do you think he/she cares how it is done? when he sees a laoding screen for him / her it isn't seamless.
As for WoW, that tunnel thing was a bad example, yes, there's background loading of areas, but there's no tricks like tunnels to achieve that: enough times that you can walk large distances across the continent without any tunnel equivalent. Even more, these days you can fly across it all.
From the impressions I read so far, with TERA each area can have 1+ instances, but traveling across areas is seamless/without loading screens. Don't know if they use any tricks like coralling players between areas, haven't played it yet.
Well the average joe will then have to contend with 10 minutes flying times if he doesn't want to see loading screens.. at least until we're able to cram the whole game into RAM.
Did they actually talk about this design choice in any past interview ?
As a coder myself I would be very interesting to read about the technical details.
Maybe but you can also FLY. I hate tons of stuff in WoW, but being able to fly from Tanaris in the south all the way up to the northen Moonglade IS impressive and add a lot to the feeling of freedom Azeroth has.
Note also that there are places where you are at the intersection of 3 or 4 zones and can see everything that happens (critters, mobs, players) in them at the same time. That's pretty cool imho.
After the first time you go into a new zone, you're going to teleport there every future time anyway, so it's not like not being seamless will affect much of anything. If your game is based on teleportation, then it can't preload.
GW2 is said to be as big as GW1 plus all three of its expansions. It's a little muddled because it's not directly talking about size of landmass as much as amount of content, but we should be able to gather that GW2's zones are very large. In GW2, there's 25 zones. In GW1, just the first three expansions have 120 explorable areas. In GW1, you could run directly across a sizeable area in only a few minutes if the mobs didn't bother you. I'm never going to be able to find it, but I'm pretty sure the quote was something like "15 minutes to run across but that was stopping for all the fights I couldn't avoid." Whatever that means. The point is that it's not like you're going to be hitting loading screens all the time.
With this new Overflow idea, I don't think they could make it seamless anyway. It's going to stop and ask you if you want to travel to the overflow server or if you're going to want to wait and be notified when that zone in your server is below the limit.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
What the hell are you guys on, saying that WoW is not seamless?? How the hell will you otherwise define seamless, than that there is no loading screens?
OF COURSE WoW loads in the background. It cannot be done in any other way, as a machine only has so much memory.
Loading in the background, avoiding load-screens is the very definition of seamless, so gimme a break.
About the guy claiming that it is not seamless, because you go through a tunnel: It is still seamless. There is no "seam" (load screen). Also, that is only one example. Many zones in WoW you move between without any limits like that (Elwynn Forest to Duskwood for instance, where you swim over a river whereever you want).
The only non-seamlessness in WoW is between continents and when entering instances.
FF XIV tried seamless and to keep good graphics simultaneously they were forced to copy+paste far too much to maintain the seamlessness.
Which is why, as far as I know, they've decided since then to abolish the goal of keeping things seamless.
Non-sense.
Seams refer to zone borders, which are still there in WoW whether you notice them or not.
As far as I remember there are no loading screens between zones but there are loading screens between regions (a group of zones such as Kryta) but don't quote me on that.
It is a belivable explanation to why they copy+pasted terrain in a far larger extent than other MMORPGs. Do you have an alternative believable explanation to offer?
It may be game immersion. On lower spec systems / networks the lag moving around seamless appearing worlds can be immersion breaking. You can fly across Perfect World and it feels seamless, but descend into a quest area while playing on a Dell Dimension 3000 with consumer grade ADSL and you regularily get slammed back into the real world waiting for the game to catch up.
I like the portal approach as I know I'm moving somewhere new with one break, the alternative is often walk, run, love the scenery, do a happy jump, hit an invisible wall, stagger, repeat.
*shrug*
There's very likely a server performance advantage to the current setup, and GW2's combat is much more action based so needs that low latency to work well.
The OP is correct, if they wanted to, they could have done. A fair few F2P games are 'seamless' as well, so it's not hard. But there's obviously an advantage to the zonal setup.
But we all know 'immersion' is NOT dependant on a seamless world
Skyrim has loads of load screens. Sure, the main world is 'seamless' but that's only about as big as 4 big GW2 maps.
Actually here is a direct official quote from http://wdl.square-enix.com/ffxiv/download/en/FFXIV_2.0_Outline_EN.pdf :
"The current maps in FINAL FANTASY XIV
are not only massive, but allow for seamless
passage across wide expanses of the realm.
In order to maintain this seamlessness,
however, we were forced to heavily reuse
assets, resulting in static, repetitive areas.
To provide our users with areas that feel
fresh and dynamic throughout the extended
lifespan of the game, we are both revamping
and redesigning area maps. We hope that
this, in turn, will equate to increased
opportunities for adventure."