Bit of topic but the map is bigger then the world is right?
I noticed a huge chunk does not have level numbers.
It's because the main cities are not level specific and some uncovered places on the map will be available after more updates and expansions are coming.
People are partially comparing the really living world of GW2 with tons of empty areas with some trees and a mob or two running around in different colors in other mmos and that's just hilarious.
Anyway... lore based Kantha and Elona are closed and cut from the rest of the world in tyria so expect them to be revisited and open in the future while being as big as tyria or only slightly smaller as tyria.
That would probably double and triple the size of the current world
The zones are actually the size of average WoW zones, a lot smaller than Barrens. But they feel larger due to smart landscape design. All in all I'd say that in actual size, it's somewhat smaller than WoW vanilla and LotrO, but with even more content and content variety in each zone than those games. All those MMO's can't compare in size though to MMO's like Vanguard and AC, but those were far emptier and things were more spread out.
The GW2 cities though are among the largest I've seen in an MMO.
Zone sin GW2 aren't that great or big. The zoning isn't hidden at all - big swirly portals, yeah sure they're well hidden. Only mmo I know which really hid them well was LOTRO. The lands in LOTRO is currently bigger than GW2. GW2 lands seem big because you walk everywhere, they are also rather empty. In comparision TSW/AoC have more detail and so are in comparision smaller.
Divinity's Reach is a bore to be honest, too large, too empty of life. The centre part is good though.
THE SECRET WORLD - PAY ONCE PLAY FOREVER - Give it a go!
Big enough! Does that answer it, to give you a frame of reference WoW's world is pretty huge and feels massive and I feel like GW2 is as big, every area feels epic and massive.
The portals between areas while I would rather they were not there, dont remove any of the massive feel of the world.
I have not been in Freep or Q since the revamp but before is it just not true. And the constant zooning in them made them a real pain. Personally I refered Neriak in EQ2, especially since they fixed the code so you wouldnt lagg so much in it.
But Divinitys reach is far more detailed than any town in EQ2 was prior to me quitting at least (which was when Sonys server got hacked).
So how many zones are there in DR,i mean sewers and ajacent zones that have they're own mobs and quest lines,sorry but DR is a great looking cities but it has no where near the content that Freeport or Qeynos has.
Even before the revamp of freeport it had more content and Qeynos hasn't even been revamped yet.
The small dungeon zones around should not really be counted since they arent really part of the town, in DR they just put those outside the town (and in instances for the personal story).
I thought Q was revamped, they talked about it for a long time now.
Freeport was better in EQ, and neither of the town really feels real.
But yes, if you count the combat activeties and count in neighboring zones (like the peat bog which clearly is not part of the city) then the EQ2 towns are larger. Then again, Sheamoor village would be counted in DR if you see it like that. DR do have some fun good minigames but is none combat zones.
So it kinda depends how you count, but there is a reason all my EQ2 characters lived in Neriak and GF, the zooning in Freep and Q together with the somewhat random citystructure makes them really annoying to navigate.
Big enough! Does that answer it, to give you a frame of reference WoW's world is pretty huge and feels massive and I feel like GW2 is as big, every area feels epic and massive.
The portals between areas while I would rather they were not there, dont remove any of the massive feel of the world.
Wows world is of course larger, it have been out for 8 years. But for a post 2003 vanilla game it is huge.
I think the size is a matter of perspective. I, personally, think the world is the largest I've ever seen. The cities are absolutely massive and have a lot more purpose to them than just being a hub for crafting, vendors, and Trading Post(AH). Some will discredit it because its different parts are split by zones and swirling portals, but that doesn't subtract from the facts; The world is huge. If you take 5 large pieces of cake whose combined size is the same as a really big cake...you can put the 5 pieces together and still have a really big cake, just in pieces. I think breaking it down into pieces makes it easier to digest. If you don't want to move on to that area yet, you don't have to. And it keeps you from wandering mindlessly into an area you're not ready for, level-wise. To me, it's very refreshing, open, and expertly crafted. Nothing feels copy-pasted!
Zone sin GW2 aren't that great or big. The zoning isn't hidden at all - big swirly portals, yeah sure they're well hidden. Only mmo I know which really hid them well was LOTRO. The lands in LOTRO is currently bigger than GW2. GW2 lands seem big because you walk everywhere, they are also rather empty. In comparision TSW/AoC have more detail and so are in comparision smaller.
Divinity's Reach is a bore to be honest, too large, too empty of life. The centre part is good though.
You either didnt play the game OR never bothered to tour the city to even see what it offers.
On the top of it most mmos with large zones are having copy/paste props and life empty areas.
GW2s areas are instead filled with lots of life (enemies, npcs, animals and more).
As about how "empty and boring" Divinitys Reach is:
Zone sin GW2 aren't that great or big. The zoning isn't hidden at all - big swirly portals, yeah sure they're well hidden. Only mmo I know which really hid them well was LOTRO. The lands in LOTRO is currently bigger than GW2. GW2 lands seem big because you walk everywhere, they are also rather empty. In comparision TSW/AoC have more detail and so are in comparision smaller.
Divinity's Reach is a bore to be honest, too large, too empty of life. The centre part is good though.
Empty of life? I'm wondering if we were looking at the same city, or better yet playing the same game. I think Divinity's Reach is BEAUTIFUL and absolutely teeming with life. The conversations the NPCs share with one another, the children running through the streets, the nobles chatting about politics and the queen, everything is moving and alive, everything in the city seems to have a purpose; Overall its just a very well crafted city. Theres even a circus that, in your personal story(depending on what you chose), you get to join! There are so many things to see, so many small nooks and crannies and even more high up vistas to find.
You must have a sense for exploration and wonder to really get to enjoy it. Or even just have the itch to want to find out whats up those stairs or "how do i get on top of that?"
Big enough! Does that answer it, to give you a frame of reference WoW's world is pretty huge and feels massive and I feel like GW2 is as big, every area feels epic and massive.
The portals between areas while I would rather they were not there, dont remove any of the massive feel of the world.
Wows world is of course larger, it have been out for 8 years. But for a post 2003 vanilla game it is huge.
Yeah WoW is larger, what I meant with my post is that WoW size world is the sort of the massive and epic feel I am looking for in an MMO and GW2 didnt disappoint me in that respect it feels massive and epic, I havent actually done any measuring or comparing just going by my feeling of the world.
I just hit level 80 last night, after 135 hours of play. I never had to linger in one area to "grind", I was always out exploring and doing content as I went. In that 135 hours, I only reached 40% world map completion and there are many zones, from level 2 to level 80, that I haven't even set foot in.
The world is massive. In contrast, I had seen half of the entire TSW game world in less than 20 hours. I had also see all of Rift, at launch, in about 60 hours. Even if you were to calculate the rough size in square kilometers, it would be one of the larger MMO worlds. However, what they do with that space and the way the game feels is nothing short of massive.
There is enough zone redundancy that I could chart an entirely different path to level 80 for my next character and the two characters combines would still have not seen everything there is to see. There are also no factional divisions, so the entire world and all it's content is open to every character.
Setting Vanguard aside, GW2 is clearly one of the largest MMO game worlds since WoW and probably trumps WoW on the number of raw hours of game play you can experience while fully exploring the world. There are 26 PvE zones in GW2, excluding the cities. I spent between 6-10 hours in each zone while leveling and exploring. That's in contrast to WoW, where the average to do all the content and map out each zone was closer to 2 to 5 hours until you reached the highest level zones, where time was extended only due to the time you needed to spend grinding.
I just hit level 80 last night, after 135 hours of play. I never had to linger in one area to "grind", I was always out exploring and doing content as I went. In that 135 hours, I only reached 40% world map completion and there are many zones, from level 2 to level 80, that I haven't even set foot in.
The world is massive. In contrast, I had seen half of the entire TSW game world in less than 20 hours. I had also see all of Rift, at launch, in about 60 hours. Even if you were to calculate the rough size in square kilometers, it would be one of the larger MMO worlds. However, what they do with that space and the way the game feels is nothing short of massive.
There is enough zone redundancy that I could chart an entirely different path to level 80 for my next character and the two characters combines would still have not seen everything there is to see. There are also no factional divisions, so the entire world and all it's content is open to every character.
Setting Vanguard aside, GW2 is clearly one of the largest MMO game worlds since WoW and probably trumps WoW on the number of raw hours of game play you can experience while fully exploring the world. There are 26 PvE zones in GW2, excluding the cities. I spent between 6-10 hours in each zone while leveling and exploring. That's in contrast to WoW, where the average to do all the content and map out each zone was closer to 2 to 5 hours until you reached the highest level zones, where time was extended only due to the time you needed to spend grinding.
That is BS I was completing whole areas in GW2 when I was leveling in 2-3h so it was fairly close to the WoW zones, I never had to stay in an area and grind in WoW either, dunno how you managed to do that, if you have indeed played WoW, while leveling there were tons of areas you could choose to go to, and most of the areas in WoW I never actually finished all the quests before moving on, when I originally leveled. I call shenanigans on this, I will agree you did it at your own pace and you might have spent more time in an area than average, but I was running around with a party we fully completed every area we were in, repeated the same DEs several times cause they kept popping up 2-5h is about right for both WoW and GW2.
Again not saying you didnt have more hours of fun or whatever, its up to personal experience, but both WoW and GW2 offered top notch world experiences while leveling at no point did anyone have to grind zones or repeat stuff they didnt want to and in my experience the same amount of hours per zone.
I just hit level 80 last night, after 135 hours of play. I never had to linger in one area to "grind", I was always out exploring and doing content as I went. In that 135 hours, I only reached 40% world map completion and there are many zones, from level 2 to level 80, that I haven't even set foot in.
The world is massive. In contrast, I had seen half of the entire TSW game world in less than 20 hours. I had also see all of Rift, at launch, in about 60 hours. Even if you were to calculate the rough size in square kilometers, it would be one of the larger MMO worlds. However, what they do with that space and the way the game feels is nothing short of massive.
There is enough zone redundancy that I could chart an entirely different path to level 80 for my next character and the two characters combines would still have not seen everything there is to see. There are also no factional divisions, so the entire world and all it's content is open to every character.
Setting Vanguard aside, GW2 is clearly one of the largest MMO game worlds since WoW and probably trumps WoW on the number of raw hours of game play you can experience while fully exploring the world. There are 26 PvE zones in GW2, excluding the cities. I spent between 6-10 hours in each zone while leveling and exploring. That's in contrast to WoW, where the average to do all the content and map out each zone was closer to 2 to 5 hours until you reached the highest level zones, where time was extended only due to the time you needed to spend grinding.
That is BS I was completing whole areas in GW2 when I was leveling in 2-3h so it was fairly close to the WoW zones, I never had to stay in an area and grind in WoW either, dunno how you managed to do that, if you have indeed played WoW, while leveling there were tons of areas you could choose to go to, and most of the areas in WoW I never actually finished all the quests before moving on, when I originally leveled. I call shenanigans on this, I will agree you did it at your own pace and you might have spent more time in an area than average, but I was running around with a party we fully completed every area we were in, repeated the same DEs several times cause they kept popping up 2-5h is about right for both WoW and GW2.
Again not saying you didnt have more hours of fun or whatever, its up to personal experience, but both WoW and GW2 offered top notch world experiences while leveling at no point did anyone have to grind zones or repeat stuff they didnt want to and in my experience the same amount of hours per zone.
You make a good point, but let me ask this: Were you exploring to simply gain the objectives or exploring to explore. Because if you take your time(though it may not be your playstyle) you will find that the game will present you with things you would have never seen while running by to grab a point of interest. If you stop and listen to the NPC and Mobs chatter on about this and that things will chain into something awesome.
I ask you this because you could go through and get all of the waypoints, Points of interest, fill all of the hearts by grinding them out in a few minutes, get all the vistas(which doesn't take long; just a bit of effort), and complete all of the skill points, but you sill could have missed 50% of the content there. Your character profile might say 100% zone completion, but you still missed things you can't see.
I was in Bloodtide Coast on Laughing Gull Island, I stood around listening to some chatter and then suddenly a war galleon comes rolling in from Lion's Arch. It parks just off the island and proceeds to open fire on the pirate fortress located at the islands center. I see Lionguard jumping off the side of the ship into the water and swimming ashore storming the fortress. Seconds later a dynamic event cues up and I get to join in this madness. Had I just gone by ....killed a few mobs in the area to get to the skillpoint there, gotten the waypoint and moved along quietly I never would have seen that.
In Blazeridge Steppes if you don't hang around long enough you will miss the big fight with the shatterer. So I think that Fiontar was correct in his comparison of GW2's zones to WoW's. In WoW theres no real reason to hang around as the things in the zone won't change much if not at all, besides bosses spawning and such. GW2 zones change quite frequently and power is shifted in certain parts of the map to make way for new events: Humans taking over centaur camps, Lionguard taking over pirate keeps, and vice versa. GW2 wants you to stay in a zone for as long as you can and experience what all is there, because what is there may not be there later.
I just hit level 80 last night, after 135 hours of play. I never had to linger in one area to "grind", I was always out exploring and doing content as I went. In that 135 hours, I only reached 40% world map completion and there are many zones, from level 2 to level 80, that I haven't even set foot in.
The world is massive. In contrast, I had seen half of the entire TSW game world in less than 20 hours. I had also see all of Rift, at launch, in about 60 hours. Even if you were to calculate the rough size in square kilometers, it would be one of the larger MMO worlds. However, what they do with that space and the way the game feels is nothing short of massive.
There is enough zone redundancy that I could chart an entirely different path to level 80 for my next character and the two characters combines would still have not seen everything there is to see. There are also no factional divisions, so the entire world and all it's content is open to every character.
Setting Vanguard aside, GW2 is clearly one of the largest MMO game worlds since WoW and probably trumps WoW on the number of raw hours of game play you can experience while fully exploring the world. There are 26 PvE zones in GW2, excluding the cities. I spent between 6-10 hours in each zone while leveling and exploring. That's in contrast to WoW, where the average to do all the content and map out each zone was closer to 2 to 5 hours until you reached the highest level zones, where time was extended only due to the time you needed to spend grinding.
That is BS I was completing whole areas in GW2 when I was leveling in 2-3h so it was fairly close to the WoW zones, I never had to stay in an area and grind in WoW either, dunno how you managed to do that, if you have indeed played WoW, while leveling there were tons of areas you could choose to go to, and most of the areas in WoW I never actually finished all the quests before moving on, when I originally leveled. I call shenanigans on this, I will agree you did it at your own pace and you might have spent more time in an area than average, but I was running around with a party we fully completed every area we were in, repeated the same DEs several times cause they kept popping up 2-5h is about right for both WoW and GW2.
Again not saying you didnt have more hours of fun or whatever, its up to personal experience, but both WoW and GW2 offered top notch world experiences while leveling at no point did anyone have to grind zones or repeat stuff they didnt want to and in my experience the same amount of hours per zone.
If you played WoW at launch, you indeed did have to grind the final levels in a hand full of zones. I still have dreams of grinding mobs in Winterspring and Eastern Plague Lands for hours on end to gain a level. The game is not only much bigger now, but the leveling process is much more stream-lined. That's all I was pointing out. The exceptions to the 2-5 hours per zone rule were only due to grinding from 50-60 in Vanilla WoW.
If all you do is run around collecting the PoIs, Waypoints, SPCs and Vistas in GW2, yeah, you maybe can complete a zone in 2-3 hours. I'm talking about actually playing the game, exploring, doing content, harvesting nodes, killing mobs for bonus XP. No matter how much I would try to stretch out a zone I enjoyed in WoW, there was really a fairly limited amount of questing you could do in a zone before you were completely done with it. Unless you went back to grind a particular drop or to do gathering circuits, when you were done with a zone in WoW, you were actually done. (I played WoW heavily the first two years, a moderate amount after BC, before finally moving on, while occassionally returning to check out an expansion. I've been playing MMOs for almost 14 years, I have some clue what I'm talking about).
There is clearly more hours of exploration and play available in each GW2 zone than in the average vanilla WoW zone. I got a lot of enjoyment out of WoW. GW2 is the first game since I've felt as strongly about. I'm sorry if you took the comments as a slap at WoW. WoW is the game that most people have played and it becomes the yardstick to compare against. GW2's 26 Zones are fewer than the number of zones in vanilla WoW, but a lot more densely packed with places to explore and content to experience. I stand by that assertion. It also puts most of it's contemporaries to shame, as I pointed out. Kudos to Arenanet for producing an MMO with hundreds of hours of world content, rather than dozens!
If you played WoW at launch, you indeed did have to grind the final levels in a hand full of zones. I still have dreams of grinding mobs in Winterspring and Eastern Plague Lands for hours on end to gain a level. The game is not only much bigger now, but the leveling process is much more stream-lined. That's all I was pointing out. The exceptions to the 2-5 hours per zone rule were only due to grinding from 50-60 in Vanilla WoW.
If all you do is run around collecting the PoIs, Waypoints, SPCs and Vistas in GW2, yeah, you maybe can complete a zone in 2-3 hours. I'm talking about actually playing the game, exploring, doing content, harvesting nodes, killing mobs for bonus XP. No matter how much I would try to stretch out a zone I enjoyed in WoW, there was really a fairly limited amount of questing you could do in a zone before you were completely done with it. Unless you went back to grind a particular drop or to do gathering circuits, when you were done with a zone in WoW, you were actually done. (I played WoW heavily the first two years, a moderate amount after BC, before finally moving on, while occassionally returning to check out an expansion. I've been playing MMOs for almost 14 years, I have some clue what I'm talking about).
There is clearly more hours of exploration and play available in each GW2 zone than in the average vanilla WoW zone. I got a lot of enjoyment out of WoW. GW2 is the first game since I've felt as strongly about. I'm sorry if you took the comments as a slap at WoW. WoW is the game that most people have played and it becomes the yardstick to compare against. GW2's 26 Zones are fewer than the number of zones in vanilla WoW, but a lot more densely packed with places to explore and content to experience. I stand by that assertion. It also puts most of it's contemporaries to shame, as I pointed out. Kudos to Arenanet for producing an MMO with hundreds of hours of world content, rather than dozens!
It doesnt help either that people more think of vanilla Wow as it was just before TBC launched, not like it was in december 2004 which is what you should compare GW2 with.
And dont forget GW2s hidden jump puzzles in tombraider style, I love those.
But saying that GW2 have somewhat more content than Wow did at release does not make Wow a worse game or anything. Exactly how much content a game needs is something we can discuss.
Both games did have a lot more content just after release than most other modern games like LOTRO (which were really small), AoC, WAR, Rift and most other MMOs.
Noone can in sheer size compete with EQ and WW2O in size though, but both those are a lot older, it is a lot more expensive to make a larger game today,
I just hit level 80 last night, after 135 hours of play. I never had to linger in one area to "grind", I was always out exploring and doing content as I went. In that 135 hours, I only reached 40% world map completion and there are many zones, from level 2 to level 80, that I haven't even set foot in.
The world is massive. In contrast, I had seen half of the entire TSW game world in less than 20 hours. I had also see all of Rift, at launch, in about 60 hours. Even if you were to calculate the rough size in square kilometers, it would be one of the larger MMO worlds. However, what they do with that space and the way the game feels is nothing short of massive.
There is enough zone redundancy that I could chart an entirely different path to level 80 for my next character and the two characters combines would still have not seen everything there is to see. There are also no factional divisions, so the entire world and all it's content is open to every character.
Setting Vanguard aside, GW2 is clearly one of the largest MMO game worlds since WoW and probably trumps WoW on the number of raw hours of game play you can experience while fully exploring the world. There are 26 PvE zones in GW2, excluding the cities. I spent between 6-10 hours in each zone while leveling and exploring. That's in contrast to WoW, where the average to do all the content and map out each zone was closer to 2 to 5 hours until you reached the highest level zones, where time was extended only due to the time you needed to spend grinding.
That is BS I was completing whole areas in GW2 when I was leveling in 2-3h so it was fairly close to the WoW zones, I never had to stay in an area and grind in WoW either, dunno how you managed to do that, if you have indeed played WoW, while leveling there were tons of areas you could choose to go to, and most of the areas in WoW I never actually finished all the quests before moving on, when I originally leveled. I call shenanigans on this, I will agree you did it at your own pace and you might have spent more time in an area than average, but I was running around with a party we fully completed every area we were in, repeated the same DEs several times cause they kept popping up 2-5h is about right for both WoW and GW2.
Again not saying you didnt have more hours of fun or whatever, its up to personal experience, but both WoW and GW2 offered top notch world experiences while leveling at no point did anyone have to grind zones or repeat stuff they didnt want to and in my experience the same amount of hours per zone.
You make a good point, but let me ask this: Were you exploring to simply gain the objectives or exploring to explore. Because if you take your time(though it may not be your playstyle) you will find that the game will present you with things you would have never seen while running by to grab a point of interest. If you stop and listen to the NPC and Mobs chatter on about this and that things will chain into something awesome.
I ask you this because you could go through and get all of the waypoints, Points of interest, fill all of the hearts by grinding them out in a few minutes, get all the vistas(which doesn't take long; just a bit of effort), and complete all of the skill points, but you sill could have missed 50% of the content there. Your character profile might say 100% zone completion, but you still missed things you can't see.
I was in Bloodtide Coast on Laughing Gull Island, I stood around listening to some chatter and then suddenly a war galleon comes rolling in from Lion's Arch. It parks just off the island and proceeds to open fire on the pirate fortress located at the islands center. I see Lionguard jumping off the side of the ship into the water and swimming ashore storming the fortress. Seconds later a dynamic event cues up and I get to join in this madness. Had I just gone by ....killed a few mobs in the area to get to the skillpoint there, gotten the waypoint and moved along quietly I never would have seen that.
In Blazeridge Steppes if you don't hang around long enough you will miss the big fight with the shatterer. So I think that Fiontar was correct in his comparison of GW2's zones to WoW's. In WoW theres no real reason to hang around as the things in the zone won't change much if not at all, besides bosses spawning and such. GW2 zones change quite frequently and power is shifted in certain parts of the map to make way for new events: Humans taking over centaur camps, Lionguard taking over pirate keeps, and vice versa. GW2 wants you to stay in a zone for as long as you can and experience what all is there, because what is there may not be there later.
You are right. There are many levels to content in this game and the amount of hours a zone can provide goes well beyond the amount of time it takes to earn the zone completion bonus. Even in zones I spent 8 hours in, there are conversations I have yet to hear, Dynamic Events I have yet to experience and hidden spaces I have yet to see. I crawled all over the human starting areas during beta and I still managed to find a few caves there since launch that I missed before.
I'm used to pushing a pretty efficient leveling pace in other MMOs. I was in the top 5% of the leveling rush when WoW launched and I was the first Warlock to level 70 on the fresh BC server I played on when BC launched. I slowed down the rush here, but I still didn't take the time to smell the roses and explore all the hidden gems of lore and content with my first character to 80.
Even if GW2 wasn't based around DEs and didn't have level scaling, it would still have one of the highest densities of content per game zone of any MMO I've ever played. DEs, level scaling and all the things, big and small, that reward actual exploration of the GW2 game world just amplify the play time you can achieve from the raw amount of content present in the game.
I've been keeping an eye on this. I never played GW1 but they make it out to be so huge with ships and air ships and grand cities.
Is it really all that? Can we craft a full on sailing ship and then drop it in the water? Dock it up and spend a week getting to some far off city?
You're looking for ArcheAge, not Guild Wars 2
If in 1982 we played with the current mentality, we would have burned down all the pac man games since the red ghost was clearly OP. Instead we just got better at the game.
If you played WoW at launch, you indeed did have to grind the final levels in a hand full of zones. I still have dreams of grinding mobs in Winterspring and Eastern Plague Lands for hours on end to gain a level. The game is not only much bigger now, but the leveling process is much more stream-lined. That's all I was pointing out. The exceptions to the 2-5 hours per zone rule were only due to grinding from 50-60 in Vanilla WoW.
If all you do is run around collecting the PoIs, Waypoints, SPCs and Vistas in GW2, yeah, you maybe can complete a zone in 2-3 hours. I'm talking about actually playing the game, exploring, doing content, harvesting nodes, killing mobs for bonus XP. No matter how much I would try to stretch out a zone I enjoyed in WoW, there was really a fairly limited amount of questing you could do in a zone before you were completely done with it. Unless you went back to grind a particular drop or to do gathering circuits, when you were done with a zone in WoW, you were actually done. (I played WoW heavily the first two years, a moderate amount after BC, before finally moving on, while occassionally returning to check out an expansion. I've been playing MMOs for almost 14 years, I have some clue what I'm talking about).
There is clearly more hours of exploration and play available in each GW2 zone than in the average vanilla WoW zone. I got a lot of enjoyment out of WoW. GW2 is the first game since I've felt as strongly about. I'm sorry if you took the comments as a slap at WoW. WoW is the game that most people have played and it becomes the yardstick to compare against. GW2's 26 Zones are fewer than the number of zones in vanilla WoW, but a lot more densely packed with places to explore and content to experience. I stand by that assertion. It also puts most of it's contemporaries to shame, as I pointed out. Kudos to Arenanet for producing an MMO with hundreds of hours of world content, rather than dozens!
It doesnt help either that people more think of vanilla Wow as it was just before TBC launched, not like it was in december 2004 which is what you should compare GW2 with.
And dont forget GW2s hidden jump puzzles in tombraider style, I love those.
But saying that GW2 have somewhat more content than Wow did at release does not make Wow a worse game or anything. Exactly how much content a game needs is something we can discuss.
Both games did have a lot more content just after release than most other modern games like LOTRO (which were really small), AoC, WAR, Rift and most other MMOs.
Noone can in sheer size compete with EQ and WW2O in size though, but both those are a lot older, it is a lot more expensive to make a larger game today,
Yeah. Good point. I think a lot of people who have played WoW were not around at the start. They don't appreciate how steep the leveling curve was, how devoid of content most of the level 50+ zones were at launch, or the fact that some of the zones currently part of The Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor didn't even exist as zones when the game launched.
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Bit of topic but the map is bigger then the world is right?
I noticed a huge chunk does not have level numbers.
It's because the main cities are not level specific and some uncovered places on the map will be available after more updates and expansions are coming.
People are partially comparing the really living world of GW2 with tons of empty areas with some trees and a mob or two running around in different colors in other mmos and that's just hilarious.
Anyway... lore based Kantha and Elona are closed and cut from the rest of the world in tyria so expect them to be revisited and open in the future while being as big as tyria or only slightly smaller as tyria.
That would probably double and triple the size of the current world
The GW2 cities though are among the largest I've seen in an MMO.Zone sin GW2 aren't that great or big. The zoning isn't hidden at all - big swirly portals, yeah sure they're well hidden. Only mmo I know which really hid them well was LOTRO. The lands in LOTRO is currently bigger than GW2. GW2 lands seem big because you walk everywhere, they are also rather empty. In comparision TSW/AoC have more detail and so are in comparision smaller.
Divinity's Reach is a bore to be honest, too large, too empty of life. The centre part is good though.
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Big enough! Does that answer it, to give you a frame of reference WoW's world is pretty huge and feels massive and I feel like GW2 is as big, every area feels epic and massive.
The portals between areas while I would rather they were not there, dont remove any of the massive feel of the world.
The small dungeon zones around should not really be counted since they arent really part of the town, in DR they just put those outside the town (and in instances for the personal story).
I thought Q was revamped, they talked about it for a long time now.
Freeport was better in EQ, and neither of the town really feels real.
But yes, if you count the combat activeties and count in neighboring zones (like the peat bog which clearly is not part of the city) then the EQ2 towns are larger. Then again, Sheamoor village would be counted in DR if you see it like that. DR do have some fun good minigames but is none combat zones.
So it kinda depends how you count, but there is a reason all my EQ2 characters lived in Neriak and GF, the zooning in Freep and Q together with the somewhat random citystructure makes them really annoying to navigate.
Wows world is of course larger, it have been out for 8 years. But for a post 2003 vanilla game it is huge.
You either didnt play the game OR never bothered to tour the city to even see what it offers.
On the top of it most mmos with large zones are having copy/paste props and life empty areas.
GW2s areas are instead filled with lots of life (enemies, npcs, animals and more).
As about how "empty and boring" Divinitys Reach is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVvBNBtMIpo
Empty of life? I'm wondering if we were looking at the same city, or better yet playing the same game. I think Divinity's Reach is BEAUTIFUL and absolutely teeming with life. The conversations the NPCs share with one another, the children running through the streets, the nobles chatting about politics and the queen, everything is moving and alive, everything in the city seems to have a purpose; Overall its just a very well crafted city. Theres even a circus that, in your personal story(depending on what you chose), you get to join! There are so many things to see, so many small nooks and crannies and even more high up vistas to find.
You must have a sense for exploration and wonder to really get to enjoy it. Or even just have the itch to want to find out whats up those stairs or "how do i get on top of that?"
Yeah WoW is larger, what I meant with my post is that WoW size world is the sort of the massive and epic feel I am looking for in an MMO and GW2 didnt disappoint me in that respect it feels massive and epic, I havent actually done any measuring or comparing just going by my feeling of the world.
I just hit level 80 last night, after 135 hours of play. I never had to linger in one area to "grind", I was always out exploring and doing content as I went. In that 135 hours, I only reached 40% world map completion and there are many zones, from level 2 to level 80, that I haven't even set foot in.
The world is massive. In contrast, I had seen half of the entire TSW game world in less than 20 hours. I had also see all of Rift, at launch, in about 60 hours. Even if you were to calculate the rough size in square kilometers, it would be one of the larger MMO worlds. However, what they do with that space and the way the game feels is nothing short of massive.
There is enough zone redundancy that I could chart an entirely different path to level 80 for my next character and the two characters combines would still have not seen everything there is to see. There are also no factional divisions, so the entire world and all it's content is open to every character.
Setting Vanguard aside, GW2 is clearly one of the largest MMO game worlds since WoW and probably trumps WoW on the number of raw hours of game play you can experience while fully exploring the world. There are 26 PvE zones in GW2, excluding the cities. I spent between 6-10 hours in each zone while leveling and exploring. That's in contrast to WoW, where the average to do all the content and map out each zone was closer to 2 to 5 hours until you reached the highest level zones, where time was extended only due to the time you needed to spend grinding.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
That is BS I was completing whole areas in GW2 when I was leveling in 2-3h so it was fairly close to the WoW zones, I never had to stay in an area and grind in WoW either, dunno how you managed to do that, if you have indeed played WoW, while leveling there were tons of areas you could choose to go to, and most of the areas in WoW I never actually finished all the quests before moving on, when I originally leveled. I call shenanigans on this, I will agree you did it at your own pace and you might have spent more time in an area than average, but I was running around with a party we fully completed every area we were in, repeated the same DEs several times cause they kept popping up 2-5h is about right for both WoW and GW2.
Again not saying you didnt have more hours of fun or whatever, its up to personal experience, but both WoW and GW2 offered top notch world experiences while leveling at no point did anyone have to grind zones or repeat stuff they didnt want to and in my experience the same amount of hours per zone.
You make a good point, but let me ask this: Were you exploring to simply gain the objectives or exploring to explore. Because if you take your time(though it may not be your playstyle) you will find that the game will present you with things you would have never seen while running by to grab a point of interest. If you stop and listen to the NPC and Mobs chatter on about this and that things will chain into something awesome.
I ask you this because you could go through and get all of the waypoints, Points of interest, fill all of the hearts by grinding them out in a few minutes, get all the vistas(which doesn't take long; just a bit of effort), and complete all of the skill points, but you sill could have missed 50% of the content there. Your character profile might say 100% zone completion, but you still missed things you can't see.
I was in Bloodtide Coast on Laughing Gull Island, I stood around listening to some chatter and then suddenly a war galleon comes rolling in from Lion's Arch. It parks just off the island and proceeds to open fire on the pirate fortress located at the islands center. I see Lionguard jumping off the side of the ship into the water and swimming ashore storming the fortress. Seconds later a dynamic event cues up and I get to join in this madness. Had I just gone by ....killed a few mobs in the area to get to the skillpoint there, gotten the waypoint and moved along quietly I never would have seen that.
In Blazeridge Steppes if you don't hang around long enough you will miss the big fight with the shatterer. So I think that Fiontar was correct in his comparison of GW2's zones to WoW's. In WoW theres no real reason to hang around as the things in the zone won't change much if not at all, besides bosses spawning and such. GW2 zones change quite frequently and power is shifted in certain parts of the map to make way for new events: Humans taking over centaur camps, Lionguard taking over pirate keeps, and vice versa. GW2 wants you to stay in a zone for as long as you can and experience what all is there, because what is there may not be there later.
If you played WoW at launch, you indeed did have to grind the final levels in a hand full of zones. I still have dreams of grinding mobs in Winterspring and Eastern Plague Lands for hours on end to gain a level. The game is not only much bigger now, but the leveling process is much more stream-lined. That's all I was pointing out. The exceptions to the 2-5 hours per zone rule were only due to grinding from 50-60 in Vanilla WoW.
If all you do is run around collecting the PoIs, Waypoints, SPCs and Vistas in GW2, yeah, you maybe can complete a zone in 2-3 hours. I'm talking about actually playing the game, exploring, doing content, harvesting nodes, killing mobs for bonus XP. No matter how much I would try to stretch out a zone I enjoyed in WoW, there was really a fairly limited amount of questing you could do in a zone before you were completely done with it. Unless you went back to grind a particular drop or to do gathering circuits, when you were done with a zone in WoW, you were actually done. (I played WoW heavily the first two years, a moderate amount after BC, before finally moving on, while occassionally returning to check out an expansion. I've been playing MMOs for almost 14 years, I have some clue what I'm talking about).
There is clearly more hours of exploration and play available in each GW2 zone than in the average vanilla WoW zone. I got a lot of enjoyment out of WoW. GW2 is the first game since I've felt as strongly about. I'm sorry if you took the comments as a slap at WoW. WoW is the game that most people have played and it becomes the yardstick to compare against. GW2's 26 Zones are fewer than the number of zones in vanilla WoW, but a lot more densely packed with places to explore and content to experience. I stand by that assertion. It also puts most of it's contemporaries to shame, as I pointed out. Kudos to Arenanet for producing an MMO with hundreds of hours of world content, rather than dozens!
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
It doesnt help either that people more think of vanilla Wow as it was just before TBC launched, not like it was in december 2004 which is what you should compare GW2 with.
And dont forget GW2s hidden jump puzzles in tombraider style, I love those.
But saying that GW2 have somewhat more content than Wow did at release does not make Wow a worse game or anything. Exactly how much content a game needs is something we can discuss.
Both games did have a lot more content just after release than most other modern games like LOTRO (which were really small), AoC, WAR, Rift and most other MMOs.
Noone can in sheer size compete with EQ and WW2O in size though, but both those are a lot older, it is a lot more expensive to make a larger game today,
You are right. There are many levels to content in this game and the amount of hours a zone can provide goes well beyond the amount of time it takes to earn the zone completion bonus. Even in zones I spent 8 hours in, there are conversations I have yet to hear, Dynamic Events I have yet to experience and hidden spaces I have yet to see. I crawled all over the human starting areas during beta and I still managed to find a few caves there since launch that I missed before.
I'm used to pushing a pretty efficient leveling pace in other MMOs. I was in the top 5% of the leveling rush when WoW launched and I was the first Warlock to level 70 on the fresh BC server I played on when BC launched. I slowed down the rush here, but I still didn't take the time to smell the roses and explore all the hidden gems of lore and content with my first character to 80.
Even if GW2 wasn't based around DEs and didn't have level scaling, it would still have one of the highest densities of content per game zone of any MMO I've ever played. DEs, level scaling and all the things, big and small, that reward actual exploration of the GW2 game world just amplify the play time you can achieve from the raw amount of content present in the game.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
You're looking for ArcheAge, not Guild Wars 2
If in 1982 we played with the current mentality, we would have burned down all the pac man games since the red ghost was clearly OP. Instead we just got better at the game.
Yeah. Good point. I think a lot of people who have played WoW were not around at the start. They don't appreciate how steep the leveling curve was, how devoid of content most of the level 50+ zones were at launch, or the fact that some of the zones currently part of The Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor didn't even exist as zones when the game launched.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
