You are all in some sort of denial about various things with mmo's today..
Go play Asherons call, and try and actually embrace the way questing is done by means of search and figuring out stuff, and having to group to do such parts that crop up in middle of said quests..
gfx? pfft they are nice of course dont get me wrong here, I love good eye candy, but way too much is sacrificed these days to fit the fast buck earning bill...
Id plant a good 6 years solid into a new asherons call, and they can still have blocky/squared off shoulders for all I care..
you are all spoilt and think things should be a particular way to be good lol's..
game world chopped into zones with loading screens = instanced world.
No. Just no.
Actually, he is right, the zones are instanced, but it doesn't matter.
What would the best approach to game design would be in your opinion anyway?
A huge but barren world, where you may walk for a while before you bump into somebody or something interesting to do? (Example, Darkfall, Vanguard)
A normal sized world of a single instance, but depending on game popularity would need more copies of it, aka more servers? (WoW, Rift, Warhammer)
A mirrored world, one that if more people are online, would spawn more copies of the zone if there are numerous people, or less if they are not (Tera, GW2, TSW).
All models have their pros and cons. The main issue the instanced design is trying to solve is regulating amount of people over a certain content.
Option 1 can't regulate anything, it's just huge, so it'll be common to roam alone unless you are near a metropolis. You basically get 10 times the amount of space needed for fun gameplay.
Option 2 is regulated artificially via server transfers. Servers can still be jam packed, but people have a choice on the kind of server they wish to play.
Option 3 is regulated by the developers. It is a design that needs less servers and is less affected by fluctuations in people playing.
Basically if option 1 loses half the people, from barren it becomes a desert. Option 2 goes from high to mid populated or from mid to low and thus people have to migrate in order to maintain similar playing habits as before. Option 3 just loses a few intances of certain popular zones and that's it.
The interesting bit is that the same people who introduced instances and zones into mmorpgs (Funcom with AO) are the ones that are introducing probably the best design of a single server, multi-shard world (with TSW).
First issue. People need to stop saying instance when they mean zone.
Second issue, it's purely design.
Actually zone is an instance.
Totally seamless world is just one big instance.
Game composed of 10 zones with loading screens are just 10 instances.
There can't be just ONE instance. An instance, by definition, is one of many. A single piece of a whole.
Oh I just realized what you meant by that.
You might have right in past.
Nowadays modern mainstream mmorpg's like WoW, TSW, GW2 and so on are using heavy cross server features. Basically doing same thing that matchmaking multiplayer games are doing. Turning servers into instances.
In past servers were totally separated from each other, in some games you could not even transfer your character (unless there were a server merge of course) so each game server could be viewed as separate game world.
Actually, he is right, the zones are instanced, but it doesn't matter.
What would the best approach to game design would be in your opinion anyway?
A huge but barren world, where you may walk for a while before you bump into somebody or something interesting to do? (Example, Darkfall, Vanguard)
A normal sized world of a single instance, but depending on game popularity would need more copies of it, aka more servers? (WoW, Rift, Warhammer)
A mirrored world, one that if more people are online, would spawn more copies of the zone if there are numerous people, or less if they are not (Tera, GW2, TSW).
All models have their pros and cons. The main issue the instanced design is trying to solve is regulating amount of people over a certain content.
Option 1 can't regulate anything, it's just huge, so it'll be common to roam alone unless you are near a metropolis. You basically get 10 times the amount of space needed for fun gameplay.
Option 2 is regulated artificially via server transfers. Servers can still be jam packed, but people have a choice on the kind of server they wish to play.
Option 3 is regulated by the developers. It is a design that needs less servers and is less affected by fluctuations in people playing.
Basically if option 1 loses half the people, from barren it becomes a desert. Option 2 goes from high to mid populated or from mid to low and thus people have to migrate in order to maintain similar playing habits as before. Option 3 just loses a few intances of certain popular zones and that's it.
The interesting bit is that the same people who introduced instances and zones into mmorpgs (Funcom with AO) are the ones that are introducing probably the best design of a single server, multi-shard world (with TSW).
Instance is a copy, by definition. If only one copy exists it is no longer an instance even without loading screens. Many games don't have loading screens yet they have zones, some freeze for a second (Vanguard) many scifi games have hidden it in a space jump sequence or a hyperspace tunnel. Instead of freezing between zones, but switching the creen blank for a second while the other zone is loaded, would it suddenly transform from a zone to an instance? No.
The overflow instances that GW2 used were an acceptable way of handling congestion. What would've been the alternative? Once the population has settled, as far as the players are concerned, they are zones.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Graphics aren't the limiting factor for a seamless world with no load screens. You can walk from one part of the Planetside 2 map to the other and you don't run into loading screens, and of course we know WoW does it, and so did Star Wars Galaxies. For single player games like Skyrim or Fallout 3+ you can do the same thing. So the technology is there, it's just easier for devs to make the game in sections and then link them all together.
First issue. People need to stop saying instance when they mean zone.
Second issue, it's purely design.
Actually zone is an instance.
Totally seamless world is just one big instance.
Game composed of 10 zones with loading screens are just 10 instances.
There can't be just ONE instance. An instance, by definition, is one of many. A single piece of a whole.
ZONES, aren't instanced. You can have as many people as you want in a zone, with no player cap.
Suppose that all but one player logs off, and in response, the game shuts down all but one instance. Would that mean that a game is no longer instanced? Does the underlying structure of whether or not a game is instanced depend on the size of the playerbase and vary with time, even though the programming does not change?
A game can be instanced even if it has zero copies of some particular instances.
A "server" (as it appears to players, not necessarily a physical server on the back end) is an instance. Not in the traditional MMORPG definition of an instance, no.
Hooray for arguing against a concept without even knowing what the concept means?
There are a lot of different types of instancing. You can create a new instance of an area for each player or group (e.g., everything except cities and outposts in Guild Wars). You can have the number of instances scale with the number of players online, to keep the player density roughly constant, and then let players switch between the instances (e.g., outdoor areas in Champions Online). You can have a fixed number of instances of each area, but let players switch instances whenever they feel like it (e.g., Wizard 101).
Having separate instances while disabling the ability to switch between them (the separate server model) doesn't mean that a game is no longer instanced. It only means that the instancing system is badly designed.
Nowadays modern mainstream mmorpg's like WoW, TSW, GW2 and so on are using heavy cross server features. Basically doing same thing that matchmaking multiplayer games are doing. Turning servers into instances.
In past servers were totally separated from each other, in some games you could not even transfer your character (unless there were a server merge of course) so each game server could be viewed as separate game world.
Now they are just instances of same game.
Separate servers have been separate instances all along. Just because you couldn't transfer from one to another doesn't mean that they weren't separate copies of the same thing.
I have been thinking about this and trying to figure out why the best games such as "Betrayal at Krondor" and "Asherons Call" which featured huge open worlds with almost no zoning or restrictions are so rare today. Vanguard is another example but slightly more restrictive.
Asherons Call was HUGE, it tooks hours to run from the top of the map to the bottom. There were open dungeons and they were awesome.
Asherons Call was the first truly "3D" mmo I ever played and perhaps it is this wow factor that has left me jaded years after quiting the game. I can still recall the first time I logged in, it was into a town called Nanto if I am not mistaken. I set out on my own, joined later by a close friend and with little to no quests or anything like that made Asherons Call my own game.
We enjoyed playing the game, the "grind" was heavy yet nonexistent. At that time the max level was 126, which took me years to achieve but I never once felt pressured to get to that level as the game I played was ours. We set the objectives, we set the pace. We built lasting friendships and monarchy's (guilds) which lasted years.
Even now when I get the urge and pop in again I still see members of the monarchy who I know, and they remember me. This bond, this social bond is something that is not easy to describe.
Lets go back a bit though, Asherons Call was the original TSW. The quests when they came made you think, you had to discover the correct way to complete them. There was a "spell economy" which was fueled by the fact you had to research your owns spells by trial and error. The more players using those spells meant the spells would get weaker, the less the spells stronger.
Asherons Call in its infancy was a thinking mans game and it was amazing! I personally believe this is one of the reasons TSW dd not do so well, the spoiled players of this era do no want to think anymore.
Anyway before I get too long winded here is my question :
Did modern graphics kill the seamless world? My dialogue set the theme but the essence remains the same. Are we limited by what we can render?
** For kicks here is an old article I wrote that was published on IGN.
WoW is your example of 'modern' graphics? I guess Minecraft is also cutting edge?
To me, "modern" graphics means heavy use of geometry shaders, tessellation, or other features that weren't available before DirectX 10 or OpenGL 3.2. You can have modern graphics that look bad, or stuff done with older APIs that looks good.
Doubt that graphics play that much of a role (for beeing the limiting factor for whenever you want to have a streamed "seamless" world or loading screen instances).
For actually stopping the idea of a seamless world by graphic fidelity, the developer would need to have:
A working Test model of final graphic fidelity Honestly, i know not one developer who had a full DX11, tesselation, HDR, SSAO box of their new "MMO" including one map, VARIOUS armor renders and player clients during his brainstorm phase. If they would, we probably wouldn't have to deal with things what plaqued SWTOR and even GW2 till today during WvWvW. They basically would have a working game which only needs content and art. (Not gonna happen)
Most license an engine and tinker around, thus have a pretty base idea if they even are capable to run a seamless world. Because you need to work out the details all on your own it becomes quickly a money question. Actually running a seamless world in an mmo is more about server tech and core engine features rather than graphic fidelity.
It's easier to design a mmo server for a fixed zone with maybe 300 players tops and 3500 on that cluster, than an open world - where maybe 1000 players happen to fight and jump "seamless" across sectors or zones.
For an open world, you may need to cascade MORE your systems. A npc server working in a cluster matrix who deals more in sectors including load balancing, offloadingm the npc spawns and AI rather than having just a "simple" spawn table for each area one locigal server instance.
It's actually quite "easy" to adjust the visibility range or adjust your LOD system for the clients compared to scratch your whole server software core because it just can't handle the average "300" people on a square and you programmed (or had it already build in with the licensed software without additional thought) fixated for one logical "server" (no matter if it is virtualized, load balanced or even hardware).
The classical Server Software for MMOs runs still one one logical server while the databases may be clustered and offloaded. The database could provide your 1000 players on that siege with sufficent data, but the server software handling player movement and inventory requests couldn't because that 16 cores are still not enough. You would need a way to offload such request to multiple logical servers, figure and code that all by yourself OR:
instance the area, limitating the ammount of players, and save a lot of time - is exactly an easy workaround for that fundamental design problem.
So the question begs, CAN YOU DO THIS? Is it worth going through roughly an additional year to develop for an existing engine (or your own) the characteristics to run a "semless" world? It's not like zones and instances ARE NOT accepted. They are perfectly viable for the market.
It's cheaper and faster to work with boxes who are lose connected rather than an array of connected boxes with no visible transition.
It's a core design decision you just can't exchange later. You need to go with what you start.
There have been dozens of MMOs in the past and present that are not only seamless, but have no instances either. It's all about how you design the game. A game like WoW would break in half if there weren't instances. Meanwhile, a game made with much worse tech, dark age of Camelot, NEVER had issues with crowding, camping, or anything like that, and there wasn't a single instance in that game.
Instances have some major gameplay advantages. I haven't found any. For starters, they let players see the world as it is "supposed" to be Er... not really, considering the devs made the game with the intention of having other players in it, so its not "supposed" to be a static world. Its a multiplayer game., rather than heading out to kill a mob only to find that someone else already did. That's what makes it a virtual world. There are drawbacks, too, but even with no technical impediments, there are good reasons why a game might want to use instances in various ways Not if you want to make an MMO.
You cite DAoC, but that game had instances, too. It did indeed add instances in 2005, it was one of the things that made everyone quit. A "server" (as it appears to players, not necessarily a physical server on the back end) is an instance. Not in the traditional MMORPG definition of an instance, no.
Better performance Wrong.
More profound effects without disrupting other players' gameplay Possible without instances.
Prevent other players from griefing or disupting your gameplay This isn't an issue anywhere else in the gameworld, why is it an issue in dungeons? (hint, it isn't) If we use this logic, then we might as well play a game with only 4 people we know in real life.
Customzed content Don't need instances for that either.
Difficulty can be adjusted Don't need instances for that. In DAoC, mob AI would react differently depending on who you brought to the fight, and how many people. Alternativly, if you wanted a bigger challenge in a specific dungeon, you'd just go deeper. Eventually you'll get to a place that no normal group could beat.
No need for respawning mobs or anything of the sort That's not exactly a very big plus, and it doesn't prevent mobs from spawning in the overworld, does it? So it creates a further immersion breaking disconnect.
You can choose your company You can choose your company in regular zones too, by picking who to group with. Very simple.
game world chopped into zones with loading screens = instanced world.
No. Just no.
Actually, he is right, the zones are instanced, but it doesn't matter.
What would the best approach to game design would be in your opinion anyway?
A huge but barren world, where you may walk for a while before you bump into somebody or something interesting to do? (Example, Darkfall, Vanguard)
A normal sized world of a single instance, but depending on game popularity would need more copies of it, aka more servers? (WoW, Rift, Warhammer)
A mirrored world, one that if more people are online, would spawn more copies of the zone if there are numerous people, or less if they are not (Tera, GW2, TSW).
First, there's more content packed into Vanguard in each square than most MMOs have in entire zones. It's not barren. Not remotely. Neither is Darkfall.
Second, er, what about all the dozens of MMOs that never had any instances and still weren't barren? You know, the MMOs that made this entire genre exist? Stuff like DAoC that never one had a need for an instance?
I have been thinking about this and trying to figure out why the best games such as "Betrayal at Krondor" and "Asherons Call" which featured huge open worlds with almost no zoning or restrictions are so rare today. Vanguard is another example but slightly more restrictive.
Asherons Call was HUGE, it tooks hours to run from the top of the map to the bottom. There were open dungeons and they were awesome.
Asherons Call was the first truly "3D" mmo I ever played and perhaps it is this wow factor that has left me jaded years after quiting the game. I can still recall the first time I logged in, it was into a town called Nanto if I am not mistaken. I set out on my own, joined later by a close friend and with little to no quests or anything like that made Asherons Call my own game.
We enjoyed playing the game, the "grind" was heavy yet nonexistent. At that time the max level was 126, which took me years to achieve but I never once felt pressured to get to that level as the game I played was ours. We set the objectives, we set the pace. We built lasting friendships and monarchy's (guilds) which lasted years.
Even now when I get the urge and pop in again I still see members of the monarchy who I know, and they remember me. This bond, this social bond is something that is not easy to describe.
Lets go back a bit though, Asherons Call was the original TSW. The quests when they came made you think, you had to discover the correct way to complete them. There was a "spell economy" which was fueled by the fact you had to research your owns spells by trial and error. The more players using those spells meant the spells would get weaker, the less the spells stronger.
Asherons Call in its infancy was a thinking mans game and it was amazing! I personally believe this is one of the reasons TSW dd not do so well, the spoiled players of this era do no want to think anymore.
Anyway before I get too long winded here is my question :
Did modern graphics kill the seamless world? My dialogue set the theme but the essence remains the same. Are we limited by what we can render?
** For kicks here is an old article I wrote that was published on IGN.
A working Test model of final graphic fidelity Honestly, i know not one developer who had a full DX11, tesselation, HDR, SSAO box of their new "MMO" including one map, VARIOUS armor renders and player clients during his brainstorm phase. If they would, we probably wouldn't have to deal with things what plaqued SWTOR and even GW2 till today during WvWvW. They basically would have a working game which only needs content and art. (Not gonna happen)
...
For an open world, you may need to cascade MORE your systems. A npc server working in a cluster matrix who deals more in sectors including load balancing, offloadingm the npc spawns and AI rather than having just a "simple" spawn table for each area one locigal server instance.
...
It's a core design decision you just can't exchange later. You need to go with what you start.
1) Coding various graphical effects is actually pretty quick. Pixel/fragment shaders need to run hundreds of millions of times per second, and that's not happening if they're hundreds of lines of source code. Earlier programmable portions of the pipeline don't run quite that much, but still, a game that tries to have tens of thousands of lines of HLSL or GLSL source code may not run well on anything.
The bigger problem is that just because your game engine runs at 1000 frames per second when there isn't much artwork in the world doesn't mean that it's still going to run great once everything is built and added. Once you've got a ton of artwork made assuming that the graphics engine wants it set up in a particular way, if you go back and change the graphics engine, you might have to redo a ton of other stuff.
2) NPC spawning takes so little computational time as to be effectively a rounding error. Informing nearby players that an NPC has spawned, loading art assets relevant to the NPC client-side, and drawing the NPC on the screen are much harder than merely deciding whether and where it spawns. It isn't intrinsically that way, I suppose, as you could design a game with very complex algorithms that take considerable running time to determine when and where mobs spawn. I'm not aware of any game that has gone that route.
3) I think you've hit on the real issue with your last sentence. It's not that the coding for a seamless world is harder to do. It's that it might not run very well once you add all of the artwork and such, and you won't find out whether it's going to run well until it's too late to change it.
First, there's more content packed into Vanguard in each square than most MMOs have in entire zones. It's not barren. Not remotely. Neither is Darkfall.
Vanguard also isn't terribly seamless. When you cross a zone boundary and the game freezes for several seconds while it loads the next zone, that's a seam. It has a severe case of hitching from trying to load and unload various things as you move around within a zone.
Sure, if you add an SSD, those problems go away. But you know what else could make those problems go away? Loading screens.
The point is that it is not the graphics that kill open seamless world, it is player desire.
Talking about the "technology" to do a seamless world makes about as much sense as talking about the "technology" to balance classes in PVP. The tools to do it have been around since basically forever, but doing it well is the hard part--and requires sacrificing some things that some games might otherwise like to have.
I just want to chime in here and give Quiz some mad props for absolutely owning this thread with impressive, impressive technical knowledge and insight.
Anyone trying to argue with Quizzical is foolish.
I'll take modern graphics without massive texture replication (hello FFXIV) and 5 second loads screens on my SSD anyday.
First issue. People need to stop saying instance when they mean zone.
Second issue, it's purely design.
Actually zone is an instance.
Totally seamless world is just one big instance.
Game composed of 10 zones with loading screens are just 10 instances.
There can't be just ONE instance. An instance, by definition, is one of many. A single piece of a whole.
ZONES, aren't instanced. You can have as many people as you want in a zone, with no player cap.
Zones ARE instances. There IS player cap. Newest example - Guild Wars 2 - each zone have player cap.
Oh boy. Let me help you.
A ZONE is NOT an instance. When an area has a player cap and spawns copies of itself, it is not a zone. It is an instance.
Zone is a term applied ONLY to areas that have absolutely no player cap. There are no zone caps in DAoC, EQ, AC, VG, DF, and many other games.
There is a difference between the terms, you really should learn it.
I think you should learn a context and a meaning of world zone. Because zone does not mean one thing.
In example WoW vanilla was seamless world but it had zones. Similarly had Vanguard. Ultima Online did not and it was seamless as well.
Places in Guild Wars 2 or many similar games that have player cap in one location are ALSO refered as a ZONE - also by press and some devs - not to mention overwhelming majority of players whenever you like it or not.
Zone can refer to technical inside 'grid' that boundaries players don't see.
Zone can mean part of terrain in a some of seamless games.
Zone can mean part of closed terrain that if gated behind loading screen without player cap.
Zone can mean part of closed terrain that if gated behind loading screen WITH player cap.
So please educate yourself before you say, because this definiton of word has changed over the years. You may not like it, hell I personally have not like it, but I got over it - since majority of playerbase use it in all above contexts - so if you want to communicate effeficently then you kinda have.
This is intresting because it's happening on all fronts. I mean whens the last time you flew an airship over a world map FF9? The technology was there then but due to thier large player base cutting our vehicles and world maps started to dissapear from everything. Yes A couple MMO's have gone to the point of a seemless world for instance ArcheAge.
With this in mind, I think the developers are to blame. It's their lazyness that has been taking things from RPG's on all platforms. Last time I saw A bathroom on a RPG was Breath of Fire 2. Player housing used to be A standerd for all MMO's for about 5 years. AO, LotRO,SWG,FF11 just to name A few all had some type of housing. Then WoW said we only do easy stuff. Soon after that the rest followed like sheep. Same goes with RPG's last time I played A really good RPG with vehicles and freedom to explore and travel was Steamboat Chronicles.
Lots of people right now are playing games like Minecraft and Runescape because they have Basic RPG elements that newer released RPGs are missing. Creativity, Encouragment for Crafting, and Freedom of Choice.
The PS3, 360, and Wii are all out less and less good titles to look forward to comming out everyday. The PC is ok right now but not great compaired to it's old shinning glory. All we can do is hope that one day A Developer wakes up and says I'm done with this lazy BS I'm going to make A game that I will actually play when it's finished.
Lots of people say graphics don't make a game and proved it clear by sending the message to FF14. Maybe they can send A clearer one for them to wake up and put out some gold.
Avanced graphics has nothing to do with how seemless a game is. The limitation is the developer engine the world is designed in. How far you see and how much is rendered at once is controlled by your own client and system. Zones are controlled by the game engine and how the game servers load balance. Developers limit themselves through their engine. Seemless worlds are possible now and forever into the future. The developers have to simply decide how lazy they want to be. It is about making the game appear seamless. It always has seams but how much you notice them is up to the limitations put in place by developers.
Avanced graphics has nothing to do with how seemless a game is. The limitation is the developer engine the world is designed in. How far you see and how much is rendered at once is controlled by your own client and system. Zones are controlled by the game engine and how the game servers load balance. Developers limit themselves through their engine. Seemless worlds are possible now and forever into the future. The developers have to simply decide how lazy they want to be. It is about making the game appear seamless. It always has seams but how much you notice them is up to the limitations put in place by developers.
Also how much money the game company is for the servers for the game. That is the biggest issue.
Comments
Zones ARE instances. There IS player cap. Newest example - Guild Wars 2 - each zone have player cap.
Same thing was with Swtor game spawned new instance of zone if there was more players than cap. Same now with Lotro.
And with many other zoned games.
I will quote you "One of many.A single piece of a whole" - game world chopped into zones with loading screens = instanced world.
You are all in some sort of denial about various things with mmo's today..
Go play Asherons call, and try and actually embrace the way questing is done by means of search and figuring out stuff, and having to group to do such parts that crop up in middle of said quests..
gfx? pfft they are nice of course dont get me wrong here, I love good eye candy, but way too much is sacrificed these days to fit the fast buck earning bill...
Id plant a good 6 years solid into a new asherons call, and they can still have blocky/squared off shoulders for all I care..
you are all spoilt and think things should be a particular way to be good lol's..
laters...
No. Just no.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Actually, he is right, the zones are instanced, but it doesn't matter.
What would the best approach to game design would be in your opinion anyway?
Oh I just realized what you meant by that.
You might have right in past.
Nowadays modern mainstream mmorpg's like WoW, TSW, GW2 and so on are using heavy cross server features. Basically doing same thing that matchmaking multiplayer games are doing. Turning servers into instances.
In past servers were totally separated from each other, in some games you could not even transfer your character (unless there were a server merge of course) so each game server could be viewed as separate game world.
Now they are just instances of same game.
Instance is a copy, by definition. If only one copy exists it is no longer an instance even without loading screens. Many games don't have loading screens yet they have zones, some freeze for a second (Vanguard) many scifi games have hidden it in a space jump sequence or a hyperspace tunnel. Instead of freezing between zones, but switching the creen blank for a second while the other zone is loaded, would it suddenly transform from a zone to an instance? No.
The overflow instances that GW2 used were an acceptable way of handling congestion. What would've been the alternative? Once the population has settled, as far as the players are concerned, they are zones.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Graphics aren't the limiting factor for a seamless world with no load screens. You can walk from one part of the Planetside 2 map to the other and you don't run into loading screens, and of course we know WoW does it, and so did Star Wars Galaxies. For single player games like Skyrim or Fallout 3+ you can do the same thing. So the technology is there, it's just easier for devs to make the game in sections and then link them all together.
Suppose that all but one player logs off, and in response, the game shuts down all but one instance. Would that mean that a game is no longer instanced? Does the underlying structure of whether or not a game is instanced depend on the size of the playerbase and vary with time, even though the programming does not change?
A game can be instanced even if it has zero copies of some particular instances.
Hooray for arguing against a concept without even knowing what the concept means?
There are a lot of different types of instancing. You can create a new instance of an area for each player or group (e.g., everything except cities and outposts in Guild Wars). You can have the number of instances scale with the number of players online, to keep the player density roughly constant, and then let players switch between the instances (e.g., outdoor areas in Champions Online). You can have a fixed number of instances of each area, but let players switch instances whenever they feel like it (e.g., Wizard 101).
Having separate instances while disabling the ability to switch between them (the separate server model) doesn't mean that a game is no longer instanced. It only means that the instancing system is badly designed.
Separate servers have been separate instances all along. Just because you couldn't transfer from one to another doesn't mean that they weren't separate copies of the same thing.
WoW is your example of 'modern' graphics? I guess Minecraft is also cutting edge?
To me, "modern" graphics means heavy use of geometry shaders, tessellation, or other features that weren't available before DirectX 10 or OpenGL 3.2. You can have modern graphics that look bad, or stuff done with older APIs that looks good.
Doubt that graphics play that much of a role (for beeing the limiting factor for whenever you want to have a streamed "seamless" world or loading screen instances).
For actually stopping the idea of a seamless world by graphic fidelity, the developer would need to have:
A working Test model of final graphic fidelity
Honestly, i know not one developer who had a full DX11, tesselation, HDR, SSAO box of their new "MMO" including one map, VARIOUS armor renders and player clients during his brainstorm phase. If they would, we probably wouldn't have to deal with things what plaqued SWTOR and even GW2 till today during WvWvW. They basically would have a working game which only needs content and art.
(Not gonna happen)
Most license an engine and tinker around, thus have a pretty base idea if they even are capable to run a seamless world. Because you need to work out the details all on your own it becomes quickly a money question. Actually running a seamless world in an mmo is more about server tech and core engine features rather than graphic fidelity.
It's easier to design a mmo server for a fixed zone with maybe 300 players tops and 3500 on that cluster, than an open world - where maybe 1000 players happen to fight and jump "seamless" across sectors or zones.
For an open world, you may need to cascade MORE your systems. A npc server working in a cluster matrix who deals more in sectors including load balancing, offloadingm the npc spawns and AI rather than having just a "simple" spawn table for each area one locigal server instance.
It's actually quite "easy" to adjust the visibility range or adjust your LOD system for the clients compared to scratch your whole server software core because it just can't handle the average "300" people on a square and you programmed (or had it already build in with the licensed software without additional thought) fixated for one logical "server" (no matter if it is virtualized, load balanced or even hardware).
The classical Server Software for MMOs runs still one one logical server while the databases may be clustered and offloaded. The database could provide your 1000 players on that siege with sufficent data, but the server software handling player movement and inventory requests couldn't because that 16 cores are still not enough. You would need a way to offload such request to multiple logical servers, figure and code that all by yourself OR:
instance the area, limitating the ammount of players, and save a lot of time - is exactly an easy workaround for that fundamental design problem.
So the question begs, CAN YOU DO THIS? Is it worth going through roughly an additional year to develop for an existing engine (or your own) the characteristics to run a "semless" world?
It's not like zones and instances ARE NOT accepted. They are perfectly viable for the market.
It's cheaper and faster to work with boxes who are lose connected rather than an array of connected boxes with no visible transition.
It's a core design decision you just can't exchange later. You need to go with what you start.
You guys need to come up with better arguments.
Oh boy. Let me help you.
A ZONE is NOT an instance. When an area has a player cap and spawns copies of itself, it is not a zone. It is an instance.
Zone is a term applied ONLY to areas that have absolutely no player cap. There are no zone caps in DAoC, EQ, AC, VG, DF, and many other games.
There is a difference between the terms, you really should learn it.
First, there's more content packed into Vanguard in each square than most MMOs have in entire zones. It's not barren. Not remotely.
Neither is Darkfall.
Second, er, what about all the dozens of MMOs that never had any instances and still weren't barren? You know, the MMOs that made this entire genre exist? Stuff like DAoC that never one had a need for an instance?
I mean the technology of a seamless world.
The point is that it is not the graphics that kill open seamless world, it is player desire.
1) Coding various graphical effects is actually pretty quick. Pixel/fragment shaders need to run hundreds of millions of times per second, and that's not happening if they're hundreds of lines of source code. Earlier programmable portions of the pipeline don't run quite that much, but still, a game that tries to have tens of thousands of lines of HLSL or GLSL source code may not run well on anything.
The bigger problem is that just because your game engine runs at 1000 frames per second when there isn't much artwork in the world doesn't mean that it's still going to run great once everything is built and added. Once you've got a ton of artwork made assuming that the graphics engine wants it set up in a particular way, if you go back and change the graphics engine, you might have to redo a ton of other stuff.
2) NPC spawning takes so little computational time as to be effectively a rounding error. Informing nearby players that an NPC has spawned, loading art assets relevant to the NPC client-side, and drawing the NPC on the screen are much harder than merely deciding whether and where it spawns. It isn't intrinsically that way, I suppose, as you could design a game with very complex algorithms that take considerable running time to determine when and where mobs spawn. I'm not aware of any game that has gone that route.
3) I think you've hit on the real issue with your last sentence. It's not that the coding for a seamless world is harder to do. It's that it might not run very well once you add all of the artwork and such, and you won't find out whether it's going to run well until it's too late to change it.
Vanguard also isn't terribly seamless. When you cross a zone boundary and the game freezes for several seconds while it loads the next zone, that's a seam. It has a severe case of hitching from trying to load and unload various things as you move around within a zone.
Sure, if you add an SSD, those problems go away. But you know what else could make those problems go away? Loading screens.
Talking about the "technology" to do a seamless world makes about as much sense as talking about the "technology" to balance classes in PVP. The tools to do it have been around since basically forever, but doing it well is the hard part--and requires sacrificing some things that some games might otherwise like to have.
I just want to chime in here and give Quiz some mad props for absolutely owning this thread with impressive, impressive technical knowledge and insight.
Anyone trying to argue with Quizzical is foolish.
I'll take modern graphics without massive texture replication (hello FFXIV) and 5 second loads screens on my SSD anyday.
I think you should learn a context and a meaning of world zone. Because zone does not mean one thing.
In example WoW vanilla was seamless world but it had zones. Similarly had Vanguard. Ultima Online did not and it was seamless as well.
Places in Guild Wars 2 or many similar games that have player cap in one location are ALSO refered as a ZONE - also by press and some devs - not to mention overwhelming majority of players whenever you like it or not.
Zone can refer to technical inside 'grid' that boundaries players don't see.
Zone can mean part of terrain in a some of seamless games.
Zone can mean part of closed terrain that if gated behind loading screen without player cap.
Zone can mean part of closed terrain that if gated behind loading screen WITH player cap.
So please educate yourself before you say, because this definiton of word has changed over the years. You may not like it, hell I personally have not like it, but I got over it - since majority of playerbase use it in all above contexts - so if you want to communicate effeficently then you kinda have.
This is intresting because it's happening on all fronts. I mean whens the last time you flew an airship over a world map FF9? The technology was there then but due to thier large player base cutting our vehicles and world maps started to dissapear from everything. Yes A couple MMO's have gone to the point of a seemless world for instance ArcheAge.
With this in mind, I think the developers are to blame. It's their lazyness that has been taking things from RPG's on all platforms. Last time I saw A bathroom on a RPG was Breath of Fire 2. Player housing used to be A standerd for all MMO's for about 5 years. AO, LotRO,SWG,FF11 just to name A few all had some type of housing. Then WoW said we only do easy stuff. Soon after that the rest followed like sheep. Same goes with RPG's last time I played A really good RPG with vehicles and freedom to explore and travel was Steamboat Chronicles.
Lots of people right now are playing games like Minecraft and Runescape because they have Basic RPG elements that newer released RPGs are missing. Creativity, Encouragment for Crafting, and Freedom of Choice.
The PS3, 360, and Wii are all out less and less good titles to look forward to comming out everyday. The PC is ok right now but not great compaired to it's old shinning glory. All we can do is hope that one day A Developer wakes up and says I'm done with this lazy BS I'm going to make A game that I will actually play when it's finished.
Lots of people say graphics don't make a game and proved it clear by sending the message to FF14. Maybe they can send A clearer one for them to wake up and put out some gold.
Avanced graphics has nothing to do with how seemless a game is. The limitation is the developer engine the world is designed in. How far you see and how much is rendered at once is controlled by your own client and system. Zones are controlled by the game engine and how the game servers load balance. Developers limit themselves through their engine. Seemless worlds are possible now and forever into the future. The developers have to simply decide how lazy they want to be. It is about making the game appear seamless. It always has seams but how much you notice them is up to the limitations put in place by developers.
You stay sassy!
Also how much money the game company is for the servers for the game. That is the biggest issue.