Originally posted by Aelious EQN based upon PS2 Pathfinder Online Wildstar I think
Right of the top of my head. Others like Embers of Caerus, Camelot Unchained are not very close but intended to be open world.
There may be other titles I'm not thinking of but it's nice to see.
wildstar is not.. the rest are very far off and no concrete data is set on them at all.. we really know nothing on EQN aside from it being a sandbox..
Origins of Malu is and looking forward to testing it.. only two with possible release date anytime in the next year would be The repopulation and maybe Origins of Malu
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
Originally posted by Benedikt actually no - gw2 (and aoc) "instancing" is a protection against "empty zones" which do happen a lot in most of other mmorpgs when most of the players are already max level - have to say i was not bothered by it in gw2 at all (well mostly at all, i could have live w/o a time it took to transit from overflow to normal zone)
Make leveling meaningfull and actually lasting quite abit of time instead of the 1month level cap rush and all your zones will automaticly be filled by people leveling at slower paces and alts. No need for instanceing
Instancing is modern thing because imagine this. Dungeons are not instanced. Bosses/mobs in a dungeon are available for first come first serve basis. Farming guilds will dominate these dungeons 24/7.
Who wants to play a game like that?
Me.
PVE competition in a dungeon made EQ even more interesting.
what you dont understand is the players of today are vastly different from th eplayers back in EQ. There weren't nearly as many griefers today as there were back then. That kind of system would be abused and ultimately only used by very few because they wouldn't be able to combat the farming guilds.
to that you may say bring your own, and then you're turning what should be a pve experience into a pvp experience, but the point would be moot because those farming guilds would be ready, prepared to fend off whatever force you could bring. You may even wipe them a time or two, but be assured you would not get any boss kills cause they would wipe you right back.
The players of today would get wiped by the players of older games because they are used to it. The players of today would go to the forums and whine whine whine rather then tough it out and try try try.
The non instanced style of gameplay would weed out a ton of the baddies in the first few weeks just because its a harsher style of game. Which is fine with me. Less people/kiddie trolls in chat.
"In the immediate future, we have this one, and then weve got another one that is actually going to be so were going to have, what we want to do, is in January, what were targeting to do, this may or may not happen, so you cant hold me to it. But what were targeting to do, is have a fun anniversary to the Ilum shenanigans that happened. An alien race might invade, and they might crash into Ilum and there might be some new activities that happen on the planet." ~Gabe Amatangelo
Well that's why I said currently in development So two close, one not far from that (we'll see a reveal/demo in August) and a three down the road. With the rate of released MMOs slowing down I'd say six in the foreseeable future pretty great.
Oh, don't forget AoW, AA and Black Desert. Not sure what Instances AA has though.
Originally posted by Benedikt actually no - gw2 (and aoc) "instancing" is a protection against "empty zones" which do happen a lot in most of other mmorpgs when most of the players are already max level - have to say i was not bothered by it in gw2 at all (well mostly at all, i could have live w/o a time it took to transit from overflow to normal zone)
Make leveling meaningfull and actually lasting quite abit of time instead of the 1month level cap rush and all your zones will automaticly be filled by people leveling at slower paces and alts. No need for instanceing
Instancing is modern thing because imagine this. Dungeons are not instanced. Bosses/mobs in a dungeon are available for first come first serve basis. Farming guilds will dominate these dungeons 24/7.
Who wants to play a game like that?
Me.
PVE competition in a dungeon made EQ even more interesting.
what you dont understand is the players of today are vastly different from th eplayers back in EQ. There weren't nearly as many griefers today as there were back then. That kind of system would be abused and ultimately only used by very few because they wouldn't be able to combat the farming guilds.
to that you may say bring your own, and then you're turning what should be a pve experience into a pvp experience, but the point would be moot because those farming guilds would be ready, prepared to fend off whatever force you could bring. You may even wipe them a time or two, but be assured you would not get any boss kills cause they would wipe you right back.
The players of today would get wiped by the players of older games because they are used to it. The players of today would go to the forums and whine whine whine rather then tough it out and try try try.
The non instanced style of gameplay would weed out a ton of the baddies in the first few weeks just because its a harsher style of game. Which is fine with me. Less people/kiddie trolls in chat.
so you're just a big bad elitist veteran who think the players of today are carebears who don't know how to do anything but qq.
you cannot be more full of shit. the players of today almost thrive on making OTHER people cry by griefing them. its what gets them off. and yes, you can be damn sure the top min/max elitist guilds will be farming as many open world dungeons as they can as a whole to cut off anyone else getting whatever drops they can get from them.
the players 10 years ago weren't dicks. players now are. your vastly misinterpretting the gamers of today by confusing WoW's continued success vs other "harder(in your eyes)" games like GW2 where you think it requires so much more skill to play than WoW.
Originally posted by Aelious Well that's why I said currently in development So two close, one not far from that (we'll see a reveal/demo in August) and a three down the road. With the rate of released MMOs slowing down I'd say six in the foreseeable future pretty great.
Oh, don't forget AoW, AA and Black Desert. Not sure what Instances AA has though.
AoW, BDO, and AA are not completely seamless.. AoW is about at zoned and instanced as they come... my point is any of the "down the road" games could easily be instanced games..only ones i have seen concrete design info on that say they will be seamless worlds are The repopulation and Origins of Malu... AA looks to have a huge world but even seige warfare is in its own instance.... just because they are more sandbox style doesn't mean they won't be heavily zoned/instanced games like Age of Wushu
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
I've played PWI (yes that old outdated etc game) for some time now and assumed that the open world style was the norm. Then having jumped on the GW2 bandwagon I was very confused by the gameplay style.
So this is 'instanced' where you have a small area to quest in, then (at least back when it started) you wait in line to get into the next area? I must admit I was baffled. I dont have a lot of MMO experience and suddenly this super new game seems like a whole bunch of small games linked together by portals.
How is it that this is even accepted by the gaming community. Like seriously, am I the only one that thinks the 'instanced' style of GW2 really sucks - I mean REALLY. I was extremely disappointed to say the least and it actually made me feel claustrophobic playing GW2.
(as a sideline I didnt play GW2 for long because my computer wont play it for pvp but thats my problem)
I guess I'm interested to hear others opinions on 'instancing'. Does anyone out there actually like it - and if so why? Is instancing a result of developers trying to cramb so much into each small area that it cant be done in an open world format?
There are a lot fo reasons for it. Some of them are lessons long-ago learned, others are being re-learned frequently. I´ll start with 2 games as reference. UO and WOW.
Problems?
1. camping - There will always be a best (ie most efficient) way to get loot. After awhile, there will be a pecking order. In UO, this was elder gazers. They were an easy, but high level mob with a very small spawn area. What happened? People formed lines to camp the spot... and that is if they were being nice. If they weren´t being nice, you would end up with 5 people trying to get you killed. Nothing sucked worse than going from dungeon to dungeon finding every decent spot already with a line of players waiting.
2. No bosses that you have to work to get to - Let´s suppose, at the bottom of a dungeon there was a boss. A group of friends fight their way for an hour through the trash.. a second before they pull the boss, another group runs up behind them ( through the now clear dungeon) and tags the boss.
3. No boss too big - The other problem, which you see with overland bosses is that they can be zerged and dominated too easily. WOW recently added a couple overland bosses.. you know what happens? the fight is designed for 40 players.. on my server, we usually get at least 60-100 to kill it without any effort.
And that leads to the biggest problem.
It is simply impossible to tune boss fights when you don´t know how many players are going to be fighting it. In WOW, it is very common to wipe on a boss at less than 5%, or to kill a boss with only 3 of 25 players still alive. That balancing is only possible because the devs know exactly how many players will be fighting the boss. WIth non-instanced bosses, the majority of the time the bosses are going to be impossible, or super easy. The only other alternative is to do what EQ did.. make the bosses very easy, but require them to take hours to kill... not exactly engaging gameplay to fight a boss, using the same 5 abilities for 4 hours.
Instanced dungeons are required to make boss fights interesting.
That's surprising to hear about AoW since it was supposed to be "open world". Just to be clear I look at "instancing" as separating a group of people from others. Semantics aside dedicated small group instances and methods to seperate areas of the gameworld are what I'm taking about.
Originally posted by Aelious That's surprising to hear about AoW since it was supposed to be "open world". Just to be clear I look at "instancing" as separating a group of people from others. Semantics aside dedicated small group instances and methods to seperate areas of the gameworld are what I'm taking about.
so am I... AoW has a LOT of seperating people in their own instances for all kinds of things.. now don't get me wrong it has some HUGE areas but is as instanced as most themepark MMOs.. also again only those two games I listed repop and malu don't follow what is in red from what I have seen.. true seamless games are very very rare
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
LOL, instancing reminds me of D2, and while its hardly on the same scale, it can feel retro. What I don't understand is how "entirely persistent" zones are so immersive. Your in a world overflowing with hero's, pretending to participate in mostly exclusive events which everyone is doing, and even the best environtments lack the depth and openness of a realistically populated world. I mean, how many homes are there really in that capitol? 100?, 5000 people are living in a city with hardly a fraction of the development necessary to sustain them...
Anyway, time to go home, layers.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
Originally posted by BahamutKaiser LOL, instancing reminds me of D2, and while its hardly on the same scale, it can feel retro. What I don't understand is how "entirely persistent" zones are so immersive. Your in a world overflowing with hero's, pretending to participate in mostly exclusive events which everyone is doing, and even the best environtments lack the depth and openness of a realistically populated world. I mean, how many homes are there really in that capitol? 100?, 5000 people are living in a city with hardly a fraction of the development necessary to sustain them...
Anyway, time to go home, layers.
ehhh the way a capital works is. People travel there. Take Atlanta for instance. Most people who are in Atlanta, don't live in Atlanta. They commute to Atlanta for work, or entertainment.
The players of today would get wiped by the players of older games because they are used to it. The players of today would go to the forums and whine whine whine rather then tough it out and try try try.
The non instanced style of gameplay would weed out a ton of the baddies in the first few weeks just because its a harsher style of game. Which is fine with me. Less people/kiddie trolls in chat.
so you're just a big bad elitist veteran who think the players of today are carebears who don't know how to do anything but qq.
you cannot be more full of shit. the players of today almost thrive on making OTHER people cry by griefing them. its what gets them off. and yes, you can be damn sure the top min/max elitist guilds will be farming as many open world dungeons as they can as a whole to cut off anyone else getting whatever drops they can get from them.
the players 10 years ago weren't dicks. players now are. your vastly misinterpretting the gamers of today by confusing WoW's continued success vs other "harder(in your eyes)" games like GW2 where you think it requires so much more skill to play than WoW.
Agreed but even if he is right and you "weed out a ton of baddies" you will have a playerbase the size of Darkfall. Not exactly a success story.
Hate it myself also.Much preferred EQ in it's launch and early expansion state where everything , including major dungeons , were open world.Zero instancing.
Like Vanguard which has no instances and is totally open.
Much preferred EQ in it's launch and early expansion state where everything , including major dungeons , were open world.
Zero instancing.
Like Vanguard which has no instances and is totally open.
EQ1 even at launch was not completely open at all.. not sure what you guys are thinking but EQ1 had loading portals between every zone.. it sucked too because at the time computers were slow as dirt and loading took forever.. also the mob trains!!
think so many are confusing zones and instances though...
Vanguard has a seamless open world EQ1 did/does not
me personally i like seamless worlds but enjoy instanced dungeons more
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
I've played PWI (yes that old outdated etc game) for some time now and assumed that the open world style was the norm. Then having jumped on the GW2 bandwagon I was very confused by the gameplay style.
So this is 'instanced' where you have a small area to quest in, then (at least back when it started) you wait in line to get into the next area? I must admit I was baffled. I dont have a lot of MMO experience and suddenly this super new game seems like a whole bunch of small games linked together by portals.
How is it that this is even accepted by the gaming community. Like seriously, am I the only one that thinks the 'instanced' style of GW2 really sucks - I mean REALLY. I was extremely disappointed to say the least and it actually made me feel claustrophobic playing GW2.
(as a sideline I didnt play GW2 for long because my computer wont play it for pvp but thats my problem)
I guess I'm interested to hear others opinions on 'instancing'. Does anyone out there actually like it - and if so why? Is instancing a result of developers trying to cramb so much into each small area that it cant be done in an open world format?
There are a lot fo reasons for it. Some of them are lessons long-ago learned, others are being re-learned frequently. I´ll start with 2 games as reference. UO and WOW.
Problems?
1. camping - There will always be a best (ie most efficient) way to get loot. After awhile, there will be a pecking order. In UO, this was elder gazers. They were an easy, but high level mob with a very small spawn area. What happened? People formed lines to camp the spot... and that is if they were being nice. If they weren´t being nice, you would end up with 5 people trying to get you killed. Nothing sucked worse than going from dungeon to dungeon finding every decent spot already with a line of players waiting.
2. No bosses that you have to work to get to - Let´s suppose, at the bottom of a dungeon there was a boss. A group of friends fight their way for an hour through the trash.. a second before they pull the boss, another group runs up behind them ( through the now clear dungeon) and tags the boss.
3. No boss too big - The other problem, which you see with overland bosses is that they can be zerged and dominated too easily. WOW recently added a couple overland bosses.. you know what happens? the fight is designed for 40 players.. on my server, we usually get at least 60-100 to kill it without any effort.
And that leads to the biggest problem.
It is simply impossible to tune boss fights when you don´t know how many players are going to be fighting it. In WOW, it is very common to wipe on a boss at less than 5%, or to kill a boss with only 3 of 25 players still alive. That balancing is only possible because the devs know exactly how many players will be fighting the boss. WIth non-instanced bosses, the majority of the time the bosses are going to be impossible, or super easy. The only other alternative is to do what EQ did.. make the bosses very easy, but require them to take hours to kill... not exactly engaging gameplay to fight a boss, using the same 5 abilities for 4 hours.
Instanced dungeons are required to make boss fights interesting.
As I said earlier most of these at their core are design issues.
1, 2, 3 :
If you design or set specific locality for entities and spawn them in at random in the static locality without diversity of spawn scale or entity system extrapolation based on previous spawn rates you will get camping, you will get players overwhelming bosses, and kill stealing etc..
While I agree it's easier to create/control content for a set number of players, there is no reason that effective dynamically scalable systems can't be created, even better would be these systems with purpose, (GW2 claimed to have this but really all they have is scripted chain events) which were a step forward but not really great.
Something that really struck with me was when I played UO many years ago, a troll army spawned with a troll king and started attacking a town(can't remember which) all hell broke loose on the server, these are the kind of events that make RPG games, not static dungeon crawling, not implementing special quest lines for events over a period to pretend a living breathing world exists.
Simple things like, going to a dungeon starting a fight with some monsters, escalation of that event leading to maybe a full blown event that causes dungeon monsters to create a hoard, leave their dungeon at start attacking local towns etc..
MMORPG's need to start having reactive environments, things that were typically controlled by GM's in classic pen and paper games. Even if it means they employ GM's as controlling entities over spawn rates and dynamic reactive content.
There so much more that could be done, and i hope as the industry evolves, this will get better.
I've played PWI (yes that old outdated etc game) for some time now and assumed that the open world style was the norm. Then having jumped on the GW2 bandwagon I was very confused by the gameplay style.
So this is 'instanced' where you have a small area to quest in, then (at least back when it started) you wait in line to get into the next area? I must admit I was baffled. I dont have a lot of MMO experience and suddenly this super new game seems like a whole bunch of small games linked together by portals.
How is it that this is even accepted by the gaming community. Like seriously, am I the only one that thinks the 'instanced' style of GW2 really sucks - I mean REALLY. I was extremely disappointed to say the least and it actually made me feel claustrophobic playing GW2.
(as a sideline I didnt play GW2 for long because my computer wont play it for pvp but thats my problem)
I guess I'm interested to hear others opinions on 'instancing'. Does anyone out there actually like it - and if so why? Is instancing a result of developers trying to cramb so much into each small area that it cant be done in an open world format?
There are a lot fo reasons for it. Some of them are lessons long-ago learned, others are being re-learned frequently. I´ll start with 2 games as reference. UO and WOW.
Problems?
1. camping - There will always be a best (ie most efficient) way to get loot. After awhile, there will be a pecking order. In UO, this was elder gazers. They were an easy, but high level mob with a very small spawn area. What happened? People formed lines to camp the spot... and that is if they were being nice. If they weren´t being nice, you would end up with 5 people trying to get you killed. Nothing sucked worse than going from dungeon to dungeon finding every decent spot already with a line of players waiting.
2. No bosses that you have to work to get to - Let´s suppose, at the bottom of a dungeon there was a boss. A group of friends fight their way for an hour through the trash.. a second before they pull the boss, another group runs up behind them ( through the now clear dungeon) and tags the boss.
3. No boss too big - The other problem, which you see with overland bosses is that they can be zerged and dominated too easily. WOW recently added a couple overland bosses.. you know what happens? the fight is designed for 40 players.. on my server, we usually get at least 60-100 to kill it without any effort.
And that leads to the biggest problem.
It is simply impossible to tune boss fights when you don´t know how many players are going to be fighting it. In WOW, it is very common to wipe on a boss at less than 5%, or to kill a boss with only 3 of 25 players still alive. That balancing is only possible because the devs know exactly how many players will be fighting the boss. WIth non-instanced bosses, the majority of the time the bosses are going to be impossible, or super easy. The only other alternative is to do what EQ did.. make the bosses very easy, but require them to take hours to kill... not exactly engaging gameplay to fight a boss, using the same 5 abilities for 4 hours.
Instanced dungeons are required to make boss fights interesting.
As I said earlier most of these at their core are design issues.
1, 2, 3 :
If you design or set specific locality for entities and spawn them in at random in the static locality without diversity of spawn scale or entity system extrapolation based on previous spawn rates you will get camping, you will get players overwhelming bosses, and kill stealing etc..
While I agree it's easier to create/control content for a set number of players, there is no reason that effective dynamically scalable systems can't be created, even better would be these systems with purpose, (GW2 claimed to have this but really all they have is scripted chain events) which were a step forward but not really great.
Something that really struck with me was when I played UO many years ago, a troll army spawned with a troll king and started attacking a town(can't remember which) all hell broke loose on the server, these are the kind of events that make RPG games, not static dungeon crawling, not implementing special quest lines for events over a period to pretend a living breathing world exists.
Simple things like, going to a dungeon starting a fight with some monsters, escalation of that event leading to maybe a full blown event that causes dungeon monsters to create a hoard, leave their dungeon at start attacking local towns etc..
MMORPG's need to start having reactive environments, things that were typically controlled by GM's in classic pen and paper games. Even if it means they employ GM's as controlling entities over spawn rates and dynamic reactive content.
There so much more that could be done, and i hope as the industry evolves, this will get better.
That would actually be pretty interesting. Like if a mmorpg actually had a team set aside to actually "play" the mobs, that not only makes their AI better as its...well not artificial, and not scripted, but they would also be able to do complete off the wall random actions whatever they wanted to.
Much preferred EQ in it's launch and early expansion state where everything , including major dungeons , were open world.
Zero instancing.
Like Vanguard which has no instances and is totally open.
EQ1 even at launch was not completely open at all.. not sure what you guys are thinking but EQ1 had loading portals between every zone.. it sucked too because at the time computers were slow as dirt and loading took forever.. also the mob trains!!
think so many are confusing zones and instances though...
Vanguard has a seamless open world EQ1 did/does not but both do have open world non-instanced dungeons
It didnt take forever to load if you had 2 Voodoo 2 12mb , SLI'd cards made the zones load fairly instantly at the lines , Glide ran much smoother than dx at the time on the Voodoo 2 cards.
I'd take EQ's zone lines any day over today's instanced/hub crap.
Shame Vanguard had the train wreck of a launch that it did , loved its world feel.
Well, I'll throw in another perspective on this. While I think game developers can do new ideas to get over the whole need for instancing (look at how Pathfinder Online is possibly doing this for a good example of how it should be done) there are problems that present themselves with open world dungeons.
Playing Everquest 2 again with a group of guildies highlighted these problems. We are literally the only ones I have ever seen taking legitimate groups into dungeons at our level. Everyone else we've seen in the dungeon is either soloing with mercenaries from Age of Discovery expansion or dual boxing (with mercs too) and AoEing everything in the dungeons down. It's frustrating seeing other players do this, as they literally run past us and pull rare spawns and quest MOBs left and right forcing us to wait for respawns (which can take upwards of an hour) to progress our quests.
Non-instanced dungeons and open world content comes with two problems, both of which CAN be addressed, but haven't been addressed in such way yet that:
Players can kill and tag spawns your party was waiting for, and higher level players can literally clear out entire dungeons essentially griefing your dungeoneering party.
It promotes camping, which frankly is boring gameplay. Sitting there waiting for respawns isn't nearly as fun as clearing out the entire dungeon and keeping a constant pace.
I come from an Everquest background so I know all about open-world dungeons and I do know solutions can be put in place to bring them back without the previous problems (as I mentioned Pathfinder Online has a good system in place for this). Still, the griefing and camping it causes needs to be addressed before you can tackle the no-instancing, and for now until developers start doing that I would prefer instancing over the latter.
Don't like the instancing currently being used. I quit AoC due to it. BG's are a form of instancing and when Blizz put it in WoW, it ruined what was a active world pvp scene. Though the servers crashes ended.
I suppose as technology improves and bandwith caps limit the amount of data sent over a set amount of time, it forces game makers to appease players who want the best graphics to use the instancing.
Roses are red Violets are blue The reviewer has a mishapen head Which means his opinion is skewed ...Aldous.MF'n.Huxley
Originally posted by BahamutKaiser LOL, instancing reminds me of D2, and while its hardly on the same scale, it can feel retro. What I don't understand is how "entirely persistent" zones are so immersive. Your in a world overflowing with hero's, pretending to participate in mostly exclusive events which everyone is doing, and even the best environtments lack the depth and openness of a realistically populated world. I mean, how many homes are there really in that capitol? 100?, 5000 people are living in a city with hardly a fraction of the development necessary to sustain them...
Anyway, time to go home, layers.
ehhh the way a capital works is. People travel there. Take Atlanta for instance. Most people who are in Atlanta, don't live in Atlanta. They commute to Atlanta for work, or entertainment.
Yeah, except that there would be a great deal of settlements all around that modern city to accomidate them, not a complete lack of, beyond the fact that the majority of fantasy based medievil environs tried to house whatever they could within the physical protection of the city, not like Atlanta >.>
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
Originally posted by BahamutKaiser LOL, instancing reminds me of D2, and while its hardly on the same scale, it can feel retro. What I don't understand is how "entirely persistent" zones are so immersive. Your in a world overflowing with hero's, pretending to participate in mostly exclusive events which everyone is doing, and even the best environtments lack the depth and openness of a realistically populated world. I mean, how many homes are there really in that capitol? 100?, 5000 people are living in a city with hardly a fraction of the development necessary to sustain them...
Anyway, time to go home, layers.
ehhh the way a capital works is. People travel there. Take Atlanta for instance. Most people who are in Atlanta, don't live in Atlanta. They commute to Atlanta for work, or entertainment.
Yeah, except that there would be a great deal of settlements all around that modern city to accomidate them, not a complete lack of, beyond the fact that the majority of fantasy based medievil environs tried to house whatever they could within the physical protection of the city, not like Atlanta >.>
you gotta think, just cause there's millions of players doesn't necessarily mean there's millions of "people" living in game. all the players are basically multiple instances of the same person. by that i mean every paladin is really just multiple instances 1 paladin, same for all the other classes.
where you start in WoW for instance is probably where you live. also as far as the whole in medieval times they kept their housing environments inside the city, that's not necessarily true in a game where you can teleport/just fly gryphons for pennies on the dollar large distances lol.
but that kinda takes the debate in a weird direction.
Lots of games have (even single player games like GTAIII - Bomb da Base Mission ) it and it serves a purpose.
That is, it allows for an area to be completely reset on entry by a player.
Sure it also allows multiple players or groups to play the same area at the same time too. And not bump into each other and all fight the boss and all get the kill and all get the treasure without having to share...
But the reset is very important to the designers. It allows them to plan the experience.
It allows them to make sure the right traps are set, doors are locked, keys are where they should be and the monsters are on patrol in the right place at the right time. It makes the planning and designing easy...
And because it is easy... lazy people (devs) love it.
So rather than being only used when absolutely necessary... now it's used just because it's easy and devs can be lazy.
Some devs claim that instancing is absolutely essential... but recently several MMOs have proven this is not the case.
In Wizard 101, there is a boss (the Kraken on Triton Ave) that is not instanced. Players que up to kill him. Some players hate having to wait... some don't mind and enjoy watching others fight... pluses and minuses.
In The Chronicles of Spellborn there were several un-instanced bosses wandering the world. If you found and killed one then a timer would start before the monster respawned and started walking its 'patrol route' again. Hunting these 'bosses' was often half the fun.
One in particular was a good argument for instancing though... She (IIRC it was a she) would begin walking when the server was reset each day and follow a route that lasted about 15 minutes... and walk off the edge of the world... then fall forever... so she never respawned. Which meant if you wanted to kill her you had to be on and ready when the server was reset. Still that could have been fixed by the devs repathing her.
I don't mind instancing when appropriate. The dungeons in DDO for example. D&D (pen and paper) was an "instanced" game for example.
But in many games - it's simply used by lazy devs who have put no thought into how to make the gameworld work. They have adopted the easy out of simply using the 'reset' button everytime a player enters and area.
Originally posted by Benedikt actually no - gw2 (and aoc) "instancing" is a protection against "empty zones" which do happen a lot in most of other mmorpgs when most of the players are already max level - have to say i was not bothered by it in gw2 at all (well mostly at all, i could have live w/o a time it took to transit from overflow to normal zone)
Make leveling meaningfull and actually lasting quite abit of time instead of the 1month level cap rush and all your zones will automaticly be filled by people leveling at slower paces and alts. No need for instanceing
Instancing is modern thing because imagine this. Dungeons are not instanced. Bosses/mobs in a dungeon are available for first come first serve basis. Farming guilds will dominate these dungeons 24/7.
Who wants to play a game like that?
Me.
PVE competition in a dungeon made EQ even more interesting.
This for me aswell, i love non instance world such as EQ, Competetive PvE is some of the best PvE imo better than the stale kind imo
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wildstar is not.. the rest are very far off and no concrete data is set on them at all.. we really know nothing on EQN aside from it being a sandbox..
Origins of Malu is and looking forward to testing it.. only two with possible release date anytime in the next year would be The repopulation and maybe Origins of Malu
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
The players of today would get wiped by the players of older games because they are used to it. The players of today would go to the forums and whine whine whine rather then tough it out and try try try.
The non instanced style of gameplay would weed out a ton of the baddies in the first few weeks just because its a harsher style of game. Which is fine with me. Less people/kiddie trolls in chat.
"In the immediate future, we have this one, and then weve got another one that is actually going to be so were going to have, what we want to do, is in January, what were targeting to do, this may or may not happen, so you cant hold me to it. But what were targeting to do, is have a fun anniversary to the Ilum shenanigans that happened. An alien race might invade, and they might crash into Ilum and there might be some new activities that happen on the planet." ~Gabe Amatangelo
So two close, one not far from that (we'll see a reveal/demo in August) and a three down the road. With the rate of released MMOs slowing down I'd say six in the foreseeable future pretty great.
Oh, don't forget AoW, AA and Black Desert. Not sure what Instances AA has though.
so you're just a big bad elitist veteran who think the players of today are carebears who don't know how to do anything but qq.
you cannot be more full of shit. the players of today almost thrive on making OTHER people cry by griefing them. its what gets them off. and yes, you can be damn sure the top min/max elitist guilds will be farming as many open world dungeons as they can as a whole to cut off anyone else getting whatever drops they can get from them.
the players 10 years ago weren't dicks. players now are. your vastly misinterpretting the gamers of today by confusing WoW's continued success vs other "harder(in your eyes)" games like GW2 where you think it requires so much more skill to play than WoW.
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AoW, BDO, and AA are not completely seamless.. AoW is about at zoned and instanced as they come... my point is any of the "down the road" games could easily be instanced games..only ones i have seen concrete design info on that say they will be seamless worlds are The repopulation and Origins of Malu... AA looks to have a huge world but even seige warfare is in its own instance.... just because they are more sandbox style doesn't mean they won't be heavily zoned/instanced games like Age of Wushu
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
There are a lot fo reasons for it. Some of them are lessons long-ago learned, others are being re-learned frequently. I´ll start with 2 games as reference. UO and WOW.
Problems?
1. camping - There will always be a best (ie most efficient) way to get loot. After awhile, there will be a pecking order. In UO, this was elder gazers. They were an easy, but high level mob with a very small spawn area. What happened? People formed lines to camp the spot... and that is if they were being nice. If they weren´t being nice, you would end up with 5 people trying to get you killed. Nothing sucked worse than going from dungeon to dungeon finding every decent spot already with a line of players waiting.
2. No bosses that you have to work to get to - Let´s suppose, at the bottom of a dungeon there was a boss. A group of friends fight their way for an hour through the trash.. a second before they pull the boss, another group runs up behind them ( through the now clear dungeon) and tags the boss.
3. No boss too big - The other problem, which you see with overland bosses is that they can be zerged and dominated too easily. WOW recently added a couple overland bosses.. you know what happens? the fight is designed for 40 players.. on my server, we usually get at least 60-100 to kill it without any effort.
And that leads to the biggest problem.
It is simply impossible to tune boss fights when you don´t know how many players are going to be fighting it. In WOW, it is very common to wipe on a boss at less than 5%, or to kill a boss with only 3 of 25 players still alive. That balancing is only possible because the devs know exactly how many players will be fighting the boss. WIth non-instanced bosses, the majority of the time the bosses are going to be impossible, or super easy. The only other alternative is to do what EQ did.. make the bosses very easy, but require them to take hours to kill... not exactly engaging gameplay to fight a boss, using the same 5 abilities for 4 hours.
Instanced dungeons are required to make boss fights interesting.
so am I... AoW has a LOT of seperating people in their own instances for all kinds of things.. now don't get me wrong it has some HUGE areas but is as instanced as most themepark MMOs.. also again only those two games I listed repop and malu don't follow what is in red from what I have seen.. true seamless games are very very rare
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
Anyway, time to go home, layers.
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes.
That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
ehhh the way a capital works is. People travel there. Take Atlanta for instance. Most people who are in Atlanta, don't live in Atlanta. They commute to Atlanta for work, or entertainment.
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Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion for EQ1.
That was probably the first one for MMO's and that was 10 years ago. At least it's the first I remember.
Agreed but even if he is right and you "weed out a ton of baddies" you will have a playerbase the size of Darkfall. Not exactly a success story.
Like Vanguard which has no instances and is totally open.EQ1 even at launch was not completely open at all.. not sure what you guys are thinking but EQ1 had loading portals between every zone.. it sucked too because at the time computers were slow as dirt and loading took forever.. also the mob trains!!
think so many are confusing zones and instances though...
Vanguard has a seamless open world EQ1 did/does not
me personally i like seamless worlds but enjoy instanced dungeons more
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
As I said earlier most of these at their core are design issues.
1, 2, 3 :
If you design or set specific locality for entities and spawn them in at random in the static locality without diversity of spawn scale or entity system extrapolation based on previous spawn rates you will get camping, you will get players overwhelming bosses, and kill stealing etc..
While I agree it's easier to create/control content for a set number of players, there is no reason that effective dynamically scalable systems can't be created, even better would be these systems with purpose, (GW2 claimed to have this but really all they have is scripted chain events) which were a step forward but not really great.
Something that really struck with me was when I played UO many years ago, a troll army spawned with a troll king and started attacking a town(can't remember which) all hell broke loose on the server, these are the kind of events that make RPG games, not static dungeon crawling, not implementing special quest lines for events over a period to pretend a living breathing world exists.
Simple things like, going to a dungeon starting a fight with some monsters, escalation of that event leading to maybe a full blown event that causes dungeon monsters to create a hoard, leave their dungeon at start attacking local towns etc..
MMORPG's need to start having reactive environments, things that were typically controlled by GM's in classic pen and paper games. Even if it means they employ GM's as controlling entities over spawn rates and dynamic reactive content.
There so much more that could be done, and i hope as the industry evolves, this will get better.
That would actually be pretty interesting. Like if a mmorpg actually had a team set aside to actually "play" the mobs, that not only makes their AI better as its...well not artificial, and not scripted, but they would also be able to do complete off the wall random actions whatever they wanted to.
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It didnt take forever to load if you had 2 Voodoo 2 12mb , SLI'd cards made the zones load fairly instantly at the lines , Glide ran much smoother than dx at the time on the Voodoo 2 cards.
I'd take EQ's zone lines any day over today's instanced/hub crap.
Shame Vanguard had the train wreck of a launch that it did , loved its world feel.
Well, I'll throw in another perspective on this. While I think game developers can do new ideas to get over the whole need for instancing (look at how Pathfinder Online is possibly doing this for a good example of how it should be done) there are problems that present themselves with open world dungeons.
Playing Everquest 2 again with a group of guildies highlighted these problems. We are literally the only ones I have ever seen taking legitimate groups into dungeons at our level. Everyone else we've seen in the dungeon is either soloing with mercenaries from Age of Discovery expansion or dual boxing (with mercs too) and AoEing everything in the dungeons down. It's frustrating seeing other players do this, as they literally run past us and pull rare spawns and quest MOBs left and right forcing us to wait for respawns (which can take upwards of an hour) to progress our quests.
Non-instanced dungeons and open world content comes with two problems, both of which CAN be addressed, but haven't been addressed in such way yet that:
Players can kill and tag spawns your party was waiting for, and higher level players can literally clear out entire dungeons essentially griefing your dungeoneering party.
It promotes camping, which frankly is boring gameplay. Sitting there waiting for respawns isn't nearly as fun as clearing out the entire dungeon and keeping a constant pace.
I come from an Everquest background so I know all about open-world dungeons and I do know solutions can be put in place to bring them back without the previous problems (as I mentioned Pathfinder Online has a good system in place for this). Still, the griefing and camping it causes needs to be addressed before you can tackle the no-instancing, and for now until developers start doing that I would prefer instancing over the latter.
Well it's dynamic content that doesn't require much resources. I like the instances.
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Don't like the instancing currently being used. I quit AoC due to it. BG's are a form of instancing and when Blizz put it in WoW, it ruined what was a active world pvp scene. Though the servers crashes ended.
I suppose as technology improves and bandwith caps limit the amount of data sent over a set amount of time, it forces game makers to appease players who want the best graphics to use the instancing.
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Yeah, except that there would be a great deal of settlements all around that modern city to accomidate them, not a complete lack of, beyond the fact that the majority of fantasy based medievil environs tried to house whatever they could within the physical protection of the city, not like Atlanta >.>
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes.
That way, if they get angry, they'll be a mile away... and barefoot.
you gotta think, just cause there's millions of players doesn't necessarily mean there's millions of "people" living in game. all the players are basically multiple instances of the same person. by that i mean every paladin is really just multiple instances 1 paladin, same for all the other classes.
where you start in WoW for instance is probably where you live. also as far as the whole in medieval times they kept their housing environments inside the city, that's not necessarily true in a game where you can teleport/just fly gryphons for pennies on the dollar large distances lol.
but that kinda takes the debate in a weird direction.
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Instancing isn't new.
Lots of games have (even single player games like GTAIII - Bomb da Base Mission ) it and it serves a purpose.
That is, it allows for an area to be completely reset on entry by a player.
Sure it also allows multiple players or groups to play the same area at the same time too. And not bump into each other and all fight the boss and all get the kill and all get the treasure without having to share...
But the reset is very important to the designers. It allows them to plan the experience.
It allows them to make sure the right traps are set, doors are locked, keys are where they should be and the monsters are on patrol in the right place at the right time. It makes the planning and designing easy...
And because it is easy... lazy people (devs) love it.
So rather than being only used when absolutely necessary... now it's used just because it's easy and devs can be lazy.
Some devs claim that instancing is absolutely essential... but recently several MMOs have proven this is not the case.
In Wizard 101, there is a boss (the Kraken on Triton Ave) that is not instanced. Players que up to kill him. Some players hate having to wait... some don't mind and enjoy watching others fight... pluses and minuses.
In The Chronicles of Spellborn there were several un-instanced bosses wandering the world. If you found and killed one then a timer would start before the monster respawned and started walking its 'patrol route' again. Hunting these 'bosses' was often half the fun.
One in particular was a good argument for instancing though... She (IIRC it was a she) would begin walking when the server was reset each day and follow a route that lasted about 15 minutes... and walk off the edge of the world... then fall forever... so she never respawned. Which meant if you wanted to kill her you had to be on and ready when the server was reset. Still that could have been fixed by the devs repathing her.
I don't mind instancing when appropriate. The dungeons in DDO for example. D&D (pen and paper) was an "instanced" game for example.
But in many games - it's simply used by lazy devs who have put no thought into how to make the gameworld work. They have adopted the easy out of simply using the 'reset' button everytime a player enters and area.
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
This for me aswell, i love non instance world such as EQ, Competetive PvE is some of the best PvE imo better than the stale kind imo