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NO OPEN WORLD IN AOC!!!!
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WAKE UP MODERATOR. PLEASE LOCK THIS THREAD WHICH THE TROLLERS KEEP ALIVE.
Oh, goddamnit... Of course everyone is comparing AoC to WoW.
As long as WoW is the 300 pound gorilla with 60% of the MMO market, every released MMO is going to be compared to it. And every released MMO is going to borrow many things from WoW too. Get used to it. Stop pretending that WoW doesn't exist or that it's somehow a lesser, cheaper product just because it's popular.
AoC is going to have its success and worthiness measured against WoW, whether you like it or not.
It's going to be defined, described, reviewed and judged in terms of how it differs from wow.
Any good feature (like the open world) that WoW had that isn't present in AoC is a bad point for AoC, period - no matter how much fanboys rationalize that not having that feature is somehow better.
lol... I'm not taking either side here. I can't stand WoW and AoC didn't appeal to me. So all of your huffawing in that post means nothing.
My point stands....
It odesn't matter what "everyone" is comparing "everything" to. The OP is not comparing AoC to WoW. They're not comparing it to *anything*. They are speaking specifically about AoC. Go back and read it for yourself again. Repeatedly if necessary. No mention, or reference to WoW at all. They are speaking specifically about how AoC handles its areas/zones... and nothing else.
If you think that by referring to an open, seamless world, they're immediately referring to WoW... well... sorry for your lack of perspective. There are MMOs that existed before WoW was even announced that had open, seamless worlds. I see nothing in the OP that invokes WoW... no matter how I look at it.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
I agree on this. I would just be a bit more patient and see how AoC will mature, especially since there will be quite some time before WAR and WoW expansion launches.
Its amazing how uninformed people are or at least not trying things in their own mind. The game opens up A LOT. Just go to khopshef province a 20s lvl zone. Place is easily as big if not bigger then the barrens.
Game is way too much instance based. Feels more like oblivion. Hardly meet even others players. People run pass to next loading zone all time, hard call it real world. EQ2 players maeby like tis game but its way too much loading my taste.
Another one pulling WoW out of thin air...
Please show me where in the OP, WoW is invoked as how they want the game to be?
Amazing... WoW is like the wildcard argument against everything now.
Complaint: "I don't like the game 'cause there's not enough areas"
Reply: "It's not like WoW! People need to stop thinking it's like WoW!"
Complaint: "I don't like the graphics style, and the armors don't look right"
Reply: "It's not WoW! Stop expecting it to look like WoW!"
Complaint: "The game has too much instancing"
Reply: "It's not like WoW! I wish people would stop comparing it to WoW!"
Complaint: "My child won't eat their vegetables!"
Reply: "Your children are not like WoW! Stop comparing them to WoW!"
Complaint: "My car won't turn over, and I'm late for work"
Reply: "Stop comparing your car to WoW! It's not using the same engine!"
Yes... I'm being facetious.. but it gets the point across.
Seriously... can people at least start addressing the arguments people are actually making, and stop invoking WoW to give themselves something to argue against? Not every argument being made is automatically linked to Blizzard's game. Some arguments - like the OP's - are clearly made on their own merit, without comparison.
yeah,i get sick of seeing WoW crop up needlessly over and over.
It reminds me of the old vanguard stuff,where any critisizm was instantly responded to with "THIS ISNT WOW!!11". We're all well aware its not WoW,but why exactly people think theres the need to constantly do the 'fashionable' WoW bash thing when arguing about something totally unconnected is ridiculous.
"Im really enjoying the game,but I had some trouble with lag in a city"
"SO WHAT IRONFORGE WAS ALWAYS LAGGY AND BUGGED ITS YOUR SYSTEM NOOB"
We disagree wtih you therefore we are trolls, lol. I think the original Troll was named by the British towards the american revolutionists
They disagreed and complained and had a difference of opinion with King George with how they were being treated therefore they must be TROLLS!!!
No one is debating the "size" of the zones, we are debating the "instance" part of it.
soo confusing to see that half of the ppl call the areas huge and the other half tiny....
maybe they are just of decent size
MMOs currently playing: -
About to play: Lord of the Rings Online
Played: Anarchy Online (alltime favorite) and lots of f2p titles (honorable mentions: 9Dragons, Martial Heroes, Dekaron, Atlantica Online)
I think everyone should qq. If it was a completely open world your frame rates would go to hell.
Which are?
Smaller worlds. Visually pre-loading worlds could never look like AOC without them performing very badly like Vanguard. There is also a reduction in performance around pre-loading points, try having a large PVP battle in WoW on a pre-load point and you'll see a large drop in performance on a average machine. There is no such thing as a open world, some MMOs just go out of their way to make it seem that way.
Smaller worlds? Smaller than AoC, you gotta be kiddin, you obviously have no idea. AoC has the smallest world of all major mmoprg i played.
I'm not going to argue with you, I knew as soon as you said "which are" that you where looking for an argument about things you clearly don't understand. I said smaller worlds as bait and you took it, I could go into detail as to what I mean but I don't see any point, you've made your mind up.
LOL, yeah, exactly my point, you have no arguments at all to back up your bold statements.
actually he does.
A zoning system like WoW requires far more memory to function properly (equal detail to equal detail) than does a system like AoC, thus you have to have smaller zones because you are going to require far more data to be held in memory. And here is why. When you pre load the zones, all of that data has to be stored in memory, often times, they have as many as 5-9 zones loaded at any given time (depending on how it is implemented). So therefore, zones either have to be smaller and/or far less detailed to be held in memory.
With AoC, none of this data has to be held in memory, thus you can have far more detailed zones with a higher level of graphics and a completely different texture set (if needed) since all of this data can be unloaded and loaded at zone points (thus what is happening during your zoning and why if you have a faster computer it goes much faster).
Another thing to consider in WoW style zoning (which is similiar to what was attempted in Vanguard (and we all see how that turned out) is all the zones have to be the same shape/size to work, because irregular shaped zones will cause issues with preloading, while an AoC style system (which is the same basic system used by every MMO out there, btw) can use zones of any shape and/or size to hold the content they want to have in it. If you'd ever played AO, you would of known how they were going to build the game, since the engine on AoC is a decendent of the Anarchy Online engine, it was heavily zoned as well and actually has instance tech in it too (was used back at release and then again later with the new newbie zones).
As for instancing, AoC isn't the first game to use this tech, as I just mentioned AO used it back in 2001 when it was released and EQ2 uses an alomst identical system of once full, creating a new instance (kylong plains 1, 2 or 3 anyone?). This is nothing new and it is a way to allow for much more detailed games without allowing lag and spawn caming to get out of control, once the population spreads out, you will likely rarely ever see more than one instance of anything (how long has it been since there was more than one instance of the commonlands? How about the graveyard, I can remember when there were 7 different instance of that zone!)
This isn't a game breaking feature, but rather a feature to keep the game from breaking itself.
Also, every dungeon area i've ran into, and i was asked to enter the normal/epic instance, there were always people running around inside jacking my boss kills and watching me die while they run by. Not once have I been to a dungeon instance and not seen other people.
This guy is smoking rocks, this game is not closed off or play-controlled. It is just as open as any other game with loading zones, the difference here is AoC uses PLAYER COLLISION DETECTION which means you can't have 2 people standing in the same physical space, so if theres say 100 people in that small village in that hunting zone you're in *which BTW that little hunting zone is BIGGER than most WoW open zones and bigger than most loaded zones in games* then you're never going to get out of that tent, or you'll never get into that bar, or those 12 IRL friends will never let you past that gate, it has it's reasons for setting a maximum player cutoff point per zone. Other than that, the game's zoning is just like everything else except WoW. DDO is an instance game, the town is instanced into super tiny zones with no open space and solid textured tree line walls.
I vote we burn the OP. One match at a time.
"Sometimes, things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. People are basically good. Honor, courage, virtue mean everything. Power and money, money and power mean nothing. Good always triumphs over evil. Love, True Love Never Dies."
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Man, this thread is filled with so much nonsense.
Let's do a quick recap/fact-check:
Issue 1) AoC has very good graphics so instancing even normal zones are needed for it to work
Fact 1) Nonsense, if the cache handler was coded with prefetching in mind this wouldn't even be needed. The issue here is that the codepath of this game is horrible, and as such having too many players together will cause lag.
Opinion 1) I think FunCom made the best possible solution they could instancing it this way because of poor design from the start. I hate that any MMO coming out now aren't open worlds, it seems like they cut huge corners to rush out the game. Again based on the poor design, intancing it this way IS the best solution.
Issue 2) WoW this, WoW that
Fact 2) WoW is the game to beat for mainstream games like AoC, WAR etc. - there's a sandbox genre as well, here CCP's EVE Online is king, and all the upcoming sandbox games are aiming for their crown. This is how life is, to complain about it is stupid.
Opinion 2) WoW is in it's current form has the best technical design and balance. I'm only speaking technically not char development/graphics/sound etc.
I'm not reading all these pages, but when I saw this I had to respond.
In every initial launch a game is going to have lots of players and lots of lag, however as people level the numbers start to disperse and players in different zones even out.
Obviously you never played any old school MMOs like EQ1, UO, or DAoC. These games had zone lines, but none of the world was capped off at a certain number of players and had multiple copies of each zone. When you zoned into Butcher Block in EQ you zoned into Butcher Block. You didn't zone into Butcher Block1 or Butcher Block 2.
For a PvP game, that is PERFECT! AoC would be much more fun if they didn't have several instances of the same zone. How? Well then you'd have people PvPing for quest mobs and different camps.
Doesn't sound fun to you? Don't worry, you can roll on a PvE server and group up with other carebears
However, that is not the case and the game WILL suffer for it. Right now there's not a lot of people playing the game, but there's a good amount. However, those who want a game with better PvP and an open world WILL LEAVE AoC for WAR. If you think otherwise, then
A.) You're obviously an idiot
B.) You yourself are not a true pvper.
AoC zones are just as large as your favorite popular games. Some zones seem bigger than anything I'd ever gamed in.
If AoC zones are so small, why is it with my view distance at 30% *equivilent to max view distance in WoW* that when I max it out at 100% and top out my display sliders, that I still am only seeing 1/8-1/4 the width of a smaller zone? according to wow zone sizes and view distances, if I tripled my view range in wow, I should be seeing 75-90% of a Large zone.
"Sometimes, things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. People are basically good. Honor, courage, virtue mean everything. Power and money, money and power mean nothing. Good always triumphs over evil. Love, True Love Never Dies."
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Which are?
Smaller worlds. Visually pre-loading worlds could never look like AOC without them performing very badly like Vanguard. There is also a reduction in performance around pre-loading points, try having a large PVP battle in WoW on a pre-load point and you'll see a large drop in performance on a average machine. There is no such thing as a open world, some MMOs just go out of their way to make it seem that way.
Smaller worlds? Smaller than AoC, you gotta be kiddin, you obviously have no idea. AoC has the smallest world of all major mmoprg i played.
Please learn general coding before you come back and tell us we dont know what were talking about. Yes smaller areas. Perhaps you havent see the mountains that you cant climp up? Ironforge area? Elwynn Forest? Redridge? Terrokar Forest? Even the seas are there to serve as walls. Just because you cant see the shimmering portals, dont mean that they arent there (oh wait, said that already). Also, ever notice that your game lags a tiny bit when you face in a certain direction?
Instead of blindly bashing aoc for being instanced (Im glad it is), and having zones, I think you should try to make an mmo with only one zone, make it huge, and give it graphics like aoc. Then well see how well it runs.
Okay first off most of the people complaining have not left the island or are not playing at all.
Once you leave the island the zones are huge. According to the producer Tortage is only 5% of the total land mass. So all of tortage and the zones there etc are 5% of the total game world.
According to the developers the Zones are 2-3 KM in length and Width. so they would be around 4 sq miles each for the bigger zones. Which from my experience is at least the 3 20-30 zones are that large.
So that right there is about 12 SQ miles so those three zones are about 2/3rs of Azeroth in shear landmass. Now I am sure the 30-80 zones will be atleast equal in size to the 20-30 zones for total land mass which would mean that Hyboria is around 75% the size of the Outlands and Azeroth combined.
Instances are not even noticable to be perfectly honest. I was in the 20-30 zone for the Aquilonians (I forget the name now) and there was about 30 people within viewing distance of me almost all the time. It didn't matter how far away I ran from them there were more people. I would guess there is roughly a 200-300 cap at the lowest on most instances.
The people talking about instances are using hearsay or are using the single player 1-20 aspect of the game and then trying to expand it. I am sorry but this game is nothing like World of Warcraft. It is nothing like Warhammer will be either. When you use better graphics you are going to need the ability to keep the population down in an area. But there is no reason to think it is down to a few people. They have already hown by their sieges that 100 people can be fighting in close combat in an area (basically 48 vs 48). Even with WoW's low end graphics they have trouble running that many people in an area. How many people did old world PVP when the server would be running like ass because of the 100+ people in an area. So WoW is not capable even with their low end graphics of supporting higher numbers in close combat. Heck their largest amount of people that they support in an area is AV and that is 80.
So in conclusion we have a world that is roughly equal to World of Warcraft's total worldsize that can support as many people fighting in a single area as World of Warcraft can.
Currently playing:
LOTRO & WoW (not much WoW though because Mines of Moria rocks!!!!)
Looking Foward too:
Bioware games (Dragon Age & Star Wars The Old Republic)
How about change your gigantic signature because is annoying....
For people who are saying you need to do instancing to get Age of conan graphics you are incorrect, if you have good engine you can pull even GTA like graphics in an MMO while making seamless world without taking lot of memory by carefully doing preloading. Rockstar has said they can do GTA mmo for current consoles (which are limited to 512 MB iirc) but they have no plans.
That said few other companies are working on MMOs with those graphic and dynamic worlds. Read up on APB MMO and supposed Blizzard's Unnamed MMO under devolopment.
The zones seem farily large to me. Some people call them small because you can't run through every single bush and log or climb that 300 foot mountain. I know..realism is a bitch. It kind of reminds me of life where you can't just turn off the highway at any time you want. Real life is to linear ;(.
There are really two different techs in WoW and AoC too, when it comes to terrain generation. WoW uses a traditional 'height map' system, where the landscape is layed out on a latice work or a grid formation, with each number representing the height of the terrain at that particular point. This has some minor holding back when it comes to how landscape can be portrayed.
In AoC, the landscape is done more on a mesh style system, which doesn't have the latice work or grid of numbers to represent the terrain.
Now, what does that have to do with the price of rice in China? Absolutely nothing, but it does have alot to do with this current debate. To put it simply, it is easier to create a preloading system on a height map system, but the landscape detail will suffer for it. Where as a mesh system is much more robust, but is held back in performance due to the amount of requirements for processing.
This basically means that the systems aren't really comparable, they are trying to accomplish two different things. AoC was never intended to be a no zone system and I beileve by extension that is why the instancing came about too (EQ2 uses a similiar tech and has a similiar solution).
The next point of issue is something WoW doesn't even attempt to do, in fact, NO game to date has done. Player to Player collision detection. This is a VERY expensive calculation and is probably the primary driver (even more so than the graphical) for the instances. The more people in a 'zone' there are, the more of these possible Player to player collision detection calculations there could be, but IMO this is a very important part of the game. Could they have done it without the instances? Sure, but everyone would have to be running Q9xxx with 16gb of ram, Windows Vista and SLIed 9800GX2... Needless to say, there isn't much of a market for games with that as the MINIMUM requirement.
And the final point I'll make is, As anyone who has ever played EQ2, these instances eventually die down and the lowbie zones will be used less and less, so which would you rather have, them spend the time to create 4x the newbie zones, most of which will be empty in a year, or instance what is there and spend more time on the zones where people will be spending their time in a year? Is it a short cut for the developer? Sure, I won't deny that, but it is a short cut that I think is worth taking. I'd rather them spend their time on where I'll spend the majority of my time (as will alot of othe people I think) in the game, the upper level stuff.
I note that someone mention somethign about EQ not using instances, but think back to how many places you could go as a starting area? How many starting areas did they really have? would you have rather they spend that time on 30+ zones, or 50+ zones, rather than creating yet another newbie zone when a new race was created? I wouldn't, I'd rather they spend their time more effectively and get content in places people will enjoy it. But that is just me
hmm I didn't know it was instanced in the GW way (in cities) if many instances of the same area. Personally I might compair it more to City of Heroes. They have overfill multiple instance zones when area is filled.
That kinda sucks, but they did what they did for preformance I'm sure.
I once said EVE was sort of instanced in that when you use jump bridges. You sort of zone in, but there is not multiple copies of the same area. Everyone is in one universe. Also these zones are fit into the game feel. It is not out of place.
Now I understand why people compair it to GW.
Multiple copies of zones are bad for PVP as your enemy can just slip through in another copy of the same zone.
That does take away from the persistant world feel.
O and the statement of "No MMo does collision detection" is WRONG. EVE ships very much so do have collision detection and it is a factor in PVP.
SHOHADAKU
Those previous MMOs are hardly relevant anymore. Please realise that a majority of MMO players got into it because of WoW, given the amount of new players it brought to the genre. Who first did what doesn't matter. It never mattered in any domain. Putting something into application successfully, however, does matter.
WoW will fall out of relevance some day, too. But in the meantime, it's the scale against which every other MMO is going to be measured. Whether you like WoW or not has nothing to do with it.
Also, who cares whether the OP is explicitely talking about WoW? Are we somehow supposed not to introduce anything in the discussion that hasn't been mentioned by the OP?
No... AoC IS a height map with meshes placed on it, just like WoW (minus the portal system that WoW has that allows seamless transitions to indoor areas).
The terrain is precompiled into a set of tiling meshes, but that's an implementation detail.
not really Sho. As is evidenced by EQ2 (who first used this replicated zone on population) eventually there will get to a point where no zone has an instanced copy, this really is just a way to help ease the launch and help with quest line choke points.
Eve isn't instanced, it is zoned (there is a difference) but this game isn't like GW at all, it is more like EQ2 in that sense, zones aren't created for a specific person or group (in most cases, there are some instanced dungeons that are for only one person or group), they only have an upper limit of people.
For example, the City of Tortage (since people are familiar with that place) the limit may be set to 100 people in the zone (it is very small, comparatively) and thus 100 would proably make the place seem smaller, so when person 101 tries to zone, it, Tortage 2 is created and it begins to fill up.
It is dynamic, you can't just log in and say I want to go to Tortage 2, because Tortage 2 may not exist at that time, thus you'll go to Tortage 1 (the original).
It really isn't bad.