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Zone Instancing
RedChampion
Member Posts: 30
What is everyone's opinion on Zones being instanced? Not dungeons, but when you enter a whole new area you would get a loading screen.
Does it completely kill the immersion for you?
What about lag, by limiting the amount of players in each zone you would have less lag.
You could play with anyone in the game, instead of having to be on the same server.
Comments
Yes it kills immersion..kills the game for me..
If you get an instanced continent like wow..going from one to another continent its acceptable...going from one planet to another also no problem..
But from small zone to another zone with instancing is bad..and worse is multi copies of the instanced zones...like AOC, sto, champions, aion in the first few levels because they only have 2 starting zones one for each race..they want to make fast games, with minimum content, 1 start zone with instances to handle the number of players...its the easy way..and also the sucky way.
Depends on the implementation of the zone transfer method.
You're talking about zones not instances. Instancing means when your group enters the zone they have their own zone and no one else can enter your instance.
As far as actual zoning, yea id rather it not take time to go from one area to another. But the problem is somehow that other area has to be loaded. Either you load it when you zone and it costs time to zone, or you load it ahead of time and it costs memory. If you load the zone you are in and every zone that is next to it then you multiply the amount of memory required.
My first MMO was EQ1.
I have no problem with zones. It allows the Devs to develop the game in chunks...which is basically what programming is about. That would be data-abstraction.
You dont care what a function/procedure does(at least the process it uses)...just the paramaters you are going to pass/receieve.
Same goes when they make zones....designer A doesnt need to worry that designer B is making this and that in another zone...as other than any parameters that may be passed between zones...nothing else is going to interact between zones.
Makes for kicking out content that much easier.
With a "seamless" world you still see a bit of "transition" when moving about the area, but to me would make for more opportunites for problems due to all the pre-loading required.
Granted I never completed my Bachelor of Computer Science(was a yr away...have an Associates in Electronics), and things have changed since I went on disabilty in 02...but some things will never change. That would be the more you try to sqeeze in, the more apt problems are to occur.
With zones I refer to the motto of K.I.S.S.(Keep it simple stupid).
For the so called "seamless" effect you get for avoiding zones, it just seems that things would go smother if Devs keep things in blocks.
Just my 2 cents anyways. And for the record...I look at gaming as just that - gaming. Not alternate realities.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
It will loose immersion and the word massive no longer applies. What? I have to hope I run into someone that joined one of the 15 identical instanced zones? While he could be standing at the next tree or roadsign ready to go on an adventure with me. Running into people left and right.
I dont care about zoning, but I prefer non-instanced stuff. I know the difference between zones and instances
My first MMO was FFXI and they did have zones. and you did have to load em each time. But honestly I liked that alot better then when I was playing WoW. reasons?
1. it made each zone run alot smoother, even in a old game like FFXI
2. It enabled the devs to make the zones so much larger. (take 15 minutes to cross the dunes, thats just 1 zone...not even the biggest zone)
3. It allowed the devs to add on more zones seemlessly, (when an expansion came out it was like...wow that fits) Instead of like in WOW where you have some planet that you zap yourself to. (that killed the WoW imersion for me)
4. One of the biggest things I liked about it, the Devs could work on 1 zone at a time. So instead of the whole game going down for 20 minutes-3 hours, they would be like "System wide notice: La Thein Plataue will be shut down from 1:00 server time - 4:00 server time" and you could keep on playing,
There are way more reasons but I can't think of em at the moment, sorry about the spelling and grammer.
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I guess it all depends on the size of the zone. If a zone is big enough for me to spend couple of hours in it doing quest and not forcing constantly loading and zoning in and out then it would be fine. I personally have no problem with zoning as long far and few in between. A great example of this kind of zoning system would be EQ2 and LoTRo. What I do hate however is that if you have to zone and load every tiny little thing in the game. It always annoyed me so much that I have to zone into the town, then zone into the building in the town, then zone into the second floor of the building. Greatest sinner of this bullshit is AoC(god how this game pissed me off) and to lesser extend EQ2 and LoTRo.
However, nothing pissed me off more than the zoning system of vanguard. Of everything out there, vanguard zoning system if by far the absolutely worst. I can already hear the fanboys screaming in my ear, "but vanguard don't have any zone, it is a huge continuous continent" which is absolute crap. The way vanguard zoning system works (and I hope to god no one game follow this) putting the entire world on a grid system. This way every time you cross from one block or "chunk" as they like to call it, you get hit with a micro loading time of roughly 3 to 10 seconds depends on your system. This is the absolute worst when you are trying to farm or complete quest in an area at the corner of one of this stupid chunk. To make matter worst, you can't interact or shoot a creature from one chunk to the next even you they standing within arm reach of where you are.
All in all, every single mmo out there is heavy zones. The only difference is that you either load it one chunk at a time or you are continuously loading everything as you go. Having one chunk loading at a time is good for the players cause it would take relatively less memory and cpu usage. Not every company have the resources of Blizzard to developed what I considered to be the absolute perfect zoning system. So the best thing other developers could do is to know where to draw the line and design it in the way where the loading doesn't inconvenience the player too much.
Instancing doesn't bother me one iota, never has done. On the contrary, if there are a lot of people in a zone such that there is too much competition for the same mobs or harvest nodes then there's a positive advantage in splitting that population up into several instances. Most games that have instancing have a simply means of moving between the instances for those who want to meet up with others, and I simply don't see it as an immersion breaker or problem in any other kind of way.
Of course, there are different kinds of "instancing". I've mentioned one of them, the duplication of crowded zones, another is the kind of instancing that happens when there is a separate image of the zone created just for you/your party. That is fine also, it enables you to proceed at your own pace and not to reach the end of a long quest only to find the boss mob being camped by someone else.
Lastly, there are those who define any kind of zoning as instancing, so that if there is a loading screen between Area A and Area B they call that instancing. I don't personally, I call it zoning, but again I have no problem with it at all. A decent system minimises the loading time and it's never troubled me.
So whichever way we define it, instancing simply doesn't bother me at all. If it enhances the game's performance, or my enjoyment of the game, then I'm all for it.
It's nothing to do with Blizzard's resources, it's to do with the inferior specifications of the graphics and the limited system resources they require. If their graphics engine was anything like as demanding as the other mainstream MMOs they too would have to have zoning. I'm not knocking WoW btw, just commenting that comparing the performance and demands of that game's graphics engine with those of EQ2, AoC, WAR and LoTRO etc is simply an "apples and oranges" argument.
I'm very pro-dungeon-instancing, because you get substantially higher quality content from instanced dungeons. Content quality matters to gamers.
With instanced zones, you don't get better content quality and it's primarily population management. Population management is important for load-balancing server perf/networking, but it doesn't provide huge benefits that matter that much to gamers (server performance matters, but it's a lower tier of importance compared to content quality. A gamer would suffer through a slightly laggy game if the content was awesome, but would probably get bored of a low-quality game even though things run silky smooth.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I'm not sure how much graphic affect the zoning decision of a game. For the most part LoTRO is pretty similar to WoW in term of zoning. You have one huge world where you continuously load the surrounding area as you move along. The only major difference between the two game really is that LoTRO don't have the phasing technology that WoW have. Yet once you go to town almost everything you need to do required some kind of loading (I don't mind lotro as much as other game since it takes a split second for me to load) that I feel could be so easily done without. You load in and out of your bank, you load in and out of the auction house, you load in and out of the crafting hall. All of this have me asking is all this loading really necessary? Wouldn't simply make the town a bit bigger would solve the on micro loading problem if their reason being it was to save space?
Graphically, I don't see that much difference between game like LoTRO and other such as AoC, EQ2 that explain the necessity for it so heavy zoned as it is. I would like to include Warhammer in it also but I never touch so yea...
Low lag is crucial. I take zones anyday. I don't mind the occasional loading screen and I don't understand the people whose immersion they affect. Rubberbanding, warping, lag-killing (on both sides), slow response times and freezes are what kill not only the immersion but the whole game.
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