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Kill zone loading times
Lord.Bachus
Member RarePosts: 9,686
in Guild Wars 2
Apparently the game has seperate zones that require loading as soon as you zone.. (atleast the builds played on conventions had)
I can only advise people to install the game on an SSD harddrive, this will almost remove your loading times entirely... Removing most of the hatred people have against these loadingtimes.
Do you think that they should put an SSD hard drive up on the box under recomended specs?
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Comments
I thought you only get loading screens when you use Waypoints?
no i dont think they need it. the loading times should be minimal no matter the disk type.
You're not getting loading screens everytime you enter a different zone, only if you do it repeatedly.
An SSD is not a hard drive.
A good SSD is recommended if you want a nice computer. But that doesn't belong on system specs. It's kind of like a good power supply is also recommended, but also doesn't belong on system specs. You also don't want to scare people off who see an SSD in the recommended hardware and think, oh no, I don't have that, I won't be able to play the game.
From the GW2 Wiki (though it's unattributed to any source)
Are there going to be loading screens? Is it a completely seamless world?
There are loading screens when you travel between waypoints within a zone. Between some zones there are portals which will trigger a loading screen like those in Guild Wars. Aside from access to cities and outposts, portals are rare.
I just tried to do a search, can't find anything updated beyond that or a detailed description of the technical aspects either of seamless/zoned (pros, cons, technical limitations, etc).
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
Let's not forget that the main reason why we'll have to load during each zone transition is likely due to the server architecture. So having fast client wouldn't really matter, when it comes to loading players and dynamic event states, of a zone, from the server.
SSD are far from being mainstream and thus from being put on the box. You dont need SSD to have fluent smooth game with 50+ FPS. Load times will be rare and even then not long. Do WoW load times in dungeon zoning annoy you? or from dungeon finder?
Also SSD are still ridiculously overpriced and have very small capacity for nowadays needs. If i could get 300-400 GB SSD for decent price [~100$-150$ tops] i would. Until then i dont think so. Read time between SSD and HDD is similiar it is write time that is huge difference between the two and guess what you need for "loads"...."read". The only reason why SSD starts computer faster than HDD even tho both have similar "read" times is the fact that HDD is physical so it needs to start-up gaining increase in speed overtime while SSD is non-physical and right from the start running at max.
Look at this video at 23:30 ,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoICk5E9X7g
Uppon entering town there is a loading screen for over 15 secconds, with an SSD this would be less then a seccond...
Also many of the graphical lag can be overcome with an SSD...
and for a game like this an 80GB goes for less then $100 where i live.... when playing 100's of hours and zoning 1000's or 10000's of times, its a well worth investment.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Read my previous comment. I doubt the load times would improve that dramatically with such a minor hardware upgrade and wouldn't a graphics card have a better effect on the frame rate, than an SSD.
Ehhh...
Loading times dont bother me.
Playing: Nothing
Looking forward to: Nothing
I don't like load times but 15 seconds is nothing!
This. While the general structure of the zone may be stored on the hard drive, the current state of everything within the zone would be stored on the server. Which means, it doesn't really matter how fast your client is, if the server is slow at collecting and sending the data to your client, the loading time will be a while. Yeah it may speed up load times for a single player game, where all the data is stored on your computer, but this is not the case.
So in other words, save your money. You don't NEED a SSD in order to play the game. Since it's dependent on the server, a SSD would most likely only save decrease load time by a few miliseconds, if at all. Me, personally, I'm waiting until they begin to come down in price and there are actually SSD with like 500GB space for about $100.
Besides, we don't exactly know how prevalent load screens will be. How big are these zones? Is it between each zone, or only between certain areas. Load screens between divinity's reach and the outside doesn't really imply load screens between each zone. We know between major cities and when you are teleporting. That's about it. Either way, a 5-15 second wait for a load screen really isn't that bad.
few things,
1. it would never be less then a second, it would be fairly the same and be closer to say 10-14 seconds.
2. its just not worth saving those few seconds, 80GB for $100 is way too much when you can get a terrabyte, igh performance disk for less, and be sats 3 copatable. (i have one that runs at 130MBps)
this video shows the player going through a cave and emerging in another zone.