Originally posted by Techleo I was under the impression the world was sundered. Not blown apart into floating peices. Maybe im wrong. Anycase yeah deffinetly need a better mechanism then ship bells hehe. Heck id even stand for airships like in WoW. Didnt mind the load screens on those and had some fun parties on those airships hehe. Not to mention some sweat sea diving!
That's what sundered means.
sun·der v.sun·dered,sun·der·ing,sun·ders v.tr. To break or wrench apart; sever. See Synonyms at separate. v.intr. To break into parts. n. A division or separation.
The world is essentially barely being held together and made hospitable.
I think people will be pelasantly surprised with how travel is handled. I know I can't wait to play with the travel system conceived for the last big area we worked on.
"On a hill above the incoming army was a rock pile. A wizard shot a fireball at the pile and it gave way. The rocks rolled down the hill, crushing the army and allowed us to pass unmolested. This is the kind of customization their instanced areas allowed. The quests are not imposed on areas, but rather the areas are built for the quests."
What is the meaning of this? Instanced like Guild Wars?
More like CoH/CoV than GW. In Guid Wars, basically everything outside the towns is instanced for you or your group, only. In CoH/CoV you have different zones that are communal, where you will see alot of heros fighting random crime. Individual mission are instances though, usually having you enter a building (which brings you into the instance) and it works pretty well. It puts you into a instance in a way that makes alot of sence on a immersion level. I mean, a "secret" hidout wouldn't seem so secret if there were 400 other heroes in there too.
Guild Wars did some really great stuff with cut scences for their questlines. I'm hoping that HJ will do something similar.
I do understand about "loading, please wait" though, that gets really old and sucks immertion right out the window. But there are creative ways to load a zone that don't suck the life out it. Let's hope that HJ will find one that is pretty cool.
Oh, shame, even though I understand where you're coming from, but that would hurt my immersion even more then other people barging in.
To me, all this MM in MMORPG means is I get to compete with or against others (real people), first and foremost. Well, I'm off to some FFA PVP snotty-nosed leet speaking comunity, but I will not abandon hope, for there will come a day when The Game will come, One game to put a shadow on every other game, One game to bring us all together and in the darkness of our rooms forever bind us.
Cannot think of any MMORPGs that I have played that do not have zones. EVE has zones. WoW has zones. GW has zones. DAoC has zones. AO has zones. CoH has zones. EQ and EQ2 have zones. PS has zones.
Originally posted by Shoal Cannot think of any MMORPGs that I have played that do not have zones. EVE has zones. WoW has zones. GW has zones. DAoC has zones. AO has zones. CoH has zones. EQ and EQ2 have zones. PS has zones. What have you played that does NOT have zones?
DAoC and WoW "zones" (where you had to load) were few and far between, There are other games like Horizons, Lineage2, SWG, SoR ect, that do not.. Both have +'s and -'s to each though.
While every mmorpg had zones one cannot argue the fact that WoWs world was mostly seamless due to the fact there were only a few moments when you would have to encounter a loading screen. The zones were there but they were seamlessly streamed in real time which had the sweet effect of not removing you from gameplay during travel. The few places you had actual loading screens made sense. Ship travel loading screens made sense. Dungeon entry loading screens made sense. Loading screens to get to two obviously connected masses of adjacent areas that should be visibly in front of you...does not make sense. That being said as long as the "placement" of loading screens (that remove you from gameplay in order to zone, whuch WoW's streaming doesn't do) makes sense, it's cool.
I think you are 100% right....zoning is a horrible way to play the game....I came from the AC1 and AC2 games and to have a seemless world is very important to me....Playing EQ2 love the game...but the stupid zoning drives me nuts...
I don't understand the complaints about zones and instances. We're talking about 2% of your playtime tops. You guys are telling me that you would rather make that 2% more enjoyable even if it meant making the other 98% less enjoyable? Because that's exactly what would happen if they elimnated zones from HJ. Everyone uses WoW as an example but that game gets old really quickly.
It's not like Simu is making Elanthia a zone based world because they're too lazy to make it seamless. They're doing it because it will make the 98% of the time that you're playing the game more enjoyable. If the world was seamless then I don't think that there hero system would work too well. Let's take their quest from last year's E3 video for example. If that were done in a seamless world then you'd have to make the bridge "regenerate" so to speak, so everyone could do that quest if they so chose. How much fun is it to see a bridge regenerate a few minutes after you just saw it get blown up? At least with instances, that bridge will get destroyed and stay destroyed. Unless it's rebuilt of course. I don't know about you all, but nothing gives me less satisfaction in a mmoprg than to kill a quest boss, or notorious monster, only to see it regenerate 5 minutes later.
So in conclusion, I think that instances are the right way to go for HJ, simply because of the journey system that will be used for this game. The 2% of the time spent zoning might not be as fun as if there were no zones, but the other 98% of the time will be a lot more enjoyable.
All that comes down to what's more important to you. If some of those areas are instanced, ok, there will be no pushing or shoving, but if you take that bridge as an example, you woun't see it repaired in 2 minutes but if that i instanced, noone else would see it destroyed and you actualy didn't do anything if noone else knows about it.
So it's Easy Quests vs Real Consequences in the game world
P.S. I know you cant make gazillion quests in a game so that every character gets to do a unique one, but I'm kinda tired of mentality where everybody needs to do every single quest
Originally posted by SonofSeth All that comes down to what's more important to you. If some of those areas are instanced, ok, there will be no pushing or shoving, but if you take that bridge as an example, you woun't see it repaired in 2 minutes but if that i instanced, noone else would see it destroyed and you actualy didn't do anything if noone else knows about it. So it's Easy Quests vs Real Consequences in the game world
P.S. I know you cant make gazillion quests in a game so that every character gets to do a unique one, but I'm kinda tired of mentality where everybody needs to do every single quest
Actually an even better way would be to do more like one of Simu's other games, Gemstone, and have very few, if any quests in HJ. Instead have real time events that are drawn out for weeks or even months that have a lasting effect on the entire world. That way they don't have to create a "gazillion quests" nor is everyone doing the same quest but at different times in the game. I think it works well in Gemstone but I'm not sure if it's at all possible yet in a graphics based game.
As for your first point. Sure, there may only be a few, if any player characters that actually see you destroy that bridge but with the journey system, your destroying of that bridge will still have an effect on your character throught the game. I'd still rather have quests like that instanced as opposed to them happening in common areas. I take the opposite view point that you do. If you destroy that bridge only for it to regen in 2 minutes and you see someone else destroy it three minutes later then did you really destroy it? That's just my opinion and I guess we'll just have to disagree on this topic.
I suspect that everyone on these boards has played some game where the list of features in it seemed appealing, but then it dissappointed. I know that has happened to me many times. What I take away from this is that there are very few, if any, make or break features in an mmo. The game is either fun or it isn't. If the game is fun, I don't mind that some aspect of the world or some feature isn't how I would have liked it. And if it isn't fun, having the features I normally like won't save it. To me, HJ looks wicked fun, so I am not hung up on any one aspect of how they put it together.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Well... you don't have a lot of options in how you handle the massive amounts of data MMOs produce. You either have a game more like WoW, which you many would claim to be seamless, in that you can traverse common areas without a loading screen. Or you have something akin to Guild Wars, where you instance out as much as possible to provide quality gameplay.
First, WoW is not a seamless world, it is quite the opposite. It's about 130 different worlds with no loading screens from common area to common area. But if you and your friends from work started playing on different servers, you either re-roll, they re-roll, or you all re-roll. Not seamless.
Guild Wars one server, yet for thousands of players to exist in one world, they've zoned out and instanced the towns and questing zones. So in a way, it's like WoW, only the 'separation' occurs after you login and start playing.
I happen to like zoning and instancing rather than WoW's "pick your server and you're stuck there forever" solution. There's no physical barrier preventing me from playing with a friend in Guild Wars, we're only "slightly" inconvenienced to select the same city "district", and then join up there.
Either way it goes, an area is limited to how many clients can exist within it at any given time. WoW crashes consistantly when large numbers of players attempt to exist in the same zone at a time. As would any game.
HJs solution isn't so different than most games. As much as anyone would want "true" seamlessness, it just isn't feasible technologically or in design. It's catastrophic to NOT zone and/or separate because of crowding alone. Even if the technology could handle it, more than 1,000 people in any one given spot is a bad thing (think shinjuku station).
Would 5,000 people standing in line to do their quest break your immersion? Would trying to play with your friends only to find they rolled on server 321 instead of your server, 125, and you can't ever play with them, break your immersion? Furthermore, would your server being down one entire day out of you the week break your immersion?
I've played WoW since beta, and let me tell you, their server design is as flawed as any. I'd take a load screen any day of the week if it meant taking away an entire day offline due to patching, server queues, server's full so you can't make new chars on them, server "hopping" to try to play with friends, obsessive lag in common cities and areas, and more.
But hey, if you don't have to wait 5 seconds between the Wetlands and Arathi Highlands, I guess it's all worth it!
Originally posted by Amathe I don't mind zones. My first mmo was EQ and I guess I got used to them. I find that games with zones tend to have much more variety. In a seamless world you have to transition between, say, a forest, a desert and an ocean. You can't just stop one on a dime and start the other. In a world with zones, where each zone is its own thing, you have more artistic freedom to make that zone whatever you want.
WoW was seamless but also had dramatically different adjacent zones. You can go from snow to warm grassland in like 30 feet but they were clever about it and it never detracted from the immersion, at least for me. I suppose I don't understand what the artistic freedom you're talking about would allow you to do. I mean if it's really THAT different area to area, wouldn't that sort of ruin the immersion? Give me an example of what you mean.
Honestly, having taken geography in highschool and college, I was very unimpressed by how blizzard handled transitions. Just using a "gradient" effect to make scale one "climate" to the next didn't displace in me the fact that two such climates should not even exist in the same vacinity to one another. But I try to think "fantasy" and let things like that go, I guess.
It's a magical world, afterall. You know, the kind where spaceships fall out of the sky and leave a new race of paladins all over.
Originally posted by HJ-DEZORIN Well... you don't have a lot of options in how you handle the massive amounts of data MMOs produce. You either have a game more like WoW, which you many would claim to be seamless, in that you can traverse common areas without a loading screen. Or you have something akin to Guild Wars, where you instance out as much as possible to provide quality gameplay.
Semantics. It's a matter of how some define seamless. In other words by your definition it may very well not be but I define seamless (and I'd bet my life others who used the word to describe WoW in this thread define it the same way,) means zoning without loading screens. By that definition the common areas of WoW are seamless with exceptions that are few and far between that make sense. It's irrefutable. Because loading screen = seam. I'm not a WoW fanboi by any stretch but I will give credit to the few things the game did well.
First, WoW is not a seamless world, it is quite the opposite. It's about 130 different worlds with no loading screens from common area to common area. But if you and your friends from work started playing on different servers, you either re-roll, they re-roll, or you all re-roll. Not seamless. See my response to your first paragraph. Regardless of whatever semantics one holds the perception is loading screen = seam. By your own observation there were no loading screens and therefore no seams between the zones of the common areas. The division of the game population into different servers has no bearing on the fact that you can go from the city to the surrounding forest without a loading screen, without a seam. Having to reroll to join friends on a different server is not the take-you-away from-gameplay-in-the-middle-of-playing element that a loading screen between barrens and stonetalon would've been. Making a character is something done outside of the gameworld proper so it's not the same.
Guild Wars one server, yet for thousands of players to exist in one world, they've zoned out and instanced the towns and questing zones. So in a way, it's like WoW, only the 'separation' occurs after you login and start playing.
I happen to like zoning and instancing rather than WoW's "pick your server and you're stuck there forever" solution. There's no physical barrier preventing me from playing with a friend in Guild Wars, we're only "slightly" inconvenienced to select the same city "district", and then join up there.
Either way it goes, an area is limited to how many clients can exist within it at any given time. WoW crashes consistantly when large numbers of players attempt to exist in the same zone at a time. As would any game.
HJs solution isn't so different than most games. As much as anyone would want "true" seamlessness, it just isn't feasible technologically or in design. It's catastrophic to NOT zone and/or separate because of crowding alone. Even if the technology could handle it, more than 1,000 people in any one given spot is a bad thing (think shinjuku station).
If WoW doesn't have "true" seamlessness yet people are still singing it's praises, loving it, and even requesting it, then "true" seamlessness isn't needed to satisfy the players wanting seamlessness. The un"true" seamlessness of WoW will suffice. And that is feasable because if it wasn't WoW wouldn't exist.
Would 5,000 people standing in line to do their quest break your immersion? Would trying to play with your friends only to find they rolled on server 321 instead of your server, 125, and you can't ever play with them, break your immersion? Furthermore, would your server being down one entire day out of you the week break your immersion?
Strawmen. But I'll answer the questions for fun. 1. Yes, but I've never seen that in any game I've ever played. Such an event is perhaps so infrequent that only an elite few have ever endured it. 2. No, because it's done outside of the gameworld proper. But what if I said yes? Well then yes, but it would happen infrequently relative to say the need to travel from one town to the next. I'm sure we can all agree on that. 3.Again being bogged down for weekly maintainence is weekly so yes it can break immersion but it's so infrequent (comparitively) that it's not that bad. Rarely has the server in WoW been down for the entire day. A half a day, yes, but hardly ever 24 hours. Furthermore, the community knows well ahead of time before the server will shut down for maintenence so anybody playing or wanting to play around that time need to just get a clue. And yes, that beats the pants off of having ultra frequent loading screens in the common world.
I've played WoW since beta, and let me tell you, their server design is as flawed as any. I'd take a load screen any day of the week if it meant taking away an entire day offline due to patching, server queues, server's full so you can't make new chars on them, server "hopping" to try to play with friends, obsessive lag in common cities and areas, and more.
But hey, if you don't have to wait 5 seconds between the Wetlands and Arathi Highlands, I guess it's all worth it!
It is worth it. The only thing that really sucks about WoW is the character progression, especially after reaching the level cap. I think perhaps instead of thinking in terms of zoned vs. seamless we would be more semantically agreeable to say loading screen zones vs realtime streamed zones. Loading screen (seamed) zones (especially the ones that don't make sense or are not private instances) remove you from gameplay (during gameplay where it hurts most) so frequently that it is a maddening immersion breaker because it yanks you out of active gameplay with far greater frequency than weekly server shutdowns and the offchance that you and your friends didn't coordinate server occupancy. That all being said, I will enjoy HJ whether I see a loading screen every 5 minutes or only once per hour because the game will be just that good. It's just that seamless zones (remember my semantics differ from yours) are what I prefer.
Thanks for your responses, z80, and I know exactly where you're coming from. Try to forgive my "devil's advocate" moods, as you can see, I'm a grump.
Semantics aside, you like the same things I do. I'm not a big fan of zones because if you ever get near the border of a zone, and are in hot combat, and say the monster runs back beyond the border of the zone, you can't fight him anymore. Or, you accidently walk backward and get loaded back to the previous zone.
Then again, if done well, away from any action, load screens aren't too bad. Good time to get some water or visit the little Hero's room. I'm not on the quest or world team, but I have seen some of the zones, and they're very far from small. I don't think frequent loads or zoning is going to be much to worry about. It'll be there, and it'll happen, but I don't believe enough to greatly hurt your immersion.
Keep in mind instanced quests are there to make it possible for your character to have the best in-game experience possible. We're trying to make your hero feel... well, heroic. So watching the princess get saved 3 times by the groups in line ahead of you isn't so heroic when you do the exact same process when your turn is up. The idea is just to take away the element of tedium from accomplishing goals that affect your character and his or her place in the world. So that each person and their character can experience the quest for the first time and not having witnessed it. It also allows us to allow you to do some really amazing things that wouldn't be possible in common zones.
*shrug* It'll require a load or a zone, or something brief in between. Hopefully the personalized, role-playing, and very heroic aspect of completing the objective will offset the brief load time you had to see prior.
Cool man. I'm actually in favor of instanced quests and instanced dungeons. I like how it allows for the very things you mentioned. I have faith in the devteam of HJ.
i may be late in responding, and i may be stating something someone already has pointed out, so forgive me if i am. trying to branch out to other fora's for this game, and keeping up with four of them is not my idea of fun. anyways, i was going to mention that this all made me think of dr's transition between provinces. when on the barge from haven up to theren, you could walk around and do things. i remember walking into the 'casino' area of the barge and watching people loose a lot of money on the wheel, and then walking up and pulling it once and getting tripple daggers. that was fun. the comments i got from that.
is it possible from a technical standpoint, that the loading of a new zone does not happen staticly? while the server loads all the data you need to enter the new zone, you could be walking around a zepplin or barge or ship or something. playing in some 'casino' or exploring a ship. maybe even some small little quest on the ship itself, like rat killing? anything really that people can be involved in that would distract them from the fact that they are doing 'nothing' but sitting on a ship moving from one zone to another.
No - hopefully the zoning/loading should take seconds so thats not enough time for you to do anything else.
I like Guild Wars content streaming - so when you go into a new zone it downloads any fixes updates for that area. Sure it takes you out of the immersion for 5 to 10 seconds - but I would rather have that than lag/bugs.
WIll HJ stream updated content whilst we play? Or will it be a traditional download and install patches?
Originally posted by _Shadowmage No - hopefully the zoning/loading should take seconds so thats not enough time for you to do anything else. ...
WIll HJ stream updated content whilst we play? Or will it be a traditional download and install patches?
what are you saying no to? i agree that it should take only a few seconds. wow does this when traversing the sea to the other contenent. i was just making a suggestion for parts where it wasn't an instant travel situation.
yes, they have stated they would like to stream updates and patches while we play.
Zones are retarded, this day and age, Vanguard is gonna be seamless, Lineage 2 was Seamless, RFO Is seamless, WoW is mostly Seamless....I read somewhere that HJ will be more on WoW's type ...
Originally posted by herofips Originally posted by _Shadowmage No - hopefully the zoning/loading should take seconds so thats not enough time for you to do anything else. ...
WIll HJ stream updated content whilst we play? Or will it be a traditional download and install patches?
what are you saying no to? i agree that it should take only a few seconds. wow does this when traversing the sea to the other contenent. i was just making a suggestion for parts where it wasn't an instant travel situation.
yes, they have stated they would like to stream updates and patches while we play.
Updates and patches will only occur if we add some major code or art updates. Everything else will be live changes that you most likely will never know happen. The only time you'll know something was changed is if it was done right under you, and we can even do that if we wanted to.
I could easily, at any time, jump onto a server and raise and lower the terrain quickly, like an earthquake, and your character would bounce up and down on the terrain. I could even drop a house on your head, ala the Wicked Witch, if I was so inclined. We'll be able to make things that are so blatantly obvious OOC appear "realisticly" though. So don't worry that we're going to break immersion.
Hmmm... truly seamless world. Gather together with Guildies at City X, as discussed in Guild chat. Travel across land, take transport, onto mounts, arrive at Mountain of Doom. You see a group up ahead in the distance climbing the mountain. You arrive at the top of the mountain to kill the Doombringer, which is an automatic Epic quest for your group, resulting in EpicItem#2334B. You arrive at Doombringer's spawnpoint, the group you saw is standing around, up ahead of them is another group, currently killing mini-Doombringers to spawn the main Doombringer. "You guys waiting for the quest?" the second group asks. "Yup," you answer, as you hunker down and wait through two spawns of Doombringer, until you get to try spawn it yourself. You sit and prepare to wait one to two hours. After you get your kill, you head off to a dungeon that BadSally spawns in. You arrive and find there are four groups in the area, slaughtering anything that pops out of thin air, until BadSally finally spawns, Group3 jumps her and gets the kill, though they were obviously not their first. "OMG we've been here three hours to advance this ****ing quest you ****ing ***holes!" "LOL u r way 2 slo noob lOL" as Group3 leaves. Sorry.. you said immersion?
Instanced questing. You travel across land from TownA to TownB (no zones required here, but stepping through the town gates can be zones), and meet up with your group. You find out about a rather difficult dungeon that's located south of TownB, so you gear up and set out. You kill your way through the wilderness, passing two other groups as you go, stopping to chat, someone trades a weapon, you have a laugh and set off. You assist a second group who is having difficulty kill some 'world' mobs, because you're a nice group of people. Eventually you arrive at the old wooden door to the dungeon, and venture inside. *Zone into dungeon.. 5 seconds pass as you read a screen of Lore on the dungeon with accompanying screenshot* Once in the dungeon it's eerily quiet and your group is all alone... You quietly venture forward, with absolutely no idea of what you will encounter. Over the next one/two/four/six hours you travel through a vast, extremely detailed and interactive (thanks to the instance) quest zone, where all of your Class traits are utilised, you have puzzles to solve, amazing loot reserved only for your group, no "OMG u r a reterd!" dipsh*ts spoiling the immersion. You finally crawl out the other side of the dungeon, big smiles on your faces. Not smiles of frustrated relief that your camp is finally over, smiles of pure enjoyment. You then trudge back to TownB, battleweary and full of loot, and start telling tales of your marvelous adventers to the people sitting around the fountain.
I can see, I guess, where people would want that 'immersion' of a continuous, all in one world - an immersion so often shattered by the social retards who are frequenting the genre more and more by the month - but am mystified why you would choose such gameplay when you could instead have intense, funfilled, detailed and interactive dungeon adventures as those achieved with instances.
Either way, simply put it's a case of you being an A, a B or a C. A, you are totally with the idea of interactive quest instances and you'll love Hero's Journey. B, you're against it and want to compete for spawns and do corpse runs etc, Hero's Journey is not for you so why bother complaining anyways cos it's not going to change. C, you realise none of us have even seen the game in action, and my examples, or your possible examples, are all assumptions, so instead of going off about something being stupid or great, let's just wait and see how it unfolds. Either that or go back to the Vanguard forums (bi-monthly cheapshot at the Vanguard fanbois) :P
Personally, I am yet to hear a single thing about Hero's Journey that has made me think "Wait, I dunno if I like that." My main reservation is that we have so long to wait. And I'm not re-reading all that, so ignore the spelling mistakes.
"(The) Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude." - George W Bush. Oh. My. God.
nice, your post helped put instancing in perspective a bit more for me, arremus. hj sounds like it will have a nice blend of instance to non instance quests and areas to participate it. people that don't want to deal with griefers won't have to on their own quests, and people that want a seamless world, for the most part will have one.
the only thing i will miss i guess is meeting new people on those quests. many times ive been on a quest and found someone to assist or recieved assistance from someone or even grouped with other lone players that were just out adventuring.
Comments
That's what sundered means.
sun·der
v. sun·dered, sun·der·ing, sun·ders
v. tr.
To break or wrench apart; sever. See Synonyms at separate.
v. intr.
To break into parts.
n.
A division or separation.
The world is essentially barely being held together and made hospitable.
I think people will be pelasantly surprised with how travel is handled. I know I can't wait to play with the travel system conceived for the last big area we worked on.
GM Illuminatis
World Builder
Hero's Journey
"On a hill above the incoming army was a rock pile. A wizard shot a fireball at the pile and it gave way. The rocks rolled down the hill, crushing the army and allowed us to pass unmolested. This is the kind of customization their instanced areas allowed. The quests are not imposed on areas, but rather the areas are built for the quests."
What is the meaning of this? Instanced like Guild Wars?
More like CoH/CoV than GW. In Guid Wars, basically everything outside the towns is instanced for you or your group, only. In CoH/CoV you have different zones that are communal, where you will see alot of heros fighting random crime. Individual mission are instances though, usually having you enter a building (which brings you into the instance) and it works pretty well. It puts you into a instance in a way that makes alot of sence on a immersion level. I mean, a "secret" hidout wouldn't seem so secret if there were 400 other heroes in there too.
Guild Wars did some really great stuff with cut scences for their questlines. I'm hoping that HJ will do something similar.
I do understand about "loading, please wait" though, that gets really old and sucks immertion right out the window. But there are creative ways to load a zone that don't suck the life out it. Let's hope that HJ will find one that is pretty cool.
Oh, shame, even though I understand where you're coming from, but that would hurt my immersion even more then other people barging in.
To me, all this MM in MMORPG means is I get to compete with or against others (real people), first and foremost. Well, I'm off to some FFA PVP snotty-nosed leet speaking comunity
, but I will not abandon hope, for there will come a day when The Game will come, One game to put a shadow on every other game, One game to bring us all together and in the darkness of our rooms forever bind us.
Godspeed!
Cannot think of any MMORPGs that I have played that do not have zones. EVE has zones. WoW has zones. GW has zones. DAoC has zones. AO has zones. CoH has zones. EQ and EQ2 have zones. PS has zones.
What have you played that does NOT have zones?
While every mmorpg had zones one cannot argue the fact that WoWs world was mostly seamless due to the fact there were only a few moments when you would have to encounter a loading screen. The zones were there but they were seamlessly streamed in real time which had the sweet effect of not removing you from gameplay during travel. The few places you had actual loading screens made sense. Ship travel loading screens made sense. Dungeon entry loading screens made sense. Loading screens to get to two obviously connected masses of adjacent areas that should be visibly in front of you...does not make sense. That being said as long as the "placement" of loading screens (that remove you from gameplay in order to zone, whuch WoW's streaming doesn't do) makes sense, it's cool.
Guild Wars 2 is my religion
It's not like Simu is making Elanthia a zone based world because they're too lazy to make it seamless. They're doing it because it will make the 98% of the time that you're playing the game more enjoyable. If the world was seamless then I don't think that there hero system would work too well. Let's take their quest from last year's E3 video for example. If that were done in a seamless world then you'd have to make the bridge "regenerate" so to speak, so everyone could do that quest if they so chose. How much fun is it to see a bridge regenerate a few minutes after you just saw it get blown up? At least with instances, that bridge will get destroyed and stay destroyed. Unless it's rebuilt of course. I don't know about you all, but nothing gives me less satisfaction in a mmoprg than to kill a quest boss, or notorious monster, only to see it regenerate 5 minutes later.
So in conclusion, I think that instances are the right way to go for HJ, simply because of the journey system that will be used for this game. The 2% of the time spent zoning might not be as fun as if there were no zones, but the other 98% of the time will be a lot more enjoyable.
All that comes down to what's more important to you. If some of those areas are instanced, ok, there will be no pushing or shoving, but if you take that bridge as an example, you woun't see it repaired in 2 minutes but if that i instanced, noone else would see it destroyed and you actualy didn't do anything if noone else knows about it.
So it's Easy Quests vs Real Consequences in the game world
P.S. I know you cant make gazillion quests in a game so that every character gets to do a unique one, but I'm kinda tired of mentality where everybody needs to do every single quest
Actually an even better way would be to do more like one of Simu's other games, Gemstone, and have very few, if any quests in HJ. Instead have real time events that are drawn out for weeks or even months that have a lasting effect on the entire world. That way they don't have to create a "gazillion quests" nor is everyone doing the same quest but at different times in the game. I think it works well in Gemstone but I'm not sure if it's at all possible yet in a graphics based game.
As for your first point. Sure, there may only be a few, if any player characters that actually see you destroy that bridge but with the journey system, your destroying of that bridge will still have an effect on your character throught the game. I'd still rather have quests like that instanced as opposed to them happening in common areas. I take the opposite view point that you do. If you destroy that bridge only for it to regen in 2 minutes and you see someone else destroy it three minutes later then did you really destroy it? That's just my opinion and I guess we'll just have to disagree on this topic.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
First, WoW is not a seamless world, it is quite the opposite. It's about 130 different worlds with no loading screens from common area to common area. But if you and your friends from work started playing on different servers, you either re-roll, they re-roll, or you all re-roll. Not seamless.
Guild Wars one server, yet for thousands of players to exist in one world, they've zoned out and instanced the towns and questing zones. So in a way, it's like WoW, only the 'separation' occurs after you login and start playing.
I happen to like zoning and instancing rather than WoW's "pick your server and you're stuck there forever" solution. There's no physical barrier preventing me from playing with a friend in Guild Wars, we're only "slightly" inconvenienced to select the same city "district", and then join up there.
Either way it goes, an area is limited to how many clients can exist within it at any given time. WoW crashes consistantly when large numbers of players attempt to exist in the same zone at a time. As would any game.
HJs solution isn't so different than most games. As much as anyone would want "true" seamlessness, it just isn't feasible technologically or in design. It's catastrophic to NOT zone and/or separate because of crowding alone. Even if the technology could handle it, more than 1,000 people in any one given spot is a bad thing (think shinjuku station).
Would 5,000 people standing in line to do their quest break your immersion? Would trying to play with your friends only to find they rolled on server 321 instead of your server, 125, and you can't ever play with them, break your immersion? Furthermore, would your server being down one entire day out of you the week break your immersion?
I've played WoW since beta, and let me tell you, their server design is as flawed as any. I'd take a load screen any day of the week if it meant taking away an entire day offline due to patching, server queues, server's full so you can't make new chars on them, server "hopping" to try to play with friends, obsessive lag in common cities and areas, and more.
But hey, if you don't have to wait 5 seconds between the Wetlands and Arathi Highlands, I guess it's all worth it!
WoW was seamless but also had dramatically different adjacent zones. You can go from snow to warm grassland in like 30 feet but they were clever about it and it never detracted from the immersion, at least for me. I suppose I don't understand what the artistic freedom you're talking about would allow you to do. I mean if it's really THAT different area to area, wouldn't that sort of ruin the immersion? Give me an example of what you mean.
Honestly, having taken geography in highschool and college, I was very unimpressed by how blizzard handled transitions. Just using a "gradient" effect to make scale one "climate" to the next didn't displace in me the fact that two such climates should not even exist in the same vacinity to one another. But I try to think "fantasy" and let things like that go, I guess.
It's a magical world, afterall. You know, the kind where spaceships fall out of the sky and leave a new race of paladins all over.
Guild Wars 2 is my religion
Semantics aside, you like the same things I do. I'm not a big fan of zones because if you ever get near the border of a zone, and are in hot combat, and say the monster runs back beyond the border of the zone, you can't fight him anymore. Or, you accidently walk backward and get loaded back to the previous zone.
Then again, if done well, away from any action, load screens aren't too bad. Good time to get some water or visit the little Hero's room. I'm not on the quest or world team, but I have seen some of the zones, and they're very far from small. I don't think frequent loads or zoning is going to be much to worry about. It'll be there, and it'll happen, but I don't believe enough to greatly hurt your immersion.
Keep in mind instanced quests are there to make it possible for your character to have the best in-game experience possible. We're trying to make your hero feel... well, heroic. So watching the princess get saved 3 times by the groups in line ahead of you isn't so heroic when you do the exact same process when your turn is up. The idea is just to take away the element of tedium from accomplishing goals that affect your character and his or her place in the world. So that each person and their character can experience the quest for the first time and not having witnessed it. It also allows us to allow you to do some really amazing things that wouldn't be possible in common zones.
*shrug* It'll require a load or a zone, or something brief in between. Hopefully the personalized, role-playing, and very heroic aspect of completing the objective will offset the brief load time you had to see prior.
EDIT: removed horrendously large quote.
Guild Wars 2 is my religion
is it possible from a technical standpoint, that the loading of a new zone does not happen staticly? while the server loads all the data you need to enter the new zone, you could be walking around a zepplin or barge or ship or something. playing in some 'casino' or exploring a ship. maybe even some small little quest on the ship itself, like rat killing? anything really that people can be involved in that would distract them from the fact that they are doing 'nothing' but sitting on a ship moving from one zone to another.
No - hopefully the zoning/loading should take seconds so thats not enough time for you to do anything else.
I like Guild Wars content streaming - so when you go into a new zone it downloads any fixes updates for that area. Sure it takes you out of the immersion for 5 to 10 seconds - but I would rather have that than lag/bugs.
WIll HJ stream updated content whilst we play? Or will it be a traditional download and install patches?
yes, they have stated they would like to stream updates and patches while we play.
yes, they have stated they would like to stream updates and patches while we play.
Updates and patches will only occur if we add some major code or art updates. Everything else will be live changes that you most likely will never know happen. The only time you'll know something was changed is if it was done right under you, and we can even do that if we wanted to.
I could easily, at any time, jump onto a server and raise and lower the terrain quickly, like an earthquake, and your character would bounce up and down on the terrain. I could even drop a house on your head, ala the Wicked Witch, if I was so inclined. We'll be able to make things that are so blatantly obvious OOC appear "realisticly" though. So don't worry that we're going to break immersion.
GM Illuminatis
World Builder
Hero's Journey
Gather together with Guildies at City X, as discussed in Guild chat.
Travel across land, take transport, onto mounts, arrive at Mountain of Doom.
You see a group up ahead in the distance climbing the mountain.
You arrive at the top of the mountain to kill the Doombringer, which is an automatic Epic quest for your group, resulting in EpicItem#2334B.
You arrive at Doombringer's spawnpoint, the group you saw is standing around, up ahead of them is another group, currently killing mini-Doombringers to spawn the main Doombringer.
"You guys waiting for the quest?" the second group asks.
"Yup," you answer, as you hunker down and wait through two spawns of Doombringer, until you get to try spawn it yourself.
You sit and prepare to wait one to two hours.
After you get your kill, you head off to a dungeon that BadSally spawns in.
You arrive and find there are four groups in the area, slaughtering anything that pops out of thin air, until BadSally finally spawns, Group3 jumps her and gets the kill, though they were obviously not their first.
"OMG we've been here three hours to advance this ****ing quest you ****ing ***holes!"
"LOL u r way 2 slo noob lOL" as Group3 leaves.
Sorry.. you said immersion?
Instanced questing.
You travel across land from TownA to TownB (no zones required here, but stepping through the town gates can be zones), and meet up with your group.
You find out about a rather difficult dungeon that's located south of TownB, so you gear up and set out.
You kill your way through the wilderness, passing two other groups as you go, stopping to chat, someone trades a weapon, you have a laugh and set off.
You assist a second group who is having difficulty kill some 'world' mobs, because you're a nice group of people.
Eventually you arrive at the old wooden door to the dungeon, and venture inside.
*Zone into dungeon.. 5 seconds pass as you read a screen of Lore on the dungeon with accompanying screenshot*
Once in the dungeon it's eerily quiet and your group is all alone...
You quietly venture forward, with absolutely no idea of what you will encounter.
Over the next one/two/four/six hours you travel through a vast, extremely detailed and interactive (thanks to the instance) quest zone, where all of your Class traits are utilised, you have puzzles to solve, amazing loot reserved only for your group, no "OMG u r a reterd!" dipsh*ts spoiling the immersion.
You finally crawl out the other side of the dungeon, big smiles on your faces. Not smiles of frustrated relief that your camp is finally over, smiles of pure enjoyment.
You then trudge back to TownB, battleweary and full of loot, and start telling tales of your marvelous adventers to the people sitting around the fountain.
I can see, I guess, where people would want that 'immersion' of a continuous, all in one world - an immersion so often shattered by the social retards who are frequenting the genre more and more by the month - but am mystified why you would choose such gameplay when you could instead have intense, funfilled, detailed and interactive dungeon adventures as those achieved with instances.
Either way, simply put it's a case of you being an A, a B or a C.
A, you are totally with the idea of interactive quest instances and you'll love Hero's Journey.
B, you're against it and want to compete for spawns and do corpse runs etc, Hero's Journey is not for you so why bother complaining anyways cos it's not going to change.
C, you realise none of us have even seen the game in action, and my examples, or your possible examples, are all assumptions, so instead of going off about something being stupid or great, let's just wait and see how it unfolds. Either that or go back to the Vanguard forums (bi-monthly cheapshot at the Vanguard fanbois) :P
Personally, I am yet to hear a single thing about Hero's Journey that has made me think "Wait, I dunno if I like that."
My main reservation is that we have so long to wait.
And I'm not re-reading all that, so ignore the spelling mistakes.
"(The) Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude." - George W Bush.
Oh. My. God.
the only thing i will miss i guess is meeting new people on those quests. many times ive been on a quest and found someone to assist or recieved assistance from someone or even grouped with other lone players that were just out adventuring.