To start I'd like to tell folks the difference between instances and zones as to many people seem to either have them confused or simply don't know the difference. If you know the difference, skip the next paragraph. ;)

Zones are enclosed spaces in a game that require loading to cross. Most single player games, especially shooters, are zoned. You complete an area and then load to the next. That is a zone. In MMOGs the popular thing is to do an open world and this has various benefits and detriments but that isn't the focus of this thread. An Instance on the other hand is a copy of an area, from a zone to a quest location. These require loading and are often dungeons that only you or your group participate in. As well many modern MMOGs instance their zones. Champions Online does such, when you enter a new zone you choose the instance to join. Each instance can only hold so many people before a new instance is formed to hold more.

Ok now thats out of the way, on to the topic of the thread;

A lot of people are worried it appears that TSW will be heavily instanced. Personally I don't mind instancing if it's done right. But a lot of folks absolutely hate it, whether it's a team instance dungeon or instanced areas ala the example above. One of the bigger reasons people worry about this in TSW is because the game uses an updated version of the Age of Conan engine (which is the massively overhauled Anarchy Online engine) and AoC uses both zone instancing and personal instancing.

Let me just say, stay thy fears people. :) In an interview on ZAM.com, Funcoms Creative Director and lead of The Secret World, Ragnar Tornquest, states how much he dislikes instancing and plans to use it only sparingly in TSW. :)

"ZAM: Based on some of the gameplay footage, it looked like you could go into this modern day world. Since this is based on our Earth, you've got to have some game zones. Will there be zoning? Instancing? How big is the game world going to be, and how open is it going to be, versus how instanced?

Ragnar: I'm not a fan of instancing at all. That really sort of bugs me all the time, but some people don't care at all. We're going to avoid instances as much as possible. Instancing is something that you sometimes have to do to protect newbies - especially at launch. Our playfields are very large. We want to avoid loading screens. For example, going from London to New England isn't going to be like clicking a map and seeing a red dot go from one place to another, that's not what it's going to be like. It's going to be seamless. There's going to be very little loading, and hopefully it's going to be instantaneous. We want you to be able to move in a way that fits the mythology of the game, that actually makes sense. It's not going to be like "what the hell? Why am I in New England right now? I was just in London!" It's going to actually make sense. I can't explain why it's going to make sense, but it will make sense. There might be some instancing. We're going to have instances and places like dungeons, or something we'll call dungeons, and those will be more team based experiences. Those will be instanced. The open world stuff we're going to try to avoid instancing as much as possible. We want to make sure that you feel like you're in a living, open world, and you're traveling around that and exploring it. Like I said, our playing fields are large and they are epic and it's going to feel that way, yet you're going to be able to travel seamlessly. Lots of promises, but we'll see. I just don't like instancing, so we'll try to avoid those."

So good news for the 'I hate instancing' crowd. :)

Oh, the entire interview can be found here;

www.zam.com/story.html

Excellent post, thanks for the info and the link. Thats a relief, especially when RT outright said the word "seamless." Definitely adds to immersion and to the overall enjoyability of the game as a whole. I'm likin it

Hope he can deliver on the Seamless world and little instancing, i'll be bummed otherwise, but i won't hate him if they can't do it.

This is good, but at the same time, I'm sitting here trying to wrap my head around how this will work.

Yeah, they want to make it open world, but its based in the real world. I don't think there's a way for them to make a digital version of the world, so that leads me to believe there will be at least some limitations.

I'm going to assume that most of the game's zones are major cities, and from the concept art, possibly jungles and forests.

Seamless travel from New England to London? I'm pretty sure that's not possible. Are we going to sit on a plane for 6 hours, or on a ship for a week?

I don't really like Instanced Zones but I have no issue with instanced dungeons and stuff.

It's good to see the game will try to be seemless but with todays graphics and not everyone running a top of the line PC I can understand if a couple things are instanced to cut lag.

To me, the biggest distinction between the two is that instances are non-persistent.  When everyone leaves the instance, it ceases to exist.  Also, I don't really see the word "zone" as a antonym for "instance" since you can have instanced zones like in Guild Wars.

I have no real problem with instancing. Sometimes it´s nice to head to a "safe" area and just bash some skulls without much other worries. Sounds from that interview that they have a plan with instances and that´s a good thing. Well used instances can strengthen the gaming experience and allows the story to be driven much more clearly to either solo or group players.
 

No, I want no instances. I want to run in a seamless persistent world from Paris to Madrid in 5 minutes, and then swim to New York in another 10. I want New York to have five skyscrapers, two shops and one tavern. Because as everybody knows, seamless nonsense and absurd scaling representations are more immersive than a loading screen now and then.

Originally posted by Thillian

No, I want no instances. I want to run in a seamless persistent world from Paris to Madrid in 5 minutes, and then swim to New York in another 10. I want New York to have five skyscrapers, two shops and one tavern. Because as everybody knows, seamless nonsense and absurd scaling representations are more immersive than a loading screen now and then.

Well I might be wrong here but "seamless" doesn´t really have to mean one huge open zone. It´s more about if you notice it loading or not. You can have a large amount of "zones" that loads up while you travel thus making it seem like it´s seamless.

Only time can tell what this will be like though.

I am just hoping it's not set up like AoC. One minute your in a zone with snow cap mountains and then zone through a door and in a rocky valley. Didn't make sense.

Loved playing AoC, loved the character models, loved the atmosphere, hated the map zones.

Making the game as open as possible, while instancing important team based quests, and dungeons would, IMO help a lot.