"You mention you would worry about a cutscene getting old, but how could it possibly be worse than the static repetitive images of a normal loading screen? A moving picture is already a thousand times more visually stimulating. The best possible combination of loading screen entertainment would be a cinematic with randomized text overlaid on it somewhere talking about interesting facts or the history of the area you were going into. Heck, if the cutscenes were really logical, many people might not even realize it was loading."

It would be interesting if they used these cutscenes to introduce, hint at, world and local events. Instead of the text being random, GM's could use this as a way to drop hints about events they plan to run in the near future. So while you are paying your fee to ride the boat, you overhear two people talking about the new boot salesman that arrived in town last night.

Jonny

I forget what game it was. But there used to be one when you trasitioned to another screen youd get the time. General events for the area. Sorta like a breif newsclip. Takes alot of manpower to keep that sort of thing updated tho. In another thread I started I pointed out that involving people in there game world is often as simple as reporting whats happening in that game world. People know there going to be reported for what they do. Which leads to more events. Thriving communities require communication... also alot of time hehe. Anywho its a good idea addressing the loadscreens

[quote]Originally posted by HJ-Illuminat
[b]If you've read the Lore that's been released you'll note that the world has essentially been blown up. Zones are going to be a must with that since there is no way to create seamless zones without giving everyone the ability to fly through space. Don't worry about losing immersion though. You'll like what the folks are doing with travel.[/quote]
Sounds like the CoV approach to me. Of course that doesn't mean it can't be done well. The cutscenes people are talking about sound like they'd work nicely with the sort of transitions possible from one zone to the next.

Also, I want to point out that while WoW doesn't have loading times between areas, it does have zones. Almost all of these zones are divided into valleys, which were very common in EQ. You almost always have to travel between two impassable hills to get to the next area, while there's the occasional stream to traverse. Sometimes there's a big open area, but you can always see the zone-line because the dirt suddenly changes color. Think back to EQ. Zones were divided into valleys, a couple were split by rivers (not streams), and there were some zones with borders that extended all the way across them (like the desert).

Judging from what Illuminat said, it sounds like the zones will be (quite literally) disconnected. Hopefully we'll get something more creative than "ship bells".

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!

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Originally posted by HJ-Illuminat

Weeee! My requested thread is already almost to 3 pages!

I'll post more later, but just wanted to pipe in something real quick.

If you've read the Lore that's been released you'll note that the world has essentially been blown up. Zones are going to be a must with that since there is no way to create seamless zones without giving everyone the ability to fly through space. Don't worry about losing immersion though. You'll like what the folks are doing with travel.

GM Illuminatis
World Builder
Hero's Journey

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Yes, and regardless if I prefer seamless, contiguous zones or separate zones, I tend to trust the good folks over at Simutronics to create an immersive fantasy world.

Hmmm, also, now remembering that even EQ was able to integrate "separate" zones in a rather convincing way.  The entrance to the Planes of Knowledge was through book on a lectern ... while teleportation spires were used to go to the moon ... and a magic gem hidden behind a waterfall took you to Surefall Glade.  And, frankly, it seemed to make perfect sense to access those separate zones in the various manners.

So, overall, I'm just going to trust Simutronics to have looked into this area and come up with some good ideas -- and many thanks to the GMs who give us responses to these various topics.

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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!

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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?

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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?

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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

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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

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Originally posted by Archaos

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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.

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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.

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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.

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