Originally posted by Sylvarii

Originally posted by DarkPony

Originally posted by Sylvarii

I really can't understand someone who had no problem with swtor loading and boxed in world having a problem with GW2.

I did, Sylvarii, very much even. One of the main reasons I lost interest in it.

edit: I'm off to bed now, laters u gusy!

 

 

As i said earlier,ArenaNet unlike BioWare have never claimed GW2 to be an open world,you buy the game and know what to expect unlike the lying sack of poo called BioWare.

 

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

Originally posted by spaceport

Originally posted by Sylvarii

Originally posted by DarkPony

Originally posted by Sylvarii

I really can't understand someone who had no problem with swtor loading and boxed in world having a problem with GW2.

I did, Sylvarii, very much even. One of the main reasons I lost interest in it.

edit: I'm off to bed now, laters u gusy!

 

 

As i said earlier,ArenaNet unlike BioWare have never claimed GW2 to be an open world,you buy the game and know what to expect unlike the lying sack of poo called BioWare.

 

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

well I guess its a valid negative that the world is zoned and not entirely open.

but on the subject of loading screen times I think your being plain stupid, making assumptions based not only on a video and not the actual game but also a video of beta. surely if anything is subject to change in a beta its technical aspects of the game.

secondly have you played gw1? I assume gw2 has the same cool system where when you first load a zone you download it, but after that its very fast.

This massively reduces the time to download the game and meaning everyone doesn't have to download files they might not need. its a good system; I redownload gw1 recently and it took mere minutes to get playing again because of this system, whereas to trial just the first small areas of swtor I had to download a 20+ GB client, even tho I only needed a tiny faction of that data. especially retarded when the trial is for a weekend and it takes a day or 2 to download.

Originally posted by spaceport

Originally posted by Sylvarii

Originally posted by DarkPony

Originally posted by Sylvarii

I really can't understand someone who had no problem with swtor loading and boxed in world having a problem with GW2.

I did, Sylvarii, very much even. One of the main reasons I lost interest in it.

edit: I'm off to bed now, laters u gusy!

 

 

As i said earlier,ArenaNet unlike BioWare have never claimed GW2 to be an open world,you buy the game and know what to expect unlike the lying sack of poo called BioWare.

 

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

apart from wanting to keep in-deveplopment features close to the chest until they are ready to anounce them, has arenanet hiden anything from the public?

Did they claim they had a huge zone with pvp objectives, and then pulled a ilum?

Are they marketing the game with features that do not represent the game? (character resolutions ahem)

Are they keeping an NDA as tight as SWTOR, while accepting pre-orders for it, with "limited CE" and hushing ppl to buy it or they wont get in on day one?

Originally posted by Sylvarii

Originally posted by spaceport

Originally posted by Sylvarii

Originally posted by DarkPony

Originally posted by Sylvarii

I really can't understand someone who had no problem with swtor loading and boxed in world having a problem with GW2.

I did, Sylvarii, very much even. One of the main reasons I lost interest in it.

edit: I'm off to bed now, laters u gusy!

 

 

As i said earlier,ArenaNet unlike BioWare have never claimed GW2 to be an open world,you buy the game and know what to expect unlike the lying sack of poo called BioWare.

 

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

 

x I'm 100% sure.They have always said the game will have loading and instances.They have always said the world is persistant unlike GW,dont confuse persistant with open.So like i said,we are not talking about the lying sack of poo called Bioware who claimed there world was open.The OP knows what he is getting into if he buys the game,its more than BioWare gave him yet he had no problem with them until he realised how crap the pvp was.

I agree.

Im just saying... it wouldn't be the first time a developer outright lies or suger coats something just to make it seem better.

For all we know, of those "1500 unique Dynamic Events" 1000 of them could be "kill 10 rats/bandits/orcs and pick 5 apples/crates/dildos/whatever"

Arenanet does have a good track record, but still... it just seems like mindless fanboyism, we haven't even played the game yet.

Originally posted by DarkPony

Originally posted by DJJazzy

I don't remember TOR having fast travel?

Not sure what he means but there was this prison world (already forgot the world names yay!) with teleport portals between different areas in the same world; those were indeed seamless if I recall correctly.

Ah yeah, Belsavis ... right?

 

Actually....almost every place that has a taxi has a fast travel marker.  You have to right click them to discover them and then you can use them to travel all over the place on the same planet.  Every planet has them, like I said, they're usually by taxis.  There is, however, a cooldown on how often you can use fast travel....20 min, I think.

Originally posted by Sylvarii

Unlike BioWare and swtor,ArenaNet have never claimed GW2 to be an open world.They have always said their were loading screens so it should not supprise you.I can see why it would supprise you though,especially with you coming late to the GW2 party.

? Not that it really matters, but this isn't true. They've talked about the open world of GW2's Tyria, and the loading screens was something that wasn't so much mentioned by ANet devs but discovered from gameplay by players and gameplay vids. They haven't lied about it or kept it a secret, but neither have they talked about loading screens or the zoned nature of things.

At this point I think we are beating a dead horse.............

No pun intended.

I can't say this issue bothers me, after playing Tor without an ssd, they can't be as bad as some of the later planets loading screens. And even if they are, it prolly won't be enough to really bother me any more then Tors do.

Between zones there are loading screens.

Some of you may also note that each zone has a specific player cap. If the cap for each zone is reached player trying to access the full zone will be moved to an "overflow" server where they will play with everyone else waiting to get into that zone (from their respective servers).

It's basically like SWTOR's instances of zones, except it only happens when the player cap is full in that specific zone.

Originally posted by indojabijin

Between zones there are loading screens.

Some of you may also note that each zone has a specific player cap. If the cap for each zone is reached player trying to access the full zone will be moved to an "overflow" server where they will play with everyone else waiting to get into that zone (from their respective servers).

It's basically like SWTOR's instances of zones, except it only happens when the player cap is full in that specific zone.

Do you mean, it's like GW in the sense that between each zone there's a portal?

I wonder if people have already discovered what currently the player cap is for an area, and if it's the same for all areas, or if it's variable.

Will you be able to chat to everyone in the world. Like a general chat? Or is it like WoW, everytime you enter a new level zone, you enter a new general chat for those levels?

I'm not concerned about loading screens.  I've played both Age of Conan and Star Wars: The Old Republic (among others), which have plenty of loading screens themselves (especially SW:TOR), and it didn't bother me when I played them.  Thank you for the heads up.

After playing EQ for 7 years, a little zoning here and there is nothing to me.

Hell even with the zoning in EQ the world felt larger and more alive then half the "try to be all open" mmos these days.

Valid concern, though playing gw1, you knew gw2 was going to be an mmorpg, but that they would not be a true mmorpg.  The world doesn't really feel persistent whatsoever. 

Originally posted by cutthecrap

Originally posted by indojabijin

Between zones there are loading screens.

Some of you may also note that each zone has a specific player cap. If the cap for each zone is reached player trying to access the full zone will be moved to an "overflow" server where they will play with everyone else waiting to get into that zone (from their respective servers).

It's basically like SWTOR's instances of zones, except it only happens when the player cap is full in that specific zone.

Do you mean, it's like GW in the sense that between each zone there's a portal?

I wonder if people have already discovered what currently the player cap is for an area, and if it's the same for all areas, or if it's variable.

There's a portal between each zone. In total there are over 20 zones. Each zone is designed for several levels and has several hearts. The zones themselves are rather large (just as SWTOR) and provide you with several hours of gameplay... not to mention you have several zones for the same level brackets providing alternative places to level alts (or to simply level in if you get tired of your current zone).

The estimated cap is about ~500 per zone for the human starting areas (which is 3 or 4 zones I believe... can't remember). I am unsure if when the cap is reached if the zone creates multiple instances (a la SWTOR) or if it just moves people to other low population servers to fill their zones for the moment while being queued to enter their zone in their server (aka overflow servers).

If that is the case, then it would be nearly impossible for the game to have queues during launch as the population would be evenly spread out throughout all the servers -- even though not everyone playing that server will be FROM that server (if that makes sense).

ALSO, the world feels very much alive due to the nature of dynamic events. It may not be seamless, but the scenery between zones transition very well.

Originally posted by indojabijin

Originally posted by cutthecrap

Originally posted by indojabijin

Between zones there are loading screens.

Some of you may also note that each zone has a specific player cap. If the cap for each zone is reached player trying to access the full zone will be moved to an "overflow" server where they will play with everyone else waiting to get into that zone (from their respective servers).

It's basically like SWTOR's instances of zones, except it only happens when the player cap is full in that specific zone.

Do you mean, it's like GW in the sense that between each zone there's a portal?

I wonder if people have already discovered what currently the player cap is for an area, and if it's the same for all areas, or if it's variable.

There's a portal between each zone. In total there are over 20 zones. Each zone is designed for several levels and has several hearts. The zones themselves are rather large (just as SWTOR) and provide you with several hours of gameplay... not to mention you have several zones for the same level brackets providing alternative places to level alts (or to simply level in if you get tired of your current zone).

The estimated cap is about ~500 per zone for the human starting areas (which is 3 or 4 zones I believe... can't remember). I am unsure if when the cap is reached if the zone creates multiple instances (a la SWTOR) or if it just moves people to other low population servers to fill their zones for the moment while being queued to enter their zone in their server (aka overflow servers).

If that is the case, then it would be nearly impossible for the game to have queues during launch as the population would be evenly spread out throughout all the servers -- even though not everyone playing that server will be FROM that server (if that makes sense).

 

ALSO, the world feels very much alive due to the nature of dynamic events. It may not be seamless, but the scenery between zones transition very well.

Thanks for the concrete, detailed info, much appreciated

Sounds like they're using the same map size and zone structure as in GW, with the difference that in GW2 the areas are persistent. The overflow server system, where the overflow of players gets directed to low(er) population servers I find a stroke of genius.  This could enable the lower population servers to get a regular influx of players from other servers, if ANet don't go overboard with creating too many servers at launch.

Originally posted by aesperus

Originally posted by DarkPony

Can't blame you by not wanting to watch this entire vid I linked, but there are some moments that he goes through multiple loading screens in quick succession. All in all (I didn't actually count them) between 12 and 15 loading screens in 40 minutes. Kind of hard not to notice that.

Rewatched, from what I can tell he's playing the Norn starting area, and going through the story quests. So, yes, there's a lot of loading screens if you are doing a lot of story quests (1 to get into each event, 1 to leave) in addition to all the waypoints and such.

Very few of the loading screens were from him actually changing between major areas. It would be cool if they had a system similar to what TOR did (have a loading portal that you can kinda seamlessly load through), but I don't know if their system is setup for that or not.

However, I can see how that amount of loading screens can be jarring at times.

I already made the point, but some might be missing it. TB isn't just doing the Personal Story for himself. He's in a group with other people who are also doing Personal Story content. When you are grouped with someone, if they select a Personal Story Instance to enter, you are given the option to join them in the instance, even if you aren't right there with them. That accounts for a lot of the instancing in the video. :)

Originally posted by DarkPony

Just watched & listened to Cynical Brit's overal impression so far. Essentially 40+ minutes of continuous gameplay in the Norn area and despite the environments looking pretty appealing I couldn't help noticing a couple of things really impacting the "open worldness";

The big one:

- The amount of loading screens.  Every time you zone in or out of town, personal instances or fast travel: pretty hefty ones too (on his system around 30 seconds each, it looks like he even short cutted some of them (as some bars run to 100%, others are suddenly cut short at low percentages), probably to make the vid more appealing). (EDIT: apparently some loading screens can in fact skip from 5% to 100% and the vid might not have been edited afterall)

This reminded me very much of Swtor or AoC, even though Swtor's "worlds" are larger than GW2's zones, you frequently had to travel between them; i.e. staring at loading screens a lot. To me personally that became a frustrating aspect. It looks like in GW2 this may even be a bit more impacting due to the frequent use of fast travel (as the time spent physically traveling towards an objective will be much shorter once you discovered an area for the first time and once you are done with something, you can instantly fast travel out it seems).

Specifically personal story related ones:

- Conversation breaks: pulling you out the world around you and into a conversation setting, playing out a predetermined exchange of lines (without choice it looks like). This is a lesser interuption in my eyes but it will mean a lot of skipping for many people.

- Instanced areas in the open world: running into certain areas prompts you into accepting entering an instance or not and another loading screen, venture too far out and you leave the open world instance.

In total it ammounted to an impressive number of interuptions from the immersive flow of an open world experience: fight some mobs, fast travel to town *loading screen*, run to npc, fast travel back *loading screen*, run to objective, enter instanced area *loading screen*, fight for a few minutes, complete task, fast travel back to town *loading screen* , etc. (It's obvious how the fast traveling mechanic, rather than a natural, real time means of transport is responsible for most breaks).

I hope they will be able to optimize the game somewhat more in order to make the loading screens less time consuming but I reckon people would do good to invest in a SSD if they haven't already, to cut the annoyance down somewhat.

What remains to be seen if these frequent interuptions are typical for mainly storyline gameplay or not: it could be that while doing mainly random dynamic events in the same zone, they are much less of a factor.

Anyway, this might sound a bit dramatic but I was a bit disappointed about that aspect while watching this vid. I didn't expect to see them so frequently in a 40 minute session and it drains some of the "persistance magic" out of the beautiful surroundings and turns them into a series of somewhat more artificial back drops, rather than a consistent world which might change dramatically around the next corner while you physically travel without interuptions between destinations.

So what's your thoughts on this?

edit: Changed the description of when loading screens happen: loading screens between open world zones themselves (while not fast traveling) haven't been confirmed yet.

edit: added description to kinds of occurances to reflect the difference between personal story and other content.

Wow Pony...I expected a little bit better from you...

Ok where should I start..

Fast travel

First of all, if a game has instanced travelling, you would kind of expect these to have loading screens. Just look at Skyrim for instance. It is not even an mmorpg and does not have hundreds of people running around in an ever-changing world and yet, it cannot avoid loading screens in instanced travels.

As for some loading screens that take a while for instance travel, that is obviously subject to optimisation. When the game is about 3-4 months from its release date, the devs have plenty of time to optimise the game.

However the main point here is: loading screens are to be expected in instanced travel even regardless of the game's genre and are unavoidable (maybe due to technical limitations?)

Personal instances

Think about it, how can you include these areas - which is integral part of the game - without any loading screens? You expect to seamlessly enter your home instance along with 4 others in your party? Mate, that is just not going to happen. Just think about it for a sec: how in the world can you make the whole experience seamless when you go back and forth between the open world and your instance? There HAS to be a loading screen to indicate the transition as instances are made for you and your party only. Again, this is most likely a technical limitation, but it is also relevant for any other game.

You can argue "but why put personal instances in the first place?" Easy answer. Personal story and home instances would NOT exist without personal instancing. Personal instance, again, is an integral part of the game that: gives your character an identity, that opens up great variety of gameplay options; and caters to those players who simply enjoy single player rpg games with co-op thrown in it (think Diablo 2, or Borderlands for instance [no pun intended] which I personally enjoyed).

Zoning in and out of towns

To be honest, I don't really have a valid argument for this one. The only thing I can say is that it may be a technical limitation given the nature of DEs and how huge and detailed these towns are.

Conversation breaks

Really unavoidable. What is better: having a simple voice dialogue or a wall of text trying to immerse you in the story and make youa attached to your character or a conversation cutscene for the same purpose?

It must also be noted, like others here have done, that conversation breaks are ONLY for your personal story. So if you won't follow your personal story much, you will not get these conversation breaks.

Instanced areas in open world

Now that is very poor wording. Open world is divided into zones where hundreds of people can play together. You are talking about the loading screen that happens when you transit to another zone? That is very common across many mmorpg games. The devs may have avoided these loading screens all together had they not included DEs. So it is more of a technical limitation. Having said that, what is better: loading screens that last few seconds or having conventional quests?

fight some mobs, fast travel to town *loading screen*, run to npc, fast travel back *loading screen*, run to objective, enter instanced area *loading screen*, fight for a few minutes, complete task, fast travel back to town *loading screen*

This sentence got me a bit annoyed. It seems to me like here you are stuck in old mindset. Either that or a very poor example of trying to get a point across that the game has too many loading screens.

You get DEs notifications as you explore the world. Once you complete any of these, you get your rewards immediately based on your participation and through the mailing system (an award of some sort from an npc). You do not need to run back and forth between exploration areas and towns to submit or get another "quest". You would only go back to the town to buy/sell/craft stuff or to just hand out with others in town.

Bottom line: It would not have been possible to make an mmorpg that redefines a lot of aspects of conventional mmorpgs without many of the loading screens due a lot to technical limitations. It comes down to a question of: do I want a very fresh and new experience in my mmorpg even though the mmorpg is not fully open world or would I rather stick to same-old but with more of an open world feeling?

This OP claimed that the GW2 zones were smaller then the SW:TOR planets. Having played both games somewhat extensively I would say many of the GW2 zones are 3 to 4 times the size of SWTOR planets. Even a few of the major cities in GW2 are the size of the smaller planets in SW:TOR.  I mean I have even ehard some rumors from devs at PAX and Gamescom about 25% more unseen playable zone places that have to be discovered through exploration. I saw the lake cavern that took almsot 5 minutes of continous running  just to get to the other side and it was only a small part of a dungeon which was a small part of a much larger zone. GW2 devs claim that GW2 will ahve as much playable land as WoW did on release. And to be honest just form what I ahve played and seen I think they are shortselling themselves.