Does it work like GW1 or is it a proper open, seamless world?

 

 

Edit: Just found this in a sticky above:

 

Instances and Open World
The majority of the game will take place in a massive open world, each player also has their own personal storyline, these will be instanced but you can choose to invite friends to help you or just to come visit. Dungeons are also instanced.

 

Sounds great...

 

Only personal story is instanced.

Originally posted by tuppe99

Does it work like GW1 or is it a proper open, seamless world?

 

The only instances are in dungeons or personal stories. It is zoned however, and not a seamless world.  It IS however, definately proper.

Originally posted by eyelolled

Originally posted by tuppe99

Does it work like GW1 or is it a proper open, seamless world?

 

The only instances are in dungeons or personal stories. It is zoned however, and not a seamless world.  It IS however, definately proper.

Zoned as EQ2 is zoned or more like WoW where mostly continents are?

only things instanced in this game are as follows:

- Personal story

- Dungeons (only the storymode / explorable dungeons, there are open world dungeons that are not instanced)

- Structured PvP

dungeons, personal story, your home region in your race's capital, sPvP are all instanced. In a way every pve zone is instanced as well because of overflow servers. The only thing that isn't instanced are the 4 WvW maps(of which the 3 are exactly the same sadly).

Originally posted by tuppe99

Originally posted by eyelolled

Originally posted by tuppe99

Does it work like GW1 or is it a proper open, seamless world?

 

The only instances are in dungeons or personal stories. It is zoned however, and not a seamless world.  It IS however, definately proper.

Zoned as EQ2 is zoned or more like WoW where mostly continents are?

Never tried EQ2 but I would say it's similar to AoC but the map areas are probably at least twice to four times as big.

 

Personally, I would much rather have zones then suffer the downfalls to a seamless world, but thats just my opinion.

Originally posted by eyelolled

Never tried EQ2 but I would say it's similar to AoC but the map areas are probably at least twice to four times as big.

 

Personally, I would much rather have zones then suffer the downfalls to a seamless world, but thats just my opinion.

 

Now that you mention AoC, is was completely putting me off the game that I could not get on my horse and travel from city to city. I stopped playing that when I had to jump on a wagon and then got zoned into the next area.

 

Is GW2 similar to that or can I travel to whereever I want by mount or foot? (With zone loads as I go along, of course)

Originally posted by tuppe99

Originally posted by eyelolled

Never tried EQ2 but I would say it's similar to AoC but the map areas are probably at least twice to four times as big.

 

Personally, I would much rather have zones then suffer the downfalls to a seamless world, but thats just my opinion.

Now that you mention AoC, is was completely putting me off the game that I could not get on my horse and travel from city to city. I stopped playing that when I had to jump on a wagon and then got zoned into the next area.

 

Is GW2 similar to that or can I travel to whereever I want by mount or foot? (With zone loads as I go along, of course)

You can not. There are occasional zone loads.

As far as I could tell, all areas are connected to each other. However, you may not be able to travel between cities right away, because there are higher-level areas between them. I know I could travel from Divinity's Reach (human starting city) to Lion's Arch (the main hub) by foot, but the road went through a level 25-35 area.

I think GW2 does zoning right. Each zone is huge and offers hours of gameplay, so you don't have to stare at loading screens constantly.

Originally posted by colddog04

Originally posted by tuppe99

Originally posted by eyelolled

Never tried EQ2 but I would say it's similar to AoC but the map areas are probably at least twice to four times as big.

 

Personally, I would much rather have zones then suffer the downfalls to a seamless world, but thats just my opinion.

Now that you mention AoC, is was completely putting me off the game that I could not get on my horse and travel from city to city. I stopped playing that when I had to jump on a wagon and then got zoned into the next area.

 

Is GW2 similar to that or can I travel to whereever I want by mount or foot? (With zone loads as I go along, of course)

You can not. There are occasional zone loads.

Actually he can (note that he accounted for zone loads already in his question). :P

Though there are no mounts, so you'll only be able to do it by foot.

Originally posted by cinos

Originally posted by colddog04

Originally posted by tuppe99

Originally posted by eyelolled

Never tried EQ2 but I would say it's similar to AoC but the map areas are probably at least twice to four times as big.

 

Personally, I would much rather have zones then suffer the downfalls to a seamless world, but thats just my opinion.

Now that you mention AoC, is was completely putting me off the game that I could not get on my horse and travel from city to city. I stopped playing that when I had to jump on a wagon and then got zoned into the next area.

 

Is GW2 similar to that or can I travel to whereever I want by mount or foot? (With zone loads as I go along, of course)

You can not. There are occasional zone loads.

Actually he can (note that he accounted for zone loads already in his question). :P

Though there are no mounts, so you'll only be able to do it by foot.

Oh yeah, I misread what he was asking.

 

Yes, you can travel by foot wherever you want and get wherever you want and there are occasional zones loads in between. Perhaps Orr is different in that regad since there is a strip of ocean in between the mainland and that island.

 

GW2 also utilizes heavy use of teleporting through Asura Gates (which are free and connect to major cities) and a paid teleport that will take you pretty much anywhere you've been for a fee.

Originally posted by tuppe99

Originally posted by eyelolled

Never tried EQ2 but I would say it's similar to AoC but the map areas are probably at least twice to four times as big.

 

Personally, I would much rather have zones then suffer the downfalls to a seamless world, but thats just my opinion.

 

Now that you mention AoC, is was completely putting me off the game that I could not get on my horse and travel from city to city. I stopped playing that when I had to jump on a wagon and then got zoned into the next area.

 

Is GW2 similar to that or can I travel to whereever I want by mount or foot? (With zone loads as I go along, of course)

it is amazing to see that there are still people out there that dont know about how guild wars travelling are done =)

Originally posted by tuppe99

Is GW2 similar to that or can I travel to whereever I want by mount or foot? (With zone loads as I go along, of course)

there are no mounts in GW2

You do not need mounts in GW2 due to your crazy fast built in run speed buffs when out of combat.

With regard to travel across the world map, there are also dozens of Waypoints across each zone and city. Once you've found each, you can instantly travel to them from anywhere via the world map for a small coinage fee

Originally posted by tuppe99

Originally posted by eyelolled

Never tried EQ2 but I would say it's similar to AoC but the map areas are probably at least twice to four times as big.

 

Personally, I would much rather have zones then suffer the downfalls to a seamless world, but thats just my opinion.

 

Now that you mention AoC, is was completely putting me off the game that I could not get on my horse and travel from city to city. I stopped playing that when I had to jump on a wagon and then got zoned into the next area.

 

Is GW2 similar to that or can I travel to whereever I want by mount or foot? (With zone loads as I go along, of course)

There are 25 PvE zones in the game. This doesn't include the massive cities. The average zone size is probably about the size of The Barrens in vanilla WoW. There are portals connecting each zone, but the zones all fit together to make up the world map, so you aren't travelling massive distances between zones when you step through a portal. The exit from one zone matches right up with the entrance in the destination zone on the world map.

Here is a map showing how all the zones fit together:

This map shows the level ranges. (An older map, it's missing one or two zones seen on the first map):

The GW2 world makes use of Waypoints for easy rapid transit. There is only a small cost associated with waypoint travel, with cost scaling based on the distance between your current location and the destination waypoint. Load time between zones is only a few seconds. Load times to waypoints with in the same zone are usually shorter.

There is no cooldown timer on waypoint travel.

This is the zone south of the large, round city, (Divinity's Reach) seen on the first world map. The diamond shapes with the blue middle are waypoints:

For size comparison, I feel that you could probably fit the three WoW zones, Elwynn Forest, Westfall and Duskwood combined, into the confines of the zone shown above and this zone is maybe 4% of the PvE game world, excluding the cities.

Most PvE content is in the form of Dynamic Events and you find most DEs by stumbling across them during your travels. So, even though easy waypoint travel is available, I find I only ever use it when I need to join up with a friend, or return to a vendor, city or crafting station. I worried waypoint travel would detract from immersion, but it didn't. It was a welcome convenience, but the vast majority of my travels are on foot through the world, because this is a world you want to "live in" and explore and you can travel though an area a number of times before stumbling on a DE associated with that area, so the game rewards you for covering the same ground if your travels criss cross places you have been.

There are short cuts for getting to the 6 major cities in the game, the Asuran Gates. These are a key part of the game lore and not just something tossed in for convenience. However, because all the zones fit together edge to edge to make up the entire game world, you can indeed travel from city to city entirely on foot, if you so desire.

Personal Story action takes place in instances, which you can invite friends into. What I love, though, is that these are all instanced versions of locations in the game world and you do have to travel to them in the world in order to enter the instance. The entry icons are only visible to you. There are not areas of the world closed off by instance boundries, like in SWTOR.

So, technically it's not a seemless world, but the zones are so huge, waypoint travel feels so natural and all the game zones do fit together in the world map logically, so the logistics do not interfere with immersion in the game world.

All the PvE zones are persistent and shared by others on the same server. This is not a totally instanced world like GW1, where each player had their own instances of game zones.

The game does make use of Overflow Servers when capacity for a zone is reached. This is likely to only be an issue during the opening week or two after launch. During the three BWEs, I mostly only ever encountered Overflow Servers for the starting zones, not for zones beyond that point. In BWE3, with all five racial starting zones opened, I only infrequently encountered overflow in the two starter zones that had been added for the final event.

If party members get seperated via Overflow, you can just right click their party portrait and select "Join" to join them in their Overflow. The Overflow concession technically compromises your connection to the persistent world, but these overflows are shared by many people, so the actual play experience feels the same. When you go to Overflow, you get put in a queue to go to the normal zone. When the normal zone is available to you, you are given the option to enter the normal zone, or stay in overflow. I think the concession is an acceptable one, because the alternative would be server queues. With this system, there will never be queues to get into the PvE world.

As I stated, I fully expect that Overflows will not be seen much, if at all, after the first week or two and if you play a lot of hours in the opening days, you will probably escape them entirely once you reach the level 15-25 zones and beyond.

I gave up fretting the semantics of "open world", "Instanced", "Zoned", "Overflow" etc.. once I was able to spend some time in the game. For me, GW2 is the most immersive MMO I've played in 14 years and zoning/overflow/waypoints did nothing to detract from the over all experience. This game is a dream for explorers and those who enjoy large, immersive game worlds.

Game is zoned like Swtor or AoC, though zones are bigger.  It is not like WoW where you have whole continents and no zoning.

Other instancing is quite traditional like in other themeparks - Arenas are instanced, Dungeons are instanced.

There is WvWvW  PvP place-zone  which consist or 4 zones / big instances that allow few hundread of people.

Originally posted by tuppe99

Does it work like GW1 or is it a proper open, seamless world?

 

 

Edit: Just found this in a sticky above:

 

Instances and Open World
The majority of the game will take place in a massive open world, each player also has their own personal storyline, these will be instanced but you can choose to invite friends to help you or just to come visit. Dungeons are also instanced.

 

Sounds great...

 

Its a real open world like any other MMO, and not like GW1.  Their is zones though but in all honesty you wont be doing alot of zoning because each zone has hours of content to take in before you might need to move on.  Every thing else is in an open zone.

That is brilliant, thanks a lot for all the clarifications, especially the post with all the maps :)