well..if you have an strong pc ok..but arenanet does the seperate zones for lower end pc's...1 whole world takes alot more loading and this can cause lag for lower end people..
loading didnt bother me at beta though
and running 5 mins? .. you cant even get from 1 side of a city to the entrance within that time
However after the 'revolution' of the genre thing ... yes i think they kind of underestimated the importance of an open world. The loading screens are about the only part of the game i don't like.
That being said. Im fine with them choosing for zones, but i'd just much rather have an open world.
This game would have been far far better if it had one huge seemless zoneless world to explore (ala Fallen Earth)
I've already bought the game but I really am not sure I will be able to swallow this sour pill. Load screens in this day and age just piss me the ^%$# off.
Restrictive world regions break the game emersion big time. What is restrictive? Running in any direction for less than 5 min and hitting a zone wall.
UO had a seemless world back in 97
I really hope the other aspects of the game that I do like will be enough to offset this major "flaw"
Things I do like:
Crafting system
Market system
PvP system
Dynamic event system
Combat skill system
Clan control system
There is alot in the game to like.
Its a good thing GW2 has no sub...if it did have a sub I would not have pre-purchased it.
Who knows!?
The game has many systems in place, which are more complicated than Falling Earth and UO. Maybe it's a engine limitation, maybe it's for hardware scaling, maybe it's just for ease of design?
No game has it all. I don't find it immersion breaking. Not really. I find that it is a giant world. It bothered me in Age of Conan though. That world felt very restricted.
Dear OP, it's exactly due to the fact it's 2012 and not early 90ties that we have loading screens.
Back in the golden days of UO and 2d tiles it was easy to load and transfer themw ithout any hiccups on the bandwidth. You could even have most of that already with the game installation. It was small, simple and static. The more advanced the graphics and algorithms behind them get however, the more strain on both hardware and internet it puts.
Hence came the "streaming of content" technology, which allows for areas in even single player games to be bigger than initial system limitations. The problem with streaming in however is the fact you need to limit the pathways in zones a lot. You seen that even in modern single player games (shooters best example). You run to part of zone like a tunnel or series of sharp bends - that's where the swap of assets happens, everything behind you get's unloaded and new content is streamed in so by the time you get out of that tunnel you see new world without need of loading screen. It's all an illusion.
Now as to why it's not really good in MMOs, it should be obvious. With current technology, average hardware and average bandwidth limitations spread across thousands of users, to keep up with relatievely decent graphic fidelity, the zones in the game would have to be very linear, following singular path, surrounded by high hills/cardboard buildings in order to provide smooth streaming.
Or You can have huge open zones spearated by loading screens that wipe the previous assets from memory and load up new ones.
Eventually, You can do like FE and have huge but very barren and static world with rather choppy animation quality...
This game would have been far far better if it had one huge seemless zoneless world to explore (ala Fallen Earth)
I've already bought the game but I really am not sure I will be able to swallow this sour pill. Load screens in this day and age just piss me the ^%$# off.
Restrictive world regions break the game emersion big time. What is restrictive? Running in any direction for less than 5 min and hitting a zone wall.
UO had a seemless world back in 97
I really hope the other aspects of the game that I do like will be enough to offset this major "flaw"
Things I do like:
Crafting system
Market system
PvP system
Dynamic event system
Combat skill system
Clan control system
There is alot in the game to like.
Its a good thing GW2 has no sub...if it did have a sub I would not have pre-purchased it.
I realy realy dont understand your whole arguement about this zone loading, why you so bothered with sometimes loadscreens, world in between still are huge and game cannot have it all.
And you take a crappy game like Fallen Earth as an example lol ive played it and that game resembles me from 2000 not GW2 lol.
Yeah, it is somewhat annoying. I do know that Strain wanted a system similar to Wows originally but he wasn´t happy with the limitations.
What you can do is to run the game from an SSD so you minimize the loading time. It does not make the thing go away but it lessens the pain a lot.
As for why older games didn´t have zones it is due to have modern games handle 3D. The best you can do today is a similar system to Vanguard and GW2 had their reasons choosing as they did.
I think things will change soon, in just a few years your ram and your HD will be the same huge fast thing and then there wont be much need for zoning.
This game would have been far far better if it had one huge seemless zoneless world to explore (ala Fallen Earth)
I've already bought the game but I really am not sure I will be able to swallow this sour pill. Load screens in this day and age just piss me the ^%$# off.
Restrictive world regions break the game emersion big time. What is restrictive? Running in any direction for less than 5 min and hitting a zone wall.
UO had a seemless world back in 97
I really hope the other aspects of the game that I do like will be enough to offset this major "flaw"
Things I do like:
Crafting system
Market system
PvP system
Dynamic event system
Combat skill system
Clan control system
There is alot in the game to like.
Its a good thing GW2 has no sub...if it did have a sub I would not have pre-purchased it.
I realy realy dont understand your whole arguement about this zone loading, why you so bothered with sometimes loadscreens, world in between still are huge and game cannot have it all.
And you take a crappy game like Fallen Earth as an example lol ive played it and that game resembles me from 2000 not GW2 lol.
Do you actually know how the games where in 90s?
I also don't believe you have bought the game.
=D ahaha so cool arguments really =D the main his feature no sub ahahah =D if i didnt play gw1 with no sub i wont even try such game because free to play games also suck ... bad customer support , lots of things to buy in game for real money ... so for me better pay 15-20$ mounth and play fine than play free trash =D And man really tell us what do u know about games in 90s ?
Dear OP, it's exactly due to the fact it's 2012 and not early 90ties that we have loading screens.
Back in the golden days of UO and 2d tiles it was easy to load and transfer themw ithout any hiccups on the bandwidth. You could even have most of that already with the game installation. It was small, simple and static. The more advanced the graphics and algorithms behind them get however, the more strain on both hardware and internet it puts.
Hence came the "streaming of content" technology, which allows for areas in even single player games to be bigger than initial system limitations. The problem with streaming in however is the fact you need to limit the pathways in zones a lot. You seen that even in modern single player games (shooters best example). You run to part of zone like a tunnel or series of sharp bends - that's where the swap of assets happens, everything behind you get's unloaded and new content is streamed in so by the time you get out of that tunnel you see new world without need of loading screen. It's all an illusion.
Now as to why it's not really good in MMOs, it should be obvious. With current technology, average hardware and average bandwidth limitations spread across thousands of users, to keep up with relatievely decent graphic fidelity, the zones in the game would have to be very linear, following singular path, surrounded by high hills/cardboard buildings in order to provide smooth streaming.
Or You can have huge open zones spearated by loading screens that wipe the previous assets from memory and load up new ones.
Eventually, You can do like FE and have huge but very barren and static world with rather choppy animation quality...
Good post.. everyone should save this and put it on every thread like this that crops up.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
The ability to visit and play with friends on other servers
Overflow servers, never ever a login queue
Localized downtime and maintainance. GW1 that ran on a similar system, and infact the GW2 engine is a heavily evolved version of the GW1 engine, had no regular downtime, and less than 10 crashes/server wide downtimes from launch day all the way to today. 1 zone crashes, you get moved to overflow and you arent realy effected in any signifigant way.
Very detailed and dynamic content in each zone. And keep in mind the GW2 zones are huge.
And those are just some of the very obvious ones from a player wievpoint. i cant even begin to imagine the advantages it has on the game developers side.
All these ppl screaming that GW2 does not bring anything new realy need to sit down and read up on all the features. What other AAA MMO tittles has enabled you to easily visit other servers with your character to play, and jump back to your own server. no server transfers, no costs, you just go there. Not to mention the brilliant overflow system that makes sure you will never be faced with the scenario of not beeing able to play becouse of login queues or god forbid zone crashes.
Reason for the load screens, is because each zone is split up into many servers, used to handle the Overload feature. Similar reason why some MMO use Instanced channels for zones and also have load screen. Load screen, means you loading into a new server (not confused with main servers), this way the game can place you into different channels, ask overload feature, for just that zone rather than all zones
While that might be a pro of loading screens I don't think it is the real reason for it. The main reason is hardware limitations vs graphics advancements. Back in the old MMO's the graphics are...well...crap. The textures are small, low poly counts, animations minimal, etc. This allows them to load quickly and thus when steaming them in for a seamless world it works decently. However, now we have better graphics; textures are big, high poly counts, complex animations, etc. Harddrive speeds hasn't advanced much since early MMO's so seeking/reading larger files takes longer than the old small files. Yes, there are SSD's but most people don't have them yet for game designers to be designing around them.
This leads to a bottleneck and the result of that bottleneck is things suddenly "popping" in. If you played WoW then you know what it was like to run into say Org and not have certain buildings loaded and most characters were just shadows until they slowly loaded in. To combat that you pre-load a bunch of things to memory(hence why we have bigger and bigger memory footprints in games), but there are limitations there as well. First off 32bit clients can only use 3gigs of memory(including all running processes) iirc so there is a limitation there and using 64bit limits the game to only those with an operating system that supports that. Second, people don't always have gobs of memory. So the devs need to figure out whats a good middleground of memory usage is for their userbase.
Now lets talk about zones. Zones usually utilize a lot of the same textures, by re-using these textures it saves memory space. Using a zoned approach allows the devs to cram more things into a single zone due to that saved space. Now with streaming you need to not only have the current zones textures but also the zone you are heading towards. Even though you might only be loading 1/2 the current zone, since the re-use of textures, you're not saving enough memory space to allow for another 1/2 of a different zone. So in order to steam you need to either have less detail per zone, use a lot more memory, or deal with bottlenecked loading of things.
TLDR: Zoning allows for more detail in a single zone with the only major drawback being a loading screen. Streaming runs into hardware bottlenecks as well as "popping" of objects and due to this has to use lower quality zones.
The load times are really fast in GW2. Plus as another poster mentioned due to DE and world bosses you want to be able to control the player population in zones.
In a truly open seedless world everyone on the server can decide to show up at the same spot which would unbalanced the content in the game but even worse cause huge lag and eventually crash the server.
On a side note SWTOR load time are epic long. GW2s by comparison are blazing much faster.
The load screens are much easier to digest for GW1 players. But in all honesty load screens exist in so many other games from almost all genres. If a game is good enough then I can forgive such minor detail. It still felt the same when I went into another zone. It still felt scary to be in the next area and explore another huge zone. That's what's important isn't it?
Play for fun. Play to win. Play for perfection. Play with friends. Play in another world. Why do you play?
The load times are really fast in GW2. Plus as another poster mentioned due to DE and world bosses you want to be able to control the player population in zones.
In a truly open seedless world everyone on the server can decide to show up at the same spot which would unbalanced the content in the game but even worse cause huge lag and eventually crash the server.
On a side note SWTOR load time are epic long. GW2s by comparison are blazing much faster.
Yea thank god their not SWTOR style load screens. Although if you need to Walk the Dog, fix a sammich and read the first 900 pages of War and Peace then you might enjoy SWTOR style loading screens.
Playing: GW2 Waiting on: TESO Next Flop: Planetside 2 Best MMO of all time: Asheron's Call - The first company to recreate AC will be the next greatest MMO.
This game would have been far far better if it had one huge seemless zoneless world to explore (ala Fallen Earth)
I've already bought the game but I really am not sure I will be able to swallow this sour pill. Load screens in this day and age just piss me the ^%$# off.
Restrictive world regions break the game emersion big time. What is restrictive? Running in any direction for less than 5 min and hitting a zone wall.
UO had a seemless world back in 97
First, it's "seamless" (as in "without seams"), seemless means something totally different.
Now... I'm also one of those, like you, who prefers seamless worlds. I prefer the UO, AC1, WoW world model than the EQ/EQ2 model. But I have no problem with the GW2 model, simply because the zones are HUGE. I've explored a good part of the 3 racial areas available last beta week end without encountering a single zone gate. So GW2 is not like EQ2 (for instance), where you had several zone limits within the same city. And a single zone in GW2 is like 3x or more the size of Antonica in EQ2.
Originally posted by Thorbrand
EQ almost not loading.
Sorry, but...
Respect, walk, what did you say? Respect, walk Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me? - PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
This topic seems to be more created to vent an opinion than to facilitate open discussion. So there's not a whole lot more I can say other then the, by this point, generic response: It doesn't bother me.
The load times are fast and its never hampered my imersion to see a load screen. Certainly doesn't in skyrim nor did it in most games I've played. Perhaps I'm easily immersed, I don't know. I have no problem with loading though. I think every game should have load screens due to the limitations of fully integrated worlds. Yes we have the technology to do it, its not about being able to do it but about what you can do WITH it.
You could not, for example, make GW2 a seemless world and still achieve the system specs, speed, etc. that it has right now. At the very least it would add a sizable chunk to the development time line specifically aimed at world integration to do so. Still I have my doubts that a seemless world running all of the DE's at the same time with the graphical standards of today would be possible without demanding serious hardware from consumers. Its more likely that to create a fully integrated GW2 world they would alienate a good 25-50% of the community with the huge jump in system requirements that that would cause.
Ok, loading screens suck, you are right. It is something ArenaNet took over from GW1, because it makes some things way easier for them to implement and saves them money. But try to look at it this way: WoW has no loadingscreens between zones, yet most of the time you get teleported to battlegrounds, dungeons, etc. A big seamless world is worthless, when players tend to hang around at one place waiting for their teleport.
Moreover, it is not so important how big the zones are, as what they contain. If a zone has a lot of stuff to do and good content going on, I do not care about having a loadingscreen, when I get back to town. Vanguard delivers exactly what you want, but nobody wants to play it. There has to be a reason.
GW2 has some flaws like every other MMO does. The designers have to concentrate on those aspects of the game, they want to make good. So there will always be something about a game you wont like. However, I do not understand, why you like crafting. I think crafting in GW2 to be very wow-like and a little disappointing. Another think I do not like? The fact that there are no mounts in the game. With such big zones and the medieval setting a good steed would have been great.
But here ends my negative list for GW2, and I have to think deeply to find more. With WoW, WAR or SWTOR it would be much, much easier for me to make a very long thread with thinks I really hate in those games.
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.
There is no place in GW2 where you can go and not see every zone wall.
Ok, now I'm 100% sure of what you are doing here. I has a doubt, but this confirmed my first impression.
This, sir, is simply a lie. Yes, you are not telling the truth. And this comes from someone who got from level 13.5 to level 16+ only from exploring without killing a single mob during last beta week end.
We all see your point (yes, GW2 HAS zones, albeit huge ones), you do NOT need to lie to be "right on the Internet".
And I hope the moderators who will read this have also played the beta and know what I'm talking about.
Originally posted by Palladin
Therefore GW2 does not have an emersion quality to it.
Zoning really only occurs when travelling great distances, so unless you're really jumping around a lot it's a non-issue. Most play zones are not crossable in 5 minutes as you mentioned, so maybe you're referring to a city? Then again, even those are giant.
I also didn't notice more zoning than any other game I've played. It just wasn't something I encountered *unless* I was travelling far, and given the giant nature of the zones, I could easily spend hours and hours in one giant zone without ever zoning.
I'd seriously recommend a solid state drive if you're having zoning issues - it pretty much makes load screens a fast blip on your screen, and as I mentioned elsewhere, I don't get time to even read the text on the load screens as they're just gone so fast.
I can't imagine what it'd be like to sit there and wait for a load screen, sounds horrible.
Look into an SSD, they're cheap and make a massive difference, you won't regret it.
I don't have a SSD and loading screen took only 1 or 2 seconds maximum. I use two old school Western Digital 1TB Sata III HDDs in raid 0 mode.
Yes, the time it takes is less then taking a drink from a soda. If you lose immersion in that time you may need to consult a physician, you may be suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
I don't have a SSD and loading screen took only 1 or 2 seconds maximum. I use two old school Western Digital 1TB Sata III HDDs in raid 0 mode.
Ah, good to know. I had no basis for comparison as all of our PCs now have SSDs. I was imagining loading being an actual hinderance based on how much of an issue it seems to be for some, while it wasn't even something that crossed my mind in GW2.
I don't have a SSD and loading screen took only 1 or 2 seconds maximum. I use two old school Western Digital 1TB Sata III HDDs in raid 0 mode.
Ah, good to know. I had no basis for comparison as all of our PCs now have SSDs. I was imagining loading being an actual hinderance based on how much of an issue it seems to be for some, while it wasn't even something that crossed my mind in GW2.
Thanks.
Hehe well the main reason I don't have a SSD yet is that the price / capacity ratio is still very bad. You can get modern HDDs (SATA III high transfer speed, low seek times) with a 10x higher capacity for the same price. The day they make 500gb or higher SSDs for a decent price, I'll make the jump - but for now, my PCs work just fine with "old tech".
end of off topic =P
EDIT: and this is my post 666 here... I'm scared now o_O
Respect, walk, what did you say? Respect, walk Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me? - PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
Comments
well..if you have an strong pc ok..but arenanet does the seperate zones for lower end pc's...1 whole world takes alot more loading and this can cause lag for lower end people..
loading didnt bother me at beta though
and running 5 mins? .. you cant even get from 1 side of a city to the entrance within that time
https://ashesofcreation.com/r/Y4U3PQCASUPJ5SED
I don't mind a loading screen per sé.
However after the 'revolution' of the genre thing ... yes i think they kind of underestimated the importance of an open world. The loading screens are about the only part of the game i don't like.
That being said. Im fine with them choosing for zones, but i'd just much rather have an open world.
Who knows!?
The game has many systems in place, which are more complicated than Falling Earth and UO. Maybe it's a engine limitation, maybe it's for hardware scaling, maybe it's just for ease of design?
No game has it all. I don't find it immersion breaking. Not really. I find that it is a giant world. It bothered me in Age of Conan though. That world felt very restricted.
Dear OP, it's exactly due to the fact it's 2012 and not early 90ties that we have loading screens.
Back in the golden days of UO and 2d tiles it was easy to load and transfer themw ithout any hiccups on the bandwidth. You could even have most of that already with the game installation. It was small, simple and static. The more advanced the graphics and algorithms behind them get however, the more strain on both hardware and internet it puts.
Hence came the "streaming of content" technology, which allows for areas in even single player games to be bigger than initial system limitations. The problem with streaming in however is the fact you need to limit the pathways in zones a lot. You seen that even in modern single player games (shooters best example). You run to part of zone like a tunnel or series of sharp bends - that's where the swap of assets happens, everything behind you get's unloaded and new content is streamed in so by the time you get out of that tunnel you see new world without need of loading screen. It's all an illusion.
Now as to why it's not really good in MMOs, it should be obvious. With current technology, average hardware and average bandwidth limitations spread across thousands of users, to keep up with relatievely decent graphic fidelity, the zones in the game would have to be very linear, following singular path, surrounded by high hills/cardboard buildings in order to provide smooth streaming.
Or You can have huge open zones spearated by loading screens that wipe the previous assets from memory and load up new ones.
Eventually, You can do like FE and have huge but very barren and static world with rather choppy animation quality...
I realy realy dont understand your whole arguement about this zone loading, why you so bothered with sometimes loadscreens, world in between still are huge and game cannot have it all.
And you take a crappy game like Fallen Earth as an example lol ive played it and that game resembles me from 2000 not GW2 lol.
Do you actually know how the games where in 90s?
I also don't believe you have bought the game.
Yeah, it is somewhat annoying. I do know that Strain wanted a system similar to Wows originally but he wasn´t happy with the limitations.
What you can do is to run the game from an SSD so you minimize the loading time. It does not make the thing go away but it lessens the pain a lot.
As for why older games didn´t have zones it is due to have modern games handle 3D. The best you can do today is a similar system to Vanguard and GW2 had their reasons choosing as they did.
I think things will change soon, in just a few years your ram and your HD will be the same huge fast thing and then there wont be much need for zoning.
=D ahaha so cool arguments really =D the main his feature no sub ahahah =D if i didnt play gw1 with no sub i wont even try such game because free to play games also suck ... bad customer support , lots of things to buy in game for real money ... so for me better pay 15-20$ mounth and play fine than play free trash =D And man really tell us what do u know about games in 90s ?
Good post.. everyone should save this and put it on every thread like this that crops up.
Ok. Lets see what the zoning enables.
The ability to visit and play with friends on other servers
Overflow servers, never ever a login queue
Localized downtime and maintainance. GW1 that ran on a similar system, and infact the GW2 engine is a heavily evolved version of the GW1 engine, had no regular downtime, and less than 10 crashes/server wide downtimes from launch day all the way to today. 1 zone crashes, you get moved to overflow and you arent realy effected in any signifigant way.
Very detailed and dynamic content in each zone. And keep in mind the GW2 zones are huge.
And those are just some of the very obvious ones from a player wievpoint. i cant even begin to imagine the advantages it has on the game developers side.
All these ppl screaming that GW2 does not bring anything new realy need to sit down and read up on all the features. What other AAA MMO tittles has enabled you to easily visit other servers with your character to play, and jump back to your own server. no server transfers, no costs, you just go there. Not to mention the brilliant overflow system that makes sure you will never be faced with the scenario of not beeing able to play becouse of login queues or god forbid zone crashes.
While that might be a pro of loading screens I don't think it is the real reason for it. The main reason is hardware limitations vs graphics advancements. Back in the old MMO's the graphics are...well...crap. The textures are small, low poly counts, animations minimal, etc. This allows them to load quickly and thus when steaming them in for a seamless world it works decently. However, now we have better graphics; textures are big, high poly counts, complex animations, etc. Harddrive speeds hasn't advanced much since early MMO's so seeking/reading larger files takes longer than the old small files. Yes, there are SSD's but most people don't have them yet for game designers to be designing around them.
This leads to a bottleneck and the result of that bottleneck is things suddenly "popping" in. If you played WoW then you know what it was like to run into say Org and not have certain buildings loaded and most characters were just shadows until they slowly loaded in. To combat that you pre-load a bunch of things to memory(hence why we have bigger and bigger memory footprints in games), but there are limitations there as well. First off 32bit clients can only use 3gigs of memory(including all running processes) iirc so there is a limitation there and using 64bit limits the game to only those with an operating system that supports that. Second, people don't always have gobs of memory. So the devs need to figure out whats a good middleground of memory usage is for their userbase.
Now lets talk about zones. Zones usually utilize a lot of the same textures, by re-using these textures it saves memory space. Using a zoned approach allows the devs to cram more things into a single zone due to that saved space. Now with streaming you need to not only have the current zones textures but also the zone you are heading towards. Even though you might only be loading 1/2 the current zone, since the re-use of textures, you're not saving enough memory space to allow for another 1/2 of a different zone. So in order to steam you need to either have less detail per zone, use a lot more memory, or deal with bottlenecked loading of things.
TLDR: Zoning allows for more detail in a single zone with the only major drawback being a loading screen. Streaming runs into hardware bottlenecks as well as "popping" of objects and due to this has to use lower quality zones.
In a truly open seedless world everyone on the server can decide to show up at the same spot which would unbalanced the content in the game but even worse cause huge lag and eventually crash the server.
On a side note SWTOR load time are epic long. GW2s by comparison are blazing much faster.
get a really good ssd. problem solved.
The load screens are much easier to digest for GW1 players. But in all honesty load screens exist in so many other games from almost all genres. If a game is good enough then I can forgive such minor detail. It still felt the same when I went into another zone. It still felt scary to be in the next area and explore another huge zone. That's what's important isn't it?
Play for fun. Play to win. Play for perfection. Play with friends. Play in another world. Why do you play?
Yea thank god their not SWTOR style load screens. Although if you need to Walk the Dog, fix a sammich and read the first 900 pages of War and Peace then you might enjoy SWTOR style loading screens.
Everything you need to know about Elder Scrolls Online
Playing: GW2
Waiting on: TESO
Next Flop: Planetside 2
Best MMO of all time: Asheron's Call - The first company to recreate AC will be the next greatest MMO.
Didn't EQ have "Loading please wait... " all the time even when you died it said "loading please wait..." . How can anyone say it had no loading.
if you want a zone like that play Lineage 2, it is free..
Which FF Character Are You?
First, it's "seamless" (as in "without seams"), seemless means something totally different.
Now... I'm also one of those, like you, who prefers seamless worlds. I prefer the UO, AC1, WoW world model than the EQ/EQ2 model. But I have no problem with the GW2 model, simply because the zones are HUGE. I've explored a good part of the 3 racial areas available last beta week end without encountering a single zone gate. So GW2 is not like EQ2 (for instance), where you had several zone limits within the same city. And a single zone in GW2 is like 3x or more the size of Antonica in EQ2.
Sorry, but...
Respect, walk
Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?
- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
This topic seems to be more created to vent an opinion than to facilitate open discussion. So there's not a whole lot more I can say other then the, by this point, generic response: It doesn't bother me.
The load times are fast and its never hampered my imersion to see a load screen. Certainly doesn't in skyrim nor did it in most games I've played. Perhaps I'm easily immersed, I don't know. I have no problem with loading though. I think every game should have load screens due to the limitations of fully integrated worlds. Yes we have the technology to do it, its not about being able to do it but about what you can do WITH it.
You could not, for example, make GW2 a seemless world and still achieve the system specs, speed, etc. that it has right now. At the very least it would add a sizable chunk to the development time line specifically aimed at world integration to do so. Still I have my doubts that a seemless world running all of the DE's at the same time with the graphical standards of today would be possible without demanding serious hardware from consumers. Its more likely that to create a fully integrated GW2 world they would alienate a good 25-50% of the community with the huge jump in system requirements that that would cause.
http://www.wix.com/guardiansofthegarter/home
Ok, loading screens suck, you are right. It is something ArenaNet took over from GW1, because it makes some things way easier for them to implement and saves them money. But try to look at it this way: WoW has no loadingscreens between zones, yet most of the time you get teleported to battlegrounds, dungeons, etc. A big seamless world is worthless, when players tend to hang around at one place waiting for their teleport.
Moreover, it is not so important how big the zones are, as what they contain. If a zone has a lot of stuff to do and good content going on, I do not care about having a loadingscreen, when I get back to town. Vanguard delivers exactly what you want, but nobody wants to play it. There has to be a reason.
GW2 has some flaws like every other MMO does. The designers have to concentrate on those aspects of the game, they want to make good. So there will always be something about a game you wont like. However, I do not understand, why you like crafting. I think crafting in GW2 to be very wow-like and a little disappointing. Another think I do not like? The fact that there are no mounts in the game. With such big zones and the medieval setting a good steed would have been great.
But here ends my negative list for GW2, and I have to think deeply to find more. With WoW, WAR or SWTOR it would be much, much easier for me to make a very long thread with thinks I really hate in those games.
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.
Ok, now I'm 100% sure of what you are doing here. I has a doubt, but this confirmed my first impression.
This, sir, is simply a lie. Yes, you are not telling the truth. And this comes from someone who got from level 13.5 to level 16+ only from exploring without killing a single mob during last beta week end.
We all see your point (yes, GW2 HAS zones, albeit huge ones), you do NOT need to lie to be "right on the Internet".
And I hope the moderators who will read this have also played the beta and know what I'm talking about.
e·mer·sion
noun
1.
Also called egress. Astronomy. the emergence of a heavenly body from an eclipse, an occultation, or a transit. Compare immersion (def. 5).
2.
Archaic. the act of emerging.
I agree with you, GW2 doesn't have an emersion quality... even though you can emerge from the water in the game.
Can be confused: emersion, immersion.
Respect, walk
Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?
- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
Zoning really only occurs when travelling great distances, so unless you're really jumping around a lot it's a non-issue. Most play zones are not crossable in 5 minutes as you mentioned, so maybe you're referring to a city? Then again, even those are giant.
I also didn't notice more zoning than any other game I've played. It just wasn't something I encountered *unless* I was travelling far, and given the giant nature of the zones, I could easily spend hours and hours in one giant zone without ever zoning.
I'd seriously recommend a solid state drive if you're having zoning issues - it pretty much makes load screens a fast blip on your screen, and as I mentioned elsewhere, I don't get time to even read the text on the load screens as they're just gone so fast.
I can't imagine what it'd be like to sit there and wait for a load screen, sounds horrible.
Look into an SSD, they're cheap and make a massive difference, you won't regret it.
I don't have a SSD and loading screen took only 1 or 2 seconds maximum. I use two old school Western Digital 1TB Sata III HDDs in raid 0 mode.
Respect, walk
Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?
- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
Yes, the time it takes is less then taking a drink from a soda. If you lose immersion in that time you may need to consult a physician, you may be suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Ah, good to know. I had no basis for comparison as all of our PCs now have SSDs. I was imagining loading being an actual hinderance based on how much of an issue it seems to be for some, while it wasn't even something that crossed my mind in GW2.
Thanks.
Hehe well the main reason I don't have a SSD yet is that the price / capacity ratio is still very bad. You can get modern HDDs (SATA III high transfer speed, low seek times) with a 10x higher capacity for the same price. The day they make 500gb or higher SSDs for a decent price, I'll make the jump - but for now, my PCs work just fine with "old tech".
end of off topic =P
EDIT: and this is my post 666 here... I'm scared now o_O
Respect, walk
Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?
- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023