Open up the world, please! Part I

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

No games aside from minecraft and similar clones are actually fully seamless.

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You know exactly what I mean; there's no need to play semantics. Go play any of the games I mentioned. You can run through mountains from one zone to the next without a loading screen. The only loading screens happen when you cross ocean to get to another continent (or when you're making use of some form of teleporting fast travel).

Like I said, though, instanced zones are fine so long as they're properly taken advantage of. That's not something SE has done so far; instead we get narrow, rigid zones tightly limited by invisible walls that feel claustrophobic. We get cities that feel more like just walking down a single boulevard and window-shopping rather than experiencing a city (go check out the capital cities in GW2 - Destiny's Reach, for example). SE can and should do better.

I would suggest taking a look at Remnants of a Realm in order to see just how seamless 1.0 really wasn't ... and realize that city states may not ever be seamless due to development choices required by hardware no longer supported in the game.

Then go take a look at the other videos in this series.

As for games like WoW -- try flying with a friend across a cross-realm zone boundary to see exactly how 'seamless' that solution isn't.

While it would be nicer, the game would also be much harder to run like that. The game can run on lower end PCs just fine and they can because they only have to render one zone at a time, not an entire continent.

While this would be nice, considering the servers can't seem to handle congestion very well, they would probably implode if zones like Sea of Clouds and The Ruby Sea were completely seamless when transitioning into areas like Foundation and Yanxia/The Azim Steppe.

1.0 had large, seemingly seamless areas. And while 1.0's issues were far deeper than large maps, it didn't work out. ARR's devs and Yoshi realize that, and they seem far too cautious to allow for this tbh.

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Originally Posted by Naunet

You know exactly what I mean;

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Yes, and a truely seamless map experience requires abandoning the concepts of zones, and instead take a page from sectorized cellular networks. One server controls either one really large, sparsely populated area, or it sectorizes and your game client is always in contact with the three overlapping sectors. No loading time because the load is always spread over three servers and manages smaller and smaller areas as places get congested and other servers spin up to spawn off them. Should something crash, that sector goes offline and the neighboring sectors "escort" remember where your character is, so you can continue to move through the sector, but anything interactive in the offline sector is frozen until it comes back up.

There are ways of creating seamless experiences, and it largely comes down to making the maps loaded dynamically as you move through them. Where you start noticing the lack of seamlessness is on a mount that can traverse the map quickly. In a sectorized system you'd get handed off between each sector as you near it's coverage area, thus you could go as fast as possible through the area and not hit a "loading" wall. Flying mounts are especially bad about breaking seamlessness because they typically fly 2-3x faster than a land mount, and the land mount is typically twice as fast as walking.

I was actually a little disappointed that they sped up the land mounts, there was nothing wrong with their original speed. What they should have done was give all mounts their own "sprint" command, along with a "horn" command (eg make the mount growl, roar, laugh, chirp, etc), and made it so that mounts sprint ends if the mount takes damage instead of being able to literately outrun everything.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Yes, and a truely seamless map experience requires abandoning the concepts of zones

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What's your point? My post had no confusion about what SE might have to do to improve their zones - only my opinion on what I prefer and examples of games that managed zones differently. GW2 is a perfect example of exploiting the benefits of instanced zones to its fullest. You can walk around the entirety of Divinity's Reach, for example, up and down alleys, through markets, winding in and around multi-leveled neighborhoods and parks - and go inside a huge chunk of the buildings. Compare that to a city like Ul'dah or even our more recent Kugane and it's obvious how restricted things are.

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Originally Posted by Naunet

GW2 is a perfect example of exploiting the benefits of instanced zones to its fullest. You can walk around the entirety of Divinity's Reach, for example, up and down alleys, through markets, winding in and around multi-leveled neighborhoods and parks - and go inside a huge chunk of the buildings.

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Not exactly the 'entirety' of Divinity's Reach. I cannot get to a certain Inn there, or a certain orphanage, for example, without entering a separate instance with those specific features -- and by features I mean alleys, markets, neighborhoods. Same in several other residential districts within the other major cities, places where major plot happens.

The other thing about that lack of 'seamless' ... aetherytes are a big method of moving about in the cities these days. If I am at the Fishing Guild in Limsa, I don't run up steps to get to the Aftcastle, I use an aetheryte.

In a recent interview, Yoshida acknowledged that the team have gotten better at designing zones since ARR and it would be nice to redo them.
Not confirmation of anything but it would be nice for a future expansion to increase the size and beauty of old zone and give them flying and diving. I'm imagining a more vast Mor Dhona with deep caverns

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

Not exactly the 'entirety' of Divinity's Reach. I cannot get to a certain Inn there, or a certain orphanage, for example, without entering a separate instance with those specific features -- and by features I mean alleys, markets, neighborhoods. Same in several other residential districts within the other major cities, places where major plot happens.

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You're talking about the player character's "Home District" - that's instanced off because of phasing for story things.

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Originally Posted by SonKevin

So you're asking me to choose between long tunnels to act as loading between zones or a black screen with the name of the zone splashed on it?

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Why are long tunnels our only option? That's how they chose to do it in 1.0, but it's possible to have an open world without weird transitions like that.

Most recent open world game I've played is Archeage, and it's so refreshing when you go exploring the world. It's a beautiful world, and the zones blend together seamlessly. "Open world" is not synonymous with bad zone transitions/tunnels - SE just chose to implement it poorly.