Thread: Why did they changed this from version 1.0 ?

Oh great, another "the areas aren't gigantic enough" thread.

For ARR, they opted for smaller, more-well-crafted areas instead of having giant areas that required lots of reuse of textures and terrain chunks to make ("copy-pasta"). There's no point in having a giant area when you don't have enough assets and content to fill it with.

The old areas are just bigger- they aren't more beautiful. They are very boring because everything is so spread out and you only see the same terrain repeated over and over and over. It just plain baffles me how anyone could like it better. ARR's areas are actually thoughtfully designed with more beauty and detail in one square foot than 1.0s areas have in their entirety.

Another thing is because they were designing smaller areas with zoning instead of large mostly contiguous areas they were able to get rid of those awful 'loading corridors'. Remember Uldah in 1.0? how you had to walk through those long side tunnels (which still exist but are blocked off) and the main gates were closed? Now they could open the main gate since they didn't need the loading corridors anymore. All over the game you had long narrow spaces that served to mask the transfer from one area to another on the server side. But since there was never anything in these spaces (and players nearby crossing at the same time would momentarily vanish) it was just meaningless padding.

You have to sacrifice details to make areas bigger. Most wide-open-world games are single player as a result (Oblivion, Skyrim for example, where you've seen one cave or house, you've seen them all)

You are so right. Looking at a black loading screen while you do nothing is so much more immersive and better design than actually moving through the world and the game designers designing the world in such a way that you don't have to stop and wait like this is a game from 10 years ago.

Because forcing people to take indirect routes through long corridors to so obviously mask loading / area transfer is just SO much more immersive. Personally I'm happy i can just walk out the gate instead of having to walk a mile to cover a distance that could otherwise be covered in 5 seconds. Seriously, it sticks out like a sore thumb and cancels out any immersion bonus. On top of this, 1.0 STILL HAD LOADING SCREENS ANYWAY.

on't know how anyone could ever disagree with this. It's crazy.

My reaction to anyone liking 1.0 areas better is exactly the same. I don't know how anyone could ever disagree with ARR's areas being far superior. It's crazy.