Open up the world, please! Part I

[Galka_Rock]

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.

That's not the way it works, though. as you move through a transition zone, the game unloads the zone behind you, and loads the zone in front of you. So, the game is still just loading one zone at a time.

[Galka_Rock]

All the coding was broken from the start, and the game was using the crystal tools engine which was not designed for open world environments. Using their new engine and tools, the game wouldn't suffer the way 1.0 did. By the way, that's a great youtube series!

[HPDelron]

I get where people are coming from but for me the seams actually lend some immersion to the world.

When I'm playing something like WoW and I walk from say Ironforge to Menethil Harbor, I literally walk the whole way. I see every inch of the journey from doorstep to doorstep. However the two places are really not so far away. It's seriously like a 10 minute walk, that is the entire journey. I saw the entire thing with no interruptions.

If I'm going from Ul'Dah to Gridania I pass through several loading gates between zones. There's space "Missing" on the way. That 10 minute walk is no longer the entire journey and instead it's just the interesting bits. It leaves my brain some place to allow for some abstracted distance. I can imagine a carriage leaving Ul'Dah and having to stop to camp overnight on the way to camp drybone. I can't imagine anyone even stopping for lunch between Darkshire and Stormwind.

In both these games space is highly compressed. "Big Cities" are scarcely a football field across, and there are enough houses for all of a dozen people. However this smallness is less obviously pronounced with they're more loosely sitched together.

In this way I kind of find the loading screens more immersive, if only because they give me just a touch more room to ignore the silly, video-gamey scale of the video game.

[JunseiKei]

All the coding was broken from the start, and the game was using the crystal tools engine which was not designed for open world environments. Using their new engine and tools, the game wouldn't suffer the way 1.0 did. By the way, that's a great youtube series!

You mean this one?

Which, by the way, is worth sitting through in it's entirety.

[Aphex]

There would be a higher mem requirement. The way these transitions work is by using 2 sets of volumes, each one loading different sets of data. The world you transitioned from isnt completely dumped. This is why it couldnt be done on the ps3, it just didnt have the mem required. Also btw, transitions wouldnt be toggled, this would be a fundamental change that would require input from every dept. Someone like Yoshi P would need to sell the idea to higher ups, and im not sure they would give it the stamp of approval as it wouldn't necessarily create more retention. However, i do have faith that this is being worked on, just a gut feeling.

[KisaiTenshi]

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.

The major problem in all MMORPG's is that you can not place 500 people inside the space of a gymnasium. There are certain aspects of computer games in general that you just can't replicate a real-world equivalent because few games actually let their NPC's have a schedule. Off the top of my head The Ultima games, Elder Scrolls, and Fallout games do this. Thus everyone knows that NPC is located at a specific location, and they will be crowded around it. You can do some lazy-instancing in this way by making the door way into the building for which the NPC is located so that only 16 people are ever in the building, but that starts to break immersion when your friends go "Hey I'm by Rowena" and they go "I'm also by Rowena, where the hell are you?" And they're both standing in the same spot in different instances.

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.

Archeage has seams, but they're not very obvious except from the air ships. When you cross a zone boundary you actually see a huge chunk of draw distance change. Trust me, you do notice where the seams are, as the PvP/PvE mode changes immediately when you cross them. The only places that feel completely seamless in that game are when you go out to sea on a ship other than the rowboat.

"Loading tunnels" are just a visual trick in V1.0 so that when they did the console version that it was visually seamless. However look at Nier:Automata and notice it is also seamless, and much newer. No draw distance artifacts at all. But a single player game doesn't need to reserve memory bandwidth on the video card for drawing 250 different players in the field of view, so you only ever see "loading time" in that game when you die and have to reload.

But here's the thing. It actually DOES have loading tunnels. They're just not FFXIV V1.0 style. Nier puts a tunnel between the city area and the desert, the desert and the place where you fight one boss, a tunnel between the flooded city and the city (the sewers), a tunnel between the carnival and the city (also sewers), and between the city and the commercial district/castle area. In fact the reason it's laid out this way is because the city changes.

The mistake V1.0 made was making the loading tunnels empty. Had there been actual things in them, like the Chocobo porter and a repair NPC at the junction point, people would have not drawn attention to it.

V2.0's mistake was splitting up the home areas. This was a mistake, and I hope they consider consolidating Ul'dah, Gridania, Limsa Lominsa and even Ishgard so that they are seamless up to their exits. I don't think it would be truely necessary to make them seamless with their surrounding areas, owing mainly to how Uldah's layout was kinda ridiculous to hide the loading time where as Gridania, Ishgard, even Idyllshire have these really long sets of bridges into them.

[NatSilverguard]

what was the memory of PS3 again? lol

[Naunet]

The major problem in all MMORPG's is that you can not place 500 people inside the space of a gymnasium. There are certain aspects of computer games in general that you just can't replicate a real-world equivalent because few games actually let their NPC's have a schedule. Off the top of my head The Ultima games, Elder Scrolls, and Fallout games do this. Thus everyone knows that NPC is located at a specific location, and they will be crowded around it. You can do some lazy-instancing in this way by making the door way into the building for which the NPC is located so that only 16 people are ever in the building, but that starts to break immersion when your friends go "Hey I'm by Rowena" and they go "I'm also by Rowena, where the hell are you?" And they're both standing in the same spot in different instances.

I'm still not sure why you're lecturing me. I'm literally talking about something that plenty of other MMOs do just fine.

[IveraIvalice]

It sounds like the people asking for this don't know how game development works. The world in 1.0 was big and empty and repetitive. It had to be in order for it to be that big. Because there can only be so much stuff loaded into memory at one time they have to repeat things a lot, like grass texture and dirt texture and rock texture can all be vertex painted onto the surfaces and blended in any way they want so it looks different then another part of the area but it is only 3 textures. The same is true for every single thing you see in a zone if you look hard enough you will find a tree or 5 with the exact same geometry, it's just rotated and placed in ways that you don't notice it.

In 1.0 the world was exactly the same but because it was so big there was the same amount of stuff loaded into memory but spread out over a much bigger area and it was a lot more noticeable that things were repeated and empty. When a map is smaller you have much less space to fill with the repeated textures and geometry so you can have more set piece geometry and textures (things that stand out and don't need to be repeated). This hasn't changed from 1.0 - 2.0 and till now. There's still a memory limit and no matter what making the maps bigger will make the repeated assets be much more noticeable. Even in the sea of clouds and other areas it's more noticeable that the textures are repeated on every tree and the ground when you fly high enough.

If you didn't know when 2.0 was being developed, they ditched the big empty zones in favor of smaller more interesting zones. The community agreed and so did I. Now you may be thinking that this has nothing to do with loading screens being seamless but it is the entire reason they are not seamless currently and they won't be unless they completely remake all the maps. If they remove a zone then the game has to load all the memory of things on both sides of that zone and that's usually not possible because there are new textures and models that exist in one zone and not the other.

This will be a problem either way, unless they raise the minimum memory limit to favor only higher end pc users will they be able to add more models and textures but they won't do that because that will limit the playerbase more. But even if they did there will always be a memory limit and they still need to choose if they are gonna have big repeated areas or small set piece areas. And they already decided that along time ago.

[Naunet]

<snip>

... Literally look at any of the other MMOs mentioned in this thread to realize it is not impossible to have large, detailed zones. If you keep with instancing, then they can be even more detailed.