Is the travel system in this game and all the instancing temporary?

Or is this the core design?

When I want to play a MMORPG, I want to be immersed in the world, and right now, I really don't feel any immersion in your world.

I want to be working my way thru the world the forest and when the forest breaks I want to walk upon a village, town, or city.

I want to run across random housing, and the people who live there.

I want to run into random encounters in the wild as I travel.

I'm sorry, and I am sure I will be torn apart by the fanbase, but this just feels wrong, like a step backwards.

But to me this is a CORE belief in why I play MMORPG's, I have to say something.

 

Everybody wants a large open world to explore, some just accept everything even when its wrong. Yes instancing is the core, 5 episodes over 5 years a lot of loading screens many just the same generic scene.

 

Ya.....um...thanks but no thanks.......

 

I will never understand why everyone throws around the word immersion.

Immersion:

The action of immersing someone or something in a liquid.
"his back was still raw from immersion in the icy Atlantic Ocean"


Deep Mental involvement
"He was immersed in a book"

One could argue that most people have more immersion in there phone then in the real world. Is that a good thing?

Personally I can spend an hour playing spider solitaire. Do i feel like I am in the game? No.
But I enjoy it none the less.

 

They've said previously that they simply don't have the manpower/funding to make a fully openworld game like that. I think that's what everyone would prefer but what you gonna do?

 

All I can say if your that easily interested in something, then good for you, and thanks for sharing.

Some of us arent, simple as that.

 

All I can say is what has already been said:

The only thing that will change this is millions more dollars for development and operational expenses. Simple as that.

You can argue for it all you want, and provide valid arguments that others support or may not actually argue (myself included), but that will not change the reality of the situation. Only a drastic increase in funding will.

There are two routes that funding can come from: Us, and corporate backing. One gives them all they need with little interference, the other can give so much more, but it comes at the cost of having to answer to the corporation that now holds the ability to make decisions on when this is to be considered "done".

I'll sacrifice the immersion a little for leaving RG and the Portalarium team at the wheel.

 

I've never played an MMORPG that does that, maybe UO but you still hit server boundaries and got bounced around as it figured out where you were. All the other big MMORPGs have loading screens between sections of their world (not just the instances). The way they are doing the dual scale map just brings it more to your attention.

Or did they change that in cataclysm in wow? can you now fly everywhere without the loading screens? I certainly remember loading between say barrens the orgimaar section and things like that.

 

You have to load to go to different continents/Outlands in WoW.

 

Yeah... last time I played WoW, it seamlessly loaded zones in the same continent, but once you had to cross a continent or world boundary, you got a loading screen

 

Well there's a difference whether you hit a loading screen every meter or you come across them every couple kilometers... ah sorry feet/yards and miles. And for me the area I play in needs a certain size to get a "natural" feeling. So yeah all MMO have loading screens but most of them handle it well. So for me loading screen isn't = to loading screen if you get what I mean.

 

Actually Archeage is doing it without loading screens. Seamless as anything since Star Wars Galaxies.

Not to say that I compare this game to Archeage. Very different games, different audience but its being done.

I do share your concerns though gwartham. It feels very small and compartmentalized. At least at this point. But I try to think of it as not an MMO as I dont think it was ever supposed to be that way. More a social RPG game. That I can deal with. But they certainly cannot package this system as an MMO and to their credit they arent trying. As far as I can tell at least.

 

Right now I play darkfall, and the only loading screens are if you get ported, or if you go into a dungeon, and darkfall is ancient.

This sadly is a deal breaker for me.

 

Right now I am not a fan of all the instancing either it is a turn off. However I understand and agree with why they are doing it. I think right now with a lot of stuff still missing from the game it is hard to see the potential in the system they are using. I actually think in the long run do to being able to easily make changes to individual hexes this system could end up being more interesting then an open world. I am hoping though that loading times improve drastically.

 

Hmm. Has Chris/any developer actually ever mentioned solid figures on this? I'm quite convinced that it's expansive, but multiple millions seems a bit... odd.

That's one of the selling points I never really understood. If you're dynamically un-/loading scenes in the background, how does that prevent you from easily changing 'hexes'? The only disturbance is visual on the intersecting boundaries, the core system for the engine very much persists, or am I missing something there?

 

Yes.

This system allows the hexes to load for the individual. Now, why you ask? Well this really comes down to how they want to tailor the system. The hex can load one scene for one group of players as well as another for another group depending on where they are in the story, time of day, weather etc. This is all superceeded with the ability for the devs to pull a hex out of rotation and completely replace it with something new....without having to worry about any interconnections with other hexes. This will be huge in the randomness(most likely not as random as I think) of volcanoes and shardfalls. Not to mention this will tie into making the world more dynamic as to allow simple changes to the overall map. According to the devs it was really difficult in UO to do the same thing.


I think this will become more clear as the overland map is worked on(not much done there lately). I am hoping that it will show weather on the overland map that will correspond with the actual hex. There are plans to add roaming monster/encounters to the map. There has been from the start talk of using the hexes with certain conditions to bring in a rare scene. Such as the gypsey caravan they talked about during the kickstarter...it would normaly be a field but at this day a gypsey caravan is there with quests etc.

What I would like to see is loading into a hex and having the ability to find some rare event that doesn't happen as often as everytime you come there. Like a full moon and a dungeon entrance is discovered by the player or something. It gives a lot of freedom to the developers to add to the game with little cost.

 

Would you care to elaborate how Unitys LoadLevelAdditiveAsync does not? Granted, I'm without access to Unity Pro, so I can neither test nor profile the feature. I simply have to trust the API reference, hence my question. The core engine mechanic seems to be exactly the same. You have different scenes that you un-/load. Just that you're doing this in the background dynamically, opposed to with a loading screen, hence tryicking the player into believeing it would be a 'seamless' world.

That's not completey true either. You'd still have visual connections to the next part of the game (e.g. like you can 'see' the Vulcano from Owl's Head, or I should rather say how you're being tricked to believe that ).

I'd really love if we could get actual figures on cost and overhead.

 

I'd sooner hit the odd server wall than have constant loading screens.
There are no loading screens between maps on LotRo (2007) the only load screen is to enter and leave Moria (Very large underworld area )
It's not down to funding, I don't think Unity is up to the task.

 

The figures quoted for an open world game were 10 - 20 million. 20 million being more likely.

 

You guys are starting to hit the nail on the head on my only issue with crowd sourcing.

I absolutely love the concept of crowdsourcing to get funding for a game. It allows for a small company to get direct funding for a project, which is also going to allow us to see games that would be passed on by the larger game producers.

My only issue with crowd sourcing is when does it stop being about funding the game, and more about getting everyone on the staff a shiny new Porsche, because they have over met the necessary funding, and are already making a profit off a undelivered product.

I believe the funding for this game is still very much in its infancy, its still very much under the average gamers radar.

As the word gets out, the momentum can pick back up very rapidly, and if there is any possibility of this game feeling more like UO, I can see them hitting the 10 million mark if not higher by the time this is all said and done.

Guess the question is, if say by some chance this game gets a serious spotlight, and all the sudden they end up with 20 million, would they change the direction of the game and make it more persistent then they planned for, or add a ton of new content to justify the incoming resources, or would it just mean 30 new Porsche's with SotA plates on em?

Or should we even care, as long as we get a game from the companies we crowdsource?