Say, no load screens between expacs and so on. Maybe even flying between continents?
I don’t think so, if they ever make WoW 2 it would be a good thought.
It would need a complete redevelopment from how zones are loaded into player clients and take too much developer time for no added benefit, as you don’t get real gameplay features added. It would save time yes and also give seamless experience.
Most games with saving/loading mechanics are built up from the start with that.
Edit:
You brought an interesting point, but I addressed the OP’s point of “WoW fully open world” and not partial open world like some MMO’s with nearly no loading bars or none at all.
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Probably technically possible, but not practically. Besides, it wouldn’t really serve any game play purposes except being able to say you can fly from the Easter Kingdoms to Northrend or whatever.
It would be something people do once and then never again because it would take way too long. Especially when they can just use a portal.
3 Likes
Is it POSSIBLE? Yes.
Is it practical? I don’t think so. Having separate instances to spread players and units around, when they can’t form a bottleneck, means they can spread the load across multiple virtual servers.
I was struck, when I tried FFXIV, at how small the world instances are by comparison. I needed two loading screens to get across the first city I came to, and another one just to walk outside its gates. One of the reasons I was immediately turned off FF.
I think WoW does very well in its instancing of the open world.
4 Likes
Probably technically. They have implemented this when traveling from Dragon Isles upper to Zeralek Caverns. You fly to this other zone but no loading screen.
But the problem is that you’d be flying for 20 minutes to go from Stormwind to Northrend, just looking down at water.
Also you couldn’t do it to Outland or Argus or even Shadowlands.
I wanna fly across the whole universe to outlanf pls. Imagine the space!
Why not? Dark irons can dig through time and space.
Via the magic of a loading screen.
I actually do not think it is possible, mainly because of portals/teleportation.
So how the game works as far as I understand (which i might be WAY off), is that it loads content by proximity. That means that it gets the textures, mobs, players, objects and loads them while you approach them.
This part works well in open world, but if you factor in teleports/portals, i think that it does not allow it to work without load/screen delay.
Just imagine that when you take a portal, it loads all the textures/objects in the destination. Without a loadscreen you would need close to infinite internet speed/cpu for them to load in an instant.
pretty sure the game engine would commite seppuku its barely hanging on as it is judging by all the stuff that keeps breaking in the older expansions
Seamless transition between world instances has been in the game since Cataclysm, though it started on a much smaller scale. Basically any change of the world geometry that doesn’t completely override the old one require a new instance. People generally refer to them as phases.
Stuff like Hyjal phases, the destruction in Stonetalon or the sword in Silithus don’t contain an entire copy of Kalimdor in their instances, they just contain the affected areas and are stitched to the continent instance.
They basically do that where it needs to be done, I don’t think a zone below another zone would work in a single instance.
not with the current engine but if they decide to make wow2, then sure.
I’d say that unless you have enough RAM and vRAM to load the entire game then it is largely limited by your storage read speed. Broken Isles Dalaran was super slow to load on an HDD, and even after the loading screen there were 15-30 seconds where NPCs and minimap were still loading.
Having an SSD almost became the official minimum requirement for the game but Blizzard changed it after some backlash from people saying they can’t afford to get one just to play the game. The reality is though that newer continents are really slow to load from an HDD.
Even if they put all Azeroth continents on the same map we’ll need Oribos flight path speed at the minimum to make it work.
Just for reference the taxi speed in the inbetween is roughly 40 times basic running speed (don’t remember exact numbers). That’s about 10x max flying speed and almost 5x max dragonriding speed.
Blizz would need to make an entirely new game for that (The WoW engine is pretty much stretched to its limits already), and what would be the point, anyway? Even with the several continents that have suddenly cropped up between EK and Kalimdor, most of the space would be featureless sea.
So if this was done, people would fly around Azeroth, from continent to continent, once (Or twice if i’m being generous), and that’s pretty much it, because a way bigger problem than “The world isn’t one seamless whole” is “There’s not much relevant content in the world to begin with”
Not to mention that that one instance for all of Azeroth would have to be ridiculously huge, keeping track of all the players and mobs mucking about anywhere on those continents, the amount of data that would be involved in such a thing is immense.
Hehe… well…
In WoD Blizzard added technology to cross from one map to another seamlessly and to view one map from another map. This is how the garrison works - it shows your buildings regardless of the distance to the garrison, and the garrison is in your own instance.
This can also be applied to dungeons, and Blizzard said they would do that one day, but they never did.
World of Warcraft also supports hiding some landscape while viewing other landscape, so that’s not an issue, either.
Regarding portals they could make an animation if the loading screen is short instead of showing a loading screen.
So yeah, they can totally do it.
i don’t think the amount of content would be the issue but it would make it hard to do sharding & would cause lags
This. One key reason many MMORPGs faltered after World of Warcraft’s success is their excessive use of loading screens. “WoW killers” frequently disrupted the player’s experience with constant interruptions. Take SWTOR as an example: not only was the player bombarded with one loading screen after another, but the immersion was further broken by sparse player populations and a glitchy party system plagued by layering issues. Unfortunately, I see this trend of “instancing” everything continue in the modern MMORPGs.
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