Loading Screens

Linstead

Something that I've always loved from WoW and hated with many many many many many other MMORPGs was the loading. In WoW you can travel entire continents without loading a single time and you can see zones far off in the distance from the other side of the continent. Is Ashes going to be like this or is it going to be like GW1/2, Tera, FFXIV, etc where there are loading screens in between every zone and invisible walls all over?

That singlehandedly killed those games for me.

Linstead

For example (this is not my image)


You can see the zone Mount Hyjal (that big tree) from that island Teldrassil. You can go to that continent by crossing the water without a single loading screen, you can go from the top of Kalimdor to the bottom, without hitting a single invisible wall, loading screen, or anything in between. GW2 made me absolutely mad with the amount of invisible walls blocking my exploration and how many times I had to load between zones.

Beekeeper

Those invisible walls and endless loading screens are also driving me a bit nuts in FF14 at the moment, but considering the multiple assurances that the game will be mostly not instanced, I don't think this will be much of an issue in Ashes. Usually, you only have a loading screen between individual instances, so you probably have one when you enter your apartment or certain story-related dungeons, but not much more. When you watch the progress stream footage, you can see them flying across the map and across many boundaries between zones.

Vhaeyne

Wow is not a game that should be praised in this area. Unless you are playing at a super slow pace. You are constantly zoning into instances and out. Moving from x-pack to X-pack. Wow also has the most ugly loading screens so they stand out more. Sometimes you will just be flying and get a loading screen.

I will agree that FFXIV is worst with the amount of loading screens. FFXIV does clearly mark the invisible walls and the loading zones. They just have more, because the map is not seamless.

The best example for me, is Darkfall online. I don't even remember what the loading screen looked like. You got in that game and you could just go. One massive world with nothing to stop you anywhere.

One thing I can recommend is having a NVME for your games. Or something faster if you can. Having the fastest possible storage device for your games install can make a huge difference. I think my loading screens in FFXIV are like 5-10 secs right now. By the time I go to my other monitor to look at something. The game is loaded.

Dreoh

Vhaeyne wrote: »

Wow is not a game that should be praised in this area. Unless you are playing at a super slow pace. You are constantly zoning into instances and out. Moving from x-pack to X-pack. Wow also has the most ugly loading screens so they stand out more. Sometimes you will just be flying and get a loading screen.

I mean, I get your point, but the fact that each CONTINENT is instanced doesn't mitigate the fact that the zones within those CONTINENTS aren't instanced.

One WoW continent is pretty much the entire size of Wildstar's (RIP) playable open world to give perspective.

Maybe they could have kept all of Azeroth in the same instance, but would you really want to sit on the boat or zeppelin for like 30 minutes as it travels the ocean in-between the two continents? I do agree that would add a nice level of immersion, but nobody has time for that.

Making the distance between the two continents isn't a good alternative either because that just makes the world seem smaller.

Edit: Not to mention that zoning in and out is only really done at high level when you have no reason to wander the zones and you're just running errands and stuff. Classic/Vanilla WoW levelling you could spend an entire day not changing instances.

Linstead

Vhaeyne wrote: »

Wow is not a game that should be praised in this area. Unless you are playing at a super slow pace. You are constantly zoning into instances and out. Moving from x-pack to X-pack. Wow also has the most ugly loading screens so they stand out more. Sometimes you will just be flying and get a loading screen.

I will agree that FFXIV is worst with the amount of loading screens. FFXIV does clearly mark the invisible walls and the loading zones. They just have more, because the map is not seamless.

The best example for me, is Darkfall online. I don't even remember what the loading screen looked like. You got in that game and you could just go. One massive world with nothing to stop you anywhere.

One thing I can recommend is having a NVME for your games. Or something faster if you can. Having the fastest possible storage device for your games install can make a huge difference. I think my loading screens in FFXIV are like 5-10 secs right now. By the time I go to my other monitor to look at something. The game is loaded.

See the post below yours. You are being pretty disingenuous to say that WoW is all loading screens unless you are specifically leveling through nothing other than dungeon finder and sitting in a main city using portals.

Also it's not about loading times, I have an NVME, it's about immersion breaking. There is something absolutely abhorrent about games that have loading between each individual zone. It feels like the world is just a bunch of domed "areas" instead of an actual world. You can't go past the invisible wall, you have to teleport in a specific spot, etc. It feels so "gamey" and not like you're actually in a fantasy world. Yeah, WoW has loading screens between entire continents, but that's because it's an old ass game from 2004 and it does save time. If the WoW world were actually as big as the map and had no loading, it would take hours to fly across the ocean to get to the other continent.

Samson

I can't get into GW2 for more than a couple hours because of the constant zoning.