u/hendricha

Based on this they need additional (this one is also a contractor role) helping hand for making new content, specifically open world content. Which for me, as a hardcore casual, is absolutely good news.

(It would also like be my dream job if I lived over there and ... made some career choices differently in the last decade. Oh well.)

Anyways, added it to the spreadsheet.

Edit: What I'd like to qoute is "Experience playing MMOs and Open World games, with Guild Wars 1 and 2 being especially meaningful" from the last section. Firstly because some people still like to insist that GW3 will be a lobby game, and like the first part of the sentece sort of (but also sort of not really) indicate to me that at least will feel large and open when the devs have to have knowledge on how previous larger scale games worked. But what can we unreasonably take from the second part of the sentence? Is this just "it's nice to have if you have some knowledge of the world/lore already" or do we think it implies familiarity with game mechanics too specific to previous games of the franchise?

Reading today's blog and recent chatter around it... I was thinking, how do we think the "smaller scale" groups but less loading screen laden immersive open world will work together?

The only idea I came up with would be like this: the world while looks seamless, still is separated into "zones" on the backend. (I imagine these zones might be smaller then your avarage GW2 core map, let's say half or third of the zone.)

These are instanced in the backend and work how the megaservers work in GW2, you load in into an instance, you see the people who are in your instance, let's say max 30. You can do evens with them etc. And when you go to a bordering area the game queues you into the instance of the other zone and then you are there. Okay cool.

But this comes with the caveat that if all 30 people would be leaving for the nearby area there is a high chance that some of them would be sent to another instance. Which would mean some people would just disappear from around you. (And you would look like as if you would be disappering for them.)

Some mitigation ideas I have for this would be:

1. "Keep the squad together": the game checks when someone nearing a border is in a party or a squad and the game would assume that they would be leaving together, so the backend would find an appropriate instance that fits all of them, or spins up a new empty one for the squad if no such instance exists. (Negative: But with randos the issue would still happen, just now whole parties/squads would disappear together.)
2. "Network of nearby instances": Whenever anybody tries to leave the area, the game checks if there is a low population instance of that area that does not have a connected instance from this side, if there isn't spins one up. From there on this border always leads to this particular instance, so if randos follow eachother even with small delays between their crossing they still land in the same instance. Thus a network of neighboring instances are formed. But since this network belongs to all the players who had formed it, the whole network of zones will have a player limit. (Otherwise one could not return to another zone in the network if that would be filled in the meantime.) When everyone leaves an instance then said instance is removed, and thus the network can split into smaller separated networks that allows for once again higher player count in the separated networks. So randos can just waypoint in. And the game can use the "low population, voluntier to another instance" message we also have in GW2 to force separation of the network when there are few people in a linking instance. (Here the negative seems to be that if a bunch of players start to run around erratically they may force together a large network of instances limiting the player population all around.)

Is there a better idea on how it could work? How do other games solve this or similiar problems?