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90 minutes/level / World Size / World vs World [New York Post Interview]
AmazingAvery
Age of Conan AdvocateMember UncommonPosts: 7,188
http://www.nypost.com/p/blogs/gamereport/guild_wars_VLBHkktdTgcqtpP063qkxO
Saw this posted earlier, interesting read 
just a few Q&A below and not the whole article as linked above.
Post: How big is the Guild Wars 2 world?
Eric Flannum: The world is quite large. Depending on the route taken, to walk from one side of the world to the other could take several hours
Nice!
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Post: Guild Wars 2 has a maximum level cap of 80 -- which is pretty damn high. And with high level caps, there's always a feeling that players need to grind their butts off. Is there anything in place to prevent that urge or need to grind?
Eric Flannum: We regard leveling as a good measure of progress and not as the ultimate goal of the game. There is an amount of time at which a single level becomes useless as a measure of progress because you can’t make significant gains in a single play session. We are continuing to tweak and tune just how long we think that is but we currently put it at around 90 minutes. Since we aren’t interested in leveling as an end goal this allows us to cap our leveling time at around the 90 minute mark. This means that our leveling curve flattens out relatively early in the game. For example it currently takes about the same amount of time to progress from 79 to 80 as it does to go from 49 to 5o. This allows us to avoid the grind often associated with the later levels in an MMO
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Some other new-ish news:
Post: We know that there will be PvP, PvE and Guild v Guild, but can you explain what World v World (The Mists) combat is?
Eric Flannum: The best way to think of WvW (World Vs World) combat is to think of a huge epic strategy game. Forces fight to control resources on the map including towers, fortresses, mines, lumber yards, and supply routes. Each player is one soldier in this massive fight. We do our best to provide a variety of different objectives to keep players involved regardless of whether they prefer going solo or travelling in a group of a hundred.
The three sides consist of three different worlds (what you might call a server in another game) that are matched up at the beginning of the week with one of the worlds emerging victorious
Does this mean 100 people on a PVP battlefield in one group on on side of the fight meaning potentially larger battles in same area? or total in fight maybe?
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Lastly:
Post: Anyone launching a MMORPG now has to compete with World of Warcraft. What about Guild Wars 2 do you think is going to help you pull players from WoW?
Eric Flannum: One of the biggest factors for us is that we don’t feel we have to pull players away from WoW (or any other game for that matter). Since we don’t charge a monthly fee players can go right ahead and play our game alongside any other game (online or offline) that they choose. They can even put our game down for a period of time and pick it back up later, perhaps when we release some expansion content or when we hold one of our holiday events. This is something we’ve seen as pretty common behavior from players of the first game and it suites our business model well.
As far as why a player might play Guild Wars 2 over some other game I could probably go on about specific features but what it’s really about is quality. We want our game to stand out as providing a finely crafted and polished play experience. We want it stand out among not only other MMO’s but among games in general.
Not setting out to compete with WoW more to co-exist
Comments
Good interview, thanks.
Nothing new here but it is always good to forget about all the pointless scaremongering (dungeon DLC) and remind oneself of how awesome this game will be. Like a lot of people, I'm most excited about how the PvP will turn. The World v World one in particular. Could potentially see some Eve Online-esque epic battles & strategic encounters... minus the ridiculous griefing.
Good interview, thanks for sharing. It's good to see their approach to co-existing with WoW as opposed to competing with it, which is exactly as I had assumed and posted as much in the GW vs. WoW thread.
Yea, now it's GW with WoW
Guild Wars 2 Youtube Croatian Maniacs
My Guild Wars titles
I like what he said about the World PVP and I am particularly excited about that possibility, along with just joining in with people randomly. I also like his answer to the WOW comparison and the filler game (or play along side) it may be to those that are addicted to WOW. That is exactly what someone like me wants to hear, especially since I intend to play this game and SWTOR at the same time (let alone possible Rift and who knows what others). I am just worn out with WOW despite preordering Cataclysm and Warhammer only keeps my attention for about 3-4 weeks and then I need a break again. Please someone break into my gamespot account and delete my preorder. I need that extra push lol.
There Is Always Hope!
Wow, good find, Avery.
There were several newsbits in the article, at least to me.
He talked about that walking from one end to the other could take you several hours. This is an interesting remark, I'd calculated the world in GW2 to be as long as Kalimdor or Eastern Kingdoms myself.
The leveling he said was 90 min/level. I suspect that the early levels are faster since people I think leveled within the 45 minutes they got to play. So let's say that from level 20 onwards it's 90 min, and from level 1 to 20 it's 1h average. That makes the time to reach max level 110 hours. The average MMORPG ranges the amount of hours to reach max level - at least at launch - between 150 to 250. It's longer than it took in GW, I like their philosophy how they want to remove the grindy stuff that's just put into MMORPG's to prolong their staying subbed.
The World vs World will be one of their most exciting endgame features, I suspect. Avery, they were talking about one side bringing 500 and another 503, so I'm guessing that having 1500+ players wandering around in the Mists not a strange thing. They've already shown that battles with 60+ players involved is an effortless thing to do, as the fight with the Shatterer showed.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
From what we have seen the engine can't really handle a lot of people in one area using abilities.
Anyone that has played large scale pvp mmos know how pesky lag can be.
The demo itself seemed to struggle when some players gathered together and spammed spells with no pvp involved,
Yep, and the demos also showed 60+ people fighting with a dragon larger-than-in-other-MMO's along with a mass of mobs, with no lag at all.
Pretty good stuff.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Yep but 60 people fighting a stationary mob all spread out is a lot different than large scale pvp fighting.
As we saw in the demo when players were away from mobs and just spamming spells in clumped spots the fps dropped down to 10 or less for good amounts of time.
I mean objectively people have got to consider that like all other mmos before it, gw2 simply may not be able to handle epic battles of hundreds vs hundreds.
I mean that has got to be a very really consideration from an objective point of view. Whereas someone that isn't objective might just say "it's ok anet will take care of it".
I personally would be disappointed if large scale pvp never happened in GW2 just because players wanted to avoid fps lag.
This is indeed a concern or at least marked as something that MUST, MUST WORK.
eg:
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
Yep if the game can't sustain WvWvW in large fights it is going to cripple the image of the game. I would like to hope that it can but from the demo we saw massive fps lag with much fewer players spamming spells and pvp wasn't even enabled for those spells to have pvp related effects on people.
No mmo I have seen to date was capable of such large scale battles without having very archaic graphics and not nearly as much action going.
This is a thing we shall need to wait and see...
As for RobertDinh, I wouldnt really listen to him, hes professional troll that haunts this place for some time so...
"It has potential"
-Second most used phrase on existence
"It sucks"
-Most used phrase on existence
The game ran fine. Even in Alpha stage it runs smootther than huge majority of MMOs i know. Ars Technica praised it for that, and so did Machinima, Rock Paper Shotgun etc... And the game is yet to be optimised.
And Robert Dihn. Did you dedicate you entire existance on this forum just to bash Guild Wars 2 ? I really wonder why mods havent banned you yet because all of your posts are about Guild Wars 2, and most of them are Troll posts. And no, nobody believes that you played GW2 Demo. Your history here destroyed any credibility you had...
From what i've noticed mumbojumbo tries to remain a bit more objective than most of the people here, I think he will have no problem talking with me.
Some of the less objective people tend to be close-minded though and basically disregard any possible shortcomings that gw2 could have.
There was a video not too long ago showing the game suffers massive video lag when players group in an area and use lots of spells.
Some of us more objective people aren't in denial about such things, but others may think that anyone that is not on the hype bandwagon doesn't have any credibility.
Not the best example: there are very, VERY few MMO's that will experience no lag when you have 100-150 players all standing withing 10-20m all spamming spell effects at the same time, which is the demo example you're referring to.
That was the only time any kind of lag could be noticed, even in all the massive dragon fights or behemoth fights no lag could be discerned.
Objectively looking at it, that was a good result already for a demo.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
You've just made my day dude haha
"It has potential"
-Second most used phrase on existence
"It sucks"
-Most used phrase on existence
That's wonderful but let's stay on topic and try to be objective about things.
Actually if you look at it objectively it raises many concerns. There were at most 50 people in that clump, and the game was already suffering from severe video lag.
Now hundreds of people with PVP enabled where spells are harming other players and the server has to account for all of that on top of the typical graphical strains, it is just going to be exponentially worse than players just grouping together without pvp enabled and spamming spells.
Lol, it wasn't massive at all. And it was at least 160 players there, spamming spells in the game in alpha stage, with unoptimized engine. You are just nitpicking cause you wan't to troll. I really hope that you get payed for this, cause if you aren't ,it's really sad.
I suggest you take a look at that demo scene again, saying that it was at most 50 people suggests that you have a serious problem with math. But if you have trouble making quick rough calculations, just freeze the video and do a manual count. You'll find 100+ people in the shot, all standing within 10-20 meters, and lag only happens when all these people spam spells at the same time within the same spot.
As for 50+ people, yes, that was the Shatterer fight several times with something like 60-70, and with all the things happening on the screen there was still no lag.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
@RobertDinh
I was at Gamescome this year and from what i have seen there live they had no severe lag issues except for those at the very end. The lag and framerate drops you have seen in those infamouse videos i have actually seen live and i can tell ya the reason why they where occuring was because they where about to shut down their servers and in the course of that weird framerate drops and glitches were apearing. These lags apeared at the very end of this good bye gathering after they have annouced that they will shut down their servers in a few minutes. So I have seen in this GW2 demo a 100+ people cramped together usind all sorts of skills and spells without any major framerate or lag issues.
What I dont understand about you Robert is that you complain that people dont see GW2 "objective" enough but than again i have seen you only post either on this site in the GW2 forum section or on the gw fansite gwguru. Of course people will be more forgiving and hyped about the game cause these are forums dedicated to this game specificly. So what do you actually expect when you start arguing with these people. For me it looks like you are just here for the sake of the argument and this isnt objective at all. Over 400 posts mostly consisting of arguments that you had with the GW2 community on this site alone makes you more look like a troll than a objective mmo player that is just raising some concerns about the game.
Off topic, hey Rob didn't I see you on the guild wars 2 guru site?
Stop trolling bro
Awaiting GW2
I think no matter if RobertDinh's comments are trolling or not, the point raised: That performance for large numbers of ppl in a small area needs to be very steady/high quality is a MUST for ArenaNet. WAR sold this promise, sorry OVER-SOLD this promise and failed to deliver; even locking down zones once the population cap was reached or the lag became too unplayable, not just jarring.
I've heard ArenaNet say they have the technology to be able to do this right and by god that sounds like a miracle from what I've seen of previous so-called MMOs! So I will on this point keep my skepticals on until I see a comprehensive working example of it. As for Gamescon lag, it sounds promising that it was minimal and the alpha build still has time for optimization. So far so good, but there's not enough confirmation this feature will deliver as yet.
In fact it is a bit like the promise of DE's, they have many innovative features, but the overall end effect, diversity and replayability, will that be substantial enough? PQ's are another horror story sadly from WAR, ghost-towns as far as the eye could scan... . So far GW2 has sailed through with flying colors, but information on some features is far from complete, currently and that is the current situation albeit nothing to be pessimistic about, but also not a done deal either.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
I think GW2 will have a poplation cap for each zone or WvW battlefields. Like in GW1 they will probably divide the persistent areas into districts. The whole distirict system would solve the technical limitations and gives you the freedom to swap between districts at free will.
Sorry fellas dropping down to below 10fps for a long period of time is considered massive video lag.
I suggest people take a very objective approach to the footage. I remember when the video lag was first pointed out by me, people watched the video over and over and were still in denial, while the more objective people saw it clearly.
It's amazing how biases can augment one's perception so drastically.
I see what your saying but don't you think there would be some queue's. Imagine being in one fight say protecting or raiding a lumber yard / supplies and then you think to yourself, 'hey did this bit now, lets switch over', then you change district and start somewhere else. What if there was a queue to get in, if there was a limitation on the area? Like say an alliance battle in the first game where the timer could be going on for ages before joining. I think if it did happen like that it would definately take the fun out of it.
Isn't it shard vs shard vs shard, would they split it up into districts? or could they?