Is SotA heavily instanced or is it one world per server?

Archaegeo

Trying to decide if I want to jump in, but I cant determine what the game is.  It seems it even has solo play?

Is it a big shared world where you encounter people? Or is it like skyforge where there are hubs you then go off to instances from?

Stone_Fountain

Originally posted by Archaegeo

Trying to decide if I want to jump in, but I cant determine what the game is.  It seems it even has solo play?

Is it a big shared world where you encounter people? Or is it like skyforge where there are hubs you then go off to instances from?

It is all about the Shards. The Single Player game can be entered solo or with friends. Most 'zones' can be entered in solo mode or multiplayer mode. (i think) PVP zones are ofcourse multiplayer. It is level-less and class-less with a planned lootable PVP component in certain zones. It promises to be a very social game with player cities, purchasable homes and a deep crafting system. I've been playing it for a while now it though it's still rough around the edges I can see where it is headed and I'm enthusiastic about this title. 

Archaegeo

But by your description if I am reading it correctly, it is not one big shared server (aka ESO) or even One world per multiple servers (so you can get to know the same people).

 

Sounds a lot like skyforge and the others that have a hub that you then go off to adventure from?

Quicksand

Its not hub based, it is like EQ2 in the since that it is players moving around a large worlds from zone to zone.

 

The shards however are broken into instances (like ESO did at launch, when to many people hit a zone, there was another instance of it created and people were funneled into that, and so on)

 

The amount of players per instances/server I believe is going to be smaller than ESO and other games did, but the players chosen to be grouped into instances will be decided by friends list, guild list and so on.

 

All that comes from a dev video I watched yesterday, but I dont know how old the video was or how much of that has changed. 

Archaegeo

I bought it today and it certainly feels like a bunch of instances so far, esp with world travel being on a big faux map from one instance to the next (like Elite star travel)

Tibernicuspa

Yeah its not a cohesive virtual world, not really a proper MMO.

goboygo

My experience so far is very small zones all instanced, with walls of magically impenetrable forests and circular mountain ranges to keep you boxed in.  Perhaps that will change later, but for example zones in EQ2 though instanced were ENOURMOUS in size compared to SOTA.

Archaegeo

Yeah, these feel more like GW1 size zones, or even smaller, so far.

Ice-Queen

Originally posted by goboygo
My experience so far is very small zones all instanced, with walls of magically impenetrable forests and circular mountain ranges to keep you boxed in.  Perhaps that will change later, but for example zones in EQ2 though instanced were ENOURMOUS in size compared to SOTA.

Aye, it is instanced.

PascalC

Originally posted by Ice-Queen

Originally posted by goboygo
My experience so far is very small zones all instanced, with walls of magically impenetrable forests and circular mountain ranges to keep you boxed in.  Perhaps that will change later, but for example zones in EQ2 though instanced were ENOURMOUS in size compared to SOTA.

Aye, it is instanced.

not only instanced, you can mark goboygo's words, zones are VERY small with walls...

Ice-Queen

Originally posted by PascalC

Originally posted by Ice-Queen

Originally posted by goboygo
My experience so far is very small zones all instanced, with walls of magically impenetrable forests and circular mountain ranges to keep you boxed in.  Perhaps that will change later, but for example zones in EQ2 though instanced were ENOURMOUS in size compared to SOTA.

Aye, it is instanced.

not only instanced, you can mark goboygo's words, zones are VERY small with walls...

Very true, it's zoned to death, and small areas and and they feel lifeless and boring. Practically no exploration like we had in Ultima Online. The world itself is pretty small as well. Even the dungeons are small. The small zoned areas are a big negative for me. For a bit we were slowed down on the overhead map at slooooow walking speed. I'm not sure if it was because we could see how small the world was itself, or something internal, but thankfully they sped us back up so it doesn't feel like we were moving at turtle speed anymore. I still have hopes that the game will be good enough to play for years to come once its released. The team they have, I feel are really working hard to improve the game. It's still pre-alpha, so I don't feel anyone should write the game off based on its current state. Pre-alpha and alphas are usually bare bones anyways, it should take more shape when it's closer to beta.

209vaughn

Tibernicuspa said:

Yeah its not a cohesive virtual world, not really a proper MMO.

It is insistence, but not a proper MMO?  Huh?

To OP, while the world is instanced - the upside is that it is one mega-server, so everybody gets to play together.

I am someone who use to not be able to stand instances, after being spoiled by Oblivion, Skyrim etc.  But frankly It makes little difference, there is still tons of exploring and wandering around to be done.  Just with some loading screens sprinkled through. 

Aragon100

209vaughn said:

Tibernicuspa said:

Yeah its not a cohesive virtual world, not really a proper MMO.

To OP, while the world is instanced - the upside is that it is one mega-server, so everybody gets to play together.

No they wont. You're not aware of the limitations? There are just a limited number allowed in every area.

209vaughn

Aragon100 said:

209vaughn said:

Tibernicuspa said:

Yeah its not a cohesive virtual world, not really a proper MMO.

To OP, while the world is instanced - the upside is that it is one mega-server, so everybody gets to play together.

No they wont. You're not aware of the limitations? There are just a limited number allowed in every area.

There are limitations on every single MMO ever made.  My greater point is though, that everything is hosted in one server, so that all players can still be in the same world.  There will always be instances still, but I cant think of a game where there are none.  ArcheAge maybe?  But even AA has still like 8 different servers.

Aragon100

209vaughn said:

Aragon100 said:

209vaughn said:

Tibernicuspa said:

Yeah its not a cohesive virtual world, not really a proper MMO.

To OP, while the world is instanced - the upside is that it is one mega-server, so everybody gets to play together.

No they wont. You're not aware of the limitations? There are just a limited number allowed in every area.

There are limitations on every single MMO ever made.  My greater point is though, that everything is hosted in one server, so that all players can still be in the same world.  There will always be instances still, but I cant think of a game where there are none.  ArcheAge maybe?  But even AA has still like 8 different servers.

Ultima Online did not have instances, all that played on the Europe server played together, in SotA you wont play with all the other's on the server, 50-60 tops.

That is not a MMO in my eyes, it is a game where you play with very few same time.

209vaughn

Aragon100 said:

209vaughn said:

Aragon100 said:

209vaughn said:

Tibernicuspa said:

Yeah its not a cohesive virtual world, not really a proper MMO.

To OP, while the world is instanced - the upside is that it is one mega-server, so everybody gets to play together.

No they wont. You're not aware of the limitations? There are just a limited number allowed in every area.

There are limitations on every single MMO ever made.  My greater point is though, that everything is hosted in one server, so that all players can still be in the same world.  There will always be instances still, but I cant think of a game where there are none.  ArcheAge maybe?  But even AA has still like 8 different servers.

Ultima Online did not have instances, all that played on the Europe server played together, in SotA you wont play with all the other's on the server, 50-60 tops.

That is not a MMO in my eyes, it is a game where you play with very few same time.

You are pulling these numbers out of thin air.

falgos

It is heavily instanced and it does break immersion. Portalarium blaims it on backers hardware since they cant rebuild the project from scratch. Basicly the game concept is based on the UO nostalgy of veteran mmo  players willing to continue their virtual life on a renewed platform. Niche game for niche age bracket fanbase.

jtripper

SotA is one persistent world cut up into hundreds of scenes.  Every player plays in the same persistent world, and the players you see will be dependent not only on which scene you're in, but which instance of that scene.  If there are multiple instances of that scene, the selective multiplayer logic will determine which scene you will be put into.  The cap varies per scene, and can vary between 8 to 64 to 128.  Some story-based scenes will be a single-player scene.

And yeah, most scenes are small and that is disappointing, especially for the outdoors scenes.  The world being cut up into hundreds of instanced scenes just makes the experience that much worse.  Make bigger scenes already, like 10x bigger.  And fix the load times!

209vaughn

jtripper said:

SotA is one persistent world cut up into hundreds of scenes.  Every player plays in the same persistent world, and the players you see will be dependent not only on which scene you're in, but which instance of that scene.  If there are multiple instances of that scene, the selective multiplayer logic will determine which scene you will be put into.  The cap varies per scene, and can vary between 8 to 64 to 128.  Some story-based scenes will be a single-player scene.

And yeah, most scenes are small and that is disappointing, especially for the outdoors scenes.  The world being cut up into hundreds of instanced scenes just makes the experience that much worse.  Make bigger scenes already, like 10x bigger.  And fix the load times!

There is an upside to this though.  And that is that there will be only one server.  So you dont have to worry about that guild you want to join being on another server.  Or some cool player driven event being on another server etc.

Yes tons and tons of small scenes is not "good".  But there is a small upside in that all of the community can be on one server.

Rawyn

209vaughn said:

jtripper said:

SotA is one persistent world cut up into hundreds of scenes.  Every player plays in the same persistent world, and the players you see will be dependent not only on which scene you're in, but which instance of that scene.  If there are multiple instances of that scene, the selective multiplayer logic will determine which scene you will be put into.  The cap varies per scene, and can vary between 8 to 64 to 128.  Some story-based scenes will be a single-player scene.

And yeah, most scenes are small and that is disappointing, especially for the outdoors scenes.  The world being cut up into hundreds of instanced scenes just makes the experience that much worse.  Make bigger scenes already, like 10x bigger.  And fix the load times!

There is an upside to this though.  And that is that there will be only one server.  So you dont have to worry about that guild you want to join being on another server.  Or some cool player driven event being on another server etc.

Yes tons and tons of small scenes is not "good".  But there is a small upside in that all of the community can be on one server.

Once an instance has filled up with its cap people will be put into another one. 

jtripper

209vaughn said:

There is an upside to this though.  And that is that there will be only one server.  So you dont have to worry about that guild you want to join being on another server.  Or some cool player driven event being on another server etc.

Yes tons and tons of small scenes is not "good".  But there is a small upside in that all of the community can be on one server.

Yes, I think having one persistent world vs. separate worlds is a good thing.  So I can see why they went that route instead of having one giant contiguous world without any separate scenes / loading screens, which would have forced separate servers.  The development cost would be too high and quite frankly Unity is a piece of shit for an open world game like that.

But given that the world is made of separate scenes, that doesn't stop them from making those scenes bigger.  They just need to make the effort to do so.  Unless, again, they've hit some limit with Unity they don't have time (budget) or the know how to solve.

Ice-Queen

jtripper said:

But given that the world is made of separate scenes, that doesn't stop them from making those scenes bigger.  They just need to make the effort to do so.  Unless, again, they've hit some limit with Unity they don't have time (budget) or the know how to solve.

According to the Unity website with Unity 5.3 it's suppose to make it easier to build bigger environments.

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/12/08/unity-5-3-all-new-features-and-more-platforms/

Easier scene management

The editor’s scene-editing capabilities are also getting a significant upgrade with the introduction of multi-scene editing. Unity now allows you to split a level up into smaller scenes, which has some useful applications. For instance, if your game includes a very large level, you may want to split it up to support streaming scenes dynamically and loading/unloading them from memory on the fly. Overall, this should result in performance gains when working with larger levels, giving you more freedom to build bigger in-game environments.

MMOredfalcon

209vaughn said:

 But frankly It makes little difference, there is still tons of exploring and wandering around to be done.  Just with some loading screens sprinkled through. 

SOME loading screens? Run 5 minutes in either direction...loading screen. Run the wrong way, hit a wall. Loading screen...and into the next scene...that pretty much looks the same as the one you just ran threw.  And nothing really different to find from one scene to the next. Or if you want...you can explore the overhead map...ugh. 
As for one server...perhaps...and how many instances? A very limited amount of people on each instance.

As for the whole pre-alpha/alpha defence...this game has been in that stage for well over two years. Highly unlikely much is going to change in the game world size and small zones for beta....if it ever makes it there.

jtripper

Ice-Queen said:

According to the Unity website with Unity 5.3 it's suppose to make it easier to build bigger environments.

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/12/08/unity-5-3-all-new-features-and-more-platforms/

That's great.  I hope they make use of it then and make the scenes bigger.

Axxar

Heavily instanced with small zones and lots of loading screens.

Arglebargle

They are trying to make a modern Ultima styled MMO with a small team and a really small budget.   There are going to be some constraints.