Praetoria "zones": no War Walls means one "zone"?

This is something I've been thinking about. The devs have stated that there will be no War Walls in Praetoria. That means, possibly, that you can travel between the zones without having to go through a "zone gate" like we do in COH, or a ferry like we do in COV (since as far as I'm aware, Praetoria won't be a bunch of islands).

Now, they probably could rig something so you could change zones by touching the "force field" at the frontier of a zone and appearing in another zone (you can do that currently if you swim to the south end of Peregrine Island; the game will dump you in Talos). However, the more I think about it, the more I feel that the devs wouldn't be happy with such clunky zoning, and would rather have a seamless zone transition.

Which would mean, you could start in whatever zone Praetoria starts at, and sprint all the way to the highest level zone without seeing a single loading screen. And how could they do that without messing with the game too much? By cramming all of Praetoria in a single zone.

We have pretty huge zones; the Shadow Shard zones are massive (if quite empty), Nerva could be considered three zones by itself (Actual zone, Agincourt, Primeva/Thorn Tree), Independence Port is quite large as well...

Actually, think about Independence Port for a while. It has a zone "within" the zone, Terra Volta, which is larger inside than outside. The screenshot that was given to us as a teaser showed some caves. Maybe one of the zones will be a system of caves where the Resistance meets, which can easily be "gated" from the rest of Praetoria?

Of course, if this were the case, I expect to see a ton of instances of the zone, as I'm sure a lot more than 200 players would visit it (at least when first released). The zone population cap is the one big issue I see against this implementation.

How would you feel if Praetoria had four or five "zones" worth of content, but all together in one "big zone" so we can seamlessly move between them? Would you think "THE EXPANSION IS JUST ONE ZONE! FAIL! RAGEQUIT!" or welcome the lack of zoning, and adapt to hopping instances a lot?

It sounds just like Champions Online.
In each of their major zones there is like 8 different mini areas, similar to zones.

TBH, I am not really excited about that. I didn't like it much in CO.

I hope it is different here.

it will be interesting to see how this feature is done, but right now we dont exactly have that much information on how it will work or anything

Croatoa has no War Walls, but that does not make it seamless with surrounding terrain.

Far as I'm concerned, making the whole expansion a single zone would be a SERIOUS mistake. Even if it's as big as any one of the Shard zones, that's still far too small for a seamless work. A Shard zone is roughly twice the size of Independence Port, or a little under twice the size of Nerva Archipelago. It's probably not much bigger than the full area of just Grandville. And even CoV, a side which is disturbingly small for what it's supposed to be, has MUCH more land area than just that.

Separate zones with "more city" beyond the borders make the world feel much bigger than it is. You may only ever have about four square miles of land are in each of, say, four zones, but if you see sprawling cityscape in all directions everywhere you look, it can still feel like you're seeing only a small part of, say, a 1000 square mile metropolis. Furthermore, even if you COULD make the whole thing one giant seamless mess, that just means it would KILL to travel in. As a simple example, a person once fell through the floor of his base and landed in a featureless void. Placing a waypoint over his own position and setting himself to autofly away from it, he went to have dinner and watch TV, and an hour and a half later, he was around 80 miles away from his waypoint. Which is realistic, given that Fly is something like 45-50 mph. As Jay Leno's father put it, "a mile a minute." Make the zone ten miles across and you instantly give people a ten minute journey, which would make a WoW bat ride brief by comparison.

As far as we know, Praetoria's zones will be huge, but there's no reason to suspect that there will be only one zone, not unless it really IS just 1-20 content. If it has anything more than that, you'll simply see blue forcefields separating the zones with some kind of mass transit system or specific gated checkpoints to travel between locations. In fact, the same way you can't walk from Port Oaks to Cap Au Diable despite them being part of the same land mass and even linked together by an inexplicably barred-up tunnel.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

From the Devs during HeroCon:

There are separate zones in Praetoria. It will not have war walls. You can visibly see the next zone in Praetoria, but you will still have a loading screen when you pass from one zone to the next.

Whether or not the finished product will still be like this I have no idea, though I do hope it works that way.

OMG FLASHBACK

We were discussing something on the old EU forums to do with Going Rogue before I left. I don't know whether this was actually based on fact, but we were talking about Praetoria, as you say, being a single massive zone, but - and this is the thing that suggests to me that it may be based on something we'd been told - the separation of the zones is not made by walls, the thing that stops you from getting into the next zone is how easily you would get killed if you did so. Again, this is a really long time ago, so I can't be certain, but I at least definitely remember that we were discussion something along those lines.

No war walls could mean anything tbh. It most probably means a huge city zone as it is built in the same place as paragon city, only with more forests and stuff between zones.

I recon it'll be one big zone with an endless ocean at the end maybe, which would be cool for super speeding =D

Also, the "multiple zones" might not all be in the same area anyway - like Shadowhunter probably hangs out in wilder areas, fighting the DE - and the Resistance's main base is probably outside Nova Praetoria too.

From what I remember when chatting with devs at HeroCon, as you approach the edge of a zone in Praetoria, it begins to dynamically load geometry within your draw distance from the adjacent zone, so that you're actually looking into the next zone, as opposed to the relatively-featureless buildings beyond the war walls you see in Paragon, etc. Then once you hit the actual barrier, you get a shortened load screen while it loads the rest of the necessary zone data.

When I first heard the "no war walls" thing I was underwhelmed. I remember when the Rikti invasions started, the devs hyped the fact that the war walls were coming down. All it meant was that they were no longer visible to players, and the Rikti could go through them. The walls were not gone in any meaningful way.

Maybe it means something different this time, but it isn't a big deal to me however they do it.