Zones vs Seamless Zones vs Hybrid?

News & General Discussion
1

So, trying to decide which I’d rather go with for moving through different locations. Technically neither is more difficult than the other, it’s a purely aesthetic thing and I’m curious what people generally prefer.

Zones
Each area is it’s own enclosed space but appears to be part of something larger. Entry and exit is via ‘portals’. Interiors are also separate.
Example: Guild Wars

Seamless Zones
Each Zone is its own scene, but loaded additively when required and unloaded when it isn’t. Player gets the impression it’s a single large area. Interiors done the same way.
Example: World of Warcraft (Not instanced area’s)

Hybrid
Seamless Zones for exteriors, Regular Zones for interiors.
Example: Oblivion / Morrowind

Which do you prefer?

2

Based on potential gameplay experience I would prefer to have seamless zones. However, I have grown to come to appreciating zones exclusively for the intended experience.

Zones I find appealing from both developer/player stand point because the artist/designer is able to actually control the experience visually and dynamically. This allows the player to closely comprehend what the developer is trying to communicate to the player.

What the hack am I talking about? The easiest way I could explain is visually. For example, if a game designer created a scenic view where the lighting comes into place above the canopy at just the right moment as the player approaches a cliff edge over a village (run-on sentence?). Well in a controlled area/zone the game designer would expect the player to approach along the roadside and be able to prepare an “epic” feeling as the player approaches the amazing scenic cliff. However, in a seamless world approach: lets say the player comes in from below the cliff, or even a comes to the cliff far off from the path where the view is less than stellar.

Seamless zones a lot of the art or it’s intentions may go unnoticed because the player may come from any direction. In traditional zones the artist is capable of painting an amazing visual experience and also is able to focus their attention to smaller details. I’m sure in seamless zones there are less attention to details because they usually go unnoticed.

Even in AI scripting is easier to say create an ambush of monsters that jump from below the cliff edge to attack you. In a seamless world this ambush would be ruined / less appreciated if the player saw the ambush well before he/she arrived because it was seen from another direction.

TLDR: I think Zones Rock!

3

It would depend on the game.

Are we talking about an MMO? An RPG? A platform game? An fps? Adventure?

4

Haha, you are so thinking along the same lines I am :wink:

Do you have different preferences in this area, depending on the game?

5

Okay I had typed an answer, then deleted it and am retyping because I realized something.

I disagree with you that it’s an aesthetic thing. It’s a completely technical thing. I don’t think everquest had to have zones because someone thought “you know what would be cool right here? If the player had to stop and wait for a bit while the next zone was loading!”. I also thing Oblivion/Morrowind separated interiors/exteriors as a sort of optimization and not because they thought it would be cool.

It’s an optimization that allows for shorter initial loading times, doesn’t need extra super awesome culling etc. Because otherwise, if your world is supposed to be seamless, I don’t think making the player to wait as the game loads every now and then is adding anything to the experience.

6

I can’t think of any benefit of instances/zones, other than optimisation of poly counts (why they existed to start with) which could be done better with culling and numerous other techniques these days.

Loading times? Windows? Destructible buildings? Discontinuous movement through portals/doors?

The argument of not being able to control what the player experiences is just an excuse for p!ss poor design. It can be done just as well with seamless worlds.

7

I’ve been debating your question for the game I’m busy working on.
It’s my first game with unity, so I’m not sure which approach would work best.

It basically comes down to user experience, as callahan says.
If I can fit my entire world into one zone, without the user waiting too long to get playing, then why would I chose anything else?
Even when moving inside a building, it would be great if you could look out a window and see what was going on outside.
Games are generally only broken into zones because of hardware and/or bandwidth limitations.

In the game I’m building, I’m going to have several towns, and when you are in one town, you can’t see any others, so it’s logical to break it up into zones but how does that affect the user experience?

8

I’d say hybrid. IMO easier to manage than a 100% seamless world. By seamless I guess you mean game where there is no loading screens?
But it largely depends on the game.

9

Well in the case of others yeah it is a technical reason behind it. But for the purpose of this, it really is just an aesthetic thing, as the loading of different scenes doesn’t change (both are additive and done in the background) and Unity doesn’t really care which of these methods are used, it’s just the actual method of switching to the new area from the players point of view, but either would work:

Zones: walk into the teleport/trigger would switch to the new location
Seamless Zones: continue on without any portals
Hybrid: mix of both, depending on exterior/interior.

Zones would allow me to be more ‘creative’ with how locations look, using lots of cheats to improve the quality as I’d not have to worry about the player seeing things from angles they shouldn’t, or getting too close.

An example would be distant mountains. Eventually I might want the player to be able to reach them. With Zones, those mountains could be done differently, from the furthest being just flat images, then as you get closer, each zone (split up with a fade/fake loading screen) the mountains are made differently, and steadily more detailed to the point where the player is then walking on them. Seamless would require a more LOD approach, and consideration as to how things are built from any angle. Cutting unseen polygons and details from sides that wouldn’t be seen wouldn’t be possible anymore as the player could conceivably be in any location. That’s about as technical as it gets, in this case.

What I’m trying to find is what you as a player prefer. Or if it matters to you. Kinda seems like an obvious question and that seamless would be always preferred, and I thought it was until I realized I actually quite like the Zones method, seeing it as something of a finish line, getting through the portal and being all “oh made it!” especially if being chased by some nasty about to kill me horribly bad guys heh. So thought I should make a thread and get some idea what others think. Mostly out of curiosity.

10

I disagree that zones and seamless is technically the same difficulty level. As your examples are all MMOs and zones vs. seamless is a typical MMO-design decision I’ll assume you are referring to multiplayer games.

With zones, it’s very easy to manage scope and load-balancing. Players in the same zone are usually on the same physical server or server “instance”. You may still further optimize scope (e.g. based on distance) but you always only have to deal with the players in the current zone. When a player leaves a zone, there’s a transition in which the player cannot interact with anything or anyone. And that’s what makes things really simple. I don’t know about current games using zones - but in EverQuest one way to escape a monster was by running to the end of the zone. The monster can’t follow you. Problem solved. Immersion broken :wink:

Now try that in WoW :wink:

So, implementing a zone-based world is comparatively easy. AFAIK, usually, a seamless world in reality is just zones the player can’t see. You need the zones for performance / scaling reasons. Of course, there’s all kinds of alternative approaches one could think of, each with advantages and disadvantages. But what you’ll always have to deal with is a much more complex system. For example, when you have actual zones that are just hidden from the players, think of player A starting a trade with player B at the edge of the zones. As the world is seamless, they don’t even know there’s a zone transfer going on while the travel. Now, what has to happen on the servers is that the server serving zone A has to synchronize with zone B, so what you really have is a distributed transaction (which requires complex protocols to be handled safely). It’s much simpler when you can go with the assumption that only players in the same zone can trade items because usually, the server state can be in the same physical memory. That way, you have much less surface for exploits.

If you look at WoW, you’ll see that they do have zones; they are just not obvious to the players because the transition happens seamlessly. What you see is that usually, there’s a small pathway going from one zone into the other. By designing their world that way, they reduce “nasty cases” (it’s simply much less likely that a lot of players suddenly run from one zone to the other, doing trades and fighting monsters all at the same time causing major synchronization overhead for the servers).

So, from a developer perspective, I’d say seamless is much more challenging than zone-based and introduces a lot of complexity and risks.

From a player perspective, I see zero use for zones. It’s just annoying. It’s okay for instances because there, the “stop, wait for loading and connecting to instance server” serves the purpose that I know “ok, from here on, we’re just us, no other players”. It does break immersion but it’s at least useful information.

The examples given (scenic views with special lighting that only plays the full chord when you’re coming from a specific angle) certainly make a lot of sense - but by proper landscape design, you can easily achieve the same result (simply have a small pathway to that spot and prevent the user from coming any other way).

So in the end, IMHO, it comes down to how immersive you want your game to be. Obvious zone transfers do break immersion - but it might save you lots of headaches during implementation.

11

Nope, I hate multiplayer games, but everyone seems to love them, so used examples people would recognize, and Guild Wars and WoW both show well the two types.

Trust me, in THIS case, it is PURELY an aesthetic choice.

12

Well, I’ve put almost 2,000 hours into Guild Wars and I, just like a lot of the player base, didn’t like the zones. It really disconnects people.

13

I think you’re talking about instances here, not zones.

14

No he’s right on the money, instances/zones is how Guild Wars works, each location is split up by a portal (there is a technical reason for it and part of the gameplay but that’s not what this thread is about so I wont go into it). Whereas WoW takes the seamless approach (except for it’s raid instances, which would confuse matters for the purpose of this thread, and so mentioned they weren’t included in the original post).

For what I’m doing, technically neither matters to me, both are the same level of work, just done differently and planned differently. I’m curious what people prefer from a gaming point of view. Discord said something interesting, “it really disconnects people”

Discord, can you go into more detail why you feel it disconnects people by using portals? When you play Guild Wars with heroes/henchmen, do the portals still make you feel disconnected, or does it only feel that way when playing with a team of real people?

15

Well, as I said, if it’s supposed to be a seamless world, there should be no zones.

But if it’s an adventure game, where each area is more or less disconnected from the rest (and also more compact), obviously “zones” are a must.

EDIT: to expand a bit, if the game is supposed to have some sort of linear progression, meaning you can’t backtrack, having each area separate will allow you to change lighting etc to simulate time passing by and convey different mood. That’s why I am asking what type of game we are talking about.

16

It could be either, in this case. Which is my problem, lol. Technically either will work, gameplay wise, either would work. I was going with seamless from early on since Unity and careful planning makes that work really well, but the realization I kinda like zones made me wonder if I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

The results of the poll so far are kinda interesting too, it’s a lot closer than I expected it to be. :open_mouth:

17

Well, I think you have it backwards then, you should think of how your game is going to be, how you want it to feel etc and then solve technical things like zones.

18

If you’re talking strictly about the aesthetic benefit of the player, and your game is intended to truly be a nonlinear, open world game, zones should be completely out of the question.

Zones completely break the suspension of disbelief of the player. “Oh, it makes perfect sense that this jungle forest is located perfectly adjacent to these snowy mountains, because they are clearly separated by illogical, impenetrable mountains and this small canyon accompanied by a loading time”.

Zones might give a designer and developer more freedom do create aesthetically varied locales, but that is ultimately a cop-out on his part. A truly skilled designer would be able to create the same variety in a nonlinear, seamless world without needing artificial restrictions to pull it off (Just Cause 2, Shadow of the Colossus come to mind).

If a player prefers zones because they give definitive finish lines and clear goals, it means either:

a) He doesn’t really like open world, non-linear gameplay.
b) He’s comparing it to an experience he had with an open world game that was poorly designed.

19

I don’t like open world games and have mixed feelings about non linearity. But again it depends on the type of the game…

20

What makes you think I haven’t done all that already? As I said a few times. It’s no different technically or gameplay wise for me or how I do it, it works either way, hence the question. I’m wanting to know which YOU the GAMER prefer. As there’s no technical reason for me to pick one over the other.