Instancing in Warhammer Online

August 27, 2008 – 1:17 pm

I have decided to write this article based on a reader’s recent comment about instancing in WAR. Here’s what he had to say:

WAIT WAIT WAIT.. HOLD THE PHONE

dude i listened to your last podcast. And you were talking about instancing of the world. Thats kinda a deal breaker there. Thats not something you discuss as an after thought. 70 vs 70 limits and zones not connected. WTF??!?!?!?!

Like in WOW if i assault a city i want to be able to get 600-1000 of my friends and bring everyones computer to a crawl if i want. this is what WOW offers and you know what. I love every moment of those large city battles. Now its not like i am looking for quality of play here. What i am looking for is a sense the world is THE WORLD. Computer power will eventually catch up and make that possible. What i want to make sure is the world is designed to be M.M.O. Instanced World design = M. O. not M. M. O., Until a game designer gets it that you can’t skimp on the massive part of MMO I just don’t think anything will come close to where WOW is. I can’t believe this you even deluded yourself. I could tell in the podcast you left it to the end because you were embarrassed to discuss the fact that this is a deal breaker and will turn the game to one big who the hell cares another useless MO. Many of us hated Age of Conan cuz we bought it loaded up the world realized it was instanced and logged out and threw the game in the garbage. ~Jayson Cowan

First let me start of by saying there are only a few occasions where instancing occurs in Warhammer Online:

PvP Scenarios - 12v12, 18v18, 48v48, etc. These scenarios are set up the same way as battlegrounds from World of Warcraft and Dark Age of Camelot. Each scenario has a PvP-oriented objective (flag, bomb, murderball, frag fest, etc.) and you are pitted against an equal number of enemies to ensure a somewhat balanced playing field. These scenarios can be accessed from anywhere in the world with the click of a button. You port in and then port back to your original spot once complete.
Dungeons - Many dungeons are realm-instanced, which means both Order and Destruction can enter them, but they have their own instances and will never meet once inside. This gives each realm unencumbered access to the dungeon content, where enemies can’t harass them. That said, some dungeons are planned to be non-instanced, so Order and Destruction will meet inside and compete over resources and control.
City Siege - Once you have locked down two enemy fortresses, the enemy’s city will enter a contested phase. Once contested, any amount of attackers and defenders can enter, but they will be instanced off into 48v48 pairings. This is mostly for performance issues because the scale of these cities is so large and they’re so detailed that any more than a hundred people fighting inside would make the experience extremely laggy and difficult to enjoy. I believe each phase of city siege will be instanced to 48 people, though I’m not entirely sure.

Here’s a description of city siege from Mark Jacobs himself:

Cities are broken up into instances of 48 on 48, which in the concentrated, urban environment is quite intense. Players must play a tug of war in the city wide public quest to attempt to beat the other side (one side is trying to put out the fires that the other is lighting) in addition to controlling battlefield objectives at key strategic areas. This PQ plus winning scenarios contributes victory points, and much like normal zone capture this is displayed in the victory points bar above the minimap.

At this point the defender will either win and oust the attacker or the attacker will capture the city. No defenders can enter the city at this time and the rest will be booted once they’re dead (but they’re still able to put up a fight!) If the defenders win the campaign resets and control goes back to the neutral tier 4 zones.

Once the city is captured 2 public quests unlock and players are able to explore the PvE dungeons within the city. (expanding the amount of PvE content available to the server.)

Once these two PQ’s are defeated the king encounter unlocks for all city instances and warbands can now assault the palace and challenge the king.

Next I want to talk briefly about interconnected zones. In Warhammer Online, each Tier is made up of four or five Chapters (mini-zones). All of these chapters are connected without a loading screen. Tiers, however, are linked together by loading screens. The reason? Tiers are huge and each of them contains a large RvR zone that increases in size as you progress from Tier 1 through Tier 4. The main reasons I believe each Tier is separated by a zone wall is that it makes them much easier to manage on the back end and it gives a very obvious visual cue for players trying to understand the model. Also, having one seamless world at this scale for each pairing would likely introduce performance issues.

I also want to discuss the city siege concept Jayson explains. It’s been over a year since I played World of Warcraft, but from what I remember, Orgrimmar was never sacked on Shattered Hand (PvP server), nor was it ever really designed to be. I very much doubt anyone’s system could handle 600-1000 attackers and defenders fighting in that city because it barely ran well with 300 allies just sitting around AFK. Are you really willing to sacrifice gameplay for a truly MMO experience? I think the MMO provided in WAR is more than sufficient, especially in the open-world RvR, which will end up being at least 50-75% of the endgame, as it’s a requirement for city siege.

Do you honestly think anyone would enjoy a city fight with THAT many people around in WAR? Not only would their systems screech to a halt (anywhere from locked to 1FPS), but even if their computers could handle it, they would die instantly unless they turtled up with the zerg. I already dislike the 50 vs. 50 keep standoffs… I can’t imagine I’d enjoy a 500 vs. 500 city standoff even at optimal performance.

I also find it hard to understand where all the WoW bias is coming from… If anything, it has as much or more instancing than WAR plans to have. WoW has 5-mans, 10-mans, 25-mans, 40-mans, battlegrounds, etc. You even encounter a loading screen when travelling to different continents (Outland, Kalimdor, Eastern Kingdoms, and soon, Norrath - that’s what it’s called, right?).

Finally, there is really no comparison between the 20-level sandbox and destiny quest line in AoC and WAR/WoW because you won’t find anything remotely like them in either of the latter games.

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Post tags: opinions, Warhammer Online

25 Responses to “Instancing in Warhammer Online”
This is a case of “wishful thinking” versus reality I think. I personally think (wishfully) the more the merrier. However, in reality, your little computer can only handle so many pixels flying around. So they split things up because in reality, Warhammer Online is launching in 2008, not in 2015 or whatever it takes for this to be a possibility. Live with your limitations and enjoy what you can instead of griping is what I say.

By Thallian on Aug 27, 2008
You know, every time somebody tried to do world pvp on a large scale in WoW it always sucked.

The server used to crash when they’d try to attack IF. Any gathering of 100 people brings the zone to a crawl, even before they start fighting.

I admit that it would be very cool to have a real city siege with thousands and thousands of people, but it just isn’t going to happen in a manner enjoyable to anyone but masochists. And I doubt that it will EVER be possible, because this is a graphics v. performance issue, and I doubt anyone will be too interested in a game with graphics so shoddy that you can have a 3000 person battle going full bore on a mid range PC and be ok. The converse of having that is that the graphics in a 1v1 encounter could be 3000 times better! I mean, WAR could have ultima online level graphics and probably have as big a war as you could desire; problem is nobody would show up to fight because they would be repulsed by the graphics.

http://media.arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/gaming-evolution.media/everquest-1999.jpg

http://uo.theabyss.eu/images/uo/start/start_b3.jpg

If WAR had those graphics, it would be a laughing stock, and for good reason. The graphics are a bit dodgy already for gods sake.

By Toxic on Aug 27, 2008
Well also if you look at the world of Warhammer the areas themselves where the fronts are fighting on are spread out from each other. Heck even the High Elf and Dark Elf is on a Island so unless you want to fly over seas for 5 hours to get to land fast transportation/ instancing is the only way.

Also the tiers are zoned so from 1 to 2 you will get slight lag and be on your way. This keeps the server from going ASQ@$DA(G with a ton of people in each tier section.

By Greg on Aug 27, 2008
I like Warhammer, but let’s face it - it is instanced. You can’t fly from town to town, tier to tier. You have to admit those flying cut scenes are so 1990! It definitely made me feel more constrained with less open-ended game play.

By Treb on Aug 27, 2008
500 on 500 battles would not be much fun if everyone ended up in the same place. 500 on 500 battles would add to the game immersion if you could simply see in the distance that the battle stretched a long way off in each direction… but likely it would just clump near an objective or bottleneck and ruin the gameplay. Instanced is fine with me thank you very much.

48 vs 48 is still a big battle (think of Alterac Valley back when it first came out in WoW, with the zerg on zergs before it was altered enough to allow some strategy).

My only question is, with multiple 48 vs 48 battles going on for control of a capital, will you really feel like you are contributing to the overall capture of a city, especially if you continue to win your instances while the overall effort fails?

By Knash on Aug 27, 2008
During my time on WoW, I’ve been to many attacks to the big three horde capitals (as the victim usually, the horde was never big one these attacks), and while there was some fun about seeing that many people coming to get us… it just wasn’t viable.

It was simply not a game. It was a very cute slideshow that would get worse and worse until the entire server crashed and every single player on that particular continent would have to login back to the middle of whatever they were doing. Didn’t matter if the attack was on Orgrimmar and you were questing on Un’Goro, you were gone.

The only reason people actually did that was to crash the server, since they could accomplish nothing else with that (supposedly the kings drop loot, never heard anything concrete about that).

By that, you can also see why Mythic would chose to have the main tiers as separated areas. If some massive attack does occur, it shouldn’t affect other areas than that.

So you can see that, on a game where capital city attacks have an actual purpose other than mess with others, a single, thousand-plus attack would just not work.

By Kemwer on Aug 27, 2008
You know… it’s way too far into the game cycle, but what would be cool to see with siege instances is this:

Take a city/castle/capital siege, and break it down into 5/10/15 or whatever different attackable points, which then become instances everyone is split into from siege and defense. Maybe a progressible set of instances, for example:

10 first attack point instances, if 6/10 or more are won by attacker then it moves on to 5 larger attack point instances inside the first line of defense, where if 3/5 or better of these instances are won the attacking side gains access to a PvE instance that can be attempted by any group over the next 2 days, as many times as they want up to actually making a kill, say a city boss, at which point they’d get the “ultimate loot/rep/bragging rights” whatever and the system resets

It’d make the siege feel more progressive anyway, and divide people up to various objectives more like a real siege.

Anyhow, just a random idea I just had, far too late to implement anything like it.

By Knash on Aug 27, 2008
haha, Norrath, awesome. Not sure if you are serious or that is some sort of rip on WoW but Norrath is the main continent in Everquest The new WoW area is Northrend.

By Serenikill on Aug 27, 2008
@Treb - I actually prefer the cut scenes. Flying from zone to zone in WoW was awesome… the FIRST TIME. Every time after that, I took a bio break…

@Knash (1) - Excellent point. I would likely be annoyed at winning my instance but losing the campaign overall.

@Kemwer - I never experienced a capital city attack in WoW but what you describe is pretty much how I assumed it would go.

@Knash (2) - Interesting concept!

@Serenkill - That was unintentional and definitely a “Doh!” moment… But I’m still leaving it up there because it’s funny!

By Snafzg on Aug 27, 2008
Awesome post! I haven’t learned this much since Cosmo came out with Top Ten Things Not to Do in Bed.
1. Question tho: I am in the Dark Elf starter zone, can I que up for the Greenskin vs. Dwarf senario?

By Scarybooster on Aug 27, 2008
Any gameplay element that involves having a book next to the computer so you have something to do is a bad element. The load screen flights & the fact that you get returned to the exact same spot when you leave a scenario are two small but really cool features to me.

Useless time sink=suck.

You ever fly from Darnassus to Dire Maul? Good god, you could right a novel during that flight.

By Toxic on Aug 27, 2008
@Scarybooster - Nope, you can only queue for the realm-specific scenarios in the early game, but as you level up, you can join each realm’s scenario queues. I’m not sure why this is the case, but it is so from what I have tested.

@Toxic - Exactly! Not to mention you had to get the flight point in the first place… Not so in WAR!

By Snafzg on Aug 27, 2008
@toxic, i used to have to log on about 30min before raid to get from IF to AQ40 on time, it sucked big time,
or from Shatt to MH. that was even longer. till that put the port guy in the inn.

ppl who are QQ about WAR instanced ever had to run to Ony or AQ40 or even MC/BWL and even Nax was not easy to get 2.

i love how they have made it in WAR.

By cheese on Aug 27, 2008
Let me get this right: Mass-Scale PvP (1xx vs 2xx ie) battles can happen in the “normal” Tier1-4 zones, right? Like fighting over a keep? Or are those areas limited to a specific player limit too?

Thanks in advance, Wake

By Wake on Aug 27, 2008
@Wake - There is no limit in open-world RvR. You could theoretically have every player on the server fighting it out over a tier 1 keep or battlefield objective and there would be no instancing.

By Snafzg on Aug 27, 2008
The flight time is awesome crowd remind me of old people complaining over this new fangled intertubes.

I mean, I could see an argument against instancing in Age of Conan, since it really was over-instanced. But this? Please. Is being able to walk from Booty Bay to Zul’Farrak really a big feature to any sane person?

By Toxic on Aug 27, 2008
ok for one the way WAR has it is awsome. i mean i hated just walking around a corner and BAM im in a desert!? have any of u traveled the world? ever seen a desert just pop up in front of u? this way the world is more realistic! i fighting in greenland and want to kill me some pointy ears well i dont want to walk across the street i want to travel to ANOTHER land!! and yes WOW was cool first time every time after u found something else to do lol.

By XBloodBlade on Aug 27, 2008
I understand the hesitancy when dealing with instancing. Too much can truly be cumbersome; however, it sounds like the writer has their priorities in the wrong place. Sure, it would be nice to be able to have massive scale PvP/RvR (600-1000 would be spectacular, IMO) but it’s just not a possibility in any game right now. I’d much rather be able to play on a lower scale than get 1 FPS or crash out on the larger scale. I think Mythic is on the right track for where most PC gamer’s computer hardware is at right now.

I’d also like to remind Jayson that WAR is being designed with a couple things in mind. First, they’re a direct competitor to WoW. Even if they’re not shooting to be a “WoW killer” right out of the gate, they’re assuredly going to avoid doing things that WoW converts will find especially irritating in comparison. They can’t please everyone but they’re aware of the market they’re (re)entering into. Second, WAR is being designed with an outlook towards the future. Josh has said that they’re prepared for the next five years. They’re engine is scalable for advancing technologies. Certainly, in a game centralized around RvR, that could mean larger scale battles in the future. 500v500? I don’t know about that, but as they advance their game you can bet that they also intend to push the envelope in the RvR domain.

Also, the comment about bring “everyones computer to a crawl if i want” strikes me as being distinctly griefer-esque. It’s not about the battle, it’s about giving other people a hard time. Forgive me if I’m being presumptuous, but if griefing is his thing, he probably won’t like WAR anyways.

Sorry for the long post

btw, thanks for adding me to your sidebar Snafzg!

By Raegn on Aug 27, 2008
Aye tbh I’m looking forward to the instant flight loading screen. I’ve just lvl’d my Orc Rogue in WoW, (getting her to 60 before I leave, thought I owed her that much as my first alt.) But aye been doing Ungorro, and the annoying up to Donova in winterspring, back to dwarf in Feralas, back to Gadgatzan. back to winterspring flights, really where starting to make me consider jumping out the window. Even using the H/stone to dodge one of the journeys, I was spending most of the evening flying.

Sorry but its just another time sink mechanic and tbh I’m glad WaR has gotten rid of it.

By Hellebron on Aug 28, 2008
If you are in Chaos T1 and your party is in Dark Elf T1… you can queue party for Nordenwatch and someone over in Dark Elf T1 can queue party for Khaine’s Embrace.

The only wierd thing is… sometimes it’ll say you are entering Nordenwatch but will really end up in Khaine’s Embrace or vice-versa… your entire party WILL be together though.

By Piros on Aug 31, 2008
On Flight Pathss in WoW… once I accidentally flew from Undercity to Booty Bay (misclick)… 17 minutes of my life lost there.

By Piros on Aug 31, 2008
I know i promised only to post in one area but i did want to add this, My biggest concern with instancing over all is that there is no zone instancing and i am happy to find out that they didn’t do that with Warhammer. Instances for dungeons is perfect. We don’t want an FFXI situation. Instancing for small group PVP ie PVP missions. Perfect. City sieges .. well that is one i do not agree with. They could have dealt with it using city gates even. Soon as a specific number of people entered a gate it could be blocked by counter attack forces making it impossible for more people to pass into the section. Who knows there is no many ideas and ways around it. Instances just seems so fake for something that important but i must admit i have to see how it plays out for myself before i am too critical. I just don’t want to see instancing used as a crutch for inability to implement something that feels realistic.

By Jayson on Sep 1, 2008
i havent tested it but i think its supose to be moreless war bands attking the city and the instancing makes it so vs a just mass zerg entering the city kinda like many spec ops teams raiding the enemy each doing something specific! RL - also way more effective

By XBloodBlade on Sep 1, 2008
As long as there is true RvR, I’m on board.

As long as I can choose every member of my group and coordinate multiple groups for assaults and attacks, I’m down.

I could care less about instancing and zone walls. Honestly, the more zone walls, the better. Less lag and more of a potential to make each zone look fantastic w/o lagging too horribly, and the potential for EPIC fights w/o having to worry about crashing things or getting a slide-show version of a fight.

RvR coordination and cooperation was ESSENTIAL for success in WAR’s predecessor, DAoC, and it was the main argument AGAINST WoW’s PvP system. Yes, Arenas could be coord and coop, but there were a max of 5. BG’s could be coord and coop, but that was RARE, and you really had no choice who you entered those BG’s with, let alone who you fought.

In DAoC, we meticulously picked our group arrangements, combat assignments, melee main assist, caster main assist, bodyguard assignments, AND if we knew we couldn’t win a fight, we booked, square and simple. And that was the essence of RvR. It was a cacophony of destruction if the machine was well oiled, and this is what will make WAR a super success if it is. Consequently, these details are lacking in WoW’s PvP and why theirs is still in a constant state of change, regardless of how great their PvE is.

By Larry-Steve on Sep 2, 2008