ArenaNet:Guild Wars 2 suggestions/A More Immersive World

A More Immersive World (Discussion)
In the original Guild Wars there was a constant feeling that everything was taken at face value. As mentioned in other suggestions, the world was very flat in its aspect that characters could only run about in the world that they could see on the outside and do little else. Sure, exploring the world was fun and immersive in its own nature, yet it lacked key aspects to make the world feel more on the real side. While it has been suggested that running, jumping, and swimming might be implimented, that merely scratches the surface. The main issue, however, is the interaction between players and buildings. Several players have suggested that the buildings, although designed nicely, seem little more than paper cut outs stuck together and provide only ascetic aspects. An example is the town of Ashford in Ascalon in the original Guild Wars. You had several intersting cottages and huts, all with smoke billowing peacefully from their chimneys, yet they were woefully inactive. I personally would've loved just to bardge on in through the door and see all what was in there. Another example is the major cities of Tyria, like Lion's Arch, Kaineg Center, and Kamadan. While they are labled 'cities', they don't feel like cities at all (save Kaineg I suppose). Instead of buildings that look inhabitable and able to explore, they are little more than walls and stalls, as I would put it. Specifically Lion's Arch seems rather disappointing in this aspect. The entire 'city' itself contains a mere one building that actually has a door on it, and you cannot enter it. There is otherwise a few docks, stalls, wide areas to walk around, and loads of stairs. What is more disappointing is seeing these huge towers all around the city that you can't get close to at all, just to view them longingly at a distance.

It seems that in a world which is much bigger in feeling like Guild Wars 2 is trying to promote with the persistancy aspect that is being pushed, the character should be able to experience the world they explore, instead of the typical waltz through and kill everything tactic of its predicessor. While that makes the play easy to get through, it makes it seem kind of shallow. Why have buildings that you cannot use, therefore? You can get through the game just as easily with removing every building that was visible and it would have no real effect on gameplay. Players will feel more like they are at one with the virtual world if they are allowed to feel like they are touching and moving the things they see, such as opening a door or looking through a window to the outside.


 * Why this is a good idea
 * Players will be much more immersed into the world, making the feeling that they are actually there more apparent. It makes the NPCs seem more realistic as well, having places of buisness or places to live instead of the 'walls and stalls' approach of the original Guild Wars in their approach to cities and outposts. That way when a character enters a city, town, or outpost it feels much more like those than just a fort which people decide to somehow call home.
 * The world would feel bigger, particularly if the buildings are scaled to a size which seems reasonable for characters to walk around in. This would make a castle or city much more sizable and much more useful to players instead of a simple way-station for ditching items and perhaps furthering only a few simple quests. The functionality of buildings can be expanded upon, being places where actual shops (instead of mere stalls or a simple NPC standing by something relavent) are existing.


 * Why it may not work out
 * The scale of the world would have to be enhanced to a more reasonable level, where just visual ques are more than just pixels in the distance. Buildings in the original Guild Wars, if able to be entered, would've been woefully small compared to the size of other objects. On the other hand some buildings were impossibly big, such as the castle at Lion's Arch, which would've had hundreds of floors and many thousands of rooms if taken at actual scale.
 * The open-air effect of the towns, with their large plazas for meeting might be lost to more crammed alleyways. Cities may become overcrowded if their functionality is improved thus causing heavy lagging and unstability in cities, where Guild Wars servers have been proven to be unable to deal with such larger numbers. Based on the system of 'worlds' in Guild Wars 2 this might present a problem of overpopulation of cities that are already bogged down by the larger scale and extra amount of NPCs or other objects.