map is divided into a number of small "hubs"

We got enough tech to get rid of invisible walls and some giant retard thought this crap was a great idea

Some games that did this retarded shit:
GTA IV, Sleeping Dogs, Deus Ex Human Red Button, Dead Rising 3

I prefer when there's a "level selection".
Like DeS, for example.

A central hub and then you pick your area, it allows for more focused, more polished level design, each level is it's own entity that exists in it's own little bubble where the developers can carefully balance everything instead of making everything interconnected and sacrificing resources, each map ends up being bland in that scenario.

BB had the best compromise, some maps linked with each other, others instead were their own separate thing.

I'd say this applies to any specific locations you will visit over and over and over and for some dumb reason aren't particularly close to each other.

Like, say it's a vaguely RPG-ish game with crafting, item storage, the need to sleep, etc, and the places to do all those things are spread out around the town. So every freakin time you want to heal, store loot, sell stuff, and craft/fix loot, you gotta walk the exact same paths from the inn/your house, to the shop, to the smith, etc, OVER AND OVER. That walk will absolutely get beyond old way before you're done with the rest of the game.

If there were game design laws, it should be mandatory that stuff you will constantly need to reuse/revisit throughout the game be placed in very close proximity. And even if everything is right next to each other, it had also all better be right next to the entrance to the town or, if there's fast travel, it better be right next to where you magically appear in the town.

Don't get me wrong, exploring virtual environments is tons of fun. Retreading places you've seen ten times before is not in the least and should be minimized.

I dont remotely get these acronyms

inb4 git gud

GTA IV did this?

From a dev perspective, how exactly do you remove loading times and make a game world seem seamless?

by not targeting archaic hardware consoles have.

What are you even asking, loadings havent been a thing on well made sandbox games from almost a decade.
We are talking about retarded map design.

Are you implying detroit should have been right next to hengsha ?

wat?

I don't think the problem is loading times so much as


If there are specific places that it turns out the players will go back and forth across countless times, then perhaps the map design should be tweaked to minimize spreading out these things the player will constantly revisit in the first place. Don't put the inn and the store on opposite sides of the game's main town, that sort of thing. In-game space isn't always there just to pad load times.

Detroit doesn't have a bridge or tunnel to China though.

Exactly. It makes no sense to complain those two places are disconnected.

A good comparison to make would be how the Hitman series devolved. 1 to Blood Money basically through you into a level and you were free to go about your business without any breaks in the level. Absolution decided to add checkpoints in the each level, points of no return which really broke the flow of each level.

I've heard the new Hitman brings back the level design from the older games, but fuck episodic gaming and fuck denuvo.

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The Prime series did this with their doors as well.

Dead Space was a weird one. All items and monsters that were in a room were unloaded once the room shut. That meant if you picked up a random object from one room and brought it to another it would disappear once the door shut, but then reappear once the door opened again. I assume this is also why monsters couldn't leave their room, because they would do the same thing.

DECONTAMINATION IN PROGRESS

To be honest? That's still better than loading screens. I know Holla Forums hates the word 'immersion' because shills use it, but it breaks the immersion and fluidity of a game less if it's a door that doesn't open.

Especially sci-fi doors with flickering lights.

Faster hardware will get rid of those loading screens if the game actually loads the scene before you try the door, which is a reasonable thing to do, or maybe turn the quality down?

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at least dubs user had his elevator muzak

imagine a monster hunter on a system that isn't a starchy vegetable

with a seamless map

What does Dark Souls do to stop loadings, why are souls great? What about the souls like experience makes souls like games not have to have loading unlike those not souls like games?

Like if they made a game souls like then they wouldn't have to worry about non-sould like loading screens.

vs


I prefer Blood Money.

fog gates.

It's good when they call each other, but it's bad when they all know my absolute exact latitude and longitude like it's programmed into their brain.

Yeah well, I guess you'll never experience this souls like experience, on a souls like game with souls like levels. You know, I like fog gates because it makes me feel like in a souls like game and souls like games are cool like that, like souls like that.

In Dead Space it really didn't bother me at all, mainly because they were pretty short

In Lords of Shadow 2 though, it could take up to 30 seconds of waiting for a door to open all the while questioning your existence every 20 minutes

maybe one day….

Monster Hunter Online and Frontier were both pc games. Still same shit.

The arcadey design decisions are intentional
They want to keep fights quick and snappy so faggots online don't get lost or quit games early

Demon Souls and Bloodborne