Why so few interiors in GW?

I have been asking myself for some time, why in GW there are so few buildings in which chars are able to enter. Why there is no actual shop with a roof, an actual open door, some windows? No inns, houses, libraries, castles, temples not open-air etc.. The only buildings in which we are allowed to go are ruins or something like that. There are some caves and dungeons as well too, but not very much. This way there is no possibility of interior design for graphics, thus cutting away an important way of creating atmospheres. There is always something missing in the life of our chars, who apparently live, meet each other, trade, etc.. always in outdoor locations. How come that? Are there some technical limitations?

the only camera angle that would work indoors is the first person one, and fighting or conversing or about anything indoors is pretty tough in this game when you can't zoom out some

think about how the mouse control of view works......then think of boxing that into a little room

I played L2 and it has similar camera angle than GW, but there are lots of indoor locations, many of them small, but I didn't notice the problems you have mentioned.

i play CoH and we enter small areas in that all the time with funcitoning 3rd person fine, so I doubt that's the reason. Personally I love GW open areas, whats the point of entering a shop, when you can just have the shop keep outside and drop possible loading times etc?

Id much prefer GW to stay the way it is with scenery, I hated the city part of Cantha, which i consider to be indoors it was so enclosed. Not that alot of work didnt go into it, but the FPS lag it caused was terrible and it ruined the gaming experience.

The camera is NOT the issue here...

They just tend not to make close locations cause of...who know, maybe they don´t want to put effort in wall textures / indoor details.

Latter.

To change a bit? all outposts have a similar structure: an outdoor place with merchants, bankers and other npcs standing like idiots (sometimes near small tents or crates).

Yeah, that's one of my complaints about GW as well. Lack of atmosphere due to lack of internal areas.

this should be added to make better rpg

TBH when i played WoW for a while, i liked the interiors as well, Being able to hide in the roof beams and drop down to scare pple is quite fun

But the main reason i suspect that we dont have alot of interior area as much as we think we would like them is purely because most of them look like exterior ones, a good example would be PvE tombs. did it occur to you when you played it that it was infact in an enclosed area?

The mechanics of the game engine with the area design have to keep in mind of the possible maximum number of entities that can exist at any location at any given time meaning to say that techinically every area in the game should be able to handle 8 MMs with their 80 minons and 8 pets and still allow NPCs to be able to follow some sort of path walk script w/o bugging (too much body block, pple are already complainting that their own pets bodyblock them in PvP... )itself. Hence what this translates is that it is less likely to run into gameplay problems if the areas are wider and less enclosed, making even enclosed areas look like open ones.

I think what this thread perhaps means to say is to allow certain buildings to have interiors that can be accessed w/o loading preferably and have more cave like areas where they can body block each other for fun with the dark atmosphere of adventure

The body block is an isse. In the most games othe mentioned there is no such thing. Also the whole gw tactical battle idea needs wide areas (or not so wide, but with different ways arround) Interior battle with narrow coridors might bring the rage quit a lot early :P

I'm not saying buildings should be enterable, but hey, dungoens would be real real nice for a change.

I'd wager it's probably technical issue - the GW terrain engine seems to optimized for rendering large outdoor vistas, which it does very well. If you think about it, every "interior" you see in GW seems to be really an outdoor area that they essentially just put a large roof over, and then obfuscated with placed models.

Honestly, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were working on improving this. Maybe we'll get big dungeon crawls in GW 4...

How, exactly, does it make better RPG?

it could just be that anet didnt want gw to be another generic rpg with all the generic rpg features. i dont know, just a thought

I would guess it's because of several things. Houses require far more detail then exterior to be convincing (more work), they require far more variation then forests (if everyone has the same set of cups, plates and cutlery it'll get boring fast), certain classes would benifit greatly from fighting in tight hallways. Rangers would be mostly useless since they can't shoot around corners (although trapping would be very powerful), elementalists would lose all their projectile spells (how would meteor shower work indoors anyway?), mesmers would have a great advantage since all their spells rely on indirect fire, warriors would simply block off the hallway, leaving the casters completely safe.

I can go on a bit if you wish, but that paragraph is long enough already

That said, I would love to see more indoor areas, the catacombs is one of the best designed areas in the game, and I really think it's a shame we don't see more of it or other areas like it.

Mike O'Brien coded the game engine. He also worked on the WoW engine. I highly doubt that its a technical issue since Body Blocking does not function in towns(which is where indoors places should be).

IT seems to be the fact that the Design Team does not want to focus on interiors unless its a crucial area. Like Arborstone for example.

Maybe just having a few indoor shops would be cool

I like the idea of more interior areas - they'd have to be pretty darn big though, to fit 200+ people.

I think part of it is also creating the graphics for a "roof" of the area, since most of GW's current aerial graphics are cookie cutter from one town to the next (i.e. you really don't need too many variations of clouds, eh?).

DutchGun is correct. The GW engine was never originally designed with extensive interiors in mind. You may notice that in the original revision of the engine, the only major indoor area was the Catacombs in pre-searing. If you look up you may have also noticed that for the most part, the Catacombs didn't have a ceiling - just lots of darkness.

With the release of the Sorrows Furnace expansion, the engine was modified to allow for more robustly modeled interiors, but I don't know exactly what is and isn't possible since the upgrade.

I would guess that the engine still isn't ideal for small, enclosed spaces (like in a building).

For the record, I got this information from a post made in these forums by a dev before the release of Sorrow's Furnace, so I would say it is reasonably reliable.

It wold make it a better Role Playing Game because it would make the game more realistic. Even in a world filled with magic and and fantasy type creatures, the traders and crafters wouldn't be standing around outside. They'd have a nice little shop with an interior atmosphere to match their character. For example, a Dwarven armor crafter would have armor lying around and on the walls. And maybe a few mugs of Dwarven ale on the counter.

Many players play the game from a role playing point of view and I'm sure they want the game to draw them in as much as possible.