You can't travel where you want to...

I wanted to get to the Iron mines of Maladune..looking at the map, the nearest outpost was the Nolani Academy. So I set out south, but found out that you can not cross boundries..no matter how you try, its a dead end. So I tried again from Sardelak Sanitarium..same problem..you can't travel south very far before you dead end. So how am I supposed to find my way to the Iron mines of Maldune ?
Dr Wu.

Complete the missions, they'll take you there eventually, or if you're impatient (which it sounds like you are) get to beacons and find someone willing to run you south to droknars forge. From there you can get to the mines.

You don't need to get there, even if you did you'd get killed instantly by the monsters. Assuming your standard level for Nolani the mobs would be, oh, twice your level in Moladune.

--Ginko

I too was disapointed with this. you look at the map, and its like WHOA, its huge!

I wanted to head south from ascalon (in my days of ignorance when I didnt know what was down there or how hard an area it would be). and I came to a wall of rock I couldnt cross.

very annoying....

Don't worry, new areas will be added. Two are coming sometime this summer, and then we'll have an expansion with the same amount of content as the original game, sometime in the first half of 2006.

its not the amount of areas (for me) theres heaps, its the fact that the game funnels you along a certain path.

an example.

say I am at Serenity temple, and I want to walk to pikens square

instead of going in an west-north-west direction, through regent valley, into ascalon city, and then through a small portion of old ascalon, and finally The breach, and reaching Piken Square I have to do the following

head south through pokman flats, into regent river basing, head west into old ascalon and then north into The Breach before getting to piken square.

thats like wanting to walk down to the end of my block, but instead walking ALL the way around the block (the long way) to get there.

Old ascalon to The breach is a good example. there is a huge interescting "line" that joins these two areas together, but you can only cross at 2 specific points.

I think this is what the original poster was talking about (and I am)

Morrowind is a great example of what this game doesnt do. its map is similar in size, but it doesnt load the whole thing in one go. it loads it via a grid system

if you think about it, in real life, travelling from one place to another in the wild is not very easy. without established trails, it's near impossible to travel from one place to another. also, crossing mountains is not easy in practice -- you pretty much always need to find a pass thru the mountains.

consider that it took hundreds of years from the discovery of america before people really found their way (via land) from the east coast of north america to the west.

we often forget this as these days, in the city, it's really easy to get from one place to another.

but its not that this is natural, it was deliberately designed this way. its not like they used a random map generator to come up with this stuff. they conciously decided to add giants cliffs or big long broken walls or giant craters etc to stop you going anywhere, and only using the routes they want


sure there are areas that only 1 way through would be possible. but more freedom would have been VERY welcome

Well, for one, the reason you can only cross between Old Ascalon and the Breach at two points is because there's a gigantic wall that pretty runs the length of Ascalon's northern border. (It's the Greater Northern Wall for a reason)

And in the case of Nolani to Moladune, well...those mountains sure as some 10,000 feet above sea level (see: Borliss pass area description) and characters aren't exactly equipped to make that.

Most of the pathing in Guild Wars is pretty realistic (Ie. you can't cross things that wouldn't be feasibly crossable, like huge mountain ranges and large bodies of water and whatnot. It facilitates gameplay too, as people don't end up hopelessly lost in the midst of a mission what not, and it keeps the progression of the storyline intact.

I for one am glad its not like Morrowind, where apparently mountains are only about 40 feet high and you can just walk or levitate over them with ease.

Indeed, and it's this very grid system that results in jittering and frequent loading bars every 60 seconds (at least on a majority of older systems with little RAM).

I don't mind so much that linearity of the missions, but I wish that the extra areas had more going on, more quests, etc.

I wish it was more mixed. After you leave pre-sear, there are very few area's until you reach the desert that give you any freedom. The odd flat plain in the jungle, but most of them are narrow paths. I like how in the mountains you are confined, but at least in the jungle or the coast I'd like to be able to go and get lost

A lot of the fun in exploring is finding ways to get from A to B. If you can just go in a straight line from A to B, then that takes all the fun out of it. Then, I wouldn't need to discover a way from A to B, I could just draw a line on the map and say "that's the way". Don't even need explorers then.

There would have been no Lewis and Clark if we could have just taken a map and said, "Here, let's just draw a straight line across the continent -- that's our way to the Pacific." Bleh. The way it is now is far superior. Don't take the exploration out of explorable areas...

indeed we owe lewis and clark far more than we realize