An instance is defined as an occurrence of something.
With Age of Conans upcoming release and open beta. A lot of gaming details have come forth. Including the fact that some cities and environments in the game will be instanced or copied to avoid issues with lag.
The topic has stirred up alot of heated debate about how instancing ruins immersion and gameplay.
However, instancing in itself is not the problem. There are many factors that can cause a player to lose immersion.
It is these factors that ruin the moment not the instancing itself.
For example, when entering a new city or area, most instances require you to view a load screen. These load screen's are reminders that you are playing a game, and definately ruin your sense of being in the moment.
Secondly, Groups, Guilds and Friends.
When entering an instanced zone if any of the above are in the same zone as you but not the same instance, you immediately become aware of what instance you are in. This also takes you "out of the game".
While instancing provides a more lag free gaming experience, I believe developers have taken the ez road as far as instancing is concerned. Development needs to take into consideration the social aspects of the game and put in place filters of some sort that better determine what instance to spawn a player or group in.
I would place a priority on a persons Group, then friends, then Guild as far as determine the best instance for each character. While this may not always be possible to have all of your guild or friends in the same instance, it would help to know you would see a friendly face most of the time.
Instancing allows for alot of the design issues with mmo's to be alleviated, spawn camping, overrun dungeons, item collecting, lag issues, can all be avoided with a seemless instancing system.
As technology evolves and become better, the ability to create virtual seemless graphically intense worlds will exist. However, I believe it will not be used as it exists now.
The upgradeability and reusability of instanced areas offers too many advantages over current open world systems to be ignored. The ability to re-use older instances as the game population ages. Controlling alot of the lag issues associated with overpopulating zones as well as easier content upgrades.
I believe the future of mmo's is to have instanced worlds that are seemless and transparent to the user.
Dynamic instance generators that create the next closest instance in flash memory to avoid loading screens.
Instances smart enough to know what friends/guildmates should be prioritized in sharing the instance with you based on level, skills etc.
Hopefully, soon we will have the technology that can make instancing seemless and behind the scenes.
Perception is reality.
If it feels like an open world, it will be an open world, whether its instanced or not.
But thats just my 2 cents. What do you think?
