The Deserted Coast in Dragon's Stand

I was exploring Dragon's Stand a while ago with my mounts and managed to find a half-finished area in the northwest corner of the map. I think that's the Deserted Coast which was originally intended to be accessible somehow. Back when Heart of Thorns was released, visiting this area was required to complete the Dragon's Stand Explorer achievement, which was impossible to do until it was fixed in a patch later on.

Anyway, I just wanted to share some screenshots from my exploration attempt. :)

This place looks kinda cool, but it's - unsurprisingly - completely deserted... I managed to get there by jumping around in the northwest parts of the map with the Springer. It also is accessible from the endless ocean surrounding Dragon's Stand, so jumping over any of the mountains at the edges of the map and swimming/skimming towards the northwest corner is another option.

Oh, and there seems to be a second "hidden" area which I haven't seen yet: Thorn Hollow.

ANET really needs to finish up these old assets. Make them new areas as part of the next LS, or something for a raid. Just do SOMETHING with them, there's no point in keeping area assets in the game if you aren't going to use them.

@RyuDragnier.9476 said:ANET really needs to finish up these old assets. Make them new areas as part of the next LS, or something for a raid. Just do SOMETHING with them, there's no point in keeping area assets in the game if you aren't going to use them.

It's probably cut content from the map's initial design, which is just fine with me. Sometimes content needs to be cut for the finished product to feel more polished. There's tons of unused assets that would just feel awkward to develop at this point unless the story absolutely demanded it.

@Athrenn.9468 said:

@RyuDragnier.9476 said:ANET really needs to finish up these old assets. Make them new areas as part of the next LS, or something for a raid. Just do SOMETHING with them, there's no point in keeping area assets in the game if you aren't going to use them.

While true, HoT had a LOT of cut content. I wish we'd spent more time on things like Malyck and the Nightmare Court instead of shoehorning the Forgotten into that part of the world and spending so much time on the storyline of the egg/Aurene. For the direction they're going with it, they could have just as easily used Vlast.

@Tamias.7059 said:For the direction they're going with it, they could have just as easily used Vlast.

Ah, but you've forgotten the first rule of gem store merchandising.

Aurene plushies sell better.

@RyuDragnier.9476 said:ANET really needs to finish up these old assets. Make them new areas as part of the next LS, or something for a raid. Just do SOMETHING with them, there's no point in keeping area assets in the game if you aren't going to use them.This isn't how game development works. In fact, its generally considered wrong to remove any content from a game's code unless you absolutely have too, even if it isn't used at all, because while it may not be used, things that are used might reference it in some way, and removing it could break those things, which would break more things, and start a chain reaction.

This is why cut content exists to be found in games in the first place.

@Sajuuk Khar.1509 said:

@RyuDragnier.9476 said:ANET really needs to finish up these old assets. Make them new areas as part of the next LS, or something for a raid. Just do SOMETHING with them, there's no point in keeping area assets in the game if you aren't going to use them.This isn't how game development works. In fact, its generally considered wrong to remove any content from a game's code unless you absolutely have too, even if it isn't used at all, because while it may not be used, things that are used might reference it in some way, and removing it could break those things, which would break more things, and start a chain reaction.

Art assets and code are not the same thing. Code often has dependencies (and if you really manage your project poorly can have a lot of them) but art assets are by design much more like a set of lego bricks. Individual 3d artists build individual packages of models and textures, which are then passed over to level artists to use to decorate levels with. Sometimes the same person does both jobs, sometimes they don't. In most pipelines that dedicated enpoint only level designers, there's a request system in place to request things that don't exist in their asset packages from the existing art team, which is then prioritized by the art lead based on their interpretation of overall project goals and deadlines from the project's director (who is sometimes also the lead designer, and sometimes not, in the case of a big team like GW2, probably not) Code never depends on the existence or placement of an art asset, and environment artists and map designers more often than not never interact with the code base in an authoritative fashion at all. The people writing code are often not even in the same building or office because their job has so little to do with level design past the initial stage of any new tech being implemented for level designers to use. Most codebase testing is done on unfinished levels unless QA finds a problem with the way an event or system is interacting with the environment (for instance, if the level designer added a barrier or door or something that the pathfinding code can't deal with because the person who wrote the pathfinding never tested it against that kind of obstacle and it doesn't perform as expected)

In the case of terrain like GW2, the map itself is generally one specialized object type describing the terrain and water level, and most things placed on the terrain (trees, rocks, mordremoth vines, etc.) share identical code to ensure they know where in the map they are, which model they reference (object instancing techniques make it cheaper on yor video card to reuse the same model and texture than several different ones in memory) and its rotation, scale, materials, collision mesh, textures, and any animation states applied. Usually very few things in the environment have any complex scripting attached to them at all, generally only those things that serve a gameplay function. Removing objects from huge chunks of such a map doesn't really run any risk of breaking any other part of the program because they don't serve any vital function to the rest of the codebase as they're dirt-simple scripts that only tell your client where and what to render and collide with and don't have any complex functions.

Often such areas are left in place even if they're not used by players because their performance impact is negligable, and the production pipeline for something like an MMO requires multiple certification and QA steps for map revisions, pushing out a patch to clients, etc. so to alter a map that's performing fine already just to remove things players probably won't see anyway is often MORE work for the team as a whole. Not because it will break anything, but because it clogs up your certification and versioning pipeline and wastes QAs time for a change that has no benefit for the end user or your team other than potentially creating unintended world holes or map breakouts that you didn't want anyway.

There was enough space to the left of DS for a map and part the terrain already exists! I hope we get the rest of the jungle someday