That was boundaries between servers, a consequence of their hosting architecture. Not sure it’s particularly relevant.
EQ’s zone boundaries existed more for server reasons than for client. With that design in mind, obviously they’d have no reason to worry about seamless client action, or you’d get oddities even stranger than UO’s. Even staying within the RPG genre, you have to look harder to find subzoning than to not, almost every game’s entire outside world was a single area, from the entire Might & Magic series, to Arena & Daggerfall, to every one of the Ultima games I played. Those game series span a decade by themselves. Going outside RPGs, it’s obviously mandatory for every flight sim there ever was, even the early photorealistic ones like Flight Unlimited.
It’s the first-person games where the console port line is most obvious. The arbitrary chunking of levels for console limits is glaringly obvious going from the first or second Thief games to the third, where not only are the sprawling mansions with outside grounds and decent chunks of a surrounding city gone, but the small buildings that -are- there are segmented into multiple pieces to boot. Same for Deus Ex between 1 and 2. You can’t even walk around your ship in Mass Effect without encountering a loading elevator, and that’s got less geometry in it than most PC tech demos (hell, Unreal & Serious Sam had more than that for the title screen background).
COH has gobs of zones, supposedly for server-split reasons, but given the very low loading of most of the zone servers I’ve always suspected it’s more because their engine is just, from a programming POV, a steaming pile of crap 35+ FPS gain just for disabling sound, to give one example.
in the days of original EQ you had crappy computers on super crappy dial up playing the game.
now you have people playing on computers that could run an old world eq server farm in one single unit. (iirc the original eq was something like 50 networked computers to make up one single server that you played on)
it is a hugely different world of computing at this point in time.
Wow as already pointed out has zones, and they use old eq tricks to control access to them, the difference is that instead of hitting the zone line and then loading the new zone you now start loading before you get to the new zone
Apparently, Stormwind alone is an absolute miracle of forced perspective and free-floating half-towers with their nonexistent bases hidden by ground-level buildings, which is a major reason why the griffon flight point is on the very edge of the city proper and you can’t climb the mountains around it. You can get some interesting views if you’re a hunter and use Eagle Eye on the top of a tower to look down into the city, however.
Yelling out “Train to Zone” in EQ was always fun. You pull the whole orc castle, realize you are screwed, and run like hell to the zone point to break aggro. Once they stop chasing you, they are all turn on everyone else in the immediate area.
Annoying as hell, funny as hell, and part of the joy that was EQ.
35+ FPS gain just for disabling sound, to give one example.