One login for the whole world, and the game opens with its films

A shorter day, spent on the way into the game: how you log in, how long a city takes to appear, and what you see before any of it.

You log in once now. Until today every zone checked your password itself, so every zone line was a whole new login. There is a world server in front of the zones now, the way EverQuest had one: it checks your password once, shows you your characters, and sends you into the world with a one-use ticket. Each zone line hands you a fresh ticket, which the zone reads about eight times faster than a password.

The world will not send you somewhere that is down. It keeps an eye on every zone, so a zone that has crashed turns you away with a reason instead of leaving you staring at a loading screen. A zone that goes quiet is now noticed three times sooner.

Logging in twice does the sensible thing. A second login politely puts the first session out, with a message saying why, once the new one has actually proved who it is. Camping out, or losing a zone, takes you back to the front door with a working character list. The old list used to sit on a dead connection where nothing could be entered or read.

Fairhaven builds in a third of a second, not thirty. Opening the city spent half a minute building its buildings. The shapes were never the problem: every one of its eighteen hundred boxes made its own copy of the same few materials, so the game was handling thirty-six hundred of them where a few dozen would do. They are shared now. For players that means a much shorter wait on the loading screen, and the Studio opens the city in under four seconds instead of thirty-five.

The game opens with two films. First the studio's own, then RetroQuest's. You can't skip either the first time you run the game, because that is what an opening is for. After that, Esc or Space skips whichever is playing. They fill the screen without being squashed or boxed in, the hotbar and chat stay out of the way until they finish, and they now play every time the game starts, not only when it shows the login screen. After Ray watched them in the game, both were re-encoded sharper.