The New Overland Map - A Prettier Way to Kill Immersion

With the pop-up map I was mostly dead. The new one is nice. We already knew that the world was going to run in a 2 scales system, but now we are in the correct way with the new overlord. (When the underworld?)

 

Love this new map and where it can go. This, to me, is more what I was expecting from the map. Now, if they give me an animated Avatar and random encounters on the map, I am happy. Right direction for me now. The cloth map look was not my cup of tea. It was well done, but just seemed to not fit right some how. The new map seems to fit right in.

 

SotA is not a MMO. This was stated many times by the developers. And in my opinion it's not out of place at all. I have much bigger problems with most MMOs, where you can't enter houses without entering a new instance. This is exceptionally well done in SotA, where you can enter each house seamlessly, and I believe that the developers deserve some praise for that...

 

I'd sooner have a scene load to go into an house than the thousands needed to explore the overland map.

These are both taken from SotA website IN THE NEWS so the developers like the MMO tag.

From Gaming Trend:

Best MMO:
Warhammer 40k:
Eternal Crusade
Shroud of the Avatar
Black Gold Online

From MMORPG

Best Indie MMO: Shroud of the Avatar
(Portalarium)

 

I love the new map ( when the mac client decided to work., had to resort going up stairs to my PC int he end. ).. its so much better and easy on the eyes. It can also be sued for so many things as stated in this thread ( random encounters etc ). I do hope their will be a Fog of war. i want to explore, not be given a idea where everything is at once.

Now for my bug bears..

1. Loading screen.. OMG the loading screens... its 2014 people.. Neverwinter nights 2 had loading screens.. so much it was horrible, it was like having a conversation and being interrupted all the time. "Hi how are...*loading*.. you? Are you doing *loading*..well?" Please do what you can to remove these, may not be possible but really it's jarring when it happens loading in every scene, every dungeon, every load of the over head map..

2. Why can't we scroll out to the overhead map? Use the mouse scroll wheel to zoom out of the scene to the map? And from anywhere, why do I have to be at the edge of the scene.. makes no sense to me.

3. GUI, I hope that's a placeholder.. because 1995 called and wants their GUI back.. Yellow is horrible to outline things, it's not scalable.. icons look horrible on a 30inch screen. we go from amazing graphical areas, with amazing lighting, then the GUI appears, it looks horrible in screen shots. IMHO.

The Overhead map I think is good move in the right direction, its the little things now that will make or break it as far as being part of the world we want to live in, or a part that just destroys immersion.

Cheers

Ruval

 

I think you're on to something Ruval, While load times in R8 may see some improvements, they can visually improve it by keeping you on the main map at all times, just replacing the loading with a in menu interface loading icon or something like that, something non-modal.

Allow you to move over the map, maybe read history about the land, it would keep people in the game universe while it loads.