Instancing?

Also Novia is just the continent for Episode 1. Each episode is supposed to double the size of the world.
I have to be honest about never getting lost in UO though. I cannot think of a single time I ever got lost. I did go exploring but I didn't make much use of the majority of the map all the time. I walked just about every square inch of the world back in those days. Then again I was already familiar with Britannia from playing the Ultima games so I knew just by looking at the minimap basically where I was. Then there was always a cloth map to refrence in UO and the other Ultimas.

Now that I think of it I never got lost in Ultima. I did enjoy having the cloth maps. Without those I probably would have been lost, but those cloth maps were iconic and it burned the image of that landmass into my long term memory. Even if I lived for 500 years and picked up an Ultima game 100 years from now I would still remember the map.

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Even with the dual scale map there will be plenty of stuff to explore. All of the points of interest have a good deal of detail. It will be far from an empty world. A world that will radically expand with each episode.

 

Plus a sextant?

 

huh huh huh huh hah huh hah huh... you said sextant!

 

You could be a pianist in the game, also.. at least with the harpsichord.

 

Hey he had sextants back when he still used a dual scale map though. There is no doubt that SotA will be bigger than Ultima 5. Ultima 5 felt like a huge game back then, and we still had tools like sextants for exact locations while we were at sea with no discernible landmasses.

 

sounded like this...

actually it was played with our number keys.

 

This is a huge issue for me. Most of the maps are no larger than a Cod map... this is unforgivable in an RPG.

Map size and combat in it's current state. My biggest concerns atm.

 

Take a look at Wynton's Folly. It is a map I would say is not small but also not huge. BUT there is absolutely nothing going on there. It is empty, it is boring, nothing happens there, there is nothing to do. If a scene of this size feels empty what do you think an even larger scene would feel like?
I want to have scenes with content in which things happen in which you have things to do. Quests, NPCs, events, things to discover... I don't need huge scenes that are totally empty and boring.

 

There is one more thing to consider - right now, the Devs are cramming many "scenes" into the Hidden Vale. These scenes are really for the large land mass. (Like Solace Bridge) Once they actually transfer them to the large map, there will be significantly more distance between them than how they are now, close together on the tiny island of Hidden Vale.

Further, this is speculation, but the devs might be able to drop in generic hexes that have resources (like our random encounters right now - except that you could *choose* to enter them). That would give you some interesting options and places to explore while going from Point A to Point B on the large land mass.

Right now they are just pulling together the building blocks of the world. I am excited to be watching that happening and can't wait until it's all been knit together on the main continent of Novia!

 

I'm hoping for more wilderness scenes for resource gathering and random exploration.

The community could help create these scenes if we got updated asset pack releases.

 

Exactly this Darkmoon. Larger scenes would be nice but if they don't add actual interesting content to them what is the point? If it came down to it I would rather have a smaller scene full of fun content then a huge empty scene like the desert one. Of course though large instances full of content would be the ideal. I just hope that in the future they plan to add more to these scenes.

 

Did you play Dragon Age Inqusition? The first real scene in the game, the Hinterlands, is very large. But there is not enough exciting content there to keep me wanting to explore everything. The larger the scene the more content and the more interesting content it needs.

If we get empty scenes then those scenes are just for grinding, gathering resources and PvP. And this is not what I expect from a deep RPG that also wants to tell a story and wants be a spiritual successor to the single player Ultimas, too.

I want to experience something while exploring, discovering things, items, secrets. I want have some events there, where maybe a dragon comes swooping down, burning a farm. Maybe I see some slaves being dragged through the desert by some soldiers and I can try to free them. Maybe I find a destroyed cart and a dead merchant and afterwards I find his wife waiting in another village. Maybe I meet an NPC who has some quest for me or I discover an abandoned hut and have to find out what happened there etc.
This is how I imagine exploring the scenes in SotA. Not just killing monsters, finding resources and doing PvP - this gets boring fast and would not be what RPGs are about.

 

In all fairness, a desert is meant to be empty. I'm not sure that scene is the best example.

I suspect in the future, scenes might have some more NPCs, quest items, etc.

 

Still it is a game and games are meant to be fun. Running around in an empty desert is not fun. So even if deserts in real life might be empty for hundreds of miles, in a game I expect even a desert to offer some interesting stuff.

 

Fair point. I'm a firm believer in the design philosophy that first and foremost design for the game to be fun.

 

just because the desert is empty now doesn't mean it will stay that way.... nothing preventing them from adding a quest (old NPC gives you a map to buried treasure or something) and you have to hunt it down (perhaps unearth a dungeon in the process)

 

Just for the devil's advocate. Deserts are full of plant(weed and cactus) life and little scurrying animals everywhere. Also, a desert does not feel like a desert until you can see the sweat coming off your body. The desert scene landscape reminds of the las vagas area. It is darn hot there. The desert in the game does not feel hot at all.

 

I was just thinking this morning that extra cold or hot scenes should give you a status effect that reduces your focus by 10% as you struggle to deal with the climate.

 

That could extend further: you shouldn't be fine standing six inches away from lava.

 

I agree, I don't mind the instancing, but anywhere I go to fight, it seems cramped and small. Not really a place to get lost in. I know it's only Pre-alpha and we're on a tiny little island right now, so I'm patient and I can wait. I just hope they plan to expand the places we go to fight mobs, because right now, they're all way too paltry.