The World Map - Moving Through the World Final Fantasy 7 Style

Is this feature permanent? Or can we expect an massive open world like Ultima Online when the game is released?

 

Permanent, and I couldn't be happier!

 

Actually warming up to the overland map as well strangely....still could do without the constant being dragged into encounters.

 

Not happy about the permanence of this style mapping. I don't like being able to reach a "wall" of trees, open world all the way.

 

Welcome to the community Grimco!

There are a lot of threads on the subject. While open worlds have various advantages, UO had to be spread across multiple servers which meant you couldn't always play on the same server as your friends. SotA is designed to be a single server for everyone, and they pull that off with instances. Each scene can have multiple instances and as you play, it dynamically populates people into each instances based on a number of factors, such as your friends list.

 

I can go either way so i'll just wait and see how it evolves

 

You mean "Moving Through the World Old Ultima style" right?
In the old Ultima games the world map was like this.

 

Man I was thinking the same thing...I come from a very different age.

 

The dual scale is here to stay, but that doesn't preclude them from making it feel more open world. Technically the overworld is just another scene and it is an instance with a cap of 8 (you and your party members). Who's to say they couldn't make that 64? 512? And if they change the scale from 50:1 to 10:1 would it feel more open world?

 

I specified "Ultima Online" which this is nothing like.

However, thank you everyone for the info. While this feature does break the game for me, I wish the rest of you the best time in SotA!

- Grimco

 

Certainly not.

This team has a mission and is building a game for their community. I would hope they stick with what is working for their players and not change anything to cater to me and other fringe gamers.

 

Yeah, that was just an open question wondering if any scale change would make it feel more "open world". I'd think 1:1 can't be the only answer. I think seeing other players will help.

 

With more details for the overland map, like animals and monsters roaming around, maybe some butterflies and wisps as well as birds flying around, whales in the sea, a bit more detail on plantlife and some low drifting clouds and cloud shadows this could come very close to the feeling of being in an open world.

The load times need to be improved and there needs to be a more natural transition to the scenes (zooming down with fog obscuring the view while loading the scene view) as well as secrets you can discover on the overland map, but I think that the devs are working on this.