I don't care for overland travel

I'm honestly confused what is hard about walking from one city to the next? I drop down menu to jump from city to city definitely would take adventure out of the game.

 

Jump to 4:40 and we get to hear what we already suspected. This game will not be easy, at least not intentionally.

 

Just the towns we've already been to...I really think after a while traveling to towns back and forth via the world map will get old. I get frustrated when I travel home and realize I forgot to purchase or sell something in town and have to walk all the way back...ugh. Other than towns, everything else should be accessed via the map. I live in a village that so far as no vendors or shops. I do enjoy adventuring, which to me means actually fighting something, exploring, or gathering something useful. To me, going back and forth to towns to conduct business is not adventuring. I guess it's just a matter of semantics.

 

I agree. I guess I understand why people want this, it just is unrealistic to me. As a Role Player I cannot see people just teleporting around at random. If you look through the lenses of a character in game, you would be bending space and time to do this, which is no ordinary feat. Just think of the magic it would take to accomplish this.

 

I did some roleplaying in my time so I understand your point, Ravicus. Really, anything to do with magic is unrealistic but the point of magic is imagining ourselves to be more than we are, at least for a little while anyway.

Thinking about it your way, my mage on UO is a goddess. She can mark and teleport, and create gates, (portals), to almost every corner of the world, and make runebooks that hold runes for her non-magical characters to use. My 2 fighting characters even have their own magic they use to teleport using the runebooks my mage made them. It is a bit much when you think about it. In UO's defense it is a much bigger world because of the 17+ years it's been around. There is plenty of adventuring to be had in the dungeons and Ishenar, (a land you can't mark , recall or gate to the lands proper). There are some dungeons you can't mark or recall out of, as well.



Broadsword, the people currently running the game, has recently introduced a new Huntmaster system. People pay for a license to hunt a particular animal. The hunter must then go into the world and hunt down the animal in question. Top prizes are taken by the player who brings down the heaviest animal, such as a grizzly bear, or the animal with the longest wingspan, the eagle, or the longest by foot, an alligator. It is not only a great money dump, which a long lasting game like UO needs, it encourages people to travel the whole world hunting and taking down that prize.

 

Sure; if you want it to be explained by magic, magic is fair game, but magic needs to have a cost and not be too easy. Its okay to make a rune IMO if it costs you to make the rune and enchant it. Rune books I always found a little cheaty, personally, and I think they impacted UO in a very negative way.

Preparation is also part of a good adventure game... you get the rations, torches, and other supplies you need to go out on your adventure, and since you have limited carry, you have to make meaningful choices and decide want to bring and what to leave at home. If you leave something at home you should have brought, that should be seen as a bad decision on the part of the player.

If you do that by accident, that does suck, but exceptions can't be made for accidents.

Just travelling from city to city... that sounds innocuous enough... but I'm guessing a lot of the gameplay will be based on travelling from city to city. For example -- carrying a shipment for someone on a road that's populated with bandits. It'll also affect the economy... part of RG's goal is to have it easier to find certain items in certain areas. If people can teleport anywhere with no cost, that'll no longer be the case.

 

Agreed. I gave that example of my mage on UO as an example of what not to do here. I can understand the need for them in that game because the world is built differently. But in this game it would take adventuring away from the map which I see in many posts will someday be populated with interesting encounters.

Pure crafters might appreciate being able to travel from town to town avoiding the map. But, it seems, no town is really safe as there are posts mentioning raids and invasions. We will have to fight to save them. I find this prospect absolutely cool.

When I forget to get something in town, of course its my fault. But I do grumble on the walk all the way back to town to get that forgotten item and lament my absent runebooks.

 

At first I was a little uneasy about the overland map and I'm still a little on the fence. With that being said, as long as it gets implemented to where we can exit out to the overland map from any perimeter line in the zone, I can really really warm up to it. It's still a little too early to bash it too hard to the point of saying it needs to be removed. I like the idea of it but it needs a lot more work (which I'm sure it will get). I would say in its current state I 51% approve of it.

 

You guys have seen this right? I'll repost this latest WIP.

 

*deep breath *

I understand this is most likely the be all end all and there will be no changing the over-world concept, at least within the foreseeable future, if at all. That being said I'd like to address the comments or reasons that I don't think apply about SotA being JUST a spiritual successor to the Ultima Series. This is true, however it is also true that this game is a spiritual successor to UO. To deny this would be an oversight especially given the fact UO is the only other inspired "Ultima" type game that was playable online as well as arguably the best MMO to date in my opinion at least to a certain point in time... I do follow Richard Garriott on Twitter, as I'm sure most of you do as well, and these are his thoughts too.

One thing we all need to remember, if we're going to say this is a spiritual successor to the Ultima Series, the over-world map concept hasn't been around in an Ultima game since 1988 in Ultima V. For 27 years we've went without an over-world map based Ultima game. That tells me that the spiritual successor excuse would also have to acknowledge the Ultima VI - Ultima IX concept of an open world environment much less Ultima Online.

Now that that hot air is out of my system I'd like to move on to my own opinions.

Online as it works right now, to travel from point A to point B, I'd have to tell my friends "Hey let's meet up there". That just seems backwards to me. I should be able to set out and head down a path with my companions and make the literal journey to that location. Even in the old single player games your party was technically with you in the over-world.

With gating, recalling, or fast traveling (whatever term you have for it) it won't matter one way or the other but what the over-world map does is create ALOT of unnecessary load times where in almost every other notable MMO I can think of you'll typically only run into a load time if you are traveling to another island, planet, province, or entering a cut scene. Over world causes those load times to double basically. Now I can't just go from one place to the next. I have to load the over world map, then I have to load any encounters I run into, load out of those encounters, and once I finally reach my location I have to load a fourth time to enter. In the Exodus days I understand you could only fit so much on a 5 1/4 floppy but thats not an issue now which is why anything beyond Ultima VI didn't have really have a need for an over-world view.

In addition to that I see a lot of debate about the PVP system and grieving, especially res killing, and no matter how you cut it there will be always someone who feels like they're getting the short end of the stick. That is something I do realize. I think though a contributing factor to the res killing issue is the fact that each area seems so cramped, as a result of the over-world view. If the MMO section of the game was an open world concept it would be much easier to find an obscure place to resurrect yourself instead of being restricted to a particular area.


That's just some things I wanted to get off my chest. I understand not everything I say is necessarily right but just going based off of what little I've seen to do with R14, or SotA in general these are my first negative impressions. Honestly half the stuff I'm upset with will probably be addressed so I'm not super worried about it either way. I will stick with the game and honestly outside of that and the things that I'm sure they plan on adding or cleaning up I think its absolutely awesome.

*exhale *

 

I'm guessing he used instances because of the free item placement. Being how restricted the overworld is, I think it would be better if it was set up as a map with game pieces. I'm not a fan of it at all though. I would rather have load screens between the zones.

 

Maybe just have something that could take you to your home and/or you could mark it for one spot at a time like a town ect

 

that way you could get to your home faster ect but make it one way once your back home you would have to walk back to where ever you were. or like i said mark it for a town ect that would help out in a jam but again just make it one way trip so you still have to walk back to where you want to go

 

I love overland map. It was a jawdropping moment when I first saw Novian continent.
It's not a 'top-notch' graphic awesomeness, true, but it gives me enough reason to get immersed into the world.

Watching my toons back for couple hours is dull, and very common in other MMOs, and overland map is a new look(for modern players) that might provide some freshness in the industry.

 

/zone brad needs to work on the over world map.

Also view needs to pull back further. It feels like someone has blinders on me.

 

I can see both sides of this argument, but at the end of the day it going to stay so we each need to decide how big an issue this is.

 

I currently enjoy the overland more than the scenes lol

 

Well I was puttering around on the map yesterday and looking for whatever I could climb, walk up, or through. The movement was really so much better. I was not having the horrible slowness except in a few patches of ground. I would prefer to not slow down that much. I want to explore. There were many rocks I could climb and some paths around moutains and I just did a little bit of the map area. If we must have the map at least let us explore and have fun, why make it drudgery to be on it. I want to swim and climb the hills and valleys on the map since we don't have much terrain off map to do that in.

**edited**

 

When the overland map idea first came out, I have to say I was worried. I am a pretty big UO fan and the Ultima classic fan in me wasn't won over by this idea. But over the development we've seen, the overworld map has really come into its own (especially now that we can see other people and talk to them, and that kind of thing is only going to be developed further).

I will miss UO's style of walking from town to town through forests and around mountains and avoiding wildlife and players trying to kill me, but SotA's overworld feels huge and it feels immersive, and it feels like fun. Just enough to make me forget that UO's world isn't the only type of travel that's worth exploring.

 

I would have to say, I don't like the overland map for many reasons.

I have never been a big fan of a lot of single player games, as I enjoy the immersion of interacting with others. I can't really stand playing solo for hours and hours to beat a game. Therefore, I never really got into all the older (or newer) single player games, like the old Ultima, Might and Magic, Warcraft, etc. I also haven't owned a console since N64 (only played them, as I could compete against/play with a couple friends or my brother. I did play UO and enjoyed the seamless map of the game.

When I travel on the overland map, running around and exploring, everything is kind of slow and slow to react. Turns aren't tight, so if you are trying to follow the path, it's a little hard as you either over-turn or under-turn a lot. Also, with the fact you can't go through the water, you are trying to get somewhere, you are blocked off by the water and have to spend 5+ minutes to get to the other side. Or if you are exploring, and find yourself in a dead end sort of place, you have to backtrack, go around the little stream/river and run back, but just on the other side, which again, eats up time. Where if this were a seamless map, you could have other options. Lets use UO as an example, if you were a mage, you could teleport to the other side.

It's too easy to just skip and bypass entire areas as long as you don't get the random encounter pulling you into the zone. In UO, if you ran from Brit to Minoc, you'd have to leave town, travel through monster infested forests, maybe an odd bandit, risk of PvP, travel through a swamp, more monster infested forest .. and you pass really close to Solen Hive and a stone portal (forget the town name it takes you to, it's been a long time). There were also Moongates (yes, I know there is something similar in SotA), which was a largely camped spot by PKers. So again, it added a bit of risk in your travel, but you could actually stand a chance at escaping the PKers. In the overland map, if there was PvP enabled there, the most you could do is pop into some zone and try to run/hide, which is not very easy to do, as they know exactly where you were when you vanish off the overland map, can go there, and enter the same zone as you.

The fun thing for me, is as I travel from Point A to B, is I can smack down a few things on the run, or maybe help out a lower lv player if they are in trouble with what they are fighting. For example, I've noticed that skeletons and spiders like to crowd agro. So if a lower lv player has 3+ on them, I can smack some down so they can actually finish the fight on their own.