Dislike random encounters...

I like tha random encounter idea, but it needs lot of work. First of all they need to lower the rate of appearing, at this time it is highly anyoing.

 

I expect random encounters to have more possibilities than a patrol of enemies waiting for you to load the scene so they can kick your ass. As time goes by, maybe we see random encounters with resource nodes, wandering merchants, monsters protecting a treasure, a big and difficult monster that opens a quest if you defeat him... By including events that could yield a reward they're part of the game, not just a hindrance.

 

The frequency should depend on how you travel.

Stay on the road - not many.
Go close to the bandid camp - more

Do you have a "invisibility spell active"- almost no encounters

 

The new map design reminds me of old school Ultima Online. A game within a game is a cool idea..

 

This is what I would like to see too.

In the old Ultimas it worked that way. I used to have fun trapping and avoiding the creatures on the world map. The later one with the party system even pulled you into the combat scene. This would give the player some chance to avoid/control encounters and would make it much more fun for me.

 

I think ultima 5 was the last to pull you into a separate scene.....

 

Once there's a bigger variety and we stop being pulled into empty scenes it's gonna be great.

 

I'm glad this topic has been started. I am making the assumption that these over world encounters, and the amount of them, is for their testing. I highly doubt this will be the behavior going forward. If people don't like instancing, the over world encounters will completely turn them off to this game as the continuous "Instance In" "Instance Out" can be quite cumbersome. On the instancing topic, I am seeing more and more feedback on these Forums on just how much instancing this "open world" game may have at release and the feedback has not been good. Lets hope the early steam access will not be full of people assuming this is a final release.

Nice job thus far Devs!