Here Come "Roving Encounters"

Good construct. Much better than random encounters.

One request though: Would be nice if getting pulled into an encounter didn't hurt your experience pool. I'm sort of a mid-level player now. I'd hate to see my XP pool shrink because I have to fight some low-level skeletons or whatever if I can't avoid them on the map.

OK also a second request: Please don't put too many of these on the roads. I understand why some encounters should be on the road (bandits especially), but given the slowdown in travel speed away from the roads, don't want too many road-based encounters.

 

Finally!

 

Love the roving encounters. Can we still have ambushes though?

 

At last! happy dance!


I have one question @Sannio. what's going to happen with the concept of random encounters? are they gone for good and all replaced by roving encounters? Some encounters may not be triggered by enemies but for an interesting location, or element.

 

@Sannio

Will some of the roving/random encounters be quest starters?

 

I'm happy to see this feature finally appear. The random encounters were slightly annoying, especially when you were trying to meet party members somewhere and you got sucked in and delayed.

I am leary about the ability of these encounters chasing you to engage though, and hope there will be ample time to avoid them if we want.

I like that we will have a choice to avoid them, but I hope that doesn't mean we have to take a much longer walk on the overworld map to do so. The reduced travel speeds (unless on roads) is already slowing down my fun as it is.

I love the idea of being able to see them and choose whether to engage... much better than random game stoppage... but I realy hope it's fairly easy to escape if desired too.

Also, it would be cool if the creatures in the scene scaled up to your level to make it worth while. Or, better yet, before loading the scene, give us 4 options for the encounter: Easy (all green and maybe a blue), Medium (all blue and maybe a yellow or two), Hard (all yellow and a red or two), and Elite (all red and on orange or two... maybe a boss mob!)

That would cool because if we can't avoid them, at least it would let us choose how much time we can expect to spend in them. Who knows, maybe the Elite option would make it actually fun to hunt them down instead of avoiding them too.

 

Sounds good, but don't forget the gypsies, merchant wagons, friendly NPCs who give quests and also make it more alive with wildlife (deer running around...) like you had it in an early prototype.

wagon:


wildlife:

 

Corv, no posting on these threads until Ultima IX: Redemption is completed. Back to work with you!

 

haha You will (hopefully) like our huge December update

 

This is awesome!

Will there be rewards for completing the encounter as well? Or perhaps a quest that comes out of getting into an encounter?

 

This is exciting news. Thanks. Hopefully we are not just pulled into creature fights that are randomized. When Richard mentioned being pulled into scenes where you had choices to help or non virtuous choices to kill the NPC's or of course other choices the more the better it sounded great. If we are just pulled into creature fight scenes all the time then it fails imo. I do love that we will see more on our maps and that we are getting a more interactive map. My one concern is for the types of randomized encounters we get coming in, are they all angry or can we interact with them, feed them, help them in some way, have choices besides kill, kill, kill and for what reward? Reward is ultra important. Ahhh but of course we have to start somewhere, but just to articulate this randomness is not random if it is just creature fights, it is just more of the same.