please add six million dollar stretch goal to abandon dual scale map

Nope. You misunderstand me deliberately. I'm for more freedom not less. Which means I'm for hybrid systems all the way.

And most of the items you list now have nothing to do with instancing or open world.

Casual or non casual, full/partial/no loot, ganking, PvP vs PvE, etc. none of those has anything to do with the dual map and instancing.

I want the good bits from UO not the bad bits.

I want this world to have ALL of the above and the freedom to chose any of those styles and move in between them whenever I so dmnd please.

I want to be able to be casual one month and hardcore the next.

I want to be able to play solo when questing and multiplayer when raiding.

I want to be able to PvP with max loot one day and then run peaceful events the next.

I want to be able to have my house that I've customized to be available to all my friends, I want the vendor that I placed in that house to be available to all players solo/multi all of them.

I want to be able to see a town grow or burn. I want the world to be ever changing and never static.

I want it all dmmt, and I want that to be available to all.

And so far I will get that, and the key to me, you and everyone to get that is instancing.

What the devs need to do later on when we reach beta is to optimize instancing, LOD all assets, fix load times etc.
Yes it's bulky now and will be a bit frustrating even when finished but if that is the price for freedom then I'm willing to pay.

 

Yeah, besides the quarterlies, which I can get at, I was just curious if that was somehow a public number at this point.

Kind of my not so subtle, thats bunk, statement.

 

With the new overland map direction -- yes, that have said the wilderness areas will be larger. I am pushing to have them be as large as the individual hexes they are now covering. This will not only give us that open exploration in the wilderness, but also reduce the number of scene transitions when exploring. Right now, those wilderness scenes are absolutely tiny. And I'm not referring to the random encounter scenes...those should be small.

 

In theory, anyone can fire up Unity and make a really awesome open scene for varying biomes and submit the finished scene as a Unity asset in the Developer Depot.

If people are really passionate about it, then do something about it.

 

Thing that gets me is if you chase some bandits out of town or set off to hunt them down, the moment you pass the town boundary, -----gone---- There is nothing on the other side! and the chase is over.

Remember the tracking skill from UO?

 

The vision as given by RichardGarriott and DarkStarr in the hangouts is for you to be able to do that.

When you have a fight, and they run to the overland map you can see them on the overland map and chase them, if they try to hide in an instance that hex will have an icon on it, and if you enter that hex you will go to the same instance you are in.
That is the vision - it is not even close to implemented yet. In R12 we see the first random encounters in the form of an auto-ambush on the overland map, that is it. This will be greatly expanded upon in the upcoming releases. Although I don't think that the complete vision is feasable for E1.

 

That would be cool for sure.

 

Despite I agree that the overworld map has some benefit, I'd rather travel to one point to another taking long walks or rides and let be enchanted by the adventure of doing it. I don't know... So far, this dual scale map is the thing that I most dislike about this game. I'm enjoying every feature and every thing scheduled for the future. But this... This is what is making me really sick about SotA
And no matter how smooth, fast loading and beautiful it will be. I simply dislike the idea. That's it. Cheers

 

I know I'm likely horribly wrong and missing an important point, but have the assets been released in the new quality and in enough quantity yet? I'm not going to get into detail, as I don't know how much one is allowed to discuss/reveal outside Dev+, but there's a massive difference in workload for level-design and having to do both level-design ~and~ a complete set of triple A graphical assets.

 

That is a fair point.

Some assets have been released. Not a ton. But the game is accepting crowd sourced submissions.

Perhaps if more people were submitting scenes with what has been released for assets, it would encourage them to release newer assets for other biomes.

 

It would be nice to get rid of the overland map. It is the only thing I don't like about the game, I love the aspect of being able to travel freely like I can/do in UO. I also understand that this is not UO...

As with Ultima and Ultima Online, I am trusting Lord British and Darkstarr...They have yet to disappoint me.

 

That's what happens as soon as you get rid of the dual-scale map.

It happened in UO where everybody had runebooks to go anywhere. When I travelled on my horse I hardly ever met anyone. It was an empty world.
Last time I played LOTRO, there were various "swift-travel" options (some of them you had to pay for, possibly with real money), even if the world was relatively small.

And let's talk single-player. Skyrim: you get to a new location (which is conveniently pre-marked on the map for you together with all points of interest so you don't even need to explore), then you can just teleport there with fast travel later.

I guess people don't like walking, and don't like big maps.

When time comes for optimisation, if they can reduce loading times by a good 50-80% then I don't see a problem with the overworld map.
Sure it's not "realistic", but neither is an open world where you can just ride from one pole of the planet to the other in 10 minutes.

The dual-scale map with Lunar Rifts and whatnot at least is better than stacking runestones.

 

You got it! Congratulations. Open worlds ARE better!

 

How is that clarifying your original statement?

You take his quote, which is your quote, as proof to your own original assumption?

You still haven't told us why or how they are better.

 

Kind of a hen and egg issue there
There's only so much one can do with what has been released. Not to mention that if you really, really want a quality scene submission, you'd have to be capable of OC and profiling the map, which (most unfortunately) ain't cheap with Unity (one of the main things I hate about it).

 

You are basing a bad functioning game feature, as a bad design. Or poor lacking of knowledge on the subject.

In UO... everyone had rune stones, because they were no longer rare to craft. And their durability lasted forever, instead of just a few times. If the cost of using them wasn't so trivial, people would've have used it in that sense. So why wrap a complete rebuttal around a misused game mechanic..? When instant travel in other games worlds work quite well, though there is a price to pay for that speed. I find your argument lacking.




Open World Design:

I bought this game ($550 Citizen) without ever playing it. I have followed the development very closely and watch vidoes, etc.

What i DID NOT KNOW was that this was an instanced based game.

The very moment I walked too far and into the overland map, my heart shrunk. I had realized I had been fooled into thinking this was a modern Open World mmorpg. Not a map based Dungeons & Dragons storyline, with connected instances. More so, the immersion from leaving the starting city and looking at a overland map took me out of character & is pointless, when my box should come with a cloth map..

I have half-heatedly lvld up to 32 and saw Lord Britsh in V pass last night. But I doubt I'll ever place a house in this game. Go play Mortal Online (minus the stupid pvp) and understand what SoTA is giving up by not having a real Open World to adventure in. An actual ongoing, continuously changing gameworld, instead of cheap 1999 instancing. My house has no meaning, when 100 feet away, the actual world ends and I have to artificially funnel thru an archway to zone out of my prison.

I think all the assets can be placed in an open world... not sure why server cluster isn't open world design. Uber fail imo...



Go play ArcheAge for 3h (it's free), before you even begin to ask the differences between instanced & Open World.
Shroud is not a sandbox... I am saddened & can no longer recommend it.

 

I have to say...you spent that much money and had no idea? I mean what what were you reading...we knew about this since the kickstarter.

No one "fooled" you.....the overland map has been here from the start, it wasn't some sneak in.

 

I share the opinion that an open map would be much better than an instanced one, but I'm surprised you put these two statements in the same post, let alone so close together. As Rune stated, they've been very clear on the dual scale instance system.

If you want to talk about things they haven't been clear about, you could mention the limited-time availability of the 2013 holiday items (which resurfaced for this holiday season), or the founder/royal founder fallout from months ago, or the water property mess, or their crowd-sourcing intentions, but the dual scale map? Nah, even casual followers of SotA knew about that.

 

Im struggling. Maybe its too much UO but i hate overland map and i think its going to be too big thing for me. Ive now played 5 days and tried to give overland map a change. I just miss too much the mindless wandering on UO, finding funny houses and meeting funny people on my journeys. I think i leave SotA for a rest and return later to see how it ends up after alpha and beta.

 

The Vale is 1/20th the size of the mainland people are saying. When the game is closer to launch and there is a larger world to explore, I think people might feel a little differently.