The Making of Solace Bridge Outskirts

Some early shots of progress on Solace Bridge Outskirts.

This is a new zone designed to come after the Solace Bridge starting map, to give starting players a better, more cohesive/informative beginning in the game (where previously they'd load straight to Soltown).

Wide shot of the camp area




Road out of the Camp (heading towards bandit country!)




Bandit Swamp Camp


Thanks for following the post!
More to come soon (Farmland, Graveyards, Ruined Town etc.)

 

Lookin good! I think these new starter areas are REALLY going to help new players.

 

Wow, you guys cranked that out fast, looks great!

 

Looks great!

As a note of reference:

Perhaps you can build in some visual queues as bread crumbs to the other surrounding scenes?

The Whiteguard Foothills has an abandoned campsite where skeletal remains are with notes speaking of one of the more famous traveling (old random encounter) merchants.... also, the bandits in Whiteguard Foothills are mostly melee bandits.

Solania Catacombs has the infamous Chaos Demon somewhere in it, perhaps clues on why its there.

I look forward to the bits of flavor to find!

 

Is this going to be a new area right next to Solace Bridge?

 

There's a mountain beside an ocean near solace bridge?

 

Yep

 

That's a hill! .. If you're from Colorado =P

 

Would be maybe useful for starting players to have some NPC character who was a traveler, and who would maybe be able to acquaint players with the larger world outside of the starting scene and what they should expect. Talk about the main roads, dangers like bandits on the roads, traveling at night, control points, talk about towns and the fact that merchants are in the town center (and you have to navigate around player housing), that you can also find bankers and town criers there, and offer some basic maps. Starting out in Solace Bridge, this might include the Soltown or Ardoris map... would include the world map and regional map, if those ever make it in the game. And a map for this starter scene to help them deal with bandits and get them used to the UI. And another NPC is willing to sell basic provisions, like food and torches, acquaint players with these things.

 

Totally a hill in my neck of the woods.

 

I like this idea a lot and have overheard Sannio and Lum discussing something similar. A nice non intrusive mechanic. One thing we do want to do in this map is cover a lot of things in one zone... cover crafting and buying and selling and combat etc. all in one map with tutorials and more transparent quests. Good feedback, thank you!

 

Great post. Aye, the game would benefit from more bread crumbs to create further meaning for landmarks and zones. I'm looking forward to this in NPC conversations, notes, books, items of explanation in quest lines, sign posts, or even foreboding text that pops up as in the new player experience. The world would benefit from this greatly.

 

Also, I'm guessing we're going to see some sort of trainer in the scene?

Earlier, one of my suggestions was that the starting skills could be picked up through a starting trainer, and for instance, the trainer for Solace Bridge Outskirts would be a ranger, as expected for the quest line. He would then tell you that if you want to advance in other skills he can't teach you, to visit the trainers in Ardoris; and also acquaint players with the fact that some trainers are more specialized than others.

If not all the starting skills, maybe a few are given to you from the start, and you're given some extra XP, so the starting trainer can fill in your skill tree a bit to match the class for the quest line. If the player doesn't want to specialize in that class, he can just stick with the smaller subset of those skills that he got at the outset of the game, until he can find a suitable trainer.

 

This would be good, but there really needs to be more feedback (visual and text) about why a given trainer cannot teach you a specific skill. Just dimming the price button blocks the action, but I'd much rather see the button show "Unavailable" and clicking it provoke a response from the NPC about why and who they should look for to learn it. Some mystery in the tiers would not be unwarranted either; like on this novice trainer only show the first tier of skills and then have a the second tier abilities all show "Unknown" which makes them advise you to seek a trainer in Ardoris. Same with standard trainers and the higher tier skills, pointing toward the expert trainers. Otherwise, you only see the skills you know, plus the lowest tier of abilities in each tree, with everything else hidden until you visit a trainer.

Yes, this might make it a little more challenging to plan a build (although, really you should do that at a trainer anyway). However, it provides a sense of growth and discovery that is severely lacking.

 

@Browncoat Jayson,

The whole skill train UI is bad, particularly in how it just reuses the skill window. Skill trees which you can't train are still available, for instance. Its just unnecessarily confusing. The UI needs to be thought about from the ground up. Also, it might make sense for some "training sequence" or "training quest" where you would have to put the skill in use. But that's a whole other thread, so I'm staying off of that for now

 

FYI here's a sneak peak of the preamble to this from today's weekly update:

For several years now our backers have been providing us feedback that the first few hours of our game have several major issues. Those issues include too many loading screens, scenes that are too small, and starting towns that include player housing / vendors. As we shift our focus to improving the New User Experience (NUE) and as we are able to measure new player progress through events like our recent free trial we realize that we must address these issues sooner versus later.

As we announced during the Spring Telethon our solution to this is to add three new maps to the game that we are calling "Outskirts". These scenes will be very close to the three starting scenes and players will go directly there after finishing those starting scenes. Outskirts will be very large scenes, similar in scope to some of our recent big scenes like Blood Bay. This will allow them to be large enough that players can base themselves in a single scene for adventuring and resupply for their first couple of hours without having to go through multiple scene loads or having to use the Overworld. Each scene will have a small outpost that will include some shopkeepers, trainers, crafting stations, and a few quest givers (and no player housing!). The scenes will also include plenty of adventuring areas (forests, ruins, bandit camps, etc.).

Our first Outskirts scene is Solace Bridge Outskirts. It is downriver from Solace Bridge where the Solace River meets the ocean. The small army that was defeated at Solace Bridge has retreated here and sent on the villager refugees to Soltown. They have made camp in a ruined tower overlooking the swampy shoreline. However they are not getting to rest in their retreat for a nearby bandit camp is preying on them, stealing supplies. Plus across the river lie the ruins of an ancient village infested with the very undead they just retreated from!

 

I was sad to see a cpl things I was looking for in r40 bumped but the NUE was terrible and people hate small scences and they for sure make the game feel overly instanced. You had to do this stuff now, most people quit well before they got to see the larger newer stuff and its been a shame.

Nice work I cant wait to see them!

 

This looks really nice. Glad to see areas worked on for new/casual players.

 

i'm curious: when you guys put in the fancy new speedtrees you didn't rebuild a treecurtain to match them. i've been expecting that that was on the 'someday' list but all these new scenes and unclones have no treecurtain at all. is the plan to not have one in game anywhere?

 

Love it! I'd always found the navigation to NPC city centres rather frustrating to wade through a morass of player housing and vendors first. And I'm familiar with the game and kind of know my way around. I think that next step is minimizing the exposure to POTs (to start). They have a lot of potential and a few of them are beautiful and active certainly, but if I knew nothing about the game I'd be incredibly frustrated to keep entering these empty landscapes (or even full ones that have nothing but player content). If the world map really highlights the Story towns and capital-like towns that will help.

I can't wait to start the game fresh through these outskirts areas.