What happened to all the overland hexes?

Its no surprise. Its the same thing since it started: They completely dropped the ball on crowd sourcing material.

They should have been using the local team to edit and review content we provided, like bulk creation of scenes to fill out the hexes.

Completely blown opportunity and the normal "communication" about it in the rears.

 

We have had a few conversations about hex maps over the last few months...this was not something I thought they would resort to. Makes it a lot easier to make 30 or 40 hexes and then add to them I guess....just seems like it cut a huge chunk out of the game to make it easier to develop.

Not many seem to see the implications of this move...

 

Hmm, mixed feelings on this change. I like the art style and application of the map, but the world feels a lot smaller now.

 

Well, let's hear them out and see what the new strategy is in more detail, moving forward. I know I've wondered many times how templated scenes would work across 95% of the world. In some ways the new direction makes sense (and is far more practical), but it also now drastically changes the design of how we travel and explore the world. Does it make sense to even have an overland map that is a full blown interactive 3D experience with a mini-avatar running around? Perhaps, but we need more details on what this new direction means.

 

I have to wonder, if this is the direction they are going why not go the whole way and just do what Dragon age origins did. Map comes up, click where you want to go, party travels there, maybe they get interrupted, maybe they get where they want to go.

 

This ...

 

I wonder if this means there will be a major change to the planned addition of "random encounters"?

 

How so?

 

They could still do random encounters and have previously hidden POIs pop up as you travel through them.

Take a look at Wasteland 2 map travel (skip to 10:40)

 

This just makes the overland map more important in my mind. It has to be even more detailed and interactive to make the world feel alive and bigger. Take that away and I think that would be a big mistake.

 

But the question arises; why spend time and energy on a visual canvas?

To me it would be worse to have a fantastic 3d world with limited scenes, or poorly designed scenes, or generic and uninteresting encounters

The 3d map is not as appealing to me if I can not enter every hex / but I also do not like the "line travel" of Wasteland (which is a fantastic game by the way - with great chance encounters / but not random )

 

It is more like it was with the older Ultimas. In Ultima 4 or 5 you traveled around on the overland map and could enter special areas like cities or dungeons etc. only.

Entering every hex would of course be great but only if every hex would be unique. I mean why would a forest at the south end of Novia look exactly the same as a forest at the north end of the continent?
The world is very large so creating unique scenes for every hex is impossible I guess. Even if they could do it then they could have a done seamless world instead as I don't think this step would have taken that many more ressources.

As for why having an overland map where you can move around on freely: to make exploration more fun, to give the impression and illusion of exploring a world and to make the game similar to Ultima.

And yes, the overland now needs to be even more detailed and interesting.

 

More money, more different hexes, more larger hexes.
I think this new overland map hex move is not money related even if you get the impression.
I prefer a more believable overland map with less hexes then a copy paste hex world.

But we need more money for sure. I think the vision of Richard and his Team is bigger then 1 Million Kickstarter, bigger then 5 Million. I estimated 6.5 Million they will get together till release. That was before they announced Steam participation. Now i have bigger hopes.



The D-Day for me is the Steam Early Access Release November 24.

It is time for a jump on fresh backers. It is overdue in my opinion. I mean a meaningful jump.
If we get them, they can hire more developers, they can deliver more content.


I really hope it will be a 5 digits jump of new backers.

I am careful optimistic as Steam has so many different style of players. Mostly action and pvp and competition players.

Just look at what games are currently played most: http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
or this funny Stats:

Spoiler

 

Before there where 25 hexes that went to the exact same instance. Now the physical size that those took up before go to the same instance. What's the problem

 

Well, I happen to enjoy exploring and the plan was to customize them so the 25 wouldn't go to the exact same instance. Now, that has changed and I have to run to the words on the overland map and click an ugly blue button to enter...I understand the whole "can't find my friends" thing but there are other solutions to "let's just take away most of the content"...

 

I'm imagining that for hidden places they might be able to do what adventure games like Monkey Island did. A spot just wouldn't appear on the map and would be inaccessible until you know about it. The logic behind that is that a forest is so big that it might impossible to discover a location in it just by luck. This could happen either through being given the information or through finding it first after figuring out how to get there.

The cloned scenes seem to me the biggest problem with being able to enter other hexes. If hexes don't look different from each other then its impossible for players to tell if they've entered a different hex, or if its the same hex, etc.

I don't really know that I like the other arguments, personally. For the "area scenes" to make sense, they would have to be larger, first, plus would also need multiple entrances and exits on the overland map. Some of them already have multiple exits, but you'd need to be able to enter from several places depending on where you go in, and then exit in different locations on the overworld map. Plus I think it would work better that within a forest you might have a lot of different locations like I pointed out; clearings, glades, groves, thickets, even spiders dens, each with separate scenes.

Other than that, I would have to wait to see how they populate them come the final game. I don't know that most scenes should have roving skeletons, kobolds, etc., they should just for the most part be scenes and not "combat locations." Quiet woodlands, fields, etc., that people could go to for gathering, hunting, meeting with their party, staging role-playing. There would always of course be spot locations where you have enemy camps, plus you would have random encounters, but I don't even know the logic of a scene full with enemies that you don't always get drawn into from the map for an encounter when going past it. You wouldn't even expect that many wolves and bears to be standing around. The player should be hunting, not mole-whacking. But again I don't know the dev plans on this.

 

You know what would be interesting - a subtle shading difference or visual cue that indicates whether hexes may be entered or not on the World Map.

The idea of an incomplete game launching doesn't appeal to me so I hope a large variety and number of scenes can be entered - but scenes that feel cemented in the world, not generic random scenes that are repeated 50 times.

I also hope that more scenes have something worth finding - whether easter egg or resource or encounter, something interesting. Currently I have been avoiding most wilderness hexes for the most part because they're often a road, a field, a few trees and a bear or dear or something. Going in and finding nothing was one thing - now when going in I expect to find nothing.

 

I'm just worried now that there are far fewer places to gather resources. We'll all be in the same location trying to get the same materials at the same time.

 

Maybe this is a way to better present their content to a wider audience / remember that we all complained about the generic filler hexes

I do hope that they plan to expand and give us generic hexes ... or treat the current system as "inter connected areas" ... with multiple hexes comprising a forest for example as Redfish pointed out above

 

Yes, we did complain about the filler hexes and gave suggestions on how to make them more unique. Non of which included limiting the areas you can explore in order to ease the workload involved. It goes against one of their stretch goals and makes the world much smaller...