What happened to all the overland hexes?

Has anyone said if this is the final approach? Don't get me wrong here, I'm with you on this ... I'm just wondering if this is an approach to better presenting content keeping in mind new users and steam ...

I want a large world ... to me spending time on the overland map and limiting scenes is not good ... its like looking at a great painting knowing that you will never be able to explore or interact "with in the world" - it will leave a wanting feeling - and if the scences are not that much better - it will just foment into another complaint

at the end of the day; I'm just looking forward to the best game that they can give us ...

 

I remember playing King's Quest, Space Quest and Monkey Island. I always imagined what would be behind the boundaries of the scene, what you would discover when you went to the places you couldn't go to but saw in the distance. This feeling and use of my imagination made the games stay in my memory and made them something special. The same with the old Ultimas. Wandering through the world I imagined how it would look in detail.
Nowadays with graphics getting better and better you don't have to use your imagination that much anymore as you can see every detail on screen and mostly go everywhere, yet I don't remember much from most of those detailed looking games.
So I am looking forward to using my imagination again while exploring the overland map of SotA.

 

As far as I know, by what they have released this is their way forward. Not sure how it's all going to work together....seems like they are banking on having enough a areas to start and then add as they go...

 

No, they said this was an experiment but after implementing it the game feels a lot better, that they feel this is the right direction to take the game. Personally I feel that, while it makes the world feel a lot smaller right now, it will get better as they add content, and I didn't really like the old system because any time I went into a random hex grid there was nothing there - the only way for that to really work well you'd need each tile to be unique *and* a grid-coordinate system to teach the players so you could have quest clues like "the pumpkin king is hidden in the fields of grid 42,31" rather than "the pumpking king is hidden in the fields of the Lonely Farm of Abagox".

Remember that The Vale is a small island compared to the vast continent, if they were to make unique maps for each tile, they'd probably need like $5 million just for that.

 

Money has always been a concern - but I was hoping that they could "engineer" (in the non-technical sense) ways to have a large world with limited financial resources - I ok - with this approach but prefer the later ... for example - say there is 1 generic scene but their is a 10% chance that a unique flowers blooms in the hex ... or an animal ... or a secret cave (and there are 20 variations on the cave) ...

Me too!

I've not lost my ability to imagine ... I'm coming from the perspective that if this approach is too claustrophobic - it may make the game feel like its on rails after some time

 

I have mixed feelings as well. On the one hand, I understand where the devs are coming from. Darkstarr said something about not having the same forest scene 50 times over in forest hexes. I get that and agree.

However, as I suggested very early on in development: how about a randomized scene in "generic" hexes. Example: If you're not at a "point of interest" hex and you enter a forest scene - it will be a randomally generated forest scene that you've never seen before. Same thing with swamp hexes, mountain hexes, etc. That would keep the world feeling vast and immersive without being repetitive.

 

I think we are seeing the "it's not an MMO" coming into focus.

 

Actually, this "small island" has the same landmass as 1/4th the continent of Novia... just sayin'

 

As we all know, nothing is truly final and things can change. Heck, this overland map has undergone many drastic changes. This is the iterative approach they're taking with development and we're seeing it first hand in all its glory (or not).

I can only guess at some of the underlying reasons why this change was made:

- locating your friends is easier (debatable)
- heavily reduced cost (a few scenes now replace what would have been 100's of templated hexes in a cluster)
- keeping players together -- we already have this problem given current simultaneous players vs. # of areas to explore, which was why they cut out some scenes already
- they can add more scenes over time that are custom, unique, interesting, vs laying out 4000+ duplicated scenes from only a handful of templates

While I agree with the comments that this world now seems smaller, I would wager that the simultaneous playerbase is magnitudes smaller than the playable area it can currently support. Even now, with the new map direction, there are threads asking..."where's everyone at". Sure, the influx of Steam early access players might change that ratio, but I would still argue it is going to be heavily skewed towards a seemingly unpopulated world. We'd need more than 10,000 simultaneous users to make even the 100+ unique POIs this game will ultimately have even feel somewhat alive. That's like 100 players in each scene...and yet we already experience that ghost town feeling even with 64 players in Owl's Head, Kingsport, and let's not even talk about Ardoris, It's likely completely dead given it's the largest scene in the game. I'd also wager the instance caps on towns will now go into the hundreds and not the "many dozens" in the initial vision for instancing.

But questions do remain around resource gathering and how that will be balanced.

 

To be fair, it is 1/6th -- but your point is not lost on me. It is tiny.

Then is that not more a project problem? If there are very few people playing, then....?

I don't think Steam is going to bring in 60k+ new players. Sorry. And you know that very well from just looking at the numbers we have and running some dead simple metrics on them.

Steam will give a jolt, but that is not going to 2x or even .5x (IMO) the sustainable playerbase.

I expect 5k+ new "players" but not some ridiculous swarm, especially given the buy in price of $40+ dollars.

 

@Joviex, you're right it is a larger problem that they need to solve. But my take on this was that it was inevitable given they were going to reveal the overland map for Novia in an upcoming release -- and allow travel on it. With so few simultaneous players relative to an absolutely huge number (4000+) of hexes, they need to solve for the current player base. Essentially with the new direction they can lockdown that much larger playable space (entire continent of Novia) to something more manageable.

I do hope we get a big spike from Steam Early Access, perhaps not immediately but over time.

 

For the wilderness, and even most dungeons and caves, I think it should skew towards an unpopulated world. Like I've said, that's my preference. The world should feel big; when you make it feel so small where everyone bumps into each other in the wild its a kind of dissonance that reminds you its a game and not a real world.

Where they should try to get population density is cities, towns, crossroads, and whatever other meeting places. They meet with their parties and go out for an adventure. Sure that makes it more like friends play online, except at those meeting places, where you can meet new friends. That's how it should be imo. Then there would still be control points where player traffic would be naturally be heavier.

Note, I understand the decision to have consensual PvP with PvP areas, but if they did that, PKing would obviously be less of a worry, too. One problem in UO is you ran across the same nasty guy every time you went somewhere (and often the nasty guy would park his house next to yours).

 

Jov,

Sorry.. meant to compare it to Drachvald, meaning it is almost exactly the same landmass, which does account for something like 1/8th to 1/6th of the landmass of Novia. But that doesn't make it tiny, quite the opposite, I would say.

Edit: Well, when we were talking about individual scenes for individual hexes, no, it felt huge and WOULD have felt that way, if the scenes were all different. Now, not so much...

 

Do we know if self segregation is highlighting this problem - friends online - people playing in dungeons - people decorating etc etc ... is this just a product of people doing what they would be doing in game anyways ..

But in terms of a ghost towns / it will always feel that way unless there are things to do there ... which leads to another topic concerning player own towns

 

Even with randomized scenes there would be a problem: what if I enter a scene twice? Will the scene suddenly be different?

 

Sure - why not, as long as its not a static one why would this matter ... it actually makes gameplay better - I know it sounds weird but its like you are exploring a new region even though you know you've been there ... it actually makes you a little more immersed because you have to re orient yourself ...

chances are they won't do this but its actually not a bad idea

 

Id rather play game with 25 unique places than 100 same forrest scenes and 150 same plain scenes. I think remove hexes is great step forward. I hope they will integrate matching overland icons for every scene (like real icon of hidden vale, obsidian fortress) to make overland map beautiful.

 

The scenes were going to be semi-randomized, by all reports. So in the instance above, if you were the first person to ever enter that scene, it was described that the system would randomly choose a scene from that hex type's pool, and set it. You leave and come back, and that will be the scene you and everyone else see until the end of time.

 

They're not finished yet.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

Yeah exactly that last part. It WAS huge, now, it is going to seem very not much so with a large amount of space between things until they can (hopefully) add more POIs.

And you may continue to say that, great. A lot of resource/crafters wont.

I already have a bad taste in my mouth from the Swamp map. I did it for the hat on Thursday. Not Wednesday mind you, when everyone and their uncle was "omg its open and we can play".

Even on Thursday, that map is so tiny that the 10 ppl I saw running around to get the Tour Guide had literally killed all the creatures.

Now, ok, sure, kill away. But that starts to harp on spawn camping. It also has far and few between actual resource nodes, which, again, were all taken and/or ppl were already running a pattern on them between spawns.

I agree, having 100 of the same scene is ridiculous, which is why many people, including myself, have proposed many ways to get some organic feel in them, from pool selections to straight up procedural spawning of resources, etc...

The short fact is, even with only 10k ppl running around, that map is way too tiny to support resource gathering "nicely".

Obviously the map will get larger when the mainland is sparked, but I also imagine the population will also get larger.

They just need to add some more hexes. They dont need 4k, but they definately need more than 40.