What happened to all the overland hexes?

They could make prospector abilities/skills that would allow you to find hexes that look worthwhile for the resources you invested skill points in. An activity on the overland map.

*note: The edit happened while I was replying.

 

Is it just me or is the Marsh scene only available at a certain time of day? If it is then brilliant! That would be a excellent option to make some scenes dependent on variables such as time or lunar cycles.

 

Its just you.

The only thing with "lunar" dependencies (time) is the moongate/stonehenge in Owl's Head. Which is on a super fast cycle now.

 

Territory controls? Other then that just travel? Sounds pretty drab.

 

They had to make them faster because people don't like to be inconvenienced. I doubt we will see many areas set to times of day even though that is cool...people will be upset at having to wait....

 

People put a lot of stock in "this is what we were promised" - but to be honest if the game is fun and amazing then that is what I want more than everything that was "promised."

Developers should listen to their fans, but cannot be shackled by their fans. Their change to scenes, in my opinion, was a good one - and one that can be reversed or changed later. The short-term solution is a good one - I very much disliked the random scenes tied to random hexes. I see no difference to 10 scenes with 100 access points to 10 scenes with 10 access points. All they did was make the world feel more permanent, and ideally they expand in the future.

Do I want that full list of features and stretch goals? Yes. But it doesn't make sense if you are cutting out half your overworld in order to have an underworld. I want an immersive world far more than I want shipping lanes - and if adding in shipping lanes means cutting immersion I don't want it either. If they make 10 promises and have to cut corners and content and "fun" to deliver them, then I would rather they deliver extremely well on 5 promises and work the others in later (if they can).

So for me the only promise that really matters is - release a game that can be considered "finished."

I'll wait.

 

They do indeed want to make larger scenes, but it's likely Unity is one major limiting factor here. Correct me if I'm wrong Unity experts.

If the vision has changed from making an arbitrary number of individual hexes of a certain size --> huge regions of a much larger size that perceptually encapsulates those hexes with many different entry/exit points depending on where you "enter" on the overland map, then maybe we're ok? We just don't know. And that's not to say that they couldn't overlay a dynamic POI on top of that region that only popped up under certain conditions, like the city of Dawn from U3. But again...we have no idea.

 

I'm can see what you are trying to say, but what is fun for one might not be fun for others. I would say as long as changes stick close to the spirit of the game then it's May be ok.

Some really want this game more PVP focused and ultima online like....because to them that is fun, should we accept that too?

 

This is true, I trust more to the vision of the developers - and this is more the reason that I say they can't get caught up in all the debates and ask for input on everything because there will be those who agree and those who disagree. You can't cater to everyone, I am surprised about some of the backlash on hexes. Most I have talked to are happy about it and I haven't seen solid reasoned feedback that supports a return to random instances approach.

For me? I would like if they make these permanent(ish) hexes a collection of hexes. ie. the Forest becomes a central hex with 3/4/5/6 exits to neighbouring hexes and larger "enterable" areas - giving you both a wide area to explore and a feeling of permanence but still not shackled to populate every hex with a random instance of a map.

 

The problem with the moongate in this release was the linear nature of the sequence. Currently the moongate is the only way to travel to places outside of the Vale. Together both of these cause a time issue. Even at 5 minutes between changes, in the worst case that could result in a 35 minute wait to get somewhere. That is likely to irritate even the most dedicated player, sitting there watching the screen for 35 minutes is going to feel like an eternity. I don't know what's in store for the final release of the moongates. But for testing what they did was a welcome compromise to let people get to the different areas, especially for the hat quest.

 

Well they were not ever random. Never even saw an attempt at that, however....

We've been talking about making procedural content and/or helping (directly) flesh out the massive amount of content required for the original vision since like the first month.

It is simply a dropped ball event, all the way from the original map, to the cloth version, back to the original, now to the reduced hex count.

Of course they can't fill in 4k + hexes, and plenty of people said that many times.

But they also never made any attempt (visible to us) to provide some "random" mixing of the content.

So, yeah, for a forest hex, you got the same one over and over, and it felt stupid, cause it is.

But it is also kind of dumb to not explore, or have the community explore, solutions to the problem.

You know, everyone keeps saying that our "input" is simply that.

I call straight BS on that because I have contributed code solutions to problems in addition to voicing my opinion.

If someone was to mock up code for a procedural solution I am sure they would at least take a look. Granted, don't expect it to be implemented immediately (or ever) because of the underlying tech.

But I'd love to see more active approaches to these problems (especially from all those who know they can offer some experience to do so -- i.e. put up or shutup).

I simply do not have the time to devote as I literally run around like a chicken 14-16 hours a day doing the same thing here.

How cheap is Texas? Maybe they should hire..... =o

Just saying, if you want to see action, make it happen, as you have a golden oppurtunity to DO SOMETHING rather than just add .02 on a forum

 

They were not randomly generated, but the idea seemed to me they would be randomly applied. They talked about creating a finite number ie. 4-6 forest hexes and then using them whenever someone entered a forest hex. So no, not totally random - given 100 hexes and 6 scenes however it would seem each scene is pulled "randomly" out of a hat. They just hadn't worked up their way up to the multiple scenes yet.

I am not saying the current map can't be improved upon, just that it was an improvement (to me) on what we already had.

 

This is a long thread

I will say just this. I want hexes back. I do not want to go into singleplayer mode everytime I need to gather something or get xp or avoid srowded areas... I want to visit empty forrest, or plains, the no man's land. I do not wand the wildreness to be crowded!