0.550 and up: concerns about future of AVWW

[Dizzard]

- Continents don't have to be small, and they don't have to be pre-explored, though exploration seems like a bit of a problem vis a vis multiplayer. Maybe continents could be random sizes and shapes (I mean more random than currently)? Sort of like a Civ game, where you could start up either on a huge continent or an island.

Agree with this. Maybe continents could start out being covered in a fog of war (the unknown) and you "scout" it simply by moving around the main map. So you still get a sense of discovering areas but it's not a long drawn out process.

[Hyfrydle]

I've played quite a bit and I really don't like the new mana system I much preferred having control over my mana the regen is much too slow or maybe as suggested the mana costs are too high. Boss battles are so annoying as I'm constantly running out of mana and then the trash mobs cause me problems. Don't like been negative but for me it just isn't working.

Also I dislike the water espers there attack is just annoying as it fills the whole screen and mix this with light espers and it's a real nightmare.

I do like the mission idea and the continents but just feel I currently don't have the tools to progress and enjoy the game.

I've even knocked the difficulty down and still find it too frantic.

[Hyfrydle]

Agree with this. Maybe continents could start out being covered in a fog of war (the unknown) and you "scout" it simply by moving around the main map. So you still get a sense of discovering areas but it's not a long drawn out process.

Great idea then at least finding a mission would become more exciting. Also over time other strange areas could be implemented to discover when exploring.

[x4000]

In terms of mana shortages: that's just because the right balance hasn't been found yet, in the main.  Kind of the point of the whole power coding thing is "a lot's changing and balance is super preliminary, but we're not working on balance yet because a lot's changing."

[keith.lamothe]

Agree with this. Maybe continents could start out being covered in a fog of war (the unknown) and you "scout" it simply by moving around the main map. So you still get a sense of discovering areas but it's not a long drawn out process.

There is a sort of bubble-popping fun to that, but honestly: is there any challenge in that, at all?  Why should the game make you manually move the cursor around to reveal the screen? 

You see, I've had enough discussions of about the trivial nature of the interaction required to optimize energy production in AI War, and while I don't feel a need to smooth over every such seam in an existing design (in the energy case, because every alternate approach I've thought through just causes another seam elsewhere) I certainly don't want to intentionally make a choice in a new design that will provoke that.

Granted, vortex pylons can theoretically make it impossible to access an area for a certain time, and hostile regions do something like that, but the amount of territory blocked off isn't generally a lot.

Anyway, we'll see.  I think the nature of the world map makes it so that the emphasis of exploration will be in-chunk, looking for things that the world map doesn't tell you about.

[Bluddy]

I totally agree that moving around to clear the fog of war is a waste of time. If it's brought back, it should be in the form of a game mechanic ie. limiting your ability to move somewhere until you've done something. The true purpose of fog of war (Civilization, RTSs etc) is to hide your enemies' moves, so I guess I also agree it's not really relevant to this game.

[keith.lamothe]

I totally agree that moving around to clear the fog of war is a waste of time. If it's brought back, it should be in the form of a game mechanic ie. limiting your ability to move somewhere until you've done something.

Yea.  I really want a cost to world-map movement and/or other limitations... but it just won't work, at least not with anything remotely like what we're doing now:
1) Missions spawn in regions of the appropriate level, and world-gen places like-level regions in roughly the same area.  Either you can get to your like-level area, or you can't, and if you can't that's a big problem.
2) If there's very much cost/restriction to world-map-movement, exploration gets harder and pushed towards the margins of gameplay, not better emphasized.  Which very much defeats the purpose behind the requests for the world-map exploration if I'm understanding them correctly

The true purpose of fog of war (Civilization, RTSs etc) is to hide your enemies' moves, so I guess I also agree it's not really relevant to this game.

I think it has relevance in this genre if there's some cost to movement: that way you have different "tiers" of anticipation:
- There's what's right around me and I can do right now.
- There's stuff a little bit further up the mountain.
- There's stuff way up the mountain just below the clouds that I can see but it could be a while before I'm there.
- There's even more mountain above the clouds and I don't even know what's there but I'll be thinking about it.

But yea, not a lot of room for literal fog in this case.  In this case it's "I know there will be more continents, but I can't see them yet", which I think is good.

[superking]

challenge and gameplay is one thing, but immersion is another. I am not going to feel like an explorer if everything is already visible 

[Hearteater]

The only way I can see world-map movement costing something would be to limit the distance you can move from a settlement, somewhat similar to how fuel cells limited how far you could travel in Master of Orion 2.  So if I had 4 Food, I could move 4 spaces.  I'm not consuming the food, it just is an indicator of the area around my settlement I can travel to.  Some terrain types might have increased costs, and some, like desert, might require 2 Water in addition.  I'd imagine these wouldn't be something you carried with you even, but rather an upgrade you applied to your settlement so it would affect all players in MP, and each time you got a new settlement you'd need to upgrade it to increase the area around it you can explore.

[Smiling Spectre]

Thank you, x4000 and keith.lamothe for removing some of my concerns!

I think, it's still not enough incentive to search chunks, but I hope, it will be expanding in the future...

Speaking of that, I like this "Exploration range" of Hearteater. I used to have "camps" that extend exploration range - planets/colonies in space games, cities in Civ-games. It would also give more purpose to second-third-etc settlements. (But yes, basically, it would be the same as it was before power coding, only with "range" restriction instead "civ level" restriction.

Another idea that come in my mind just when I read this thread is "scanning" possibility. Just as in all this space games, you can see everything from the start - all vast space or (in out case) all vast island. Catch is - you don't know what is exactly inside. Yes, it's the same now - you cannot predict stashes, minerals, etc from looking on chunk - but I want something more global! There was one such "global search" mission - stranded NPCs - but it's gone now. But if chunks would have more such sort of "auto-trigger" missions, it would be much better! Plans for lost technology, NPCs, abandoned outposts, lost mines... such sort of things. Something-global-map-changing-that-was-not-visible-before.

Yes, words of x4000 sounds like that, but I think there is no harm to repeat it.

P.S. It would be interesting to found some... little incentives for settlement workers here too. Pneumatic hammer for mining, working coffee machine for more energy, 20-carat diamond chain for morale... such sort of things.

[Dizzard]

Agree with this. Maybe continents could start out being covered in a fog of war (the unknown) and you "scout" it simply by moving around the main map. So you still get a sense of discovering areas but it's not a long drawn out process.

There is a sort of bubble-popping fun to that, but honestly: is there any challenge in that, at all?  Why should the game make you manually move the cursor around to reveal the screen? 

Not everything HAS to be a challenge, besides thanks to pylons you won't be able to scout the entire continent in one sitting.

Why shouldn't the game make me do it? I'll be moving around the continent anyway won't I? (If I want to get anywhere)

When the whole map is automatically scouted, it feels like we were here before.....or we just instantly knew our surroundings. I really liked earlier in the game where you had to move around to uncover the black regions....ok maybe it wasn't difficult but it gave you a sense of place. That you were in a world that you didn't recognise and were uncovering it bit by bit.

challenge and gameplay is one thing, but immersion is another. I am not going to feel like an explorer if everything is already visible 

This sums it up perfectly. I don't want to come to a new place knowing where everything is. It feels a little like the game is doing the exploring for me.

[superking]

slightly off topic Trivia: my perfect games of 'this kind of' genre are

1) Morrowind
2) Diabolo II
3) I Wanna be the Guy

Morrowind works because it makes the player work hard for everything; the map starts blank, and you have to run anywhere to get it coloured in. Technically, no skill required, but it makes discovering new places exciting every time.

Diabolo II works because it empowers players while pretending not to. You feel isolated out in the wilds, a million miles from town, help, anyone, hedged in by monsters.. but its all an illusion because one town portal and you are back home, where you can fully heal, sell gear, go get some food - then step back through the portal and it seals behind you, and the illusion of isolation returns.

I Wanna be the Guy works because the world hates you, and every nanometer of progress you make feels like you have put your shoulder behind a big roman shield and bashed the guy who developed the game backward a few steps toward a distant pit of spikes.. complete enough of the game and you can dream of pushing him in.

ontopic, AVWW didn't previously work because it felt infinite, with no real resistance against progress except my commitment of tme. I didn't have to work hard at all to receive many of the conviences, and once I had powerful spells I didn't think about them again in the span of that sitting. I didn't feel like pushing foward was sticking it to someone, or likely to find some interesting piece of buried temple with bling inside, and I didn't feel like an intrepid warrior helping the town by slaying all the nearby monsters, because they instantly respawned.

^ probably an unrelated rant altogether 

[zebramatt]

I'm with Dizzard, as it happens: although the consensus seems to be that it was just busywork, there was a definite unwrapping-your-presents feeling from the border patrols back in the day.

[tigersfan]

slightly off topic Trivia: my perfect games of 'this kind of' genre are

3) I Wanna be the Guy

I Wanna be the Guy works because the world hates you, and every nanometer of progress you make feels like you have put your shoulder behind a big roman shield and bashed the guy who developed the game backward a few steps toward a distant pit of spikes.. complete enough of the game and you can dream of pushing him in.

I don't mind a challenge, challenging is good, IWBTG is too much. I don't want to literally fight for every inch of progress.

[x4000]

I would posit that the very act of having continents in the first place works much like the players are asking for.  They:

1. Prevent your forward progress.
2. Prevent you from seeing anything on other continents (that haven't been genned until you complete this continetn).
3. Are a small surface area for you to walk around on on the world map, with a ton of amount of smaller areas for you to explore into.

The fog of war I really can't see coming back.  There's just no way, it doesn't fit in any fun sort of way.  Lots of games take this sort of approach, such as every Zelda game, every Final Fantasy game, and so on.  I remember how fun it was to explore the Zelda II overworld, or the overworld in Final Fantasy I, both of which work the same way that ours does now.  It was fun not because I had to walk through a fog, but because there were obstacles preventing me from getting out into the larger world at any given time (aka, continents here), and because there were lots of secrets hidden all over the place if you wandered around the already-visible overworld enough.

Keith and I have been talking about doing things like having secret missions that you can find and complete inside regions, which would let some of the freeform exploration tie in to the central mission system while at the same time rewarding pure exploration with some really exciting side stuff and attendant rewards.

TLDR: I think that people are worried about the wrong thing.  I understand where folks are coming from, but on this issue at the moment I'd really just ask you to trust us for a little while.  We've got a lot of very clear and definite plans on this sort of system, but it's going to take a while for us to get enough content into the missions and so on for it to really have the feel we're aiming for.  I think folks will be pleased by the end, but this stuff doesn't happen overnight -- and just going back to older game mechanics that were a pale shadow of what we're now trying to do is kind of missing the point.  I think you'll be really happy exploration-wise where this ends up, but for now please just try to enjoy the ride despite the fact that freeform exploration is definitely taking a hit in the shorter-term. All good things to those who wait.