Will there be any reason to go back to old rescued continents?

[Dizzard]

I'm just wondering what the story is with continents in this regard. Honestly I haven't played much of AVWW recently (just enough to check out the new enemies not so much completing missions) but I'm wondering if old continents will have any relevance in the future.

I saw it mentioned in another thread that you can't just start new worlds for each continent because then you'll never reach continents with new region types.....but I'm thinking more along the lines of what old continents themselves will really offer once you've saved them from destruction.

It would seem pretty boring to have a bunch of continents sitting pretty and not have anything to do in them. (and by things to do I don't really mean missions, you can do missions on any continent) At the same time if you've rescued a continent from destruction there shouldn't be anything that happens that's so bad that it'll put the whole continent in jeopardy again. Which would be a bit lame having to constantly go back to old continents to save them from new threats. (It would put actual progress on the back burner)

I was thinking if you save a continent maybe there would be the chance for new settlements (perhaps 1 or 2 new settlements...so there's a cap of about 3 settlements per continent) to develop as the continent becomes more prosperous. (Surely with no overlord it would become easier to grow since monsters would not be so strongly organised...even with the catastrophe) So when you've travelled far you might come back to you're earlier continents and see that you almost hardly recognise it anymore because it's been so long since you've visited it. On the other hand even though nothing so bad as complete destruction would happen to a saved continent it could still be in a poor situation and struggling to survive still. In terms of how it would work, I guess I'm thinking something along the lines of in the Animal Crossing Series your town develops even when you're not playing....so when you come back to an old continent the game calculates how long you've been away (perhaps only to a certain max amount of time so as not to be calculating really long periods of time) and applies changes to the continent based on that time and what was going on when you left.

Just an idea I thought would really add loads of depth to the game. I'm guessing this is the sort of thing you'd be looking towards for 1.0 and onwards though.

[zebramatt]

What might be even better is if some mechanic in the game might encourage you to return to old contintents after you have unlocked new spells to accomplish things which would have been previously impossible; and then to use whatever you have gained from those accomplishments to access new options in the new continents.

Metroid or Zelda -style, as it were.

[Bluddy]

I thought old continents were supposed to be destroyed regardless of whether you saved them for space conservation purposes, so I'm not sure how that jibes with the new design.

[KDR_11k]

What might be even better is if some mechanic in the game might encourage you to return to old contintents after you have unlocked new spells to accomplish things which would have been previously impossible; and then to use whatever you have gained from those accomplishments to access new options in the new continents.

Metroid or Zelda -style, as it were.

I think only material and era unlocks apply across continents so that's probably the only thing you could get on old continents that would be useful on the new ones.

[Dizzard]

I thought old continents were supposed to be destroyed regardless of whether you saved them for space conservation purposes, so I'm not sure how that jibes with the new design.

Eh, if old continents I've saved get destroyed....

It doesn't really feel like I've saved them at all. :S

[keith.lamothe]

Eh, if old continents I've saved get destroyed....

It doesn't really feel like I've saved them at all. :S

Very much my feeling on the matter too.

To the original post: I don't think the current design-for-1.0 has any compelling reasons to go back, no.  But if the game does at all well I'd be very surprised if there wasn't stuff added later that provided good reasons to do so.

[x4000]

At this point I think that the space-saving considerations have mostly been met without having to trash old continents.  And one way to make space-saving considerations in the further future get handled well would be to have reasons for you to return to the older continents.  I think that post-1.0 that in particular could be a big focus, and with the new level-less design that will really be possible (versus with region levels it would have been possible but kind of kludgy at best).

[Bluddy]

OK so here are 2 somewhat conflicting reactions to the news that space saving isn't so important.

1. There could be a chance that when you lose a continent, the overlord will be able to make his way to an old continent and threaten that one as well. Since you didn't beat him the first time, the difficulty could be lower this time to give you a better chance -- he could be tier 4 for example.

2. If not for space considerations, why are we destroying continents again? Specifically, instead of destroying the continent, the entire continent could fall under the overlord's grip, destroying the settlement and forcing the players to escape (or turning the continent into a death camp which you could later on try to infiltrate). Continental destruction could be a rare occurrence -- for example, if you manage to extend the EP clock to 2000 but still lose, that would be represented in the game as forcing the enemy to use all of his magic ability to the point that he self-destructs, taking the continent with him. Why would you work to raise the EP clock to 2000 then? Perhaps because (dovetailing with point 1) the overlord self-destructing and taking out the continent is better than him spreading to other continents that have already been saved.

[x4000]

The answer to both those is:

1. Space isn't no consideration anymore, but it's also not the first consideration.  Space only becomes a factor for advanced players who play for a really long time in one world.  And expectations are that many of them will lose some continents.  And there may be other things that we have to do as well, for players that want to push things to the 1000th degree (of which there are always some).  I don't really know what to expect with this, because players always come up with ways to surprise me.  I never expected that any player would manage to get a single wave in AI War that consisted of 16 million ships, but it happened.  I never expected anyone to put over 120 hours into a single campaign, and push the AIP over 2000, but it happened.

So from that standpoint, I'm mostly deferring the space considerations until we actually have whatever crazy edge cases players come up with.  In the meantime, the mission structure that we now have already will help to keep the chunk count lower, which is a big part of it.  And there might be other things along those lines that we could do that would reduce or eliminate the need to remove old continents for space reasons, but that remains to be seen.

2. In terms of the continents being destroyed permanently, currently this is for thematic reasons.  It's a way of losing that feels very permanent and notable, but without the entire progress of the world ending.  It's also dead simple for us to do technically and design-wise, and for now that's the best route for this particular feature in my opinion.  There are other parts of the game that are more in need of development time at the moment, and so we're focusing on those other bits.  My expectation is that we might be doing something radically different and more complex post-1.0, but that there's only so much that we can push the scope right now.  For me, having a really solid failure condition for not beating the overlord means that this one is in a pretty decent state at the moment.  Not perfect, not the way I hope it is two years from now, but the way I think it probably should stay for now.

[Hearteater]

There could be "cross-continents super-overlords" periodically that affect not only the current continent, but a few previous ones as well.  That's could sort-of be a reason to go back to them.

[freeformschooler]

Perhaps there could be a whole new category of things that you unlock by going back to a continent and doing extra-hard missions. These things could carry over between continents, but not be as massive a boost as, say, Fire Touch I to Fire Touch III.

It would fit with the Metroidvania feel, almost like a New Game Plus.

[x4000]

I think some things along those lines would work well, yeah.

[Martyn van Buren]

I've gone back to my first world lately, and am enjoying seeing the big old continent I have from pre-continent times. I do hope if continent destruction comes back there can be an exception for them; they're cool artifacts of the early design and i'd like to keep mine around.

By the way, are the new continents all square? Seems like it from more recent worlds. My old continent had all sorts of odd features like peninsulas and inland sea channels (when pylons came in I got cut off from my settlements and had a great journey across four tiles of high-level sea to get home, which took about thirty health potions. Any chance of seeing that kind of geography in new continents later on?

[Martyn van Buren]

Thinking about it, I've had a lot of fun challenges from the quirks of daily updates. As long as the game is about fragments of time thrown together by a mysterious catastrophe, how about making one of the time periods 'early beta'? You could start off collecting crafting books for the outfitting bench and every chunk you advance would apply another week's worth of updates