New continent.

[timtim]

Hi there,

I managed to get to my first new continent yesterday, and quickly discovered I lost all my decent spells and can not get to the boat again unless I get some windmills stopping the storms.

Unless I've missed something, why is this? Is a new continent basically a whole other world? I tried digging through the encyclopaedia and found nothing - I'm not sure now what the point of moving to another continent is if I just lose everything?

Any tips and advice on this would be appreciated!

[tigersfan]

This is normal, all you get to keep when you go to a new continent is your consumable items, and your enchants. It is basically like a New Game+. The new continent will have new enemies, new regions and other stuff that you didn't see on the first continent.

[timtim]

Dammit, I thought new continents were part of the game and I'd be able to move survivors from one settlement to another and start to build up the world again.

Kind of annoying I didn't know it was a whole new game basically. Seems wasted that everything built up goes to waste because I jump on a boat.

[x4000]

The message that pops up when you defeat the overlord talks about how it is basically like a "new game plus."

There's a detailed explanation here of what you keep versus what you lose: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AVWW_-_What_Is_The_General_Game_Flow%3F#World_Progression

And you will be able to get back to the old continent once you build up the new continent enough to drive the wind away from a port, don't worry!  It's more of a temporary thing.

Hope that helps!

[timtim]

Cheers, I was playing it more yesterday and I like the new types of land - The Deep is terrifying!

I just figured it was a traditional type game, where your character (I've only used one character all through the game) stays with me at a consistent level. It feels like he's been downgraded when I moved to the new continent, which feels weird.

I like the idea of a Resources Stockpile on each continent, though it'd be great to be able to build a building (very hard to make) on each that allows trading of stockpiles.

It's the learned spells bit that bugs me most. I understand why, but it just smacks me back to reality that this is a game as something has been 'unlearned'. I understand why, it'd be make the game too easy or whatever, but I can't help but feel there's another way around it :/

Cheers for the help though, and keep up the good work!

[x4000]

I appreciate it!

Incidentally, we did it a different way back earlier in beta, prior to November or so.  You just scaled linearly up, and you eventually got Fireball XIV or whatever.  They all tiered up infinitely.  The problem was, stats don't scale well along that sort of long path, and the numbers get meaninglessly high so that they can't really be quickly understood and parsed (talking about health in particular, when it's in the tens or hundreds of millions of HP).

There was tons of brainstorming with the community, and the continents (among many other changes, such as the removal of RPG-style levels and EXP) came about as a result of that.  Ultimately you are going back to square one a bit, but with new things plus old things.  The cool thing is that it's like playing the game a second time, but with extra stuff and complexity and so forth.  And each continent is different even after the first three, what with the elites being randomized per continent and other things of that nature.

As we ultimately add more and more spells, the goal is that each new continent feels like a fresh start as a way to unlock something new and try out a different style rather than just repeating what you did before.  As well as having reasons to go back to older continents and do further adventuring even though the overlord is dead; that way you're kind of able to go back and forth between your various gamestates, so to speak.  But a lot of that is just further off on the list and we haven't gotten to it yet what with all the other stuff we're working on!

[timtim]

Interesting, really interesting! Agree that limiting everything is a good idea, although I'm a fairly old-school gamer so get thrown when things seem different - hence why it was jarring my poor character couldn't cast his level 4 spell just because he jumped in a boat (I used to like going back to old towns in Pokemon to slaughter the bastard wild Pokemon that gave me troubles earlier in the game).

What I expected was that my continent one was at tier 4 or so, and I defeated the Overlord and had access to a new continent - which would be at tier 5 now with all spells still available but a whole new base, no survivors, lots of wind and a whole raft of new things to find. A whole new challenge, but rewarding because I've not lost anything only gained. So I can move that continent two up to, say, tier 10 (or however much) until an Overlord is defeated and I've got some survivors and a third continent opens up - which starts at level 10, with even more new stuff but nothing lost from the previous continents.

That's just what I was expected, sorry I rabbited on!

[x4000]

No worries!

[Mánagarmr]

Ah, game design. Such an awesomely creepy pit of tentacles, isn't it? Ideas that sound absolutely great on paper turn out to be really daft in practice. On the flipside, things that look really daft on paper sometimes turn out to have really good reasons and end up being the best in practice.