General Category > A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2

Overworld map travel, too easy?

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BobTheJanitor:
At the moment, the game basically allows you to travel to any tile (sans ocean, which I'll get to momentarily) as long as its level is less than or equal to your civ level plus 10. Is this, perhaps, too forgiving? From a 'realism' perspective, how can I float magically over these monster infested lands? I know previously the game had windstorms that would automatically drop you into platformer view after you took a certain number of steps, unless you ended on a wind shelter. That was removed, I think rightly so, because it doesn't sound like it adds much to the game. But I think the game is too far in the other direction now, allowing you to go anywhere you want within your level limits.

The only variety (that I know of so far) is the ocean tiles, which will always pull you in as soon as you stand on them. That makes them dangerous, and something to be avoided at all costs currently. I'm thinking there might be something to this danger that could be added to normal travel. One idea would be to use an RPG-esque random encounter system, where you might have a small percentage chance to be dropped into an area when traveling over it, if it is above your level. As the level variations go higher, the chance could increase to the point where you couldn't move forward any further. Before I just toss that up on mantis, I wanted to see if that was even an interesting idea to anyone else, or if people like completely free movement on the world map as it stands right now, or if there were any other ideas to make world map travel more interesting.

Right now the overworld part of the game doesn't have much gameplay, it's just a way of getting from point A to point B. Easy and simple, but without some risk or challenge there's not much room for fun either. The Zelda II overworld, for example, had the random wandering monsters that could appear in your path, and that simple addition made that map more than just an exercise in walking.

There might be more planned for this part of the game and simply not yet implemented, so maybe I'm jumping the gun here by even suggesting changes. If so, oh well, at least it's something to chat about!

tigersfan:
I think this has a lot of merit. I know the reason I cannot stand Baldur's Gate is because of all the walking with NOTHING to do in it. Now, AVWW doesn't have nearly the same amount of walking and doing nothing else that BG has, but, I don't that that invalidates your point.

Now, while I agree with you on principle, I see a few problems, the first being - what would you be randomly encountering? Yet ANOTHER microboss? Do we really want more microbosses just randomly thrown at us? A plain-jane enemy? Then we'd be pulled out of the map for something that doesn't even grant us XP.

The other is more of a potential issue than an actual one, but too many random encounters can be really annoying. Even Zelda 2 had me screaming at the tv once or twice "JUST LET ME GET TO THE TOWN ALREADY!!!"

Terraziel:
Random encounters from the overworld map is something I had thought about suggesting as well, despite generally disliking random encounters, because the sense of impunity from walking round the world sort of ruins mood for me

Unfortunately the question about what you would be encountering stumped me somewhat, microbosses, aside from being repetitive would sort of encourage grinding, the best I could come up with was instead of random encounters make it random events, so maybe you get caught in a rhino stampede, or an attack on some scattered survivors, or simply a blizzard so a temporary windstorm with you spawning in a building,

To the comment about many random encounters being annoying I think the obvious suggestion is to make roads stop them so that travelling across the road network is essentially the safe method of travel.

Lancefighter:
I once thought id be cool and travel deeper into the water tiles my first time around, thinking I could just immediately leave the ocean like I did the last time..

Yeah. Not gonna try that again.


(also, why is there not like a 'beach' chunk or something on the edge of the water, in sidescrolly mode? The far right area can have some land, to warn you 'Youre about to try to walk on water bro', and making initially exploring the ocean a tad less.. scary)

BobTheJanitor:
I would say you could use a sliding scale of chance to encounter, based on level variance. So if I'm level 5 on a level 6 tile, maybe there's only a 5% chance. That could go up by 5% with each difference between me and the tile I'm standing on, so that when I get up to a level 15 tile, at 10 levels above me, there's a 50% chance of attack if I step on it. Windstorms could go so far as to double the difficulty, so a +10 level tile with a windstorm is always going to pull you in. This also means that on equal or lower level tiles you can always travel over them with no danger, so once you get closer to your settlement you shouldn't be running into random encounters pointlessly.

As far as what you get pulled in to, I was just assuming you would get pulled in to the side view world of that tile and randomly placed somewhere within the first few sections of that area. (I'm forgetting the lingo here... area, region, chunk, etc. so this may be a little vague) Although the idea of being rarely pulled in to a small area with a micro-boss in it is kind of interesting as well.

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