Is it just me or...

[Skyrage]

...do others feel that Calradia is generally notoriously tiny and cities being packed dead close together if you really think about it?

Mind, I'm looking at this from a deep ingame perspective.

Cause in a sense it's rather disturbing to cross the map in a couple of ingame days if even that. What I wouldn't mind seeing is the world size being multiplied by at least a factor of 20 (minimum, I'd prefer a factor of 30-40 myself for bit more realistic reasons). Let it take days to reach another city, give players a reason to hang around the area of a city before moving on, make travelling risky, and open up a hellish lot of new features that would make more sense like roads, forts, villages even maybe and so on. Camping would also be an option, and if you have a big army then food and inventory space would also become an issue.
Trading would become much more attractive and interesting as well as an alternate option.

As for two kingdoms being at war with each other: both capital cities being roughly a day's worth of traveling from each other just doesn't feel right either.

Before adding anything that would give the gameworld more life, I'd personally ask Armagan to seriously increase the world size by at least the minimum factor I mentioned above.
This would also hopefully open up the opportunity to have really vast "northern cold" areas, southern plains or grasslands, forests that truly can be called forests, and you name it.

Reasonable or not?

 

[Wood]

Not reasonable.
If you increase the size of the map by 20 times, you make the game 20 times as boring. I don't enjoy spending hours of my time slowly moving accross the map when I could be in the depths of combat instead. The world map is boring, don't make things worse by forcing players to waste even more time wandering about.

 

[GonZ]

Fairly reasonable imo.

I agree that the scale is all wrong. But agree with Wood that simply making the map bigger would make it more boring.

I think that the world map does need to be bigger but in order for it to work it also needs:

More detail: more towns and villages, arable areas around towns, roads and rivers and misc other exciting things dotted about the place.

Some kind of time slider so that moving around isn't so tedious.

Camping so that long journeys can be broken up.

 

[Skyrage]

Read the last paragraph...........

 

[ThVaz]

When we could have all these things in the world map to do (like forts, roads, villages) I agree with you. Until there, increasing the size of the world will only make travelling more boring.

 

[Yellonet]

Yes, it all makes sense, and would be a very very good thing for the game. But, it would take a lot of work to implement all that

 

[Sir Prince]

I think it does need to be increased enoguh so it takes more time to get from place to place, and yes, travelling is boring, THAT IS ALSO HISTORIC. Take for example, sailors on tall ships, 98% boring hard work. 2% fun/adrenlin. And it's a very dangerous job when things get exciting (battle, storms, food poisoning, sexualy transmitted disease, poverty). THere could be modes for faster travel though like ships or caravans... maybe you can move with spacebar on?
And there is always the cheats.
I really feel that the map MUST be larger, with area around the edges for future modders to use. THen after the map size increase you can populate the land. Meanwhile we have a version withsome nice little goodies and mod tools so we can keep ourselves occupied.
And remember, we are but the beta testers, think of it like we are in a company, beta testing a game and getting payed for it. I need someone to finish off my ideas as i can't really think of how to finish this post off.

 

[Kelpo]

I believe the Calradia we have now is just a hastily assembled playtesting area. When all the other features are done, the world will most likely be completely redone. At least I hope it will.

 

[Damien]

I'd also like to see a bigger map. But like the poster above me, I believe this map is just a 'beta map.' I imagine we'll see more stuff later. For example, right now there are rivers with land on the other side... but no way to get over there.

I figure the map will eventually be expanded. But until there's more stuff on the map... increasing the -size- of the map itself would just make the game incredibly boring. Hell, it's ALREADY really boring to travel from one place to another if there aren't a lot of enemies nearby.

First things first -- we need more stuff on the map.

 

[svart]

I agree with damien, there's no sense in increasing the map size when there isn't much to do.

But personally i would just like to see a bigger map (for example more distance between cities which is filled with various little villages), but not a bigger map ratio with slower time movement (that's a bit far fetched from the current game development)

 

[Jhaerik]

Well this about it, it would be easy as hell to make it less boring. First up the movement rate by around 100%. Then add in a 50% increased view range. Then add in an option for time scaling. Which would speed travel even more by a factor of 2, 4, 8. It should not be hard to code either. And attacks made while not having time to react could simply be accounted as not having an a proper watch set. Also with small forts/villages you could easily implement more quests, and various other things. ALso the large map would allow for more localized resources. For example you could only perchase said horses in this part of the world, or you could only buy this food/weapon/armor/whatever in this general area. This would also make more sense, and make trade much more profitable than it currently is in game, because you could scale the prices upwards a long ways, but would also make it a more riskly buissness.

I mean there will always be those who think it will be more boring, but I personally think the idea of defending you cargo over a few hundred miles, with more combat than you can shake a stick at along te way, more run than running salt.....

 

[Volkier]

Personally I agree with the initial post. However, to avoid what other people mentioned earlier here is a few suggestions how to have this idea appeal to both pro and con world increase.

- Players have access to an actual 'base' map. (which is pretty large, and if you just use 'clicking' will take you may be a week to travel across.)
- Players can still travel as they do now by general clicking, and attacking / fleeing / defending / joining combat etc.
- Players however, have access to 'journey' command. Basically, you can open up the large scale map, click on any prominent landmark, and select 'journey'. This will make the time go at the fast-forward pace (like what happens when you are resting at an inn). Players will not be attacked during this, HOWEVER, they can ONLY start their journey from a landmark they have on the map, TO another landmark. (Landmark means a city / town / fort etc.)
*(Another option would be to have a 'random encounter' while in such mode, which will basically force an attack on you after calculating the speeds of yourself and the enemy. I personally prefer this option, but this specific debate would get a lot of feedback pro and con. See what happens : )
- Initial map does NOT have every landmark up at the moment you start the game. It WILL however, have all the major cities listed on it.
*Exploring the map in normal speed, will uncover new places which you can 'mark' on the map. (These can vary from rebel villages, small farms, ruined catacombs where bandits / pirates decided to hide their stash, (I do not mean the ones with monsters, but the ruined burrial grounds which actually existed) etc.
- Players will also be able to purchase and loot such 'maps' to add on to their initial map, thus improving greatly the term 'exploring' for players whom that appeals to.

We must, however understand, that perhaps the developers chose to have a smaller 'world', AT THE MOMENT, in order to minimise the game size, the number of bugs, and the ability to rectify and fix all the problems before expanding / adding new features to the world. I am probably wrong since I have no idea how the developers work, but I would have done exactly that if I was in their position.

 

[quixotecoyote]

another idea would be to simply make days go by faster in-game.

 

[Juno]

hold x and space, problem solved to make days go faster

 

[DaLagga]

another idea would be to simply make days go by faster in-game.

Actually, i would much prefer time to go by much slower. I think a day should last 2-4 times as long. I don't think having days pass in a min or two really gives you the feel of day and night cycles. A bigger map is deffinately needed, but i don't know about a factor of 20 (we're not trying to recreate morrowind). Plus, with more stuff on the map and more features, travel could be made fun and less *me click here...now me watch 10 polygon horsie with half second cycle animation travel there....drool...*.

 

[Skyrage]

Well, the factor IS kinda important since cities should really be spread apart, and the player shouldn't only be busy with city-related activities only. Are tons of different things that can be added to the map, but having a small map would really just clutter it and make things worse in the end. Having good distances is something that would add a lot. Lot's of places to explore, you can decide where to stick around for a while, whole world will actually start feeling like a world and so on.

 

[Jhaerik]

Well even with this map being 20 time larger, it would not be as large as 1 zone in Morrowind. Heck Morrowind had a few Million square miles to play in.

 

[Skyrage]

That would be Daggerfall...Morrowind is a midget compared to it's prequel.

But this ain't Morrowind :p

 

[Jhaerik]

Speaking of Daggerfall.... Where the heck can I get a copy of that game? Bethesda no longer sells, but it's not scratchware either...any ideas?

I did exagerate more than a bit, but it doesn't take nearly as long to crosee that map, as it does to cross a zone form end to end on foot, with starting stats.

 

[Ivan Bajlo]

I did exagerate more than a bit, but it doesn't take nearly as long to crosee that map, as it does to cross a zone form end to end on foot, with starting stats.

I believe solution for this would be something like Adriatic sea or English Channel, you could have several big kingdoms on both side of coast and use ships for quick traveling around - simple and historical!