Castle Paradox

[Leonhart]

Let's talk about overworlds or world maps.

In my opinion, overworlds should be able to give the whole feeling of the game. It should at least be able to let the players know what to expect once they get there. For example, if the game is a grand and epic one, then an overworld with an epic sounding music would be appropriate, and, of course, its graphics should consists of majestic views that would make the players excited about the upcoming events in the game. An example is the overworld of Chrono Cross where Serge first goes out of the map, the music is lively and cheerful, but once he got to the "other world", the music turns more serious.

In my opinion, one of the worst overworlds seen in an RPG is (you're all going to agree here) in the Legend of Dragoon. Why? Simple. There's no interactivity! The map is too linear and it quickly guides the player to the next destination rather than letting the player find his way. Battles are impossible to avoid in the overworld of Legend of Dragoon, and that just sucks.

I can't think of the best overworld in an RPG, but the one in Tales of Eternia (PS1) really fascinated me. Day and night is available, and there are lots of secrets spots found on it. The overworld of FFIX is also acceptable, because it's really gives off a good atmosphere. FFX didn't use the idea of overworlds, and that just plain sucked.

Thus, I think the most important map in a game (OHR or not) is the overworld, for it pretty much tells a lot about the whole game.

What about your ideas? What should be in an ideal world map? What about the best and the worst world maps in a game?
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The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on.
- Robert Bloch

[TwinHamster]

One of my most despised world maps can be found within LOZ: Wind Waker. I find any game that requires me to basically sail in a straight line for ten minutes to get to the next stage of the game to be a major turn down. What made this sailing worse was that after two minutes, you realize that you're seeing the same few frames over and over again. I also got lost the first few times I played without knowing how to activate the map. Ooh yeah, and I was trapped in a little whirl-pool thingy for five minutes before a squid finally spit me out. Traveling shouldn't have to take up more time than necessary.

[Valigarmander]

The Wind Waker had an interesting concept, but it didn't really play out as well as the developers would have liked. Sailing from island to island is cool, but it gets very tedious, and the islands are so tiny while the ocean is so damn big, it's easy to get lost unless you're checking your map every ten seconds.

[Moogle1]

I'm not sure why you feel overworlds are necessary or even good. They don't make much sense.

The Zelda series doesn't use overworld maps in the RPG sense. Wind Waker has unfortunate world design, but that's not quite what Leonhart is referring to.

Many RPGs use the overworld map to give the game a grander feeling without having to design so many maps. That is fine. But there are reasons not to have one: you might want to make the game feel smaller. Brave Fencer Musashi is an excellent example of a game that feels small: the action revolves around a little town and all of the game's dungeons are within five minutes by foot, most of them even closer than that. Chrono Cross also uses the map to show the game's events taking place in a very localized area.

You can also do away with world maps to make the world feel bigger. Secret of Mana is a decent example of this -- yes, it has a world map of sorts, but you can only access it by Flammie. Before that point, you're wandering around the world on foot. When you get the chance to look at the world map, you see all the areas that you wandered through before and fly over them in mere seconds. This makes the world "feel" bigger than a standard RPG where you are only flying a few times faster than it would take you to walk the same distance.

I don't mind world maps, but I'm also not a big fan of them. World maps tend to tell the player that the world is:

- Very sparsely populated. There are only a dozen cities in the entire world?
- Really small. You could walk around the standard RPG globe in about five minutes if there were a land bridge and no random encounters.
- Donut-shaped. This is really weird, but it makes things a lot easier for the programmers.
- Perpetually diurnal or flat. Night never falls on the RPG globe, or if it does, it falls at the same time for everyone.

We tend to ignore all of this as gamers, but all of the combined sillinesses of the genre are a barrier to entry for non-gamers. Even we have to suspend disbelief when we're walking on a world map, though.
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Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

[Joe Man]

One world map I thought was nice was the one in Golden Sun.

But yeah, I vote no world maps in general.
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"Everyone has 200,000 bad drawings in them, the sooner you get them out the better."
~Charles Martin Jones

Last edited by Joe Man on Fri Dec 13, 1957 1:21 am; edited 2,892 time in total

[Raekuul]

What I'm doing with Vomage Genesis is an overworld map that just sort of shows you where you are. It's semi-linear, but is really..

Maybe you should just see it.

http://veldania.castleparadox.com/pics/
click on susquon's world2.jpg
You start at b23 and work your way down to n20.
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A broken clock is still right twice a day.

[Leonhart]

Quite nice... a desert... a port town...
_________________
The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on.
- Robert Bloch

[msw188]

Funny, I had been thinking about the torus-shaped world, and was considering trying to incorporate some of the physical ramifications. In particular, I thought that this should mean that there is a section of the map that is always dim, corresponding to the 'inside' portion of the torus. This is because sunlight cannot reach it. Or, perhaps the world is a very large torus with the sun in the middle, and the torus rotates about it's 'circular axis' (imagine a donut with a wire running inside the dough making the complete circle of the donut, and then imagine twisting the donut around this wire in an 'inside-out' sort of way). This of course cannot make much sense unless the torus is very 'thin and long' (large 'overall' radius, small 'cross-sectional' radius, making for a large central hole; this also lessens the impact of the variable metric, ie. the different distances going around the outside of the torus versus going around the inside). This 'inside-out' rotation would be the cause of day and night.

All that said, in my game the world is supposed to be flat, and the edges of the map are actually magical in that they transport the traveler to the same spot on the opposite side (the reason for this is a mystery not even considered by any characters in the game until the VERY end).

As for traditional RPG world maps, physical problems aside, I like them to feel large and mostly untamed. This means I like having some fairly serious travel to do between kingdoms (with interventions and exploring), but ideally the world should be big enough to allow for that while having more than a dozen cities. This is not very practical for singular world maps (at least in the OHR), so I've begun thinking that the best possible way to go is to have town maps, and then maps for between each town, kind of like pokemon (I seem to remember it was something like this...). It would be a LOT of work, but it could be very cool.
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My first completed OHR game, Tales of the New World:
http://castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=161

This website link is for my funk/rock band, Euphonic Brew:
www.euphonicbrew.com

[Leonhart]

Town maps? Like this?


_________________
The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on.
- Robert Bloch

[msw188]

No, I was thinking of standard RPG style (think Final Fantasy 3/6) towns. Then when you left a town of that sort, you would enter a new map that was on the same scale, but would be of wilderness (as opposed to the standard world map that is supposed to be a 'zoomed out' view of the wilderness). There would be (at least) dozens of these 'wilderness' maps.
_________________
My first completed OHR game, Tales of the New World:
http://castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=161

This website link is for my funk/rock band, Euphonic Brew:
www.euphonicbrew.com

[Joe Man]

Ah, well this is along the same lines. I'll consider my topic different, however, since it's more generalized to all genres and not merely the cliches.
_________________
"Everyone has 200,000 bad drawings in them, the sooner you get them out the better."
~Charles Martin Jones

Last edited by Joe Man on Fri Dec 13, 1957 1:21 am; edited 2,892 time in total