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[POLL] WORLD MAPS VS AREA MAPS

Poll

Do you prefer world maps or connected areas - Results

Either way
13
38%
World Map
7
20%
Connected areas
14
41%

Posts

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Hey again, just interested in knowing if you prefer traditional world maps or a setup like in FF 10 and Tales of Grace where every area closely connects to each other.

For me, as long as I have the option of quick travel, I don't mind either way.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
I was gonna be all "either way can work fine, it depends on the themes and motifs of your game and the scale of the adventure your heroes are on" and voted accordingly

but then I remembered I actually am totally sick of RPGs that are ridiculously huge scale and involve exploring the entire continent/world, because honestly it just shatters my suspension of disbelief to walk hundreds of miles from one location to the next, or to claim that an adventure is taking place on a worldwide scale but then only have one or two cities per country and only ten houses per city
World Map. From a debug standpoint, the biggest trouble I had (I re-merged a split game, resulting in any maps with duplicate numbers getting scrambled teleports) with with connected areas. Fixing the world map to town connections was cake.

Also, I remember Star Ocean (both the Super Famicom, and the PS2 one). They both had annoying habit of wandering aimlessly, with no saves until savepoint, and a constant closed in feeling.
One problem I'm encountering is when a game takes place in a small area of a continent and there's no logical reason why the party can't walk over the edge of the map.

You attempt to walk west into the Pyrisian Plains. The sinister magic of 'The Plot' drives you back.
@Bill Yeah, that's always made me a little iffy about how I feel about a game. That's why I personally prefer no world map, since it's easier to put a small scale barrier that actually makes sense.
You could always do the characters telling you off thing. It can be another valuable moment to show off the character personalities and interaction, if you play it right.

"We can't go this way."
vs
"Dude, where are you going? The tower's to the East remember? We'll reach Camelot if we go that way."
"Oh, yeah. Sorry, this map's really old. We should get a new one in the next town."
"Hey! I'll have you know I made that map and it is one hundred percent accurate, thank you very much! It's the map reader at fault."
"I know how to read a map! This piece of rag is practically falling apart! What's this stain? Blood?"
"There'll be more than just those few drops on it if you keep bad-mouthing my skills like that!"
"Whoa, okay guys, calm down. Let's just get our bearings and head East, okay? We need to get there before the sun sets or we'll be swarmed by monsters."
"Yeah, fine. Let's go before he leads us into the middle of a lake or something."
"..."

Hell, this way you can reference other places that they'll visit later on without having to just resort to books, and show that they know of the world they live in too. And if you don't want the conversation on the actual world map itself, teleport them to a mini map (like with the Yuffie events in FF7) and have it play out there.

At the end of the day it's not what type of travel you pick but how you choose to use it that matters. I prefer world maps/no encounters myself, but I'm not averse to travelling through connected areas. Unless it's like FFX because that I hated.
I really don't care either way. My primary gripe is that you have some means of faster travel, be it an airship, boat, or ship on the world map, or a teleport system on the connected maps.
I choose either or because I can be perfectly fine with traveling across an expansive map to reach the next city, and moving linear isn't always so bad either. My issue comes in when the World Map has you traveling a long distance until your next destination, and the encounter rate is a battle every seven steps. Likewise, I can't stand when using area to area and each map is just dull/boring/nothing to do/isn't interactive besides walking. Finally I share a problem for both sides when means of travel is zero throughout the entire game. After moving fifteen areas over, I don't honestly feel like travelling back by foot. Hand me an airship/teleportation module of some kind or something.

Those issues aside, I have no particular preference of one over the other.
Personally, I prefer connected areas, no offense to those who prefer world maps. My reasoning is that world maps seem to make it so that each area such as towns or dungeons are stand alone sub zones where when you're done exploring it, you don't need to bother with it again and the only connection between them is the world map where you exit to to go to another area.

Connected areas offer more mystery and exploration. For example, finding out that Lost Woods is connected to Goron City. Sure world maps can rarely offer secret passages connected different areas but they usually need to use some excuse like it goes underground, in any case very limiting. It's just my personal opinion however.
I like Zelda's connected maps too. Even though I don't mind back tracking with Zelda, the series makes sure to reduce backtracking by warping. (So do a lot of games with big worlds.)

Yes speaking of warping, I just thought of another point that might support connected areas. How about the freedom to choose where to leave a warp in correspondence to where you should put a broken bridge in the game?
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