WORLD MAPS

I personally love overworld maps, and I consider it a huge loss that so many modern RPGs don't include them. I actually think they are so important that I went to a great deal of trouble to make one work with RPG Maker XP. Yes, it's unrealistic, yes, it's somewhat archaic, and yes, it's an undeniable abstraction. Even so, I find that the overworld is a wonderful way to give a sense of scale to a game. In older RPGs, the player was free to explore a large area fairly early on, allowing for the player to do things at their own pace and get a real sense of scale. Consider Final Fantasy VI, where early on you're free to travel across an entire continent, or the feeling of expansiveness the player feels when they finally get out of Midgar in Final Fantasy VII.

Contrast that with, say, Final Fantasy X or XIII, where the player pretty much travels from one location to another in real time. Despite their other strengths, both of those games have been described as very linear, and in RPGs being too linear is almost always a bad thing. Final Fantasy XIII, with its frequent cutscene location hopping, is especially afflicted with this problem; there is never any sense of size or scale to the locations, which makes the game seem downright claustrophobic at times. The only time the game ever does open up is when it expands into a kind of overworld, and I've read several reviews saying that is the point where the game gets 'good'.

This is also why I've never cared for a map screen that was just a dotted line in RPGs. This system works well for action games, but just having the world map be a line from point A to point B seems like a missed opportunity to me. If the map is just a collection of interconnected locations, it feels more like the heroes are going on vacation rather than saving the world. If your game contains an epic world-spanning plot, then it's important to make the world a part of that game. Make it detailed and realized, with lots of optional things to explore.

That's what I think anyway.

But it does seem so strange for RPG games not to have one. There are ways to get a nice world map without overwhelming the player and the maker. In my first game, my map is too big. The second one I'm doing is still running into that problem, but it's smaller, and I did have to pair it down. Farther more, although you do have a point about the epic-world spanning plot, what if your game does include more than one country. Should you just map those areas, like in Xaran Myth, or map the whole world. Although there are many different styles of games to play the ones I've seen actually need a spanning world map, or it's equivalent.

Why does it seem strange? Just tradition? Outside of tradition, world maps are an extremely bizarre concept.

If your game includes more than two or three cities in each country, you're outside the norm already. You're not really including the whole country no matter what you do, unless your game takes hundreds of millions of hours of playtime to beat.

For something like a Final Fantasy game, I'd picture the player getting on a train or a carriage and asking to be taken to a certain destination. This is how travel between cities and countries typically works in real life. If you're heading to a cave or some other wilderness location, then you take a train or carriage to the nearest possible destination and walk on horseback or chocoboback until you can't any more, and then you walk on foot from that points. Presumably the portion of the journey that's done on foot is not more than a few miles so a world map should not be necessary. If the character really has to walk 1200 miles from town to the cave he wants to explore, might I suggest that you make an entire 100 hour game out of that journey? Seems more fitting, as it would likely take years.

I'd have to agree with you Lucidstillness. I've never actually played an RPG that didn't have a world map and so it seems strange to be without one. In trying to force the player to have actually try to walk around the world without it being condensed is just plain silly. Really, LockeZ what kind of RPGs do you play that don't need the medium of a world map. Even the Secret of Manas needed it for the Flammies when flying.

That's a cool list!

But no one is arguing that. Yes, it's okay for there to exist a graphical map of the world or at least the area taking place, and all of those do it in different ways, from selecting your area to flying to it or whatever. What we're arguing is this:

You know the classical Final Fantasy/other jrpg deal, the worldmap(The huge map that you walk across to get places). Your sprite is usually small, and you travel across some expansive map to get from place to place...
Do YOU like that?

Worldmap that we walk through to get places, as in Traditional RPG overworld style, usually fighting random encounters and going across to find the next dungeon.

I do want to try the "interconnected dots" idea for the world map of this game, to be honest. Not sure what it'll look like, or if I can get it to act the way it should, but that's a minor point, considering.

I personally believe that all games need a world map

I Honestly could not care if you have to walk on it like "final fantasy"
or if you just click on a place & go there like "Dragon age: Origins"

Either one, i dont care, as long as the game play is good

author=Adon237
Do you have any reasoning? Everyone else has brought up some reasons...


Thanks for all of the input guys, all of these things make it so hard to decide...

I think the general consensus is that whatever you decide, have a purpose for it. Don't make a game without a world map just to be different, and don't include one just for nostalgia. If your game is meant to be more exploratory I'd say go for it.