WORLD MAPS

Posts

Pages: first prev 123 next last
Mostly I think there are a lot of games where seeing three cities on an otherwise uninhabited continent just feels really silly. A free-roaming world map first gives me the impression that I can go anywhere; subsequently learning that the entire rest of a sizable landmass is, except for one or two places, so uninteresting that it can't even be visited is a juxtaposition and a letdown. (Older games do get a bit more of a pass from me on this, I'm not sure whether that's just because they tend to necessarily leave more up to the imagination.)

By contrast:
- the game could take place in a small area;
- there could be many interesting places to visit (extreme example: Oblivion)
- a map like Baldur's Gate's is much better at leaving you the impression that PCs don't have the option of exploring an entire region in detail and have to pick and choose where they go.
Any of these tends to be much better at leaving you the impression that stuff is still going on even where the player doesn't or can't specifically see it, which is usually a pretty important impression to keep up.
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.

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
You say that adding an overworld adds a sense of scale, but you don't say why you think a sense of scale is important. Several of the people who dislike world maps have said that their main reason for disliking them is that they create a grand sense of scale. And I agree. A game taking place over such a large area is completely absurd from a story perspective, breaks suspension of disbelief when the game acts as though the visitable locations are the only ones in existance, prevents the game from having a unified setting, and destroys a huge portion of the game's atmosphere because it feels like the locations are too different and distant from each-other.

I cannot really see any positive side to giving the game such a ridiculously huge sense of scale.

Let me be more clear: You say "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." I say "World maps are neither detailed nor realized, and 99.9% of games should not include epic world-spanning plots in the first place.."
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.
Well, I happen to like epic world-spanning plots, but to each his own. I think a sense of scale is important for any game that is working within a given scale. It wouldn't make much sense, for example, if Arkham Asylum was an overhead RTS. Similarly, Chrono Trigger wouldn't make any sense if the entire game took place inside one town; the story demanded a huge sense of scale with a vast array of locations, spanning not only space but time. I think Chrono Trigger and games like it worked pretty well.

Now, I'll grant you that an overworld map, even if it is very detailed, is always going to be an oversimplification. Personally, I'm okay with that; it's just a gaming convention, similar to power ups, saved games and every other unrealistic device that serves to make the game more playable. If one were to force the player to trek in real time across 1000 km of mostly similar terrain for the sake of realism, I imagine the game wouldn't be much fun. An abstraction or two is necessary even in the most realistic of games.

But I'm not saying that RPGs without overworld maps are necessarily doing anything wrong, just so long as the developers aren't just avoiding using one out of some sense of it being dated. To go back to Final Fantasy XIII (sorry XIII fans, I actually don't really dislike this game, but this is my biggest problem with it), that game's sense of scale demanded some kind of world map and its absence was very noticeable. Basically, I 'm just saying developers shouldn't shun the tools and conventions at their disposal, as doing so is akin to trying to reinvent the wheel.
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
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 don't believe any RPG that has used a world map has done so with the intention of using a modern real-word global scale. World maps are something that was created to help keep things organized in RPGs, giving everything a 'relative' sense of distance. If there is a real-world basis for it, it's the isolated towns and settlements that existed in medieval Europe and similar places, which reflected a very different attitude of what the 'known world' was. In such cases, it was entirely feasible to take an, albeit arduous, journey from one community to the next. On average, a person can travel about 50 Km per day on foot in ideal conditions if they spend about 12 hours marching, and given the technological limitations of the time and the absence of roads in many places, this meant that communities were separated but were generally not too far apart (interestingly, I've read that horse travel really isn't faster than traveling by foot if one is going at a steady pace; it just allows for a heavier load).

Naturally, the more sophisticated the culture, the easier it is to have communities farther apart, so it would seem very absurd to have someone walk across a continent the size of North America in a modern-day RPG (unless, of course, this abstraction was explained somehow in-game).

So, when a 'traditional' RPG has a huge number of different biomes and areas, it's really an extrapolation on this medieval attitude towards distance, which is thematically appropriate even if it's not scientifically accurate.
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.
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
How is it even possible for you to never have played a game without a world map? Do they even make games with world maps any more? I can only think of three that are on systems later than the PSX!

Fine, okay, let me sort my entire personal RPG library into world map styles for you unwashed masses. This list is sorted by primary method of travel. In a few cases, the game starts out as a series of interconnected areas but late in the game you obtain a vehicle or teleportation spell that lets you quickly travel between them. But since you can still walk on foot, I consider that more important.

Traditional world map:
Final Fantasy 1 through 9
Chrono Trigger
Chrono Cross
Lufia 1 and 2
Wild ARMs 1 through 3
Wild ARMs: Alter Code F
Dragon Warrior 1 through 8
Xenogears
Suikoden 2

Directly connected areas:
Final Fantasy Adventure
Sword of Mana
Secret of Mana
Seiken Densetsu 3
Final Fantasy 10 through 12
Final Fantasy Legend 1 through 3
Earthbound
Earthbound Zero
Mother 3
Diablo 2
World of Warcraft
Dungeon Siege
Castlevania series, except
Mario & Luigi series
Breath of Fire 5
Chocobo's Dungeon 2
Ehrgeiz
Etrian Odyssey
Fallout 3
Pokemon Series
Vagrant Story
The World Ends With You

Areas chosen from a list or menu:
Final Fantasy 10-2
Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals
Xenosaga Episodes 1 through 3
Children of Mana
Disgaea
Disgaea 2
Disgaea 3
Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor
Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey
Knights of the Old Republic
Knights of the Old Republic 2

Interconnected dots on a map:
Final Fantasy Tactics
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
Final Fantasy Tactics A2
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
Super Mario RPG
Paper Mario
Dragon Age: Origins
Dragon Age 2
Legend of Mana
Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis
SaGa Frontier
SaGa Frontier 2
Romancing Saga
Unlimited Saga
Kingdom Hearts
Kingdom Hearts 2
Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones
My World My Way
Suikoden 3
Suikoden Tierkreis

No backtracking:
Final Fantasy 13
FF7: Dirge of Cerberus
Fire Emblem (GBA)
Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance
Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn

Can't remember, or never got far enough to be sure:
Neverwinter Nights
Neverwinter Nights 2
Parasite Eve
Parasite Eve 2
Front Mission 3
Secret of Evermore


You now have a complete list of every RPG I own. Plus a dozen or so that I have in my roms folder.
Yes, bringing up the lists like that do make your point, but there's still also points in there as well. Like I said about the Mana Series and games, they still require a world map when you are flying, and although the Manas are not world map sprawling, they still cover an entire world, and that still requires showing the different types of cultures in the world. So in a way, the result is the same. They still cover an entire world, but not with the medium of the world map.
Ocean
Resident foodmonster
11991
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.
Well, if a world map really is just a gigantic open space then it is going to be boring, just like any other map that is a gigantic open space will be boring. There is no reason that the overworld can't be diverse and interesting; it is, after all, another kind of dungeon.

One of the best overworld maps I have ever seen is Final Fantasy VI's; the map looks great, there are rarely any really huge distances between one plot area and the next, and there are tons of side areas and extras that could only be implemented with the use of a world map. It's an almost perfect example of this device used correctly.
author=Lucidstillness
Well, if a world map really is just a gigantic open space then it is going to be boring, just like any other map that is a gigantic open space will be boring. There is no reason that the overworld can't be diverse and interesting; it is, after all, another kind of dungeon.
LOL...

You make a very good point. So what is the person who set up this thread really trying to say, is the person trying to talk about the actual sprawling world map that shows different places and different cultures, or the idea of a vast world that has different cultures and places, because as LockeZ in his own way try to point out, there are ways of getting the same effect without using the world map. But I think the result is still the same.
I think it really comes down to what works best. If a game's action primarily takes place inside towns or dungeons, then an interactive world map seems pretty superfluous. On the other hand, if the game is a 'road trip' across an entire fantasy world, then a world map can be valuable or in some cases invaluable in bringing the player into the gaming experience, as well as organizing the game world into areas that are easily understood.
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21806
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.
Well, dotted line maps are not something I really dislike vehemently. I said I don't like it when RPGs are too linear, but there is something to be said for convenience.

In fact, I've taken a page from this design choice for my own game. I've placed roads on my overworld, connecting the various different communities and important areas. These roads are free of random attacks, so if the player just wants to get from point A to point B they won't have to worry about getting into any tough battles. Of course, this also allows the player to leave the beaten path at any time, to do things like explore optional dungeons for treasure, so I'm hoping this will be the best of both worlds.
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
Adon237
if i had an allowance, i would give it to rmn
1743
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...
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.
Pages: first prev 123 next last