loftar wrote:Also, for the record, I do to no small degree agree with the point about the map being homogeneous, however I look at it a bit differently. What I mind, primarily, is that exploration is not a challenge. The only thing standing in your way is the odd tree, which you can simply walk around. I would love to be able to introduce some kind of structures that actually make it legitimately challenging to get between "areas" of the map, like mountain ranges or deep forests or stormy seas or whatever. The main problem is just how to actually make it difficult, in a fun way, to pass through such structures.
Ultimately, my ideal for the map is that it be boundless, basically. I've said it previously on quite a few occasions, but I've always wanted to make it such that new map is automatically generated whenever players close in on the edge, making the map literally boundless. Of course, I realize why we haven't made it thus yet, since that just makes people spread out and no meaningful interaction ensues, but I'd like to fix that problem rather than sidestep it, in the end. I imagine the "fix" would consist in incentives for player to flock together rather than disperse, be it in the form of boons from cooperation or from wanting to avoid the very harsh wilderness, or anything else.
which is awesome.
Don't these two points solve each other? If exploration is challenging enough, people will tend to band together for convenience.
Exploration itself is fun when done with friends, and this could be a thing too. It may sound lame, but appealing to the old school rpg party systems could fit really well here. One example would be placing challenges that require different character builds to solve. For example: stormy seas would need a player with high psyche to be crossed safely without damaging the ship; thickets would need a high perception character to spot hidden waypoints and prevent the party from walking in circles and spending too much energy, deserts would need high intelligence to identify randomly generated forageables and check if edible or poisonous, and so on.
And instead of being passive, it's as if players had one hearth-magic button for each attribute, which would have to be activated before crossing the challenging areas and would, of course, cost XP.
The point is that while the challenge itself isn't fun, the process of arriving at it and then solving it would be.
Besides, a few high risk high reward biomes could also make exploration interesting. I'm thinking of deserts and snow, basically. One would need to be fully geared to avoid small but constant HP hit due to cold or heat. However, being present in one of them would cause wear damage to your gear, eventually making you unprotected if you remain there for too long. The upside would be unique curios, ore, animals, stone and wood colors, etc. These are obviously directed to endgame characters, and would give them a source of challenge after they've built, crafted and done everything in the game and now just grind stats.
The infinite map generation you mention could be done in a way that people wouldn't spread out easily either. If the number of biome challenges increased proportionately to the distance from the central grids, that would limit player scattering. I think it could be implemented in a way that, while infinite in theory, in practice the map becomes finite because at some point players wouldn't have enough stats to cross the outer grids or survive in them.
And, of course, allowing us to make kingdoms unique and offer practical bonuses (like farming speed or special recipes) would definitely make people flock together too.
