Haven 2.0: "Hafen"

[Sarge]

However, as I wrote in IRC, while I would like to see a much larger world per se, I would also want it to be much more challenging to traverse, so that it may actually feel smaller, especially to new players who wouldn't be able to traverse the rivers, hillsides, deep forests, wolf territories and whatnot else there may be. Preferably, I would like different characters to be differently abled in traversing different types of terrain, so that the "effective topology" of the same area of the world might actually be quite different for different players.

Nice!

[Potjeh]

I forget, is it 3D? I much prefer Haven's sprites to Salem's models.

[Sarge]

I forget, is it 3D? I much prefer Haven's sprites to Salem's models.

They never said, not that I know of anyways. I'm with you (and most others as far as I have seen) on that one.

[LadyV]

I have to agree no 3d.

[painhertz]

Make roads give an actual travel speed bonus both with carts/ on foot. Also have them slowly decay if not used. this would cause the building of roads in between settlements for trade purposes and would then open up massive areas of game play for robberies/hijackings/tolls/ etc etc. If people still want to travel off the beaten path, slowly, to somewhere else by all means but one of the greatest civilizing "technologies" in history were roads and it always irked me how Haven just kind of ignored that aspect of history.

Would also love to see thievery "ala" Ultima Online, lock picking, poisoning of weapons/food for assassination purposes, various sicknesses and perhaps even plagues that can jump host from animals into the populace of a village wiping it out, medicines; Haven despite to this day still being one of my #1 rated video games of all times left a lot on the cutting room floor so to speak. And to agree with what is probably the majority, fuck 3d, fuck it hard and unlubed in it's awful ass.

Question: Are you guys starting entirely from scratch with Hafen or is it just a rework of Haven?

New Years is 12 days away so I know we all look forward to our first screenshot and ripping you guys apart if it sucks ass. Happy Holidays!

[APXEOLOG]

As for me i prefer 3d, since it is easier to add new content/mechanics to 3d games (good height map like in salem actually). (for example to add horses to the hnh you should redraw many sprites, while in 3d you should just add new skeleton animation). Of course there's speedup solutions for 2d too, by anyway 3d seems to be better.
The only problem with 3d is performance, because you cannot prerender levels and everything should be calculated on update. But there's lot's of optimisations too.

[Nate_H]

2d can be problematic to work with, like if the devs intend to sell comestics or add a new mob.

It is also important to attract new players, and nice graphics do a lot of good.

[ramones]

Gameplay > graphics.

[Potjeh]

Thing is, sprites can be made to look a LOT better than 3D models, since there's no polygon count concerns.

[jordancoles]

I like the part where I can see everything on my screen and where I'm not fighting with Loftar's idea of "good" camera angles