Stories from Development: The Map System

Neat.

Wow. This is quite a series of development stories that have been released lately :o

Awesome reading! Cool!

i love doing maps, leveling up to end game is kinda boring but worth, would be cool to see something in addition to maps (not talking about uberlab since its boring...)

"

I doubt anyone in our community would disagree, but some Action RPG developers don't realise this and launch with a static world. Having random level layouts, random monsters and random events that occur within those levels means that players can repeat the same content over and over without feeling the same level of repetition that they would if the area was exactly the same each time.

LUL I guess vaults slipped by again.

"

final difficulty level completely flat in terms of area level, so you could play anywhere you wanted in the game. It was also very challenging in terms of monster difficulty. The goal was that players would have immense variety in where to farm

Gotta say, with the game as complete as it is now, I would totally play a "Nightmare" difficulty Wraeclast that's wholly the same level. The whole thing could start at, say, 70, and every time you complete Act X again it would increment by some amount and you'd start over. Quest rewards would need to be redone, but that's about it.

Hmmmmmmmm!

Nice!

"

EmptyPalms wrote:

I loved maps when they came out.

I was rather annoyed by the timing since they took away the Maelstrom of Chaos a few days before I'd've been done with the normal game and able to try it.

While I love the concept of maps as random areas of all sorts of layouts you can run over and over again.... and even more love the basic concept of an atlas of interconnected maps you progress within.... I think the current iteration of mapping has a lot of major flaws that realy detracts from my enjoyment of it.

1st - the concept of making maps a rare resource with value. I'd be ok if it was only unique maps that were rare and valuable, but pretty much all maps past a certain tier the game treats as a commodity. Being able to play the game at the level your want to play your character at should not be locked behind a scarcity gateway IMO. Special ultra lucrative unique maps are fine - I have no problem with perandus mannor or vinktar square being valuable and rare, but at the higher tiers, this becomes a problem with mapping in general. I shouldn't have to endlessly grind content of trivial difficulty because all challenging content is too expensive to run.

2nd - Your boss balancing has gotten horrible. The reward for killing them just is not there. This was compounded in 3.o when you jacked up their health by a huge amount while doing nothing to make it more rewarding to engage with. And now in Atlas, you imported a ton of multiphase complex boss fights from phase 2 of the act game..... now a boss with a ton of phases is neat and exciting when it's a significant encounter; but when it's guarding nothing and has no real loot, you are just sending a loud and clear signal that engaging with this encounter is a bad use of time. Making bosses not worth engaging with removes the 'end goal 'objective of each map.

3rd - Sextants - can you just scrap this attrocious and variety killing and strangulating sextant blocking mechanic already?