What actually is the atlas of worlds?

Am I really travelling to dreams? Or other worlds? Where am I going?

This world is an illusion, exile...

There is only numbers to raise, bars to fill and sockets to link.

Zana talks about it as different worlds or dimensions.

The player is exiled from society only to find a bigger world out there.

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I3L00D wrote:

Am I really travelling to dreams? Or other worlds? Where am I going?

I haven't checked in with the lore lately so this might be retconned by now, but the clues scattered throughout the main campaign indicate that 'Maps' are dreams ('reveries') made explorable by way of a certain device (the Reverie device invented by Malachai). Part of that process makes the dream tangible enough to bring back items (hence the ability to loot them).

One of the most interesting items in the game to me is the proto-Map created by Maligaro, to whom Malachai taught 'conscious dreaming' and how to make his own reverie (by way, I believe, of the Transmutia Device) -- and that the process involved Maligaro using his own body, specifically his 'viscera' (internal organs, specifically intestines). That Maligaro, that poor tortured artiste, would feel so drawn to escape the world by making a sanctuary by inscribing his dream (in the 'may your dreams come true' sense) onto his own body...it's all so delightfully pathetic. Talk about giving it your all -- and for what? Some shitty mess of miasma and malformed flora. Maybe there's some truth to Tolkien's sentiment of evil being unable to create anything new, only corrupt what good has already created. I find that a bit simplistic but Maligaro definitely embodies this notion.

Not all Maps are made in such a manner, but that one has such a beautiful combination of form and function.

___


As for what the Atlas itself is, I hope someone more versed in post-Shaper lore can shed some light there because I lost interest in Maps entirely once GGG had the lofty but I think futile notion to create a 2-dimensional representation of a spatially, geographically mutable concept such as dreamscape. They tapped Lovecraft (oh-so-heavily on the shoulder) but seemed to have learned nothing from what he wrote: to 'map' alien geometry leads to madness, because it's impossible. Even the board games tend to shy away from being so presumptuous as to map Lovecraftian dimensions, and present the other realms as a series of cards, events with no real time or space. No order and no sense.

The whole notion of the Atlas of Worlds reminds me of Sagan's discussion of flatlanders, which renders it a strangely dull, pedestrian move from otherwise visionary developers who at least started to represent higher dimensional space in their game. But in the service of perfectly functional, perfectly lacklustre game design, they tethered their most brilliant invention (Maps themselves) to what amounts to a digital piece of paper. They can change it now and then, but what they've done is to deny the most basic rule of dreamscape: it's always changing. I can only imagine Malachai's scorn at GGG's misplaced hubris.

So my answer to the query, 'what actually is the Atlas of Worlds?' is 'a mistake', but as you may have gleaned, I have...rather strong feelings about the matter.

why people use fandom wiki .......

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neohongkong wrote:

why people use fandom wiki .......

Because it IS the official PoE wiki and not everyone knows of poewiki.net .

Sorry, I had no idea. Are those quotes made irrelevant by my using that particular wiki?

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Mikrotherion wrote:

Because it IS the official PoE wiki and not everyone knows of poewiki.net .

There is no "official PoE wiki".

Fandom has not been maintained for ages.

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xjjanie wrote:

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Mikrotherion wrote:

Because it IS the official PoE wiki and not everyone knows of poewiki.net .

There is no "official PoE wiki".

Fandom has not been maintained for ages.

It has the "Official Wiki" badge, which they only use when they have an agreement with the game's developers/ IP holder.