(May be not so) minor annoyance: the world map has a lot of issues

Nothing game breaking, but the world map is frustrating me, so I decided to make a write up of all the issues (I'd rather do this than play maps...).

TLDR: this thing is in my opinion way (WAAAAYY!!) too over-engineered. Go back to basics.

I was checking stuff at the same time as I was writing this up, and I found out something I don't quite understand, and that could be on the level of loading every player's inventory in Diablo IV. See red section below (I can't be bothered to reorgonise the whole thing)

- The biggest is probably making it the same UI as the atlas map. Not sure if that's what causes the loading screen... of variable duration, even when switching between acts (and I'm playing on an SSD with a beefy enough conf, this is server-side in my opinion seeing how it's variable) but if so just put the atlas on a dedicated UI. It's not that big of a deal, but overtime it's really annoying

- The ground / underground levels do not always line up, and the whole thing ends up being confusing and annoying. They should be lined up. Look at the black chamber / molten Vault in Act 3 for example. It doesn't make sense. I'd say just get rid of it, I don't see what it brings.

- Some side content indicators seem to not work properly : in act 3 (both normal and cruel), the "troubled camp" chain are still lit up, even though I found the camp and spoke with the NPC. Cleared the whole maps to make sure, seems broken. Same with "Rootredge" in the Sanswept Marsh and "Ignagduk" in the Azak Bog.

- While we're on those indicators, they're really not that legible. I'd make them pop more with a clear sign that they're done or not. Also make them closer to their "node" maybe, sometimes it's not clear to which zone they belong... And also their behaviour is not consistent between acts 1 & 2 and act 3 : in the formers when you hover over them they (sort of...) hightlight their map, not in the latter. That highlight isn't very clear anyway, it only shows the node's connexions... so yeah, that should probably be clearer too...

- This shouldn't be an issue in 1.0 [Edit: well actually it could be... keep reading], but for some reason Act 2 goes West to East, and Act 2 Cruel goes East to west. Why ? Who Knows... Actually now that I look at it, all the Act are different between normal and cruel... Are these procedurally generated too ??? Why ??

Wait a second. Might this not be the explanation for the loading times? Does each player opening their world map query the server to generate a world map based on a seed specific to the playthrough ??? Who came up with this?

- On the right of the map there's a shortcut to port directly to the Chaos Trial, but not to Sanctum. Why ? Is it only me because I straight up ignored it and got my second ascension from Sekhema ?

The map is way way over thought. It fails at the one thing you need it to be, a map.

The simple paper looking map from PoE with the lines and simplicity is so much easier to see. This map pops up( after loading??) and I don't know where the hell I am or what is happening.

I am super annoyed when opening map [U] and waiting for it to load. This has to be changed. I don¨t care if they make the map and atlas more basic, less ''pretty'', but make it load instantly.

+1

+1

They have a perfect system in PoE1, clear, easy to read, easy to move around.
Now its a mess. D4 was a really bad one, but honestly PoE2 is even worse, its probably the worse I have ever seen in any arpg.

Act2 is just unreadable btw. On top of the other trillion problems with the map.

+1 I have an old pc so I can accept some long loading times when entering new zones, but 10 seconds loading when opening the world map is not on my end.

I mean look at this garbage. This stinks of procedural generation, and my hunch is the map image doesn't live on your drive or on the server, but is generated with each query...