A Discussion on 9.0 Region Design

[Salvo 1831]

Based, Minecraft's freedom of construction has rarely been used to its fullest.

[Anore 2006]

19 hours ago, Xarkly said:

Dead Space: This is probably one of the most prevalent issues in current map design. I always find it weird how we’ve made such a big discussion about what size to make the next map without mentioning the fact that so much of our current map (more so than maps that came before it) is dead and useless space. Whether it’s the northern mountains, or the stretch of deserts in the south, there’s a huge amount of land on this map that serves utterly no purpose. They’re not settled on, there’s no narrative purpose to them, and, more often than not, they’re not even interesting to look at. Why do we build space that has no purpose?

 

Dead space is definitely a huge problem on Almaris. Whether it is dead because it is too far from regions that are typically active and desirable or even just dead space that is unbuildable or even just desirable to build on.

 

 

If we look at the Northern Continent for example, we have the Volcano Biome, the Ice Spikes, Cloud Temple, Swamps, and to be honest that entire jungle biome taking up 40% of the map, and it is almost entirely unusable, non-traversable and undesirable to a majority of prospective settlements. That's not even taking into account the mountains that divide half of the map in a way that doesn't feel like a natural divider as the mountains are so wide and when an entire tile is taken up by a mountain the only reason any nation bought them is for their internal game of EU4 to create a border of separation between them and other Nations.

 

19 hours ago, Xarkly said:

• Unremarkable is the Norm: I mentioned that generic real-world biomes with little engaging detail like plains were fine for settlement regions -- this is because the settlement is the engaging detail, and the focal point of the landscape is whatever city is in the vicinity. However, when this same design philosophy is extended to secondary regions, the near entirety of the map (outside the fringe dead space mentioned above) is reduced to mostly fields, hills, and sparse woodlands without settlements serving as the main attraction. This also contributes to dead space, and makes most of the map just … uninteresting. 
• Watered-Down Biomes: There’s nothing necessarily wrong with using real-world or generic biomes, but I think, if you look at a lot of these biomes critically, they’re not so much an array of real-world biomes, but just small variations on boring old plains (especially in the north and east of the map). Our forests, for the most part … aren’t really forests. They’re just roads flanked with occasional trees that don’t really offer any real different experience in terms of traversal. Overall, our use of real-world/generic biomes is generally lacking, too, especially outside of settlement regions (again, where there is no other focus to the land so it becomes almost dead space).

 

This has definitely been the issue in the design for the majority of "plains" landscapes on the entire east side of the map, the only notable areas while traveling through the landscape are the settlements that are situated there. There are no key features in the landscape, even if we have plains, having no viable water features or interesting landmarks in there terrain leaves the map feeling empty and boring. There is a severe lack of thick forested areas on the map, with the only one at map launch (that wasn't in a jungle) was kind of here, 

 

And lets be honest, that wasn't put on the map by Junar while he was world painting, it was done by Grool and Esterlen after the fact. The core problem here is that trees were splattered around the map at launch and had impact on the map and how people traveled through it other than just filling the empty space. Without thick forests around various parts of the plains biomes they just feel like long stretches of flat land and relies too much on the players to make it look better.

 

On 8/27/2022 at 9:22 PM, Xarkly said:

Creativity is not Compromise: I’ve mentioned a lot how these generic plain biomes are best for settlement building, and that this is fine, but I think it’s also worth flagging that this isn’t always 100% true. You can have settlements built on regions that do not conform to the normal unremarkable plain terrain -- it just takes a bit of common sense in the design process, and not making the terrain utterly inhospitable (like the Rimeveld, for example). You can have settlements built even on floating islands, and coordinate with certain races pre-launch -- for example, we could design a great-tree forest (think Attack on Titan’s forest of giant trees) for them to build their settlement in.

(just refering to all nations and settlements as settlements for consistency sake)

 

They key here is going to be designing regions that can still have these exaggerated high fantasy elements while also accounting for multiple areas within each biome or region that a settlement could go on. Not having a single region on the new map that couldn't sustain a settlement because the terrain was world painted for screenshots and renders and not a roleplay server. We should know at this point what kind of terrain works for settlements at this point, we've seen builds on all sorts of terrain for 10 years now. One of the big improvements that needs to be made this time around at least at in the months leading up to map launch is more transparency once the map is world painted. Giving players and community leaders more view of the map so that they may better choose a location to settle and giving them more time to build their settlements (not during finals week hopefully).

 

On 8/27/2022 at 9:22 PM, Xarkly said:

Corner Syndrome: For some reason, there’s a persisting trend of map philosophy of trying to shove some regions in a corner of the map where they’ll rarely be accessed by anyone. This has often been done throughout most maps in recent memory. Why would we take the regions that might arguably take the most amount of work and be the most interesting to explore, and relegate them to a place on the map that is far from optimised? I take the view that interesting regions should be actively woven into the well-travelled roads of our map.

 

Two sort of ways to address corner syndrome, one is to have a more interconnected map that leaves these more interesting biomes to be more connected to areas of the map that are more active but also not just leaving the high fantasy elements to the edge of the map because you want things to be more centralized. Even in a simple plains biome you can still throw high fantasy elements into it. On Almaris is seems that any cool landscape that players would like to explore were either massive which then kills some of the uniqueness, on the edge of the map, or never utilized by story team. This ended up just creating dead zones as no one wanted to build on these zones because they were first, utilization second.

 

On 8/27/2022 at 9:22 PM, Xarkly said:

Verticality: This is just a short point, but our maps have neglected to explore verticality in our region designs. I’m not talking about some hills and mountains for the Dwarves, but regions with actual depth - like a canyon, for example, with explorable and traversable land both above and below.

 

With the new update and having more access to greater elevations, the new map should definitely utilize this and create elevation changes between biomes/regions but not just on the large scale, even within biomes there can be cliffs, ravines, cave systems, hell even floating landscape bits, Even those types of verticality implementations can be done with settlements in mind. I think many communities have a history of building flat square cities on the server but I think that is done for two reasons: Its easier considering the weird verticality and elevation changes we have on parts of the map are not super usable but more importantly most of the map is flat anyway, so why should players have to be any different. Next map definitely needs to go in a different direction with this. 

On 8/27/2022 at 9:22 PM, Xarkly said:

Interest & Identity: Lastly, a map like Almaris - with its abundance of generic, watered-down regions, extremely poorly-implemented narrative regions, and its colossal expanse of dead space - isn’t interesting, and doesn’t infuse it with a sense of identity. This is probably more just a personal thing, but I think a map should have a memorable design and, as I’ll speak about below, have features that actually stand out (in a good way).

 

Huge flop with Almaris, it had character in the planning phase, but when the original world painter fell through and Junar stepped up, there was no further communication between world team and story team. Junar painted the continent shape that was previously drawn and then used concept art that was decided on before and the primary reference. We built colossal structures like the Tomblands but at map launch since ST was kept so out of the loop on map development we launched Almaris with no story, and no narrative elements for players to care about the map. This resulted in some nations continuing to play a bit of EU4 with their tiles and focus more on expansion and politics then the world around them. 

[warlord of filth 7713]

the current harvest confederation's forest is better and more atmospheric than anything that has been on the server for the past 10 years :X

 

i think high fantasy biomes are corny and never done well

 

we should outsource map dev to one of those legitimately good PMC world painters instead of shittily doing everything in-house, lotcers buy aether vip for the worst donation perks ive ever seen, getting a bunch of players to donate for a legitimately well-done map would be ez

[Elennanore 2723]

On 8/28/2022 at 4:57 PM, argonian said:

It's important to avoid Theme Park World though. A common trend in LOTC maps is to have flat grassy plains as the default, and then they go through a shopping list of biomes, adding them to different corners of the map. It makes all the untouched (or barely touched) parts of the map extremely dull, while the few biomes there are are then exaggerated. Every mountain has to be unscalable, every forest has to have gigantic trees that block out the sun entirely, etc.

 

The map leak was pretty worrying because it looked like every mountain was part of a gigantic range designed to separate nations from each other (why???), all the interesting biomes were shoved to the corners of the map, the snowy part was a clear wasteland, etc.

 

A greater number of less drastic biomes and terrain features would be in order IMO.

Nub wae, DM me the map leak you saw, I wanna see - Elenna-nórë#7561

[Faramith 8]

Just bring back Athera lol and you'll see how everything is perfect. We only need Athera 2.0