Arelith

The recent pattern the last few years or many years has been to expand, making more zones, areas, make this city bigger, more rooms and so on. I agree that more content is good, more to do. It seems to be the trend in all games, open world games the map has to be bigger than the last open world game that came out. But when is big, too big for Arelith?

When it comes to massive open world games, there is also a lot of dead zones, just mass emptiness of nothing. That comes with Arelith as well, the new expanded and huge settlements can often be ghost towns of just NPC's.
So many new areas and zones that I have barely or never run into anybody in the wild while I am doing writs. I lvled a character to 18-19, doing all the popular writs, playing in decent high popular times and I never ran into anyone else.
Same goes for my new lvl 14 character, it favors those who have ooc friends, meetups who can login together and find hunting parties in other means. Yeah, finding a group in a town works but I also loved to make friends or meet new people while I was out in the wild, bumping into people. It just seems to rarely happen these days.

I would feel like Arelith has doubled in size, double the size of most or all settlements, I would understand if the population of Arelith was growing steadily, but it feels the numbers have been the same for years now, still healthy but the same I still find empty and available rooms in a lot of settlements.

I been playing since 2009-10 I recently started playing again and just maybe have to get used to it, and maybe I am being biased because I loved the small, quaint areas and I didn't need to walk four or five areas just to get where I was going.
I just worry that the map size is just so massive these days, that its just more common to lens, teleport, summon, spend the little 3-4k of gold so you don't have to walk 15-20 minutes to where you want to go

As I said in another thread my preference is for more condensed 'settlement' areas, so as to bring player together, and much larger wilds.

Large map sizes are of course a matter of preference, but as with Skal I do personally prefer them, and the real exploration RP that comes with with it.

I try to design the module to ensure that everyone passes through the same few 'hubs' to ensure players meet (Skaljard Village, Mayfields, Earthkin Village, Andur Hub) but at the same time have larger zones to explore and discover.

When it comes to resource placement, and 'rare spawns' (of which there are now a great many), large areas allow me to place them, and thus put unusual content in to be occasionally discovered - something that wouldn't be possible with small areas. Large areas also make horses more of a commodity.

I do think it is essential though, to allow players a faster means of travel, and both portals and caravans provide that.

Finally there is the current issue of NWN's asset limit. This, as we recently discovered when the surface server broke, is a hard limit on the number of files a module on NWN can take, of 16,000, something that caused all kinds of issues when we broke it. Currently an area takes up 2 of these, so four small areas would take up 8, the same space in a single area, only 2. Despite our best efforts we are now having to build with that cap in mind, which means more NPCS sharing the same conversation (such as many merchants basically saying the same thing), trying to combine a number of our scripts, and reducing the area file count by using fewer larger areas, than a greater amount of smaller ones.

Ultimately though, as I said before, this comes down to taste, and my own is for large wilderness areas to get lost in. I won't dispute that in settlements it is another issue (specifically Cordor's cultural district), but for the most part I think ours are designed very well - I don't actually mind open space in settlements so long as a) They contain something for players who do go there to do and b) the settlement itself has built in choke points where players are sure to encounter one-another.

I usually meet at least a few people when out and about. There is one sure fire way to make outdoor encounters more likely but thus far nobody wants to do it and screams bloody murder when anyone dares to suggests it... but that's for a different thread.

Irongron wrote: Sun Jan 26, 2020 11:51 pm ...large wilderness areas to get lost in.

The more the merrier. Can't have enough of them.

Unfortunate that there’s a hard limit on that stuff. Is it possible that they would ever up the limit or is it something that can’t be done?

Regarding the topic, I’m a fan of large wilderness areas with central hubs as well. It does give a better exploration feel to the game.