Today in Swords and Sandals Immortals development I want to talk about the overworld map. Now the first time ( aside from Crusader's moving armies around), our individual gladiators can now explore the wider continent of Brandor and its many interesting locations and cities.
When our game begins, we find ourselves camped outside Willard's Sound, a small fishing peninsula village on Brandor's western coast ( as seen in the second picture above). You can see in this picture there are a familiar set of circular buttons to press, each taking you to a caravan shop, the Fight Selector, or the overworld map. Each shop you visit will cost you one hour of time, fights will cost you 3.
Leaving the town, you will find yourself now on the overworld map. You can zoom in and out of the map with the mouse wheel, as well as pan around the map. At first, you'll see a few towns to visit and the rest will be shrouded by a 'fog of war' ( which is slightly translucent so you can still see the map itself. )
As you approach locations on the map, they will become visible to you, and will stay visible as destinations for the remainder of the game. Each destination takes a certain amount of hours to reach. Close locations like Shackleford are five hours walk away, cities like Braxis will take many days to reach.
As you walk along the map ( by clicking on the location, our hero auto walks towards it, and the hours pass.) . If the clock turns to midnight, they will make camp for the night wherever they are. The Battle Caravan will follow after you to major cities and towns, but it will not visit dungeons, adventure locations and so on ( when you encamp halfway between a city, you'll be solo etc.). There may also be random encounters ( bandit attacks and so on).
Once you reach a location, you will see a parchment popup with a sketch of the location, the option to have an adventure or to potentially enter the location itself - each location has a 'level' lock, meaning you must be at least a certain gladiator level before you can enter and go in fights.
You can tell how far away and what level the location is by glancing at the icons on the map, the shield represents the level and the hourglass the distance to travel.
There are also other locations you can visit as mentioned above. Mini 'choose your own adventure' style scenarios as seen in previous S&S games like Crusader, Pirates and S&S 2 will make their return as well as (not totally confirmed) small dungeons to explore with potentially cool rewards.
Cheers, Oli