Hey folks!
Recently we had a discussion about furthering the development and improving the world map. Our writer Jonas gave an idea of reducing the number of world locations so the maximum number of moves to reach the end of a zone is lower - previously our critical path was about 22 locations, and now we’re reducing that to around 14. The idea was given as a way to make each location more impactful but is also causing a number of side effects.
One of these is it reduces the total number of world locations. Having fewer locations on the map makes it easier to parse where to go. We had to increase the size of the models that represent the locations because they were too small now that there were fewer of them - the map seemed too sparse.
Another effect this change has is to the frequency of other node types. In the old 22-long path, the Arcane and Heroic world locations (where you get encounters related to guardian cores and heroes) we’re fairly spread apart, with a lot of regular encounters in between. In the new 14-long path, you’ll get combat or special encounters much more often. We’ve also changed our internal random generation code to only spawn Arcane and Heroic locations randomly, Cities are now manually placed in the world to allow for known locations across runs. Each run will also feature a different layout of location connectivity, so not every run will be exactly the same.
If you’ve kept track of the development and some previous screenshots, you might have noticed these screenshots showing a different model for the locations. We’ve updated the models for the locations to follow a similar style, make them more consistent and solve some problems the previous models had, like being hard to parse from directly above or specific angles. The new models are also animated, which really makes the world feel much more alive.
The world steadily progresses it's state of corruption as you go through it. This manifests in some locations on the world becoming corrupted, which changes their visuals and the encounter at the location. Corrupted locations have a much higher chance of producing a combat encounter, and Heroic and Arcane locations will in most cases require combat in order to get to the reward (that being a Hero or Guardian Essence).
Thanks for reading! If you want to chat with us, we’re all on our Discord server, and I occasionally post stuff on my Twitter.
MarkoP