Eagles view map, looking good!

[Nartwak]

Yes. Would you like one?

[Musopticon?]

Gosh, I'd sure do, mister.

Edited January 10, 2006 by Musopticon?

[Nartwak]

Hell yeah!

[Musopticon?]

^_^

[Llyranor]

More specifically, the dev mentioned that, in terms of functionality, the map would be most *similar* to Fallout.

 

Though, with how NWN1/2's toolset works, I wonder how they're going to generate land in-between the important locations. How would random encounters occur? In randomly generated locales? Or, I guess, they could premake some areas and throw all 'random encounters' into those.

 

The map, of course, looks awesome. The only downside I'm seeing is how the crap are community modmakers supposed to make similar maps?

Edited January 10, 2006 by Llyranor

[Pidesco]

How would random encounters occur? In randomly generated locales? Or, I guess, they could premake some areas and throw all 'random encounters' into those.

 

In Fallout and BG they had several pre-generated areas that worked as random encounters. They'll probably do the same in NWN2. Shouldn't be too difficult.

[karka]

I wonder if we can stop any where we want like in Fallout and are there any random encounters during travel.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I think it

Edited January 10, 2006 by karka

[Gabrielle]

If they do that I will never have enough sand to build my castle. 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

My cats like sandboxes, think it's a big litter box.

 

World map that is Falloutish is good.

[SteveThaiBinh]

That's pretty. It would make a nice cloth map like the old Ultima games had. I could pin it up on my wall and dream of dragons...

[Ellester]

The map, of course, looks awesome. The only downside I'm seeing is how the crap are community modmakers supposed to make similar maps?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

To me this looks like a 2D painting, but I wonder if the world map has the paint tool that you can use for outdoor areas in the toolset. If so then we would see some good world maps.

 

Btw, I love world maps. Not only is it easy to travel, I just like to see where I am in relation to the geography in the area. Looks great!

[Kasoroth]

The Fallout map was California, which made it a lot easier for the design team to represent scale.  The design team had a real map with which to work and many of the players had a frame of reference for the map.  ...Not that I'm disputing what you're saying.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

True, but the map that came with the FRCS shows the scale better because it's a straight down view and there's a miles scale in the bottom corner. It's nice to have the map view zoomed in enough to see detailed features of the rivers and cities, but the size of those features in relationship to the distance between them is exaggerated a little more than I'm comfortable with. If they stretched the map to 4x the size in each dimension so you had to scroll the screen around to see it all, but kept the individual mountains and cities the same size, and the rivers the same width, and given it a more top down view, I think it would convey the sense of distance better.

 

From Luskan to the far edge of the Mere of Dead Men is about 250 miles, but it looks much shorter than that on the NWN2 map. D&D rules allow you to walk 8 hours per day without suffering fatigue penalties, and a creature with a standard movement rate of 30 will cover 24 miles in this 8 hour march. This means that it should take over 10 days to cross that map area. In BG, distances seemed very compressed, for example it should have been more than a 5 day walk from Beregost to Baldur's Gate, but it was less than that in the game. Fallout and Fallout 2 are the only relatively recent (yes, I'm stretching the definition of recent here) games that seemed to really show how long it takes to get anywhere on foot. I think Daggerfall also was pretty good about this, but I don't remember it well enough to be sure, but that's going even farther back in time. I hope that NWN2 ends up being more like Fallout than BG in this respect.

 

-Kasoroth