Thoughts on the Field Map

[Sumnus 6]

Something I was interested in opinions on:

 

How - if at all - do you folks use the field map? Do you use it as it was seemingly intended, for the player to walk around and take paths into the different regions in your game? Did you simply omit it, in favor of starting the player in a more open world type of environment? Do you instead perhaps, use it as a means of "fast travel" for the player?

I'm just curious how anyone actually utilizes those features within the engine. Thus far, in my initial experimenting with it, I have simply ignored it, and so far it feels fine - although i'm still very much in the learning/experimenting phase with the software.

[King_Caramel 1]

I guess it's down to personal preference and relative logistics: Is your party travelling within a predefined region/county/country; does their adventure take them worldwide? Do YOU want an overworld? That kind of stuff.

I really like overworlds myself, the whole feeling of venturing across the globe to settle your debts or kill the baddies goes down exceedingly smoothly. It's easy for them to end up as an unenjoyable grind if they're large or poorly designed though, eliminates the convenience of having a global transit. Plus random encounters... Ugh. 

 

Apologies if I'm just babbling; sleepless nights do not make for acute cognitive response. 

[SpookyMothman 361]

In theory, world maps are great. It gives the player an entire world to explore at their leisure. They can stray from the beaten path and find treasure or sidequests or... anything, really. It's cool.

 

... but that's where a lot of games went wrong. There's nowhere to explore. Chances are, the game is going to take you all over the world, and every place that would be cool to discover will be part of the main questline, or a sidequest, maybe. Either way, you're prompted to go there, so there's no real sense of discovery and exploration.

 

STALKER does this very well, though. The world is an irradiated waste, so there are swathes of land where you'll need protection to explore. There are also buildings, such as churches or warehouses, that are out in the middle of nowhere, and there's nothing inside. Maybe there will be an NPC or two camping out, and maybe there's a box of bullets somewhere inside, but there's no quest directing you to these places. Some people might view this as wasteful; "Why spend so much time designing a large building like this when there's no point to going there?", and the real answer is "Why not?". I like that. That's exploration.

 

Personally, I'm not fond of world maps. I like to keep things local, but I like to hide things in those areas. Optional dungeons. That kind of thing.

[Tsarmina 2,612]

I don't like world maps, really. ^^" Mostly because I don't really enjoy huge-worlded games. My brain focuses on a large amount of things during the day, and memorizing the name, location, ruler, political alignment, and trading habits or whatever of each kingdom in a 23545-kingdomed world is not really my thing. (Okay, so, exaggeration, but you get the point. )

 

If you're going to make a world map, at least make it cozy and give me some direction. Wandering is great, but there are only so many hours in a day. ^-^

[Euphoria 147]

I decided to have more of an open world, there will be a main path the story takes you along, but places off to the side to explore as you go(with harder battles and better rewards in most cases). I just feel like making an overworld to get to everywhere feels kind of lazy to me. It's not a bad thing, in most games, I just don't personally like it as much.

[Phantaeon 1]

I haven't made my game yet but I was planning on adding just various leisurely thing on the overworld whilst it can just be incredibly easy with vehicles or teleportation mirrors. but I was planning on adding random shinies as items on the ground. possible supermonsters. But I think I'll be able to use large maps a bit more leisurely because I have common events and events to make overworld enemies. Passive, Aggresive and Evasive ( for those cash cows or rare roosters ).

[+ Sughayyer 163]

The first RPG I ever played was Dragon Warrior III. I was 10. It featured a large world. The story stream was not solid. I could choose where to go and what to explore. The game gives you that single objective at the very beginning, then you have to roam the world and investigate, explore, inquiry until you get to it.

On a game like this, not having a world map is unconceivable.

 

Other good example of world map lies in Chrono Trigger. 

[Rush2112 52]

Again, I must revert to Pitfall: The Lost Expedition (this game just does so much stuff extremely well!). The main story takes you over about 97% of the levels in the game. Many levels though have secret areas to explore, and the game usually rewards you with Idols, Explorers, or Shamen (you'd have to play the game to understand what these do). Nothing prompts you to go there other than the "I wonder where that vine leads?" or the classic "Can I go into that hole?". One of the levels, the Ekkeko Ice Cavern, has absolutely nothing to do with the story, but is essentially a maze made of ice that has 7 Idols, a Shamen, and an Explorer. Talk about a treasure trove!
I'm rambling here, but you get my point. Providing areas for the player to explore due entirely to their own curiosity gives the game that extra layer of exploration in addition to gameplay or whatever else. It works best when you give them a reward (even one that may not be necessary) for exploring, because it spurrs them to explore more. "Is there anything behind that waterfall?" my response "Check it out and see!"

[Onomotopoeia 12]

Some world maps are just done so well, that regardless of whether the game follows a linear progression, exploring the map feels special. I'm thinking of Suikoden I, II, and others, here. Especially the second one; Suikoden II did quite well having one world map work for the whole game; yet have the map segmented into access-restricted regions, by both geographic features (forests, mountains, rivers) and man-made features (the great walls). But, the possibility to "override" access does exist somewhat, in both teleportaion and with a certain "glitch" trick; in one specific location, the glitch exists to get to another part of the world-map otherwise hidden behind a segment of gate, and explore where it'd otherwise take some time to get access.

I like open-world access, but linear progression does still work. You can still have both a linear plot and manage to retain a somewhat open world, ... if you allow for "secret" means of getting to places otherwise inaccessible in earlier parts of the game, for the sake of the other types of players.

Say, for example, a world map with a major river cutting across the continent, and two villages, one on either side of the river. Our hero starts in a village on one side of the river, and won't (normally) have access to areas on the opposite side until a while later in the game. However, these two villages could be connected by a damp/dark/moldy subterranean tunnel deep under the river; the entry-exit locations to each village could be tightly controlled, perhaps even secret to all but those who pay the thieves' guild a hefty "fee" for access.

With just a bit more work, you can provide a way for your heroes to go where s/he has not been before; with proper eventing using conditional branches, you could even control just which version of a map the player-party transfers to.

Edited July 17, 2014 by Onomotopoeia

[Kayzee 4,032]

I think how world maps are used really depends on the kind of scope and scale of the world your going for. Usually you end up having either vary focused RPGs with smaller scopes or scales where you try and just make a big interconnected world, but it's much harder to really make a sort of open world without it feeling a bit small or linear if you don't have a world map. You can even go to the other extreme and have a game that is more or less all world map, with mostly text menu towns, focusing on a much bigger scope and scale where the kind of detailed exploration is lost in favor of just making a huge world hat you can explore. Most RPGs I think are somewhere in the middle and do the trick of changing the scope and scale from moment to moment, making a big world without as much detail to connect a lot of detailed areas such as towns and dungeons.

 

The problem I see is most RPGs tend to only use the field maps as connections between a few small set pieces. Towns feels small and cramped for the kind of thriving community they are intended to be, cities even more so. Dungeons can sprawl out into many floors but almost feel like sideshow attractions and not organic parts of the world. I do wonder if it might be better to make a lot of different maps of different scales and styles, have big world areas that look like real maps, using your position as a marker rather then as a character that you can plot routes and it takes days to get anywhere, have smaller scale maps for cities that look like street layouts that you can go to various points of interest, and go right down to individual buildings and other areas that you actually run around on in person and can talk to people one on one.

 

I guess another problem is, field maps are an abstraction, but they aren't really used like one. Like if you had NPC events on a field map it would be pretty weird don't you think? To have this big old character walking and moving around that you can talk to as if you are in a town, or attack you like a roaming enemy. But you walk along it with the same sprite and movement mechanics as you do any old map. There is no functional difference to the player between a field map and a normal one, but they are at different scales. Oh well, I guess as long as the player understands the visual 'language' your using to convey the world, it doesn't matter as much.

[Phantaeon 1]

Hmmm... I personally am thinking of using 3 world maps in my game since there are 3 worlds in the story. I don't need to go into detail but another idea would be to have no world map but divide main areas. For example the starting position is in a town just outside a forest which the towns outskirts and the forest make an entire map which is basically the region. Eventually after a few bosses the player goes through some kind of tunnel which is a smaller area and then comes out to this huge savanna like field with one town located in it which is actuelly part of the map itself.