Avernum - practical suggestion

[Guest Anonymous]

I've just finished playing Avernum 5, the first game from spiderweb I've played, and I loved it, but I have one criticism that I think would be quite easy to fix. For people with literally no sense of direction like me (it's analagous to dyslexia with directions - NO sense of 3D space at all) sometimes the game was unecessarily tough / impossible in a very not fun way because unlike lots of RPGs I've played you couldn't see where you were on a detailed map. I mean like lots of games have in the bottom right, where you can see in detail what is in the area you're in, scroll around to see the surrounding areas, or areas you've failed to explore, and importantly, leave notes to yourself to say where a particular person or place is. I missed entire swathes of land because of this, unless I wanted to spend hours figuring it out with the directions found in some cheats - sometimes this was necessary to finish major quests etc ... for someone like me that was hours and hours of figuring out where straightforward things were. I don't think that would be too difficult to implement and would make the game much more playable & easier to navigate.

[Evnissyen]

Wait . . . you were aware that there's a world map included which X's your location, right?

 

Otherwise... I agree that it would be interesting to be able to stick little post-it like indicators on the world map to remind yourself of places you need to return to, or need to recall such&such encounter/event for such&such reason.

 

It is a little tiresome to have to compile Word files of screenshots to remind myself of the above.

 

[Randomizer]

That's why Synergy made his list. It was to remind him about item locations, quests, unopened caches, etc.

 

The auto map in the lower left corner is great for locating unexplored areas until you fill it in for the first time.

[Synergy]

I just spent some time fixing my signature and links for the lists. Have a look at the A5 Items List, and see if it is the kind of thing you were wishing for. It needs to be reformatted and reposted, since the new UBB cut off more than half of the original very long list.

 

-S-

[cura]

yes but the world map is extremely zoomed out and therefore utterly useless to someone with a not very good sense of direction. The maps in other RPGs I've played, like BG etc, will show you a zoomed out version of ONLY what you can see on one screen, or sometimes 1 1/4 of what you could see (a bit of the edges on either side), as in the auto map, but that you can scroll round. Trust me, that makes a HUGE difference. On the world map, somewhere like Muck just looks like a blob to me. If I could move the automap around I could go "ah, if I want to go to X, it's 3 screens to the left, and then down". You can't see in that much detail on the world map. If you could scroll the auto map around you could also check for bits you haven't explored yet, making it easier not to miss bits.

[Men are from Slars]

A scrollable automap would be neat. It isn't really a standard feature, though. I can't think of a single old school RPG that has one, in fact.

 

I'm also not convinced that scrolling through an automap screen by screen, trying to remember what every building was and if there was anything left to do there, would be any less cumbersome than just jotting down notes on unfinished stuff. It seems like much more of a hassle to me.

[Evnissyen]

Honestly, I don't see how an enlarged, scrollable screen helps? I'm having a difficult time understanding why the world map confounds a person with an unusual or impaired sense of direction. I'm sure that if Jeff made a large, scrollable map an option in addition to the tradtional world map, it can't hurt. But I would be upset if the traditional world map were removed in favor of a larger map, since I like that feeling of looking at the map screen like I'm looking at a scroll, being able to see the entire area all at once, and thinking, "Okay, here I am, and I need/want to go here." Having to scroll through it takes that feeling away as well as making it confounding to me, since in that scenario I'm not able to see the whole map at once.

 

But, yeah... adding an option to view a larger, more detailed, scrollable map should be easy to program and I don't see how it can hurt.

 

[Sudanna]

Yeah, the current world map is quite understandable. Nalyd's never had a problem with it, though he never uses it. Excellent sense of direction pays off.

[VCH]

I really like the world map. It helps me figure out where I am. I often get lost.

[Sleeping Dragon]

I like the way the world map isn't entirely accurate, it's more realistic this way. I especially enjoyed the Avernum 4 map, where you were often exploring areas beyond the cartographer's knowledge. If you want a more detailed map, your essentially cheating (which if perfectly fine) and you can thus make use of the various other resources out there, such as the maps in the hint books.