Mountains, mountains and... more mountains. Vvardenfell vol. 2.

Turelus · April 2018

ZiRM wrote: »

This is gonna cost them a few sales and *** alot of people off.

Because that happened with Morrowind where people complained about the exact same thing right?

Yolokin_Swagonborn · April 2018

Turelus wrote: »

ZiRM wrote: »

This is gonna cost them a few sales and *** alot of people off.

Because that happened with Morrowind where people complained about the exact same thing right?

Unfortunately, forum anger doesn't result in lost sales for ZOS. People leave the game and others replace them. ZOS could announce Maelstrom weapons in crown crates tomorrow, and some people would leave the game but others would be happy.

They are unfortunately a monopoly and can abuse their playerbase as much as they see fit.

Adernath · April 2018

draekab14_ESO wrote: »

Honestly, I want the flattest land possible. I'm sick of the unnatural feeling that almost every zone in this game has. It's obvious time wasting and it looks inorganic. Forcing the player to constantly meander and snake through play areas.

Don't worry, with Hammerfell you will get your large flat map

FloppyTouch · April 2018

Turelus wrote: »

ZiRM wrote: »

This is gonna cost them a few sales and *** alot of people off.

Because that happened with Morrowind where people complained about the exact same thing right?

I agree, like I didn't want morrowind at all but they hid BGs behind it so I had to buy it(given away with next chapter now)

I don't want summerset at all like i just don't care about quest or the land and lore I'll run through it just for something to do but i want jewelry crafting so i have to buy it.

Sales wont drop no matter how small or how many mountains they add bc they are hiding things hard core players want and need with it. The chapter system is trash and I hate ZoS for changing business models but oh well what am I going to do wait a year for jewelry crafting to be base game?

Charliff1966 · April 2018

You dont have to buy the chapter if you think it's not worth your money.

DoccEff · April 2018

ZO$ is lying again, but they will get away with it, again. Too many people have already preordered because of that silly mount, and because jewlery crafting is behind that paywall. Cash is flowing.

"All future content will be included in ESO plus" LIE.
"Summerset will be the biggest zone so far." LIE.
I don't even start with gambling crates.

Looks like Orsinium/Wrothgar will forever stay the best ESO-expansion.

Darkstorne · April 2018

Turelus wrote: »

I know we want playable areas and all but... they can't just remove mountains and volcanos from the world to make every section of every map explorable.

How many inside or separate from the base zone areas are there to explore?

@Turelus That argument falls completely flat when you look at Skyrim. Mountains are absolutely fine! So long as you can ascend them and explore them. When they're colossal impassable blocks like this purely designed to create the illusion of scale... that's not okay. It's certainly not TES.

red_emu · April 2018

Adernath wrote: »

draekab14_ESO wrote: »

Honestly, I want the flattest land possible. I'm sick of the unnatural feeling that almost every zone in this game has. It's obvious time wasting and it looks inorganic. Forcing the player to constantly meander and snake through play areas.

Don't worry, with Hammerfell you will get your large flat map

Most likely instead of mountains there will be sand dunes too steep to climb or sandy slaughterfish

I hope they stop with the expansions. Imagine if they were to add a new continent! Behold! This is Akavir! The huge continent the size of Bleakrock Isle with only human and mer races on it because... transcription errors!

Marabornwingrion · April 2018

red_emu wrote: »

Adernath wrote: »

draekab14_ESO wrote: »

Honestly, I want the flattest land possible. I'm sick of the unnatural feeling that almost every zone in this game has. It's obvious time wasting and it looks inorganic. Forcing the player to constantly meander and snake through play areas.

Don't worry, with Hammerfell you will get your large flat map

Most likely instead of mountains there will be sand dunes too steep to climb or sandy slaughterfish

Or quicksand

Turelus · April 2018

Darkstorne wrote: »

Turelus wrote: »

I know we want playable areas and all but... they can't just remove mountains and volcanos from the world to make every section of every map explorable.

How many inside or separate from the base zone areas are there to explore?

Turelus That argument falls completely flat when you look at Skyrim. Mountains are absolutely fine! So long as you can ascend them and explore them. When they're colossal impassable blocks like this purely designed to create the illusion of scale... that's not okay. It's certainly not TES.

So stop complaining ZOS is lazy and not making content or maps are too small. Complain ZOS has invisible walls which don't allow you to climb mountains.

NoTimeToWait · April 2018

Turelus wrote: »

Okiir wrote: »

Astrid_V wrote: »

I don't care if these mountains are for immersion, more beautiful views or whatever.
I prefer Summerset to be completely flat like a damn desert, BUT at least filled with quests and other activities in these areas.

The problem isn't really mountains. It's that mountains in ESO are unexplorable (unlike previous TES games).

"See that mountain in the distance? You can't go there"

But even in other TES games they were just areas with nothing of interest. ZOS would let us walk all over them but if there is nothing to actually be done there then... why?

You weren't exploring the mountains quite well enough. In Skyrim there are a lot of hidden places in the mountains unmarked on the map, but having some lore, item or exploration value

NoTimeToWait · April 2018

But you really need to give a credit for the location design. Almost every part of Summerset is beautiful and feels like there were many many hours spent on it. Yes, it feels like a giant garden, and my heart still lies with arid terrain of the Vvardenfell, but I admit that some places in Summerset are just breathtaking

Marabornwingrion · April 2018

NoTimeToWait wrote: »

But you really need to give a credit for the location design. Almost every part of Summerset is beautiful and feels like there were many many hours spent on it. Yes, it feels like a giant garden, and my heart still lies with arid terrain of the Vvardenfell, but I admit that some places in Summerset are just breathtaking

Well, I was going to pay for Summerset to get new content, not pretty landscape.

Nice views won't give me dozens hours of content...

Alcast · April 2018

Faulgor wrote: »

That's a very generous map of yours. Mine's even worse - although allegedly there are some areas accessible through specific quests, which I haven't found so far.

I also felt like "Oh ok I want to go there" nope mountain in the way.
Ok lets go there, again mountain...
more mountains..

why

Orsinium felt way better, most of the area was actually accessible (or at least it felt like it was)

Shinni · April 2018

Jhalin wrote: »

After scaling the maps based on town size, the world map should display Summerset about 25% smaller than it's currently being shown
[...]

My addon HarvestMap has to measure the zone, so it can properly display 3D pins and compute distance between resources etc.
When I debugged HarvestMap to track the new jewelry resources, I realized that the size of the zone does not match the size of the 2D map.
Using the addon API, you can compute that Summerset is 84% of its size compared to the Tamriel map.

Marabornwingrion · April 2018

Alcast wrote: »

Faulgor wrote: »

That's a very generous map of yours. Mine's even worse - although allegedly there are some areas accessible through specific quests, which I haven't found so far.

I also felt like "Oh ok I want to go there" nope mountain in the way.
Ok lets go there, again mountain...
more mountains..

why

Orsinium felt way better, most of the area was actually accessible (or at least it felt like it was)

Aaaand that's the reason we are getting chapters which are not included in ESO+.

After so many positive reviews of Orsinium, where we got much bigger map and more contant than in other DLCs, ZOS took opportunity and thought "If players like big maps so much, they wouldn't mind paying for them additional money".

And that's how chapters were made.

Anastian · April 2018

Yolokin_Swagonborn wrote: »

Turelus wrote: »

ZiRM wrote: »

This is gonna cost them a few sales and *** alot of people off.

Because that happened with Morrowind where people complained about the exact same thing right?

Unfortunately, forum anger doesn't result in lost sales for ZOS. People leave the game and others replace them. ZOS could announce Maelstrom weapons in crown crates tomorrow, and some people would leave the game but others would be happy.

They are unfortunately a monopoly and can abuse their playerbase as much as they see fit.

This.
There's nothing like ESO so it's very easy for people who like playing Elder Scrolls - Online to exploit them as customers.

Honestly when I joined the game (pre-Morrowind) I was TRULY amazed by IC, Wrothgar and in general the high quality of the content. I delayed my purchase of Morrowind because I was unsure of the quality (in fact it's a kinda nice zone) and given my satisfaction pre-ordered Summerset but now I am really worried. I'd pay 20-30€ for Wrothgar, but just as I waited for Morrowind's price tag to be lower, now I'll be very wary with all the coming expansions.

PS: Got summerset just because I found a bargain... But I don't like the slope where the game is falling...

I mean if even @Alcast and other preminent members of the user base are complaining, why don't we get some hearing?

Turelus · April 2018

NoTimeToWait wrote: »

Turelus wrote: »

Okiir wrote: »

Astrid_V wrote: »

I don't care if these mountains are for immersion, more beautiful views or whatever.
I prefer Summerset to be completely flat like a damn desert, BUT at least filled with quests and other activities in these areas.

The problem isn't really mountains. It's that mountains in ESO are unexplorable (unlike previous TES games).

"See that mountain in the distance? You can't go there"

But even in other TES games they were just areas with nothing of interest. ZOS would let us walk all over them but if there is nothing to actually be done there then... why?

You weren't exploring the mountains quite well enough. In Skyrim there are a lot of hidden places in the mountains unmarked on the map, but having some lore, item or exploration value

So in ESO this translates to some books, crafting nodes and chest spawn nodes.

Sure they could do that, or they could focus the developer time on deeper content in the areas that most players will explore.

Carbonised · April 2018

Turelus wrote: »

NoTimeToWait wrote: »

Turelus wrote: »

Okiir wrote: »

Astrid_V wrote: »

I don't care if these mountains are for immersion, more beautiful views or whatever.
I prefer Summerset to be completely flat like a damn desert, BUT at least filled with quests and other activities in these areas.

The problem isn't really mountains. It's that mountains in ESO are unexplorable (unlike previous TES games).

"See that mountain in the distance? You can't go there"

But even in other TES games they were just areas with nothing of interest. ZOS would let us walk all over them but if there is nothing to actually be done there then... why?

You weren't exploring the mountains quite well enough. In Skyrim there are a lot of hidden places in the mountains unmarked on the map, but having some lore, item or exploration value

So in ESO this translates to some books, crafting nodes and chest spawn nodes.

Sure they could do that, or they could focus the developer time on deeper content in the areas that most players will explore.

As someone who has played Skyrim obsessively and discovered absolutely everything several times over, I disagree a bit with this.

I mean, sure, put the main focus on the broad explorable areas and cities, but one of the great charms of Skyrim is the small stories told with nothing but a few objects put together in a certain way. Even in the highest mountains, atop remote rocky peaks or deep in almost unreachable crevices in Skyrim, you find a few remains, some bones perhaps, some objects left by someone else, or even some books or other lootable objects.

I actually prefer mountains in zones, Wrothgar and Vvardenfell are beautifully made, with great vistas from atop mountains and peaks, but what I don't like is how un-explorable they are due to invisible barriers locking everything off.
Compare it to land such as Craglorn or most of the base game zones, and you quickly see how dreadfully boring and dated they look by now, all the land is extremely flat and you rarely have great panorama views like in the newer DLC areas.

But simply locking off mountains with invisible barriers isn't great zone design. They don't need to fill them with a massive amount of stuff, like you say, a few resource nodes, some chests, perhaps even a book or a note, and god forbid perhaps even a few objects such as backpacks, urns or other leftover objects.

Just look at this list of unmarked places and locations in the Skyrim game. It's huge! 14 Bandit and Forsworn camps, 24 fishing and hunting camps, 10 smaller shrines, 9 shripwrecks, 22 dragon mounds, 21 creature lairs, 19 ruins and monuments and no less than 58 smaller places of interest! These being the objects and various other items left behind to tell a small story, like I mentioned.

Many of these are in remote areas, very much off the beaten track, and oftentimes high up in the mountains. And these are only the unnamed places, those too small to deserve a map icon! This is what a TES game is about, with focus on exploration and discovery, and I think ZOS should consider not closing off so much of their new zones with invisible barriers and mountains too steep to scale, and instead have them be open but add a bit of clutter and unmarked locations to reward the explorer. Vvardenfell already does this to some degree, with various small camps and places with clutter and objects, but the number is very small when you compare it to the list for Skyrim, and none of them are high up in the mountains or the volcano slope, since that has been blocked completely off.

Turelus · April 2018

@Carbonised don't get me wrong I would be fine if ZOS had more added and fluffed out areas. However Skyrim have five years to fluff out the map, ZOS get months depending on when each team starts work on an update.

Also I go back to my comment that these threads always come up as ZOS is ripping us off because the zones are so small and they do it to deliberately avoid content creation.

However there is no content in those areas if you just make it nodes and views. Yes it's very nice and adds immersion but that's not what people make complaints about.

That or there are two sets of people complaining about the same thing for different reasons.

Carbonised · April 2018

Turelus wrote: »

@Carbonised don't get me wrong I would be fine if ZOS had more added and fluffed out areas. However Skyrim have five years to fluff out the map, ZOS get months depending on when each team starts work on an update.

Also I go back to my comment that these threads always come up as ZOS is ripping us off because the zones are so small and they do it to deliberately avoid content creation.

However there is no content in those areas if you just make it nodes and views. Yes it's very nice and adds immersion but that's not what people make complaints about.

That or there are two sets of people complaining about the same thing for different reasons.

I would vastly prefer if they opened up closed areas such as the Summerset mountains and Red Mountain in Vvardenfell, so we can at least scale the mountains. Adding just a few objects here and there doesn't take up endless dev time, I've decorated all my houses as well, the assets are already made, it takes only a few mins to place a handful of them on a selected spot to create a bit of atomsphere. Heck, they could even make me and other players do it for them for free

It's the same with the Vvardenfell closed off houses. It is disappointing, it doesn't really make for a great, finished product, and it would be comparatively easy and fast to simply add some generic NPCs with a simple schedule to the houses and furnish them with a bit of standard clutter. I can decorate a generic Vvardenfell 1-2 room house in half a day.

I'm not really too fuzzed about size, I vastly prefer quality over quantity, and I don't get the continued obsession about making "the largest zone ever!". I'd be happy enough with a regular size zone with great content. But when you combine regular/smallish size with lots of locked off areas, locked off buildings etc, then I start to turn sour as well.

Faulgor · April 2018

Alcast wrote: »

Faulgor wrote: »

That's a very generous map of yours. Mine's even worse - although allegedly there are some areas accessible through specific quests, which I haven't found so far.

I also felt like "Oh ok I want to go there" nope mountain in the way.
Ok lets go there, again mountain...
more mountains..

why

Orsinium felt way better, most of the area was actually accessible (or at least it felt like it was)

It's also the way the mountains are placed. Wrothgar has no barriers within the zone, only around it. In Vvardenfell it makes sense that at some point you can't walk up Red Mountain anymore becase it's too steep, but in Summerset I often run into cliffs in the middle of nowhere. These sudden rock barriers are just not good level design, and it's way behind other areas they added since launch.
I think if they made it similar to Vvardenfell with Eton Nir as the new Red Mountain, it would feel less obtrusive.

Okiir · April 2018

Shinni wrote: »

Jhalin wrote: »

After scaling the maps based on town size, the world map should display Summerset about 25% smaller than it's currently being shown
[...]

My addon HarvestMap has to measure the zone, so it can properly display 3D pins and compute distance between resources etc.
When I debugged HarvestMap to track the new jewelry resources, I realized that the size of the zone does not match the size of the 2D map.
Using the addon API, you can compute that Summerset is 84% of its size compared to the Tamriel map.

I had my suspicions about this. I've been playing the beta for the last couple of days, and the zone feels insanely small. I think it took me about 1 to 1.5 minutes to ride from Shimmerine to Alinor. That's half the distance between Orsinium and Fharun.

So yeah, not only is about half the zone unexplorable, but they literally scaled the zone up on the world map to make it look bigger.

JD2013 · April 2018

I take it you won't be pleased if they do a Skyrim chapter then? Lots of mountains there!

Dominoid · April 2018

I've seen people trying to compare two different maps without taking scale into account. That's like taking a map of the world that is 10" x 10" and comparing it to a map of my city that is 12" x 12" and declaring my city is larger, because the map is larger.

Looking at a map of Auridon and a map of Summerset and comparing just the map size is . . . well . . wrong.

You need to know the scale of the map. For that we have two options. The first is number of in-game cells which to the engine is a standard unit of measure. Vvardenfell is 81 x 81. Summerset is 144 x 144. Can't find base-game zone sizes right now.

The second is to measure how how far one walks on the Tamriel map over a fixed set of time. For example getting an assist from Map Coordinates and walking in one direction for ten seconds in Vvardenfell you traverse 1.4958 Tamriel map units. Doing so in Summerset, you traverse 1.2179. Doing so in Auridon, you traverse 1.7084 units. This makes the scale of Summerset 40.27% larger than Auridon. That would look like this:

Are there mountains? Yep. Can you get UNDER those mountains (no spoilers)? Yep. . . . maybe I'll do more. And Don't forget about Arteum as a zone too which is part of Summerset the Chapter.

Turelus · April 2018

Thanks Dominoid. I loved your Morrowind threads so am happy to see your reasoning and explanations here as well.

XomRhoK · April 2018

Dominoid wrote: »

I've seen people trying to compare two different maps without taking scale into account. That's like taking a map of the world that is 10" x 10" and comparing it to a map of my city that is 12" x 12" and declaring my city is larger, because the map is larger.

Looking at a map of Auridon and a map of Summerset and comparing just the map size is . . . well . . wrong.

You need to know the scale of the map. For that we have two options. The first is number of in-game cells which to the engine is a standard unit of measure. Vvardenfell is 81 x 81. Summerset is 144 x 144. Can't find base-game zone sizes right now.

The second is to measure how how far one walks on the Tamriel map over a fixed set of time. For example getting an assist from Map Coordinates and walking in one direction for ten seconds in Vvardenfell you traverse 1.4958 Tamriel map units. Doing so in Summerset, you traverse 1.2179. Doing so in Auridon, you traverse 1.7084 units. This makes the scale of Summerset 40.27% larger than Auridon. That would look like this:

Are there mountains? Yep. Can you get UNDER those mountains (no spoilers)? Yep. . . . maybe I'll do more. And Don't forget about Arteum as a zone too which is part of Summerset the Chapter.

I think your assumptions is wrong. If in-game cells is a standart unit of measure, then at any map, travel distance will be the same, cause it's standart. Or you'll need to rescale all 3D objects and speed at different maps, that no one will do. I think something else is a standart and in-game cells are scaleable.

I took ships in docks as reference point, cause they use same model like in Auridon, and rescaled maps accordingly.

Shinni wrote: »

My addon HarvestMap has to measure the zone, so it can properly display 3D pins and compute distance between resources etc.
When I debugged HarvestMap to track the new jewelry resources, I realized that the size of the zone does not match the size of the 2D map.
Using the addon API, you can compute that Summerset is 84% of its size compared to the Tamriel map.

Then i additionally rescaled Summerset map using this information. It seems correct considering a little different shape of the island.

Shinni · April 2018

Dominoid wrote: »

I've seen people trying to compare two different maps without taking scale into account. That's like taking a map of the world that is 10" x 10" and comparing it to a map of my city that is 12" x 12" and declaring my city is larger, because the map is larger.

Looking at a map of Auridon and a map of Summerset and comparing just the map size is . . . well . . wrong.

You need to know the scale of the map. For that we have two options. The first is number of in-game cells which to the engine is a standard unit of measure. Vvardenfell is 81 x 81. Summerset is 144 x 144. Can't find base-game zone sizes right now.

The second is to measure how how far one walks on the Tamriel map over a fixed set of time. For example getting an assist from Map Coordinates and walking in one direction for ten seconds in Vvardenfell you traverse 1.4958 Tamriel map units. Doing so in Summerset, you traverse 1.2179. Doing so in Auridon, you traverse 1.7084 units. This makes the scale of Summerset 40.27% larger than Auridon. That would look like this:

Are there mountains? Yep. Can you get UNDER those mountains (no spoilers)? Yep. . . . maybe I'll do more. And Don't forget about Arteum as a zone too which is part of Summerset the Chapter.

These must be pretty old measurements (since the Auridon map was rescaled a few times) or inaccurate ones, which is not unlikely given you used walking distance/time to perform measurements.
1km in Auridon and 1km in Vvardenfell are both equal to 0.04% of Tamriel map width, if you measure the distance by using the 3D add-on api or if you use SetPlayerWaypointByWorldLocation(x,y,z) to place two markers 1km apart from each other.

red_emu · April 2018

It's not about the overall size of the island as a whole but about explorable terrain which on this map is more or less a big X. Can you go under the mountains? Are they instances? Are they copy paste caves with narrow tunnels and copy paste mobs? Are there cities underground? Or are they more akin to harbourage in Auridon?

MisterBigglesworth · April 2018

Yolokin_Swagonborn wrote: »

Faulgor wrote: »

That's a very generous map of yours. Mine's even worse - although allegedly there are some areas accessible through specific quests, which I haven't found so far.

Welcome to "Chapters." DLCs that you pay extra for because ZOS decided to betray subscribers and go back on its promise to deliver 4DLC per quarter.

Aliyavana wrote: »

Someone made a meme where they put huge volcanos in orsinium, I'm wondering if they'll do the same for summerset

Paging @MisterBigglesworth

are we having fun yet?