I was a bit surprised to see this post from Starr Long on the Shroud of the Avatar forums yesterday. As some of you are probably aware, the overland map that was shown off in Release 4 and Release 5 was…not popular with everyone. It was, at the very least, different:

It’s a difference that…didn’t appeal to everyone, a fact that Long acknowledges:

As many of you may have noticed, our current version of the map looks different than the videos of prototypes we showed off during the earlier stages of our project. It was also the first time any of you got to interact with it, and the functionality of it was less than what was in the videos of prototypes you had seen.

The combination of art style change and lack of some expected functionality caused some concern, which is completely understandable. A few vocal community members even called for a class action lawsuit against us.

Because Internet, I suppose. Suffice it to say that while the cloth map style did have its defenders, and while some — myself included — expressed no particular fondness or dislike for either the cloth or the 3D style, the sudden nature of the stylistic change coupled with the dramatic reduction in functionality went over poorly with many, some of whom made a royal ruckus about it.

And of course, the question of why the change was made was raised. Long attempts to address this as well:

Our first attempt at the map was about trying to represent a very zoomed out view of the world with characters scaled up to gigantic size in a nod to the original Ultimas’ dual scale world. We were also attempting to automatically generate the terrain from data. We ran into several big issues.

The first was that the automatically generated terrain just did not look very good and we literally spent a couple of months trying to make it look better. It was not very flexible and the river and road pathways felt very “canned” and constrained, not natural at all. You can’t tell because of the lower resolution of the videos, but it really did not meet the standards we have for our visuals, especially the water. The next issue we ran into was scaling assets like trees, characters, etc. Simply scaling the assets meant for full scenes ended up looking really bad when they were shrunk down, and in most cases, did not work in that perspective.

Another issue we ran into was that the creature AI and pathfinding necessary to make the encounters work had to be completely different than how those systems worked in the main game. This made us very nervous about how much time it was going to take to make two versions of two major systems, so we started considering delaying some of those features until post Episode 1, which we mentioned in a video hangout.

It is also worth noting that the original programmer who worked on the map left soon after the Kickstarter campaign (it was a friendly departure!), and the map work fell on Chris, who’s plate was already quite full as the Tech Director! We got OneandOnly to jump in and work with Stephen Daniele to provide the version you have been playing with. The beauty of this style was that Stephen could create the map assets relatively quickly compared to the 3D assets we had been trying to use, so we are able to tweak and iterate fairly quickly. The team ended up falling in love with the style of the map, as it felt so much like the cloth map.

However, the cloth map is officially “no more”, as they say. Or nearly so:

The experiment with the cloth map solution solved a lot of problems that we ran into (described above) and we hoped it would be a change the community would embrace but that was not the case as we have seen.

We have heard your feedback and we are in the process of trying our best to recreate what was seen in our prototypes but to a higher visual quality. We will need to delay other features and content while we do this work so expect more schedule changes to R7 and beyond.

The implication I take away from this is that for Release 6, we will probably still be seeing the cloth map; I doubt that Portalarium can build a working, relatively non-buggy 3D overland map within the next three weeks. But for Release 7 and beyond…that’s over a month away…nearly two, really. It could happen.

The list of planned features, if nothing else, is pretty neat:

Here are our goals for the overworld map for Episode 1:

• Zoomed out 3D version of the world
• 3D Avatar animating and walking around in the overworld
• 3D NPCs animating and moving around the overworld
• Roving encounters that you can see moving around the overworld. If you intersect with them you are pulled into a scene.
• Surprise encounters that pull you into a scene.
• Indicators on map of world state including towns under siege, PVP encounters, etc.
• Terrain Types determine movement speed
• Party members visible on overworld (both moving around and indicators of which hex they have entered)
• Obscurance of unexplored areas (i.e. fog of war or something like that)

It is worth noting that there are at least two activities on the overworld that we have never planned for nor do we intend to implement:

• Resource harvesting
• Combat

Post Episode 1 we would like to add things like vehicle/mounted travel.

Of course, this change in map style — and functionality — means that other features will have to be delayed somewhat, a point that Long makes above in fact. Indeed, I would expect Shroud of the Avatar to miss its planned October release date for sure, given this.

And while I’m happy to see the 3D overland map return, because it really did look neat in the demos, I’d be remiss if I didn’t express some concern about how this will impact the final shape of the game. Portalarium’s resources — human and financial — are far, far from infinite, and it’s not unreasonable to expect that some other planned game features may not be fully developed by the time the game needs to be shipped. Indeed, it’s possible that features will have to be cut from the final game. And my worry is that this change in overland map art style will come at the expense of things like NPC schedules or world interactivity, features that are complex and time-consuming to implement and test by their very nature.

Given the choice, I’d take a cloth overland map and fully scheduled NPCs over a 3D overland map and far more static NPCs.