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Maps or no maps?

Total Posts: 34

Joined 2012-08-23

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Which if your favorite way of navigating AG worlds?

a) Maps where you can click on all destinations, but he will refuse to go to the unlocked ones.

For example how you can click on the pirate-ship in Plunder Island, but unless you’ve discovered your path there he refuses to go there.

b) Maps where you can only click on icons that has been unlocked.

c) No maps at all, you just navigate the city just as you would navigate any interior.

Like Grim Fandango, seen above in the one view-point where you can get an idea how the town is structured.

Personally I love the Grim Fandango style, it really feels like you’re exploring a city and not just arriving to different rooms. On the other hand that requires the town to be extremely stylized, probably wouldn’t work if Rubacava had more residential buildings.

     

Total Posts: 245

Joined 2006-05-20

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Maps make sense when you have to travel a long way between places. If its just 2-3 screens then not having a map is fine.

Maps where you can click only on placed you have unlocked makes sense for me.

     
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Joined 2003-09-30

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Do you think that there is a map style works good on every a.games?
Maps depends on game’s universe and style of maps depends
the story’s structure,so what’s the meaning of prefering a map style without acknowledging a game’s universe.

     

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Impossible to say without knowing about the game. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

I think some of the Sierra games could have used maps, KQ and QFG especially. Although it’s hard to say whether maps would have taken away some of the adventure-y feel. Some of the enjoyment of a game like KQ is the wandering from screen to screen, through forest to town to desert to beach. It’s part of the game, but some people hate it. You’re either the kind of person who admires the scenery every time you go through a screen or you’re sighing to yourself while travelling 10 screens to the east, wishing King Graham would walk faster.

Conquests of the Longbow used maps quite well I thought, but it retained the King’s Quest mode of wandering through empty screens, which it didn’t really need to have.

     
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Joined 2012-07-15

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I like maps. Especially the colorful sort, like the one seen in CoMI above. I prefer it when new locations immediately materialize on the map, once they’ve been unlocked, like in Sam and Max - Hit the Road. If I wanted to be argumentative, I could point out how a map may be useless in a linear game without backtracking, but I think there could be clever ways of implementing a map, regardless of how the game itself runs.

     

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Total Posts: 34

Joined 2012-08-23

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Oscar - 07 January 2013 05:00 AM

Impossible to say without knowing about the game.

Oops, my initial post made it seem like I’m asking for a specific game, I’ve updated the question now to mean in general what is your favorite.

KQ is a good example indeed. Haven’t played it for ages but I do seem to recall preferring Monkey Islands map-style back in those days. The reason why I like no-maps in Grim Fandango could be because a stylized town has more interesting pathways than a landscape.

Siddhi - 07 January 2013 03:44 AM

Maps make sense when you have to travel a long way between places. If its just 2-3 screens then not having a map is fine.

You’re not going to like Grim Fandango then. Standing on top of that view-point going to the the high-rollers wine-cellar is about 12 screens. Grin

     
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Niber - 07 January 2013 05:21 AM
Oscar - 07 January 2013 05:00 AM

Impossible to say without knowing about the game.

Oops, my initial post made it seem like I’m asking for a specific game, I’ve updated the question now to mean in general what is your favorite.

Would have to be Monkey Island, absolutely. My first time exploring Melee Island was magic, and still is. The way MI does maps is really great because you don’t lose the atmosphere going into the map screen.

I liked Discworld too. Gave you a nice overview of the city

And I really like the way RHEM does maps. They aren’t used for travelling. You find little bits of maps around the place like this, which are really useful usually revealing a hidden room or giving you an understanding of the geography and how a certain mechanism or puzzle works.

     
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Joined 2007-07-22

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I love maps, both aesthetically, and as a gameplay addition. I agree they’re not always preferable like I said recently as it can take away some of the immersion.


In that regard, I find more difficult now to adapt to older games that doesn’t let you click at the edges of screen for fast travel, specifically when talking about 3rd-person games that feature plenty of backtracking.

     

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Oscar - 07 January 2013 05:42 AM

Would have to be Monkey Island, absolutely. My first time exploring Melee Island was magic, and still is. The way MI does maps is really great because you don’t lose the atmosphere going into the map screen.

Ah yes, great point about the atmosphere, it’s so much more than just a transportation-UI, makes me whizzle MI tunes just looking at it.

On a side note tho my Uncle was completely stuck playing MI for many hours because it never occurred to him that you could navigate the map-view, he thought it was just a static picture he was shown because he was high up on a look-out point, but assumed that to get to places he had to walk down the look-out and find those places on foot.

Oscar - 07 January 2013 05:42 AM

And I really like the way RHEM does maps. They aren’t used for travelling. You find little bits of maps around the place like this, which are really useful usually revealing a hidden room or giving you an understanding of the geography and how a certain mechanism or puzzle works.

GREAT find! Sometimes there are places where the camera moves around so much it’s difficult to get a mental image of what you are navigating, a real-world outline on the wall such as an emergency-exits-drawing could help in that. Smile

     

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Niber - 07 January 2013 05:21 AM

You’re not going to like Grim Fandango then. Standing on top of that view-point going to the the high-rollers wine-cellar is about 12 screens. Grin

Well, I did play Grim Fandango and I loved it to bits Grin But that was years ago, maybe if I replayed it today I might be less patient Meh

 

     
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I love maps, in all forms and shapes. It often creates a bigger game world and gives you a clearer picture of where you are in that world.

I agree that maps are game-dependent. They have to fit the game design. But I’ve rarely seen a map system that was done poorly. If it allows you to easily travel from A to B, and give you some sense of where the two are, then it’s all good.

And if no map is included, then I’d prefer it if the game world isn’t larger than Rubacava in Grim Fandango. That’s about the largest I can handle before either getting lost or having to start drawing my own map (which is not a plus for me).

     

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