My name is Silvio, I guess I’m technically a romhacker. I’ve been working on my hack for almost 2 years now (since its conception on July 21st) and it’s gone through major overhauls not the least of which is switching from FEBuilder to Lex Talionis.
While this may not completely be shilling, I do have a request, and if this isn’t the right tag I do apologize.
I don’t know how controversial Genealogy’s maps are, but for everyone who’s played FE4 or games with big maps like those in general, I beseech you: please fill out my survey. I want to know if you liked those big maps or not, and if you did or didn’t like them, PLEASE, what about them did you like or not like. This information is important, and I really want others perspectives on big maps because this kind of affects my hack. I know I can’t please everyone, but I want to start somewhere by getting to know what people like/don’t like.
Totally agree with my dear Ves
I personally prefer 15×10 tiles maps cause it’s the size of the GBA screen
It isn’t really much to see but that’s what I like
It’s a bit difficult to focus on maps that you must roll the screen or open the minimap to see the whole battlefield
I played Genealogy and was kind of cool but it also was exhausting to keep playing the same chapter don’t even cares how many parts it was shattered to make it easy to follow the story and gameplay
I assume big maps are interesting but sometimes simple is best
Or at least what I think
I also remembered Digimon World 2 and Digimon Stories from NDS … Extraordinary big maps tends to be boring
It’s quite controversial you know
Some people like big maps while others like me prefers small maps
But if you are making a project I think the last word is yours
Yeah you are making a project for people to play it
But in my opinion
The first one that must be comfortable with the project is no one but the creator !
You in this case.
So please, do what you want , what you really like.
Make the maps the size you are good with
That’s my advice
I hope you liked it
One thing to have in mind when creating that kind of big maps (at least from what I liked from FE4, or what I want to see in other similar situations), there should be a lot of gimmicks and events happening around the map at specific times, and action whould be almost continious. It can be really boring to just travel around the map without facing anyone or arriving to any specifict point for a couple of turns.
So probably adding different events could help the map/chapter to be more dynamic, like houses/towns that need to be rescue or bridges that have to be raised or lowered, and to do that, you have to visit some specifict house or fort.
This advice also leads to severe fatigue when playing, so while yeah, once in a while a big map is fun, if it takes longer than an hour with speedup, something is severely wrong. There’s also the fact that if you’re adding a lot of grandiose maps, in order to reduce persistent fatigue, the action needs to be broken up, which is usually not really enjoyed that much in this community?
Of course, it’s also depends of how long the map actually is. Tho, it may enter more into a personal thing on saying what could be the perfect limit for tiles in a map that its intention is to be big. If we are talking about F4-like maps, it may not be a good idea to directly translate that into a FE8 (I personally don’t mind this, but I know that a lot of people would dislike it).
Maybe reserving this king of big, gimmicky maps to shorts hacks (1-3 chapters), or to Endgame/Finale of an Arc/Act is a good idea.
My hack, Deity Device, has a few large, FE4 inspired maps that open up as you work through multiple seize points, and the reactions I got to these was strongly mixed. A lot of the comments I got soon after release tended to be from more efficiency minded players who gave mostly negative reactions to those maps. After the hack had been out for a while and more casual players started picking it up, I started to see more positive reactions to these maps and appreciation for the gameplay-story integration they provided, so I would say if you want to have FE4 style maps, prepare yourself for the likelihood that you might get strongly differing reactions depending on the player.
Part of the reason FE4 maps worked too is that roads only costed 0.7 units of movement as opposed to the normal 1. So instead of horses moving 7-8 spaces it was 10+. Which can’t be done in GBA maybe in Lex Talionis but idk.
As others said keeping engagment in large maps is hard, and if you split your party sometimes players will spend several several turns arranging everyone before moving on to the next objective adding more dead or wasted time.
Geneaology sized maps can be done right, but I don’t think even Geneaology did them right. How often are units unable to keep up with others as they rush across a map to the next part of gameplay?
Maps should only be that size if there’s a gameplay reason for it beyond aesthetic reasons like “a sense of grand scale”.
I said this in another thread, but if you use Expanded Modular Save with allowing up to 127 stats you could multiply all move and move costs by 10 to implement working roads in GBA. I said it’d be ideal if code were written to cut off the 0 in the stat screen, just because having big numbers can freak the player out. Such decimal move costs could also make weather more subtle.