Random or handmade world?

[zyklop]

What kind of world building system is used for Grim Dawn? Will you build up the whole world with an editor from hand like it was done with TQ or will there be a random building system using "bricks" like Diablo?

[Renevent]

I think the hand made world in TQ was awesome. There's quite a few places that really inspire awe. With that said, I think what Diablo 3 is doing sounds really nice...which is hand crafted over world areas mixed with random dungeons.

[MadWasp]

Beautiful handmade outdoor areas are cool. Powerful visual produce good feelin'.

[Alek]

They are working on randomly generating the dungeons, however, the tools they would use were utilized too late, and so the matter is in question.

They did promise some random variations in the above-ground-levels, but nothing major as far as I know.

[The Old Farmer]

All random gets old fast unless you have a huge selection, I am thinking of Hell gate London which was random but after a while everything started to look the same. A combination is a good idea if it can be worked out, or a all hand made like TQ.

[Mines51]

Hand made layouts are usually better IMO, more thought out and usually more appealing to the eye. If you randomize some of the random pieces could get pretty repetitive.

[Jerich]

I think overworld areas should primarily be hand crafted and dungeons should be random as long as the random generator is well done. Diablo 2 had good randomization for its time, other games (like Everquest in LDON) have failed. Creating good randomized chunks is fairly challenging.

- Jerich

[k4llu5]

I would rather have a static world if it had more paths to go through instead of the lone road. The destination would be still the same of course, but it would break up the monotony. This was my biggest gripe about TQ. Randomization doesn't leave me with a lasting impression of the game world. It's nice when mobs and chests are randomized as this creates a sense of tension and surprise when you don't know whats around the corner.

[zyklop]

The Diablo3 concept of handmade key-locations and randomly generated dungeons seems to be a good mix between beautiful sceneries and always new generated dungeon challenges. I had the chance to play D3 in Cologne last august as press member and it took only a few minutes to beam me back 10 years earlier. The gameplay "flows", the same happened 3 years ago with Titan Quest. So my personal wish is, that Grim Dawn will get the best from both worlds - nice locations, remarkeble npc´s, challenging quests and randomized dungeons for a high replay-factor.

[Skorpion_King]

And what about more than one handmade map? I would prefer random maps, specially in order to play the game with a lot of characters one time and another, but reading the problems you are explaining... maybe this idea were easier.

So, maybe (i don´t know) one solution could be not having only one map for all characters, but it would be nice to have for example 4 maps for 4 characters (and 4 maps for 1 character anyway, so 16 combinations to play with).. so when you start the game with a new character a different map will be choosen. I am not sure but i think i have read somewhere that in Torchlight there is not real randomization, something like this is the way maps are generated.

Other suggestion could be having pieces of handmade maps that could be moved in the global map (randomly or previously defined).

Just some ideas Crate people could try, i don´t know the viability of them.