Goblin Squad Member
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I've seen drastically different numbers thrown around over the last couple days for hex size in many different discussions. How big, exactly, is a hex?
On Hex Layout
We know that settlements will be placed in the geographic center of each hex, and we know that there will be a few sites scattered around that players will be able to interact with. It was even stated that players will have to clear some of these sites before they will be able to begin the series of tasks that end with a settlement being created in the hex.
On Map Size
Pathfinder Online will be one single server, and they want to start with tens of thousands and move up slowly to hundreds of thousands of players, similar to how EVE Online progressed.
EVE Online's "map" is such a vast area that it takes hours or days (using the 4 hour average daily playtime metric) to travel from one end to the other, depending on the speed of your ship and whether you do it manually or hands-free. It's also a dangerous journey; different groups control different areas of space and they typically guard the choke points into and out of their territory.
I expect that the map size in Pathfinder Online will be similar in scope. If tens of thousands of players are on a single server, with the map size that some people are projecting in other threads of an hour or less to traverse across, the population density will be much too high. The devs have stated repeatedly that there will be plenty of wilderness to explore and that each settlement will be limited in size compared to the total size of a hex.
Conclusion
Can we get a definite answer, or at least a current projection, of how big each hex will be and how many hexes will be included in early enrollment, release, and the future based on player growth? Even something as vague as verification of the facts above (like wanting to maintain wilderness in every hex) would be good. I've seen people throw out numbers in other threads that make absolutely no sense to me, and that are drastically different from other numbers I've seen elsewhere and even what the devs have said. Of course, during development everything changes, which is why I thought I should start this thread and why I think everyone would be ok with an answer that's currently true but might change in the future.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Taken from "Time is the Fire in which We Burn" blog post:
For game design purposes, we assume an average human can walk about 3 miles per hour. Hexes are about three quarters of a mile from edge to edge, so it takes about 15 minutes for a character to walk across a hex. At 4× time, crossing a hex on foot will take less than four minutes, assuming the character can walk in a straight line from edge to edge. This passes a basic sanity test when considering the travel times required to cross the zones in other MMOs.
The Crusader Road area is about 12 miles tall by 11 miles wide. It would require an hour of game time to walk a line from top to bottom—a few minutes less to go from side to side. There are 256 hexes in the area, so if you could walk straight across every hex, it would require about 16 hours of play time. This also passes a sanity test when compared to other virtual worlds. And as the area of the game expands with future development, the total time to traverse the area will grow as well.
Of course, it would look silly if we sped up the movement of your avatar by a factor of four; your character's walk will appear perfectly normal, as will the rest of the physics.
Like everything in the blog, this could change.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Actual size and perceived size are two different things. In a MMO you don't really care about distance, you care about time.
Take skyrim for instance, it seems huge, but it really isn't, the entire nation is the size of a small city in real life.
Short answer: 134 square miles, 256 hexes, have some fun doing the math. Though the number of available hexes will grow with the game. Start small, get big.
Here is a blog discussing the world: Link
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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There is also this quote from Ryan:
Open maps.google.com
Search for Pullman, WA
This is the college I attended many, many moons ago. It is roughly the size of a Hex. This town holds about 24,000 folks (Washington State University is 19,000 of them).
In Pathfinder Online, this would be the largest type of settled area. In the Crusader Road area there are no settlements this large, although Mosswater is an undesigned area at the moment.
Now go north of Pullman, to Garfield. This town holds about 600 folks. It's about the size of one of the three NPC settlements. It occupies about a 4th of a Hex. A very large PC Settlement would be something roughly this size. Garfield is a town that you drive through on your way from Seattle to Pullman and its the center of a large farming community so it's daytime population is higher than 600 residents, more like 1,000 people.
Now to give all that some scale, go west to Mount St. Helens. The mountain would fill approximately 4 Hexes (2x2). So you could have something the size of a massive volcano taking up just a corner of the map, and dozens of small settlements scattered all around it without feeling crowded.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Valkenr Yeah, I've long since read through all of the blogs and the one you linked is from 13 months ago. A lot of design changes can occur in that time, and with all the different information being thrown around I thought it would be good to ask for confirmation.
@Dakcenturi That's interesting, I've never seen that quote before. If a "very large" settlement contains around 600 residents, then 256 hexes would account for 153,600 players if they each had such a settlement placed in them. This falls in line with where I think they want to be a year or two after release, if they follow a similar schedule to EVE Online. Of course, by then they'll hopefully have many more hexes so the density should go down.
Let's assume that they want 30,000 people at release, which I think is probably around what their goal actually is. I came up with that number by accounting for roughly 2,000 people per month of early enrollment and then not quite doubling that when the game is released and advertised as such. Let's also assume that during peak times maybe at most 50% of players are logged in. If everyone spreads out evenly, that leaves around 59 people (round to 60) per hex. This is a lot of people, and worries me a little bit. I hope my numbers are way high or something else in the calculation is wrong, because if there are 3-5 sites in each hex to interact with and there are 60 people in a hex (some hexes will have nearly none and some will have hundreds), that means that there will be lots and lots of competition for those sites.
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Goblin Squad Member
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It will be very rare to find people so homogenously distributed as you describe.
Now it is true that if you start 3000 people at early enrollment (the standard 2000 plus the 1000 they estimated additional if they waived the restriction fo r the kickstarter) in the three NPC towns things will be a bit crowded there. But they will disperse after a bit and go exploring. After a month those three town will be pretty empty again. Another 2000 enter and the same phenomenon should occur.
I think this will probably keep the lands pretty sparsely populated at any given time until well into release.
The places I would anticipate congestion would likely be at key adventuring locations if those are few: At the beginning if there isn't much PvE and people haven't yet managed to construct anything or start settling then the scant PvE will likely be hard pressed to accomodate them.
And all that time the devs are building and adding new hexes to the periphery. If their cash intake is adequate I wouldn't be surprized to have several teams working primarily on that. So if in a month they add four hexes (the size of Mt. Saint Helens) the environment should easily keep up.
Finally consider this isn't a game where you have to be logged in to advance. I suspect in the early days many people will be present on the server rarely, until they get some experience on their character.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Crossing that distance will feel a lot faster too, if running is at full speed. Most MMOs have our characters act as all-star athletes that can run non stop across a continent. Has anything been brought up about standard movement speed, such as whether or not default walking will be the more common movement, or will it be the jog that most games have us moving at?
If jogging requires stamina, and stamina is needed for combat, then people will tend to jog less. Second, if there is a chance that bad guy players might be out there who aren't tethered to spawn points people will tend to want to stay alert rather than running full tilt into an ambush. In fact many of the people out in the countryside I fully expect to be pretty stealthy, which should also slow them.
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Goblin Squad Member
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To me it sounds plenty big geographically. However, there are some major things that have nothing to do with geographical area that can make a big difference in how large a world feels.
How easy will it be to take a straight line to wherever you want to go? Can I set out from my spawn point and always walk to a point of interest as the crow flies, without worrying too much about terrain obstacles? The terrain from the little map that I saw somewhere (link anybody?) seems pretty open... scratch that, it seems extremely open by MMO standards.
Will there be zone lines and loading screens? These make a world feel much more closed-in and confined, but from a technical standpoint they are an important trade-off that designers often make to achieve other things.
How much "stuff" will there be to see as I wander around? If there are usually a few ways to cross a hex from facet to facet without really encountering anything other than trees or grass, the world will seem bigger, and the 4 minutes spent engaged in such a walk will pass slowly. In this case though, this is not necessarily a good thing in abundance. You want a good blend of emptiness and fullness. It might be good to occasionally have barren areas, because that builds a sense of space and wilderness, but if you have too much then the world feels boring and empty. It's a tricky balance.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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@revcasy
Some more quotes from Ryan somewhat indirectly related.
If there's 10,000 people in the game, and 2,000 of them are on-line at any given time (not an unreasonable percentage), even when we've built to the full 256 hexes of the Crusader Road, the average density would be 7 PCs per hex - 24x7x365. (We'll have way more people before we get to 256 hexes, so that's a gross underestimate of the density. I expect the average density to be a lot closer to 100 than 7). People will obviously cluster - some hexes will have 100x the average and some will have nobody in them from time to time. But PCs move around (a lot) so even a relatively sparsely visited hex will have a LOT of characters traveling through it over any reasonable timeframe.
If we have the ability to have a seamless world the hex boundaries will likely be invisible. If we have to do some kind of staged zone transfer, then you'll know where they are. There are game design and aesthetic benefits to both approaches and it remains to be seen where we'll eventually go.
In a human-scale combat, facing, positioning, terrain features, cover and concealment should have some impact.
But since there's no combat system design, I can't say what those would be or how they'd work.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Actual size and perceived size are two different things. In a MMO you don't really care about distance, you care about time.
Take skyrim for instance, it seems huge, but it really isn't, the entire nation is the size of a small city in real life.
Short answer: 134 square miles, 256 hexes, have some fun doing the math. Though the number of available hexes will grow with the game. Start small, get big.
Here is a blog discussing the world: Link
Quick and dirty math because I'm to tired to do actual math puts each hex at about 2/3 of a mile wide. As a guy that professionally walks long distances I can tell you that a 2/3 of a mile movement is basically a non-event. Moreover if you actually pull out a map you'll see that most small towns in America, are sprawled over an area of 5 or 10 miles. When you take into account that this game is supposed to represent a rural environment and rural communities the sprawl would necessarily expand far greater than that because the requirements for fields that farms would have.
The high population model used to justify the small size of the map only works if settlements are designed around a high density population model like real world cities with buildings butting tightly up against each other and rising multiple stories. And I was directly told by a dev earlier today that they would not be using that model.
The only way the map size passes the sanity test is with multiple low population servers or or high density population layouts for cities. Something is going to have to change.
It will be very rare to find people so homogenously distributed as you describe.
Now it is true that if you start 3000 people at early enrollment (the standard 2000 plus the 1000 they estimated additional if they waived the restriction fo r the kickstarter) in the three NPC towns things will be a bit crowded there. But they will disperse after a bit and go exploring. After a month those three town will be pretty empty again. Another 2000 enter and the same phenomenon should occur.
I think this will probably keep the lands pretty sparsely populated at any given time until well into release.
Lets not forget that they don't plan to add settlements until sometime into EE. That's going to pack most people into what, 3 NPC cities? Likely they will have some smaller hamlets, or villages scattered throughout the hexes, but those areas won't have full crafting capabilities or markets (well maybe markets), it'll be pretty tight for a while I Imagine.. People like NPC bankers and market vendors will rake in the OT!
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Goblin Squad Member
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I got into the details a bit in this post, reproduced here:
*****
Hexes are not very big, these settlements are going to be tiny.
Only relative to the mega-cities you're used to in the modern world.
Here is the post where Ryan describes his vision for an "advanced settlement".
Here's the picture: Carcassonne
Here's that fortified area on Google Maps: Carcassonnne. It's the peanut-shaped thing in the middle surrounded by green.
Using my thumb and the 200 ft scale, I made a very rough estimate that this area is roughly 800' x 1,600'. That's roughly 1/6th of a Hex x 1/3rd of a Hex. And that's a rather large area to walk around in.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I just curious, why was Hex chose for PFO? I would think in the video game environment, squares would be easier to handle.
I don't know for sure, but I think it's a nod to the old pen and paper maps. I personally love it. Squares cause the whole four corners thing which might be an issue if hexes have some type of loading thing upon entering.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I just curious, why was Hex chose for PFO? I would think in the video game environment, squares would be easier to handle.I don't know for sure, but I think it's a nod to the old pen and paper maps. I personally love it. Squares cause the whole four corners thing which might be an issue if hexes have some type of loading thing upon entering.
They mention in Thornkeep I believe, (making of tech demo) that it's as said nod to pnp maps. But agree, the Hex seems a better unit than a square if territory control and connections are considered: ie x6 vs x4 borders or "choke points" depending on how it works per hex.
Of course a Hex which borders a river on 3 sides may only have 3 borders intially.
For comparison, this old thread at mmorpg.com does some interesting calculations and comparisons of mmorpg world sizes: How large are MMO worlds now REALLY? A comparison in world sizes - though it has not been updated in a while, I did not immediately find a better source to compare world sizes (there's a few I've seen previously eg map visuals for comparison.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I just curious, why was Hex chose for PFO? I would think in the video game environment, squares would be easier to handle.
It is a convention from miniatures wargaming. If squares were used then if I move a unit North East, one space is about a third farther than if I move one space East. If my rate of movement is tactically or strategically important (which in wargaming it is) moving on the diagonal moves me farther than the horizontal. A hex grid makes it so moving NE gives no advantage in that sense.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Using my thumb and the 200 ft scale, I made a very rough estimate that this area is roughly 800' x 1,600'. That's roughly 1/6th of a Hex x 1/3rd of a Hex. And that's a rather large area to walk around in.
Carcassonne is almost half a mile long in a 2/3 of a mile wide hex. If you center it you get maybe 500 feet from one end of the city to the edge of the Hex.
Carcassonne also completely ignores the farming requirements for a settlement of that side, to supply a settlement that size you can reasonably expect every single hex surrounding it the be completely farmland.
It is going to be very hard to not run into settlements constantly while exploring. The only thing that is going to keep you from waving at the guy in the next town over is short render distances.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Well, this doesn't really help to settle anything, but having a bunch of small villages relatively close together is exactly what the more populated parts of Western Europe would have looked like in the Middle Ages. There are also parts of rural China that still look this way. Though, what drove/drives that pattern of settlement in both those cases is a particular pattern of land use for agriculture.
Setting that aside as irrelevant (which it is), this is not an optimal set up for an MMO. Simple solution, double the size of each hex, keeping everything else the same. Like I said, simple. =P
More complex solutions include: 1. Make it reaaaaaaaally hard to start a settlement or, 2. Make many hexes arbitrarily ineligible for player settlement and scatter these ineligible hexes around so that the settlement density remains low.
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Goblin Squad Member
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-no issues with diagonal neighbours: either you share a full border or you are at least a full hex away
-it gives 6 neighbours instead of 4, which can have huge effects on territory control and trade.
-it makes the whole perimeter roughly the same distance from the center (no distant corners).
-science nerds love Hexagonal Close Packing
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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@Hark I think it is going to be a bit more spread out.
If you look at my post 3 down from the top this is a more recent post from Ryan.
In his example a Hex is going to be about 16 square miles. Where as a settlement based off the Carcasonne comment is going to maybe, maybe be 1 square mile.
To me an extra 15 square miles around a settlement seems like a good amount of space.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Simple solution, double the size of each hex, keeping everything else the same. Like I said, simple. =P
More complex solutions include: 1. Make it reaaaaaaaally hard to start a settlement or, 2. Make many hexes arbitrarily ineligible for player settlement and scatter these ineligible hexes around so that the settlement density remains low.
I assume 1. is going to be a factor as well as requiring a large number of players to be organised to build, run and defend as settlement:
Settlements—In order to create a player settlement, a fort must be advanced using a special settlement construction process. Before this can begin, the hex must be cleared of any watchtowers or forts owned by any character not a signatory of the settlement's charter. Building a settlement requires massive amounts of resources and extensive amounts of time.
The features of a settlement are varied and warrant their own separate dev blog. Since we do not expect the first player settlements to be introduced into the game until well after launch, we'll reserve those details for now.
Further measurements:
-deleted- above more recent measurement sounds A LOT better. +1
Though I like the idea of hexes perhaps not being suitable/possible to settlement concstruction of some being more favorable. ie 2. :)
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Goblin Squad Member
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numbers out of my hat:
-pullman WA seems roughly 3x4 miles, close to what Dak said
-hexes this size give ca 4miles between neighbour settlements, very reasonable for rural area.
-the first blog suggests walking 12mi takes an hour of game time (3mph x 4 accelerated time = 12mi per hour. 15 minutes to walk to your closest neighbor settlement seems a lot, though mounts may reduce travel times.
-the River Kingdoms are big, but 4100 square miles area will cover much more than the Crusader road. If hexes are that big I expect fewer of them.
-roughly 3700 pioneers (incl alphas, brewmasters etc) + 700x2 buddies + 180 x6 guildies = 6000ish players at start of early enrollment. 256 squares with target peak pop density <100 could handle near 100k players.
-The huge world you are asking for could easily turn into an empty game with less of the meaningful interaction GW aims for. Starting small and growing the world to huge size as the player base grows (as is their stated plan) sounds much better than starting big.
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Goblin Squad Member
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One thing we may be overlooking. To establish a settlement you have to clear out other structures like watchtowers and the like. Settlements may want to scatter watchtowers through neighboring hexes to give themselves a defensive buffer, preventing anyone from dropping a town in them.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Yeah I would imagine hexes will end up being something between the originally states size and the more recent stated size.
Everything I've read and seen seems to indicate hexes are going to be large enough that you could really do a lot of your gameplay in maybe a 3 x 3 hex area for the majority of what you do while having adventures going out to outskirt hexes.
@Hark I think it is going to be a bit more spread out.
If you look at my post 3 down from the top this is a more recent post from Ryan.
In his example a Hex is going to be about 16 square miles. Where as a settlement based off the Carcasonne comment is going to maybe, maybe be 1 square mile.
To me an extra 15 square miles around a settlement seems like a good amount of space.
That changes things quite a bit from how I was envisioning them. Also I got the impression that some hexes surrounding a settlement would not be available for settlement placement, which would add to the size of the world. Maybe I am wrong in thinking that though, either way I'm less concerned about the sardine effect now :p
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Goblin Squad Member
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Quick reassess: The whole 256 hexes won't all be available initially, I believe? So the world density will be more or less at the constant av. that Ryan mentioned (iirc: 100ppl/hex)?
I get the impression the intial size of a hex stated about 1.2/1.2kms ie 15mins walking across time; does sound too small or at least too quick. I'm sure securing those fast travel roads becomes more and more vital the larger the world is, therefore; which sounds good for both conflict and cooperation and exploration:
In his example a Hex is going to be about 16 square miles. Where as a settlement based off the Carcasonne comment is going to maybe, maybe be 1 square mile.
That sounds a lot better to me, also.
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Goblin Squad Member
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15 minutes walking between settlements is fine with me. I could go as short as 10 but less than that would feel too much like just walking down the block. I want lots of wilderness between settlements, then once fast travel is implemented (and all indications lead to it being implemented early on in EE at the latest, despite what the results of the poll will be), it should be like 5 minutes between settlements. I like Andius' thought of mostly staying within a 3x3 hex area unless you feel wanderlust which I certainly will. That means for most people most of the time it'll only be 10-15 minutes to go anywhere they need to.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If I have done the math correctly a regular hexagon with an area of 16 square miles would have sides roughly 2.5 miles (~4 km) long and an r (distance from center to one of the vertices)also equal to 2.5 miles.
If you walked from the center of one side to the center of the opposite side (height) you would go ~4.3 miles. If you walked from one vertex to the opposite vertex (width) you would go 5 miles.
So, any straight line you draw which passes through the center of the hexagon will be between 4.3 and 5 miles long measured from entry point to exit point.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If I have done the math correctly a regular hexagon with an area of 16 square miles would have sides roughly 2.5 miles (~4 km) long and an r (distance from center to one of the vertices)also equal to 2.5 miles.
If you walked from the center of one side to the center of the opposite side (height) you would go ~4.3 miles. If you walked from one vertex to the opposite vertex (width) you would go 5 miles.
So, any straight line you draw which passes through the center of the hexagon will be between 4.3 and 5 miles long measured from entry point to exit point.
So that would give a little over an hour to walk across a hex? Or around 18 hours to cross a square map side to side.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Game time/character speed are sped up by a factor of four, right? I was thinking that I heard that.
In that case it would take 15-20 minutes to cross a hex. I can't do the exact math on crossing the map right now because of the way hexagons tile a plane (not the same as squares), but probably in the neighborhood of 4 hours.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Hark I think it is going to be a bit more spread out.
If you look at my post 3 down from the top this is a more recent post from Ryan.
In his example a Hex is going to be about 16 square miles. Where as a settlement based off the Carcasonne comment is going to maybe, maybe be 1 square mile.
To me an extra 15 square miles around a settlement seems like a good amount of space.
This Is much more acceptable. I don't know how accurate it will prove to be. They would need to expand the area given as the starting are for the game quite a bit as your numbers placed into the 12x11 mile map given for the game world would produce approximately 9 hexes.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Well, this doesn't really help to settle anything, but having a bunch of small villages relatively close together is exactly what the more populated parts of Western Europe would have looked like in the Middle Ages. There are also parts of rural China that still look this way. Though, what drove/drives that pattern of settlement in both those cases is a particular pattern of land use for agriculture.
Setting that aside as irrelevant (which it is), this is not an optimal set up for an MMO. Simple solution, double the size of each hex, keeping everything else the same. Like I said, simple. =P
More complex solutions include: 1. Make it reaaaaaaaally hard to start a settlement or, 2. Make many hexes arbitrarily ineligible for player settlement and scatter these ineligible hexes around so that the settlement density remains low.
I would make the available spots to settements inside the hex variable too, so some hexes would allow a city to be built in the center, other close to a corner just to look more like real world.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Just to keep relevant quotes together. From the most recent blog.
A hex is the basic unit of territory in the game design. The team has decided that they wish to sub-divide the original hex into 7 "subhexes"—that's a central hex surrounded by 6 identically sized satellites. The team is making this change to better facilitate territorial warfare, by creating intermediate points of control for settlements to contest, as opposed to an all-or-nothing contest if two settlements were immediately adjacent to one another. This design also makes it easier to visualize and implement things like escalation, and to reflect the impact of character actions on resources and wandering monsters at a higher degree of resolution.
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Bumping this up, as it is relevant to the current SAD argument.
Currently, many players feel they will be very crowded, while others feel the space described to be very open. This may be having a big affect on how they see trade routes, banditry, and player density in settlements. Some even feel that there won't be enough wilderness to venture through between each settlement.
Any newer word on sizing of hexes and how many there might be? Maybe even just an idea on if more than the Crusader's Road area might be available or if it has been stretched quite a bit? Will there be more than one mountain?
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Kios: Jump to Harad's latest map, here: Unofficial PFO Map with Topo
Background reading:
The Crusader Road area is about 12 miles tall by 11 miles wide. It would require an hour of game time to walk a line from top to bottom—a few minutes less to go from side to side. There are 256 hexes in the area, so if you could walk straight across every hex, it would require about 16 hours of play time. This also passes a sanity test when compared to other virtual worlds. And as the area of the game expands with future development, the total time to traverse the area will grow as well.
Of course, it would look silly if we sped up the movement of your avatar by a factor of four; your character's walk will appear perfectly normal, as will the rest of the physics.
Currently our hex-size experiments are falling into the range of 400 to 1000 meters across per new, smaller hex.
Territory
We're going to build about 144 hexes, each about 680 meters by 780 meters, prior to the first players joining the game. One of those hexes will be a settled area controlled by NPCs, and at least one of the nearby hexes will be a monster hex which will regularly create problems for the settlement. About 15 hexes will be sites for eventual player settlements (the systems for claiming, building, and administering these settlements will be introduced later in the Early Enrollment period). The remaining hexes will be wilderness, places where characters will go to find and extract resources and struggle with each other over the economic assets they represent.
This territory is going to be located roughly in the middle area of the Crusader Road zone we've previously discussed. It's mostly low hills and sparse forest, with some small ponds and a few higher hills. The hexes will be laid out in an east-west configuration. When you reach the edge of the area, you'll find an invisible wall that limits further travel.[...]
The Early Enrollment Development Process
Every few weeks we will be adding more content and systems to the game. Some things are obvious: More hexes, a new monster type, new items, or establishing basic settlement-building functionality.
So, initially there's 144 of the smaller type of hexes. I don't remember what that multiplies up to in equivalence to the old size hex total of about 250 for the total map in the blogs. But if GW further increase that map to cover the entire River Kingdoms then the number of hexes (using again the old size) is anticipated to grow to "1000" to provide an example of how big the hex system "could" grow. In terms of growth it appears the devs want to track player density (av.) across the map with obviously higher density in settlement hexes and av. across wilderness so that as players are each other's content the interaction balance is just right: Not too empty not too crowded and lots of room for exploration and conflict. That's the general gist I've interpreted so it could be incorrect but it's about right I think.
Personally, I have a hankering for sweeping, wildernesses full of virgin forests and untouched mountain fastnesses... Whether that translates to good gameplay or not...
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Good find. I was having trouble finding anywhere newer than these year and a half old posts where the hexes were talked about. I'd still like to see an update newer than those you found if any have been posted (Those seem to be already 9 months old)
It's a little concerning that in early EE there will be no player settlements according to this post, so all characters will be restricted to venturing forth from the NPC settlements, but very promising that new hexes are planning to be added every few weeks.
Also, it seems to indicate in the Big Things have Small Beginnings blog that the area available will not be a square as some sample maps show, but an east-west line or grouping of some sort.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Good find. I was having trouble finding anywhere newer than these year and a half old posts where the hexes were talked about. I'd still like to see an update newer than those you found if any have been posted (Those seem to be already 9 months old)
I don't think there is anything more recent on this subject. It sounds like the devs via a combination of design and tech have settled on a hex size standard unit and since that point they've used it as a basis for further development, described in this blog:
We were attempting to create a fairly small version of the low level end of gameplay. We chose a segment of the map—roughly 5x5 hexes—that included all the locations we needed. It ended up being about nine hexes to the left and two hexes up from Thornkeep (our current origin point for our hex grid), so it'll be part of the initial starting area. The area we built includes two settlements, three monster hexes, a badlands hex, and lots of wilderness hexes spread across an area that is primarily Mountain and Forest terrain.
We're calling this section of the map and the servers that are hosting it "Chitterwood" and it will be the testbed for the next stage of our development for the game.
It's a little concerning that in early EE there will be no player settlements according to this post, so all characters will be restricted to venturing forth from the NPC settlements, but very promising that new hexes are planning to be added every few weeks.
MVP = Core Gameloop for release. EE will develop that to a point it's ready to sit on top settlements with "Land Rush!" for guilds to claim a settlement hex after the preceding is all "souped up", no doubt.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm sure you recognize the two things I'm about to link, but to me this helps me visualize how big a hex is going to be (with their current iteration).
Firstly, a picture from the blog which rather clearly shows the boundaries of hexes. In the center you can see the little settlement that the devs have been mucking about in.
Secondly, a video; the Q4 milestone video to be exact. The point in the video I skipped to, about 2:30 in, is a flyover of the settlement pictured in the picture linked above; that should give a good idea of how big that settlement is, and thus how big the hexes are (in the current iteration).
