on spiro they actually had a nice solution for this. When there was foliage at a cliff it was mostly a very specific type. So everytime you saw that: stop. There was nearly always a cliff
i don't mind the cliffs in gondwa, at least it's not like gateway where a bunch of bushes are blocking you from seeing the edges of them. Sometimes they even make it so you can safely go down with parts of the cliff sticking out as platforms. Tho i really hate how tiny ass logs completely stop your movement , and it's so unpredictable too cuz you can go through some of them
One time I found myself stuck in the ravine and the only way up was strategically blocked off by rocks. Like legit there was a perfectly 45° angle slope that I could climb up, but the devs were like “nah, let’s put a rock in the middle of it so you can’t do anything lol”. Worst part is that there are no other fucking rocks around. That was the only one.
devs (and fans) in this genre often ask the question "Does this look pretty for screenshots?" Instead of "Does this seem functional?" These are video games first, and experiences second.
Bob has one thing right and it’s their somewhat good map layout. All 3 of their maps, especially rival shores allows aquatics to have actual gameplay and interactions with land creatures, which I find PoT has a hard time figuring out
Honestly, 200 players would be enough for The Isle. Most herbivore players are gonna be grouped around areas with a water source within easy walking distance of one or two foods sources. Predator players will be wherever other players or plentiful AI will be, which is still near water. The biggest issue, is that with only 100 player slots, of which most servers will see about 80 of that filled continuously, it makes it easy for players to group up around usually just two water sources, making the rest of the map seem inactive in comparison. This is easily solved by literally doubling the player cap, which is likely to double the number of continuous players, because in these kind of games you want(need?) to be in servers with more players. With 150 plus players, not even 2 water sources is gonna have enough space or nearby food available for people to chill without literally stepping over each other's toes, fighting all the time, and stripping the area of resources. Meaning people will naturally spread out across the map more. Now, it's honestly asking lot of the Isle devs, considering their lack of foresight, hindsight . . . Really anything that requires critical thinking and the ability to reflect on past mistakes, but if they really got their heads out of their asses, and buckled down on increasing the stability of their game as a whole, as well as the servers they run on, 200 player cap is a very doable number.
I want to love The Isle, but the water distribution on Gateway makes NO sense, rivers start in lakes, which isn't wrong necessarily, but then gets weird when it happens multiple times, there's no springs, some rivers just kinda end, oh and the huge dam? The river flows FROM it, not into it. Good luck following the "water goes down rule" Because it worked exactly 0 times out of 10 for me. Ponds are usually on a random meadow somewhere high on the island. But I really like the tiny pond in the volcano, that is really cool, shame that there isn't a little rivulet that eventually grows into a river that starts there tho...
The map for Gondwa is large and does have a large variety of cliffs. However, they do have teleportation with waystones to specific spots and a pull up map which the Isle doesn't have either of.
@@atoxee6867 From my experience people do that anyway regardless of teleportation. The Isle is a prime example of hotspots. Now teleportation does make it faster to go to said hotspots but that's about all I've seen. People like to congregate in areas for action and conversation as well as easy access to resources. Besides, if people don't explore the map it could be that the map is difficult to traverse, spots lack resources or the map is simply too big.
Not sure if the size of your map is meant seriously, but it looks not like a survival map but a deathmatch map. Which is fine if you like that. But survival means the necessity to move around in search for food, be that plants or other dinos. I think Gateway is pretty good already, but indeed too big for 100 player servers. 150-200 works better (custom servers). There are enough rivers for the semi-aquatics to move through, enough cliffs for flying or climbing dinos to be safe, dense forests (Why wouldn't there be? It's not modern civilized land.) and open fields. I agree with some wonky placements, though like the central domes just kinda being built into a cliff at one side and some roads and lake placements also making little sense. Also I don't think focusing on adding new dinos playables is the way to go at this state. Improve the map (size it down, fix weird shit), improve the atmosphere (why are there no birds, no insect noises), fix the food and AI animal spawns, then go for more dinos.
More players and easier to access migration zones instead of it despawning from East plains and spawning in West plains where it takes an hour to migrate safely. I'd be happy if they either let some plants grow outside of the migration zone, just more sparsely and then way more dense in the mz. OR if they just had a few zones that would slowly rotate in a ring around the map so we could follow it. The issue with carnivores is that most of the players gather around water sources that are clear of trees so they can spot their prey. Give them an incentive to be lurking in the trees, better camo, a buff from being able to sharpen claws on tree bark, more small ponds/puddles for water within them etc and reduce the amount of clutter that can stop your movement like small rocks and logs that you can barely see. Another easier way of fixing these issues would just be to create a smaller map as stated in the video and I think that's his point
Sorta hot take, dino survival games have terrible maps bc there isn't much to do in the games. Part of the experience of playing is built on struggling to get around and survive. This is especially the case in the Isle and the devs design philosophy is inherently flawed. They want an extremely immersive game that doesn't lead to an overall pleasant experience. They need their players to die a few times to cliffs so that they have to grow all over again.
Hot take: Dying to fall damage because hidden cliff is the most annoying way to die, bar none. Add in Apex AI dinos and make me RUN FOR MY LIFE instead
@@terrykrugii5652 that actually would be such a good idea. Related, I was once a pteradon and found a dead body in the woods. I flew down and started eating it but a warthog was nearby. Charged at my butt and nearly ate me. That was a terrifying experience and good lord I had good headphones. I was a raptor another time running from carnos, dare to say I cannot navigate through maps bc IDK where I am and can't read the 'compass' thing anymore. I ran through trees and fell to my death, that made me absolutely mad bc i had such a hard time growing earlier. However it is fun manoeuvring through cliffs to be safe, only if you can clearly see them. I would prefer Ai
As a level designer and map developer by trade and an actual job. You make some valid points but one thing to remember with players and the survival genre as a whole is that you need to design a level based around your style of game. Of course, dinosaur survival games have dense map designs with lots of terrain variation. Most of them are walking simulators for the most part. You need interesting things to see and things to go do. Some maps in ARK, the game that I made Appalachia for, are way too crazy yes but it makes a simple map like Appalachia seem like a breath of fresh air. I added stuff like ghost towns, settlements, old forts, and a lot of environmental story-telling to the map because it's based on North America if the Precursor Overseers met humanity and wanted to control it during the 1800s. It's a lot of flat-ish land but that was for builders and because it makes sense when humans were there. Nature did take over again but the effects on the landscape are far from gone. That said, a massive map needs things to do and things to see. For the case of dinosaur survival games, you need to take a look at it from different perspectives. Vast open areas are great for hadrosaurs, sauropods, ceratopsians, and stegosaurs while dense areas are better for dromaeosaurs, smaller carnivores, small herbivores, and more. Take a look at it this way. You wouldn't put a bluegill in a saltwater tank or in a fish bowl. With map design, it's the same concept. You build your map around the gameplay and vision you want for your game. If you want a more realistic look, you need more detail. If you want a cartoonish stylized look, you need less detail and more exaggerated things. Personally, I like how the maps are. Do I want to make one for Path of Titan's one day? Maybe. I do have my gripes with the games in general but the maps are something that we as players spend a lot of time in. We see that world and if it were not cohesive, I wouldn't spend an hour exploring it. The maps of Path of Titans at least do that well. It's cohesive and it goes for a style.
The map you made would need to be almost doubled in size to fit 100 players without being a clusterfuck. It would still be smaller than an Isle or PoT map overall, and make running into other players a more common occurance, but running into a player or group every 5-ish minutes would be much preferable to running into them every other minute, which is what would happen with your proposed map size. As a carni it would make hunting an absolute chore, with how easily your prey could get stolen, recieve back up, or how easily you could become the orey yourself. And it would incentivise herbis to mix together and megapack even more for increased protection. I'd say perfect map size for 100 players would be 2/3 the size of Gateway.
The map is representative. Remember, it was done as an example for a youtube video. It takes a very, very long time to build a big map and what was presented in a video is good enough as a mockup for an actual map at proper scale with the right terrain detailing.
I love the environments of Panjura and Gondwa, but my biggest issue with Path's maps are the cliffs on Panjura and the sheer size of the maps meaning that you never come across anyone unless you got to a hotspot. I really hope alderon makes a much smaller and generally flatter map, or gives dinosaurs the ability to walk over small inclines.
They could cut the entire tile have of the map and it be 10 times better since no one goes there except for like babies who don’t want to get absolutely murdered
One thing that I like in the Bermuda map, is the underwater caves, where you can pass for the arrived in a lake or river, this making it difficult to drink water fresh water and also leave the experience more interesting, different from path of Titans, where the experience with aquatic animals is boring and uninteresting.
Even with the interactive map for The Isle, I still barely know where I am. Traveling to the hotspots is a pain on Cerato (my favorite) because THEY GAVE THEM 2 SPAWN CHOICES. It's either on the hotspot where you are likely to insta die because someone spider sensed you, or starve to death because no one is around/no ai spawn.
I played on spiro for years, and at some point I knew the map like it was my own room, and when they added gateway my senses were completely erased and I still barely know the map..
A big part of the issue for me, is that their damn compass system doesn't work properly, and never has. Pay attention, and you will realize it isnt consistent in which way the cardinal directions point. Which means to get around, you better either memorize the map manually, or use one of the online virtual maps with coordinate plug-ins and learn to read that. Memorizing the maps wouldn't be such a big deal honestly, except as Goldfish mentions, the maps are oversaturated in dense jungle straight from a Vietnam vet's worse nightmares. He even downplayed how bad it is in the current map I feel. If you aren't following a road, you're just begging to get lost as soon as you enter the jungle. Funnily enough, the river on Spiro actually made it easier to navigate, as it was the only large water source, so you always could orient yourself to it. The abundance of different rivers and streams in Gateway actually makes it more difficult in the jungle areas. Despite being ostensibly "worse" maps, V3 and Thenyaw were surprisingly much more navigable. Memorizing them was honestly much easier due to many recognizable land marks, and changes in biomes.
I found spiro quite easy to learn and master I still don’t know where I’m going in many parts of gateway besides it just seems as massive as gateway is players only hang around 10% of the map
1:36 I wanted to mention that a lot of Evrima players feel Legacy folks will come over someday. I’ve read online comments that go like, we’ll get legacy players once we get X, that magical X factor could be more Dino’s , or a better map, an optimization patch. Let’s be real here legacy players aren’t waiting for eveima to get any of that, we play legacy because we prefer that game over eveima. A lot of the legacy folks tried eveima, and said thank you but no.
AI should only spawn when less people are in one location so hot spots would barely have AI making people have to actually traverse the map away from people so they can get food, hot spots wouldn’t exist cause no food
Gondwa would be good if they forgot about the weird locations like the rainbow hills whatever it’s called and cut the entire top part of map in general, the game would be a whole lot better
Dude that first meme immediately made me think about panjura from path, the amount of times I’ve been shotgunned down their narrow ramps down sheer cliff drops is too many
My main issues with the current map is too large with no goal. The migration system is added to force players to move to different places so they are not camping on one side of the map which means the map design is flawed. Too many places to explore but basically no water and no food so totally just a waste to make if you only limiting the scope to a tiny segment. Another annoyance the cliffs, rocks, vegetation which is normal but on this map the amount of small rocks added everywhere to make chase or flee almost impossible if you try to do the chances you stuck into one is high then you die. There needs more food sources to all kind of animals also need to make larger server caps and somehow solve the high pings. I am sure they cannot afford those large servers with shards what large studios have but for a game like this 250-300 player on one server would be much better if they can solve the lag. Players could form large herds, can go and explore, carnivores have more food options, omnivores (if more ai critters added) could also get their diet and more or less you will find another players more quickly. There are times when I instant find someone but the majority of time I am wandering hours with no other players. The stamina is also limiting the players to run though the map also they need to keep stamina when they need to run and avoid predators. There is no mini map basically the only option if you go to notable places and try to write down the coordinates and later nagivate there.
This is why Cerulean Island is my favourite map. It's small, traversable as both a land animal and water animal, has easy to access quests, and has plenty of reachable water and food sources for both carni and herbi players. Also this vid is fantastic btw, but I almost partly wish the issue of food sources and bad quests was also brought up a bit too for pot😩💦 My other personal gripe is the lack of convenient bush layouts in these maps.... Maybe it's just me, but I find that herbivore on Panjura is especially bad because the only viable place to find consistent bushes is if you stick to the grassland hot spots, otherwise it's a hassle for you to find one bush because the map makers forgot to place more food sources. Thank god most of them can switch to eating other things, but I wish that wasn't necessary.
that's a hard take, Cerulean for the most part is good for aquatics but still has the same issue of people conversing to one single hotspot. As gorgeous as the map is, I haven't seen a single player in land.
When I studied Landscape Architecture they taught us: Designs are experienced from eye-level. Stop designing things that look pretty from the top. The design is made for humans, not birds! When I look at most of these maps, they're breath-taking to fly around in... See what's happening? The devs should take this architecture rule into account.
I fully agree with the Video. One problem i always had in the isle are hotspots, they are always laggy asf and its the only relieable food source for carnis. This problem was so bad that in the all time low of the Ai that I was allways starving when i wanted to visit a part of the map that i liked and wasnt as popular.
I hate popular places in general, one reason why I prefer 'death match' servers instead which The Isle evrima doesn't have. Also let's shove in there I have extreme skill issue when it comes to growing, at least in Legacy I made it to adult in things longer then 1 hour growth. In Evrima my ass can't grow for shit bc where's food? where players? My herb is bored walking to no where. And I am not patient enough to spend 2 hours growing something with 500 hp to be bit once and die. BUT I HATE hot spots on any survival game it ruins the experience! I love exploring and walking around. No people? damn they're all in one spot... now I gotta force myself to keep repeating a cycle just to see people and eat! diets were a good thing to encourage ppl to actually migrate and travel but shit don't care. I do, I don't want bad stamina and slow growth and get punished for not finding any meat bc no players actually do anything then stay in one area..
Remember in the POT video when I said: "Everyone makes hangout games look like survival games" well no! players flat-out turn survival games into hangout games and defend it as a survival game LIKE DAWG YOU ARE TREATING THIS GAME AS A HANGOUT GAME, STOP TRYING TO HIDE IT. prehistoria on Roblox is an obvious example of the player base trying to defend the game as "survival" though all they do is sit at 1 spot on the map and do nothing other than attack someone for fighting or hunting
Yeah I’m path of titans no one does anything other than sit in crater, I got jumped by these fantasy moose for just existing, I didn’t even get to fight my target
I mean at least path has rp or "hard" realism servers with extensive profiles that encourage you to move. With global either entirely removed or strict moderation (asking for names for reports for example) The one I'm in is predominantly "walking simulator" unless your territorial than it's "yell at everyone in a 50 mile radius simulator" Not that it's perfect (there is a lot about path i would change if i could *cough* proper dodging and sharp turns that don't waste all my stam *cough*)
I completely agree, cliffs just suck, every game nowadays think it's necessary to spam everything with cliffs. Inclines and hills fine, but why cliffs? Also I actually like dense vegetation, especially for juvies and smaller species it's important to have a refuge, but yeahs it shouldn't be the whole map. And the devs themselves know by now the maps are too big, hence why they try to push 150/200 ppl server and AI (Ik, 200 players still wouldn't be enought for the maps size) but yeahs, it's a big problem aswell.
I think something that would drastically help all dinosaur games especially path of titans ocean gameplay is to add a bunch of AI critters. That means including hostile ones. Small, medium, big and occasionally huge ones. Make it fun and dangerous. It's not like it's all that punishing to die in POT anyway, you still get to respawn with most of your progress left.
I crapped myself the first time I saw a Shark/Meg in the ocean, till I realised it was terrified of me and I could swallow it whole with a baby Spino… then I realised oh, the ocean is boring gotcha
Playing modded PoT maps reminded me that the game can actually be enjoyable. I don't touch officials anymore, at least until they fix the aquatics situation in Gondwa.
I think dev in general should study Skyrim's map design and philosophy. Most regions of the map have picturesque views and something to interact with, and it also puts the player in many different situations. I personally think a big map isn't the problem with the Isle. I would say the problem is the lack of things to do and lacks NPCs in the world. Adding in NPC creatures and interactables in different regions of the map would not only make the world feel less lonely, but it would also encourage the players to explore the world. Example #1 You stumble into a cave, and you go inside the cave, and you find a bunch of broken vials whose contents are spilled onto the ground. You decide to drink them, and you get a random mutation. Example #2 You are going to an abandoned greenhouse because it has some non-native plants that your dinosaur wants. Then you hear a bunch of small carnivores roaring. It turns out a couple of NPC Beipi have nested in the greenhouse, so now you have to either kill or scare away the Beipi.
They should study red dead redemption 2, that map is beautiful while also being playable, multiple biomes, cliffs, mountains, it also has actual trailers that look similar to game trails (basically roads created by wild animals)
The beginning of the vid was so relatable with my 90% elder para in prior extinction but the difference was i was at the edge of the ravine and there were some hole between the the rocks and I couldn’t go back cuz there were some rocks I couldn’t climb over. Btw i never knew there were map problems with pot or the isle ( although i have heard 99% of the map was empty) this is because I don’t play those games
@@S.W-217 yeah, you see i was actually walking on the rocks of the ravine and I thought there would be a path where I could get of the spot so I walked and then i fell into a gap of the rocks, I tried unstucking but when it was in the 20 or 11 sec before i unstuck i fell to my death
Thank you for making this video, it’s good to finally see someone addressing this. I absolutely despise everything about gondwa, it’s extremely unrealistic and immersion breaking, and there are cliffs every 3 feet no matter where you go. As a level designer I am deeply pained by the fact that they thought this was good enough to release, because it’s so bad that you don’t even need a minute of development experience to see how awful it is.
I try not to complain about maps: there are usually two factors that dictates map design being Biomes and Size. I can understand wanting a large map both to fit in more biomes and to fit the size of the biggest creatures. To The Isle's credit, they probably felt the size of the maps had to be so expansive in order to ensure larger Dinosaurs like Sauropods couldn't just walk from point A to B in three bursts of the stamina bar. Speaking of points, Biomes are something I wish these Dinosaur survival games took advantage of. As much as I despise BoB I will give it credit that every Biome at least has different challenges involved in it despite them just being... well, islands. I genuinely believe that one of them can make a map that supports drastic Biome diversity with their own challenges without separating them into obvious parts. Basically, don't build your maps like Minecraft where you have a desert and move slightly to the left and suddenly you're in the tundra. The change between Biomes should be gradual. I know many of the games, if not all of them, take place in an Island setting but, I think in terms of map design more inspiration should be pulled from continents. Gradual shifts in temperature and Biomes should be achievable for these games. To BoB's credit, the things I like most are the environmental hazards such as temperature, flooding, forest fires, etc. It'd be nice to see that in the other two big names which would offer more customizable abilities that aid in survival within these particularly hazardous places. Also, for the love of all that is holy, keep the mountains and cliffs to a minimum! It's fine to have one or two so that smaller creatures and flying creatures have a place to set up but, you don't need five mountains and endless cliffs!
The map you proposed looks amazing. I dig the subtle Mediterranean theme, and the landmasses have a good balance. It would be great to explore in something like Path of Titans. There's another issue (Though, it's only present in one game I know of, and it's a Roblox game), which is the map being too small. Land of Lizards 2 used to have a large archipelago with land bridges, similar to Beasts of Bermuda, but the developers decided to compress the map into about 1/9th of its size, making the game laggier somehow, and leaving no hiding spots for juveniles. Besides the map itself, along with the season colours, look awful in general. The game has a host of other issues, but this one relates to the video so I thought I'd make a comment about it.
I personally think that gondwa doesn't do a terrible job. I think the super dense forests are an amazing place for new players to grow and still have tons of cover in a game that's not really gotten many stealth mechanics. I think that the hot spots are well distributed and reasonable however I do see a problem with a lot of the areas being just uninhabitable due to a lack of food these hotspots are because food is super easy to find. As for the water I think gondwa suffers from The same problem that you mentioned If they had just kept the land area at the north end the ocean area at the southern end with an island to get to I think gondwa would be perfect and just sprinkle in more food and get rid of the delivery quests because delivering flowers to bees is super boring
Ngl ik ppl critisise the legacy map but at least the were multiple hotspots . Hidden twin lakes gulf pond people wod walk in certin arieas and basicaly follow the river to get to ppaces i would go into common paths ppl take to get to these hotspots to ambush em since peoole tend to cicle between the diff hotspots. It wasnt great but was still pretty good
Will say as far as gondwas size to be fair they always planned on adding dinosaur AI so the size of the map does make sense in long term reasoning, honestly if they just fix the situation with the aquatic creatures and just add a few more routes to get up and down the clips easier, I think it would be good, i’m pretty sure some biomes will definitely be switched around considering they’re making new foliage so, the world should look more prehistoric
The problem with the isle is that there is too much visual clutter like bushes that make traversing the map annoying and PoT has just way to many cliffs that make you take obnoxious routes or completely block your path if your a aquatic trying to get up stream. I hate their waterfalls.
i love love gateway because it's a really beautifull, big and i love those little nooks and crannies but i can definitly agree that it's extremely flawed and harsh for new players or ppl with a shitty sense of navigation
Gondwa map on Path of Titans has a lot of beautiful places, and the surrounding ocean is amazing. But it suffers, like you explained in thus video, from being way too big. 98 times out of 100 people spawn and head straight for great plains or impact crater. And I am guilty of it too, because I wouldn't find anyone for ages from 45 minutes to an hour.
I really like Gondwa in POT because it’s so large. If the map was smaller and more condensed I wouldn’t be able to avoid other aggressive players. It would be a KOS fest or carebear fest. Unfortunately for Aquatics they will always be boring no matter what parts of the map are changed.
@@RandomMackem0069 Same thing happened on the beta for DoD. Plus if you hit a tree while trying to avoid a log sometimes the trees would eat you and you'd be clipped into them. They had to introduce the /stuck command specifically because their forest biom was ass.
Im thankful you’re actually talking about PoT maps, i mainly played on panjura and my god trying to get my tyrannosaurus and spinosaurus to adult while trying to traverse the map was pure hell, i constantly died to fall damage and i always had to keep moving 24/7 which drained stamina, its was annoying as hell and idk why in the hell they thought this was a good map
I love Path of Titans but what you said about the maps is what I've been screaming forever now. You finally get around the stupid cliffs to get stuck on a rock. You walk around the rock to get stuck on the smallest branch in the world. 😭😭😭
I think gateway is the worst . The forests are so dense I can't tell where I'm going and the grouping system makes it a chore to meet up with friends. I know the isle wants to be immersive, but it needs a in game map just from how large it is alone
I think the isle did a very good job in the last months in solving this problem. Gateway was always beatyfull but youre right it suffered from hotspots and its size. But with the sanctuary and migration system it forces people at least until theyre full grown or even after theyre full to use the maps full size. And also that every predetor has its favourite hunting ground (dilo=jungles carno,cerato= highlands or open fields trodon=Sanctuarys etc
You're preaching to the choir, I've been saying this shit for as long as I've been playing the Isle and PoT. 😩 Why, o why, do the developers of these games think we want an oversized map? Ofc you don't want it to be too small, otherwise it will feel more like a gladiator arena, but honestly, make them like half the size and flesh out the routes and biomes so that every nook and cranny feels hand made and thought out. The Isle could remove half of gateway and the players would be better off, esp at the 100 player cap. The amount of times I've lost my way and ended up wasting my time having to skirt around a massive dome or started scaling/falling down a cliff I was not suppose to in attempt to get to the next migration zone is infuriating. Alderon tried to cram too many different biomes into one map, leaving it feeling jarring and incohesive. 70% of the map goes unused and some areas feel like they were just added for the sake of filler. Rainbow Hills is the ugliest biome by far.
This is a video game though, not real life. Animals irl need large swathes of land to meet their dietary needs and also sometimes have to travel miles to reach clean water. There are zero reasons for video games (especially multiplayer games) to conform to those rules because if they did it would be fucking boring.
That's because humans have drastically reduced their wild populations... if you go to areas less effected by human enchroachment, you absolutely do see animals everywhere. The world is not empty.
Because they're scared of us. We are many, and we are deadly with all the weapons we have. That is not the same experience creatures had many millions of years ago.
Dude the cliffs in the Isle… y’all remember that one big ass ravine directly east of Center? The one completely covered in foliage so you don’t know that you’ll die to it? The one filled with corpses to lure new players in? Next time I see that ravine ima go apeshit, one of the worst map choices
I always think bob did aquatics justice for underwater tunnels for my custom map its 5 biomes with water spots around freshwater of course and rivers connecting them but theirs 2 main channels where the larger aquatics have to swim thru and the smaller rivers anything not mosa sized can swim easily thru and some underwater tunnels for far reaching ponds to keep people on there toes
Idk why PoTs devs struggle with water maps so much. They really should take notes from Beasts of Bermuda which has actual underwater tunnels connecting rivers to oceans, so aquatic dinosaurs can actually interact with the terrestrial ones.
V2 was my favourite map and era of The Isle. For me that was the peak of the game. I learned that map so well that I could orient myself wherever I spawned. I also really liked the progression system of the time. While I wasn't good at playing carnivores, I had a hell of a fun time playing herbivores and enjoyed bouncing around the progression tree. The amount of large herds I'd also been a part of was amazing, I can still remember many experiences. It was the perfect mix of playing as the animal and talking and making friends that I've ever had in this game. Gateway is still fun, but like you said it's too big, but with V2 that never felt like an issue for me. You could always find a player at a large body of water or on a path between it. Plus it had some really cool features and landmarks.
i don't see how the map being too big is a problem though, as a newbie with no friends on the isle i much prefer staying as far away from anyone else as far as possible, and just scavenging for food as a cerato alone, just so i could get to elder for once. but anytime i come close to a populated area i always get killed, skill issue? presumably, but c'mon..
In defense of Gondwa. The reason why there are so many cliffs and pathways is to create “chokepoints” and increase the chances of encountering other players. If we take the example at 6:22. The lake is a point of interest and the cliffs forces everyone that wants to go there to walk the same path. Gondwa is full of examples of soft and hard paths. Soft paths as a example are large open areas but with most of it leading to dead ends or lack anything of interest. They even put down some roads to guide players in the “right” direction. However I think the hotspot literally called “center” shouldn’t be encouraged so hard as it is right now otherwise its a pretty solid map imo.
I feel like the maps are like this because the devs want some level of "realism". Big forests, sheer drops, isolated fresh water holes and not a lot of identifiable landmarks are probably what you would expect in a lot of biomes on this planet. But does that mean it's fun to traverse? No. People play games to have fun, and fighting the environment to simply walk in a straight line is not fun. Well it could be in some games, like Death Stranding. The gameplay of that is tailored to fighting the environment to get from point A to point B, and that's the point of the game. In a dinosaur game that's not the point, or at least for the dinosaur games out right now that's not the point of them. The point of the Isle, Path of Titans and others is to play as interesting different species with different abilities and encounter other players to befriend or fight for your continued survival. But the maps take away from that. You could have a single player game where you play as a dinosaur that's lost its family and it's trying to find its way home, and the gameplay is overcoming the challenging environment to get back home. (Basically A Land Before Time game) I think Doom 2016 is also a good example of what the devs of these dinosaur games should be doing. Some of the maps in Doom 2016 are on Mars, and we know that in real life Mars' surface is pretty unremarkable. A little rocky too, a little difficult to walk on maybe as well. What did the devs for DOOM do however? Ignored that and made it fun to traverse and look at, with clear pathways and landmarks to look at. I don't know why these devs think these big maps are a good idea still. For years people have complained about how big and un-traversable they are, and yet the devs seem to instead hear "make them bigger!"
I do love gateway, it has a lot of good designs and pathways to get around (I still use the interactive map from that one website) but I agree it is way to big. One half of the island has no one on it, in my opinion they would need at least a 350 player count to fill up gateway and maybe even 400 for the islands if they do add some sort of railways onto them. Love the vid cant wait for the dino costume vid
How my map would be: A map 2 thirds the size of spiro with 2 average sized lakes (like twins in isle v3) as the main hotspot. A thin stretch of forest splits the two where forest dwellers can snatch tarvelling prey going between the lakes. There are small ponds in various other districts with meadows connected to them for nesting and general gaming. There would be a large plains farthest from the lakes with a seasonal water source so you are forced to move back to the lakes during certain seasons. The lakes would have a small stretch of plains like twins for example. One snowy mountain looms over the entire map as a landmark, you can climb up it and do idk, winter snowy dino sh? No water up there so you dont get BoB river camping herbis who sit in one spot for 5 eons. There are various caves across the map of varying size and encasement. There would be a deep thick forest with winding roots juvies can hide in next to a swamp, where crocs would reside mostly. The crocs could then snatch up unsuspecting juvies going to drink water. There would be a SMALL stretch of beach towards an ocean (no ocean aquatics) where you can go get crabs, sunbathe idk girliepop with a little creek off to the side that can fit 1 croccy in.
At least PoT HAS a map to make navigation easier to get to places. In Isle if you even mention the idea, idiots just vomit up the “Dinosaurs can’t read” meme.
What is with all the rocks and mountains on gateway drives me crazy. As soon as you leave the pathway there will be a massive mountain or dome to get around.
When I play a carnivore I can never find food on official servers even full ones so I always play on unofficial servers because there are food everywhere there should also be carcasses that that spawn anywhere
The only reason why I don't complain about gondwa its because the time to grow a dino (most), but after the video you have some interesting solutions to fact that I have to wait 1 hour to search for a player to kill just to be killed by a croc
I honestly do like the gondwa map aside from a couple things which really frustrate me: The lack of easily acessable water sources and the problem with untraversable cliffs. I think players would spread out more if there were more easily accessable water sources. I actually like that the map is large but it has so much potential and so little motivation for players to actually use that space because they risk dying of thirst whilst trying to get from one side of a cliff to the other...
For the Isle, Having herds and packs and basically whole populations of AI dinos of all the playable species is the obvious solution, to me. they can be spread out throughout the map, let players of the same species group with them if they want, and theyll exist as hazards and prey and just something to interact with throughout the whole map
Map design in these games is so bad that I just dissociate from it, I just ignore how bad the maps are, because they’re gonna be bad whether I say they are, or not. Why they can’t get a grip is unbeknownst to me
I mean to be fair, irl people and animals die off of cliffs because foliage does block your view of them. So it is realistic in that sense. I just think that we can skip that though in games because it's just annoying to die off cliffs. Tbh though Isle is the only one where I've ever actually fell off a cliff blindly because the foliage is so ridiculously dense.
I personally do not like gateway. It is so big and so densely packed I struggle to survive. I rarely play the isle anymore because I get discouraged on the idea of having to play on gateway. I think it's beautiful, but it's a struggle to find food and water. I am more likely to die from starvation and dehydration than other players at this point. It doesn't help that I have the worst sense of navigation, so it may be a genuine skill issue on my part. Also I don't like Gondwa either. Sure some places are pretty and nice, but why is it so tricky to traverse everywhere? Oh, because there's a log, a rock, a cliff, and another cliff. The fact that the hotspot is a small area is just sad. At least Gateway is more accessible to both land and aquatic, but Gondwa isn't since the rivers are so cut off from like... everyone if that makes sense. This video perfectly summarizes my own problems with these maps on these two games.
I don't play path of titans but Isle's boner for "giant unpassable structure" has always killed me lol V2, while my favorite map for its simplicity, had giant mountain walls barricading most environments from each other ( yet was still at least fairly traversible for it ). V3 had the giant 'x' shaped canyon cutting through the middle of the map that was UNBEARABLE. if you got down in it or had to go around it and weren't fast as hell expect for walking along the river / wall looking for a ramp down / up to be your life for the next real-life hour. The only credit to Spiro is that there was only one spot on the map that had it ( otherwise agree, it was boring as hell ). Gateway is much better than V3 / Spiro about this.. but it still has the fetish for giant unpassable structures. the amount of times i've spawned as a herbivore and had to spend 1hr+ walking from one side of a giant dome to the other for my migration zone is unreal. the domes really need some way to pass over / through them if they're going to be there.. or squish the map down a lot to remove them entirely until that part of the map is done
I think a lot of the devs designed these huge maps expecting a much bigger player base then they have. Even though a lot of people love dinosaurs. Dinosaur survival games will always be niche when compared to first-person shooters and third person action adventure games.
I can already tell this video is gonna mostly be about The Isle 😂 the intense foliage and bad lighting was a big reason I gave up on it after the Rework. That, and, well. 90% of the features from the trailer still isn't implemented 3 years later. Path is guilty of it sometimes too, but NOT nearly as bad lol
i only played the isle so far, but ive never seen anyone complain about the v3 map lol. For legacy there is other maps aswell and evrima just got a new map which i personally dont like (and cant play because of my pc) but many players love it and so it works for the community i guess...
Nice videos as always And i agree ngl! okay, maybe expect pot and bob, the isle have that kind of problems.(i like how i only watched the quarter and commented) XD
I thought thenyaw was the BEST map. Yet, apparently it was never even meant to be in the game because it was originally by someone who wasn't even meant to create a map in the first place (iirc, take with a grain of salt). When I mentioned this before, I was told by several people in game (before envrima) that dondi actually despised that map, and only added it due to community support.
The only dinosaur survival game I've played was a roblox one that was actually peak comedy, like me being some squid in one tunnel full of water and eating whoever falls into the pit
