9 hours ago, Riamus said:The biggest issue here is how broken it makes things. For Navesgane or even Pregen, that's one thing. But when people play RWG, they're looking for a random experience. The same for all the people who make or use custom maps, like DC. This should either be optional in the game settings for the map or it should have fallback handlers for when something isn't set up exactly they way you "want". For example, if it's set to go from Rekt in forest to Jen in burnt and Jen isn't in burnt, it will see that there isn't a Jen in burnt to go to, so will either send you to a different trader in burnt or to Jen in another biome (depending which you prefer). If there's no burnt at all, it will send you to Jen in another biome. If there's no Jen, it will send you to a different trader in burnt. If no Jen or burnt, it will send you to a different trader in some other biome. This prevents things from breaking regardless of the map and really should be done, imo. Especially if you're going to tie more things to a specific progression.
Or just have that be an option like I said, where it works the new way when enabled or the old way when disabled. Disabled and also disable the story if you feel that would be better. After all, no story will be good enough for people to want to do dozens of times the way they play the game dozens of times. So having an option to disable the story once you've done in a few times would probably be good anyhow.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this new setup except that it can't be disabled. Just look at my first RWG game. I had to travel 4km on a bike on day 3, through the wasteland, to get to Jen and then travel that far back because RWG set up the map that way. That's not a good thing. I could do it, even if I didn't enjoy the long ride, because I have played the game a long time. But a new player is going to die, probably repeatedly, trying to do that. That's a great way to lose players.
Did you change the map defaults? There should be a higher chance of shorter distances from Rekt to Jen with the default map settings. I was talking to Faatal about random gen and he may have found another improvement to further ensure a shorter travel distance from Rekt to Jen on default settings based on map size.