On the Importance of Automaps

Originally Posted by bkrueger
Of course they shouldn't show information, which the player cannot have. For example, showing locations, which other persons have told you ("Wait a minute, I will mark it on your map" - which game was that?)

It was Divine Divinity - very nice and, all in all, realistic feature. The need and type of automapping really depends on the game. In some games the area maps were pretty useless - like in Fallout (I mean maps of particular locations, not the world map, of course )

My favorite system are maps in Gothic - instead of automap you can buy a "classic" map and know your general position in the gameworld. THe game should offer, however, map of different quality (level of details) with the best maps being difficult to get and rather costly. The possession of high-quality map could get you additional benefits, like more quick-travel options and so on.

Man, I remember the days of Ultima III-V, using graphing paper to sketch the towns and the dungeons! That was actually a lot of fun. However, I also remember distinctly in Ultima VI trying to do it and realizing how much harder it was to keep things correctly sized. I finally broker down and bought the hint book, just for the maps!

I think my favorite has been the FoW like the infinity engine games did it (I think dungeon siege does it similar), but I didn't like the ability to 'cheat' by getting close to walls. Seems like it would not have been that hard to point a marker system in it that cut the fog of war off for those events. But hey, I'm not a programmer, so what do I know?!?

I was never a good drawer and even much worse as a painter at school, so I never even tried to make scetches of … environments.