Add new comment

A little review & my two cents on the Realm of Kings map, made by Graham Shelton.

Download it here: https://www.nexusmods.com/dungeonsiege1/mods/92

I played this map up to the first town, Dromnar, and also had a look at it in Siege Editor. I loved parts of it, and hated others. Here we go:

1. What I loved

The map has an awesome, dream-like atmosphere. This is done very well, using black fog and colorful point lights, making the scene look surreal, combined with mysterious music.

The map is also filled with plants and other objects, it's almost cluttered sometimes. The author certainly wasn't lazy when it comes to filling his huge map with content.
Which brings us to the next point: the map is huge, and contains monsters all the way from regular krugs up to elite endbosses. This must have been a lot of work.

2. What I hated

The map terrain is very unpolished. You can often see open node borders, even in places that would have been easy to fix. The same goes for texture borders (for example on path nodes), and lighting borders at region stitches. Issues like these break immersion, and putting in a little effort to fix these places would have improved the map a lot.

Also, a little more effort in fading building roofs in and out would have been nice as well.

Furthermore, the map is annoyingly half-linear. It is linear overall, but has a lot of side areas that are too hard when initially encountered, but you need to come back to them later to gain enough levels to continue on the main path. This is the worst of both worlds of linear and non-linear maps.

3. Whatever

A lot of the placed objects have no randomized orientation or scale multiplier, which looks unorganic in some places. Switching on object randomization, or writing a little script for it afterwards, would have looked better.

The map has a minimal background story. In the Realm of Kings, all the evil things were locked up in deep pits, which proves to be not a sustainable solution - you need to extinguish them once and for all. There are only five small quests. On the other hand, there are a lot of NPCs which all have something individual to say. And anyways this seems to be the kind of map where the story is really only an excuse to have one region of enemies after the next, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

4. Technicalities

Interestingly, the map is a .dsmap file only - there is no accompanying .dsres. This means, among other things, that none of the actors have specific talk skrits that could react to quest states etc., and also only vanilla shopkeeps are used. There are also no companions available as those would need an instance-specific talk skrit.

The map seems to be made for singleplayer only, even though there are no companions. The map can be selected in multiplayer, but there is only a single start position group without a name, right at the beginning of this huge map. This is a bit unfortunate because it might be fun to explore this world together, and maybe with existing high-level characters, and you don't want to walk for an hour just to get to a place that suits your levels.

5. Conclusion

Applause for the amount of work that went into the map, and I love the dream-like atmosphere. However, a little bit more thought and polishing would have gone a long way.