Can somebody explain the hate for auto mapping?
Because i see no way it can influence level,class or enemy design,and i play dungeon crawlers because of those factors.
All auto mapping does is just give you a digital way to handle mapping,nothing else.Unless your auto map includes secret areas and other stuff,which is just dumb.
There is no hate for auto-mapping; 99% of all dungeon crawlers released in the last 15 years have some form of unrestricted auto-mapping system. Hell, modern 'crawlers like Stranger of Sword City even let you Auto-WALK by letting you designate a waypoint in the auto-map screen and then has you walk there automatically if you want!
What happened with Elminage: Gothic is that Starfish wanted to make it truer to classic Wizardry and to other, older (i.e. more "hard-core") dungeon crawlers which tied access to the auto-map down to either an item consumable, a spell or to a character skill/ability (like cartography).
They decided to go with tying it to magic spells (like in Wizardry 1-5), and additionally also tying it to consumable magic map items (like in Wizardry Empire 1-3, which is the Wizardry series that Starfish worked on prior to Elminage).
They knew they had to include an infinite-use map consumable though, somewhere, as people would whine about it too hard, which is why in the 3rd dungeon there is an optional side-quest for getting a stone that acts as an infinite-use map item. It has a 33% chance to break after use, but you can repair it in town or with the Repair spell from the Alchemy school.
(In the 7th dungeon in the game you can get an unbreakable map stone item, again as an optional side-quest).
Of course this did indeed prove too much for the normies and everybody whined and most people who play E: Gothic, be they western or japanese persons, play the game with a mod that makes maps infinite from the start. Starfish saw the writing on the wall and they made infinite maps a toggable option in the 3DS port of the game.
EDIT: Note that Elminage: Original has unrestricted access to the auto-map AND even has an optional Onscreen Mini-map as well through a craftable item in-game. They simply wanted E: Gothic to be a truer, more "hard-core" dungeon crawler experience that called back to the classics; restricting map access is not something inherent to the Elminage series, it was something new in E: Gothic.
Starfish's Wizardry Empire games, however, used the same kind of map access restriction: only through spells or consumable items. Wizardry Empire 2 for PC came out in 2002. In the end, I think passing by Elminage: Gothic because of this one thing is too unfortunate, it's more important that people get to experience the game, so I say go ahead and use the infinite map mod please! They made it toggable in the following port of the game to 3DS (jpn-language exclusive), so it's not even really "cheating" anymore.
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