Right now I want to make the game more balanced for those who say it isn't, and work on an extended quest to add more gameplay. Neither of those would be considered "new gameplay features" really, although I'm sure several new features will make it into the add-on quest.
But in my defense, I have been adding new features to Book I as good suggestions are made: I added autostacking empty flasks, removed weight restrictions when casting if enemies are not near, and added 'x' to open commonly used windows. I know these are minor, but they directly improve gameplay and took only a couple hours each to implement. This has been done while fixing bugs, prepping the Mac version, and trying to get people to buy the game rather than pirate the hell out of it.
Remember, Basilisk Games is primarily a one-man-show. It takes a lot of time to do all these things!
Overland map
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BasiliskWrangler
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Sure, i really didn´t wanted to say that you are too slow or do too little! I guess i just spoiled by the patch policy of modern games, where there are always content/gameplay addins.
Have you ever thought about taking one or two more people into the boat? Maybe just for creating content/level design? I bet there are people who would love to do something like that for free.
Have you ever thought about taking one or two more people into the boat? Maybe just for creating content/level design? I bet there are people who would love to do something like that for free.
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BW I am happy w/how you have been doing it also. Honestly wasn't even thinking of having that implemented for I and more for II. I will put together some thoughts on options that might balance things, in my opinion, for I and post them later. As always though, this is your baby, and you are the ultimate god over it. We just reap the benefits of it. 
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deckardelectric
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I like the continuity idea...
I really like that idea. Does the fact that these "zones" exists have to go away? Perhaps the game play could just offer more of an 'illusion' that these zones don't exist. e.g. The 'cartography' viewpoint would just scroll like the primary view and the "Loading..." times when you leave the map would be replaced with some behind-the-scenes caching. (Then you can keep you map editorBasiliskWrangler wrote:....
What I would really like to do is get rid of the individual zones that Eschalon now uses and go with a seamless, truly connected world- but I am not sure exactly how to get that done without completely rewriting the map editor from the ground up. It may be beyond the scope of Book II.
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The caching and performance issues might get a little nasty though...)It doesn't seem like it's too far off from what Book 1 has, just more of an 'illusion of continuity'.
Maybe my thoughts are exactly along the same lines as yours but I would love for the "segmented, 'Loading...', feel" to go away. (That was one thing I never liked about Baldur's Gate.)
From a gut-level perspective, seamless gameworlds 'seem' better than the segmented 'sector' gameworlds, just because, well, it's more 'realistic'. But maybe sectors provide a certain level of abstraction that makes the design and implementation of the game easier and which might at the end of the day lead to a better game.
Sectors are actually a pretty reasonable abstraction. The real world is effectively 'sectored' from our individual points of view. We explore very tiny portions of it in detail and the rest of it is 'flyover' country because there is effectively nothing there. That is pretty realistic.
The alternative is to have unrealistically tiny worlds with 50 inhabitants comprising an entire nation and other such absurdities.
Also note that the hacked in and entirely unrealistic (but necessary to avoid tedium) 'quick travel' of Eschalon would have been unnecessary with an 'overland' abstraction level since at that point, the overland travel becomes the 'quick travel' option, only without the absurd zero-time zero-risk factor.
Baldur's gate 2 dealt with this by having one map represent varying amounts of terrain. While the scale of the maps was always consistent, the maps the players walked through either represented everything within that sector, or the one tiny bit of interesting terrain within a much larger sector. On some level that was an abstraction, compressing a large piece of overland terrain into a smaller navigable chunk. The game made this difference explicit by making travel between sectors take different amounts of time depending on how much land each sector represented. If memory serves, travel between city sectors took 5 minutes because they were meant to be truly seamless, while travel between wilderness sectors took several hours because they were meant to be abstractions of much larger pieces of terrain.
Sectors are actually a pretty reasonable abstraction. The real world is effectively 'sectored' from our individual points of view. We explore very tiny portions of it in detail and the rest of it is 'flyover' country because there is effectively nothing there. That is pretty realistic.
The alternative is to have unrealistically tiny worlds with 50 inhabitants comprising an entire nation and other such absurdities.
Also note that the hacked in and entirely unrealistic (but necessary to avoid tedium) 'quick travel' of Eschalon would have been unnecessary with an 'overland' abstraction level since at that point, the overland travel becomes the 'quick travel' option, only without the absurd zero-time zero-risk factor.
Baldur's gate 2 dealt with this by having one map represent varying amounts of terrain. While the scale of the maps was always consistent, the maps the players walked through either represented everything within that sector, or the one tiny bit of interesting terrain within a much larger sector. On some level that was an abstraction, compressing a large piece of overland terrain into a smaller navigable chunk. The game made this difference explicit by making travel between sectors take different amounts of time depending on how much land each sector represented. If memory serves, travel between city sectors took 5 minutes because they were meant to be truly seamless, while travel between wilderness sectors took several hours because they were meant to be abstractions of much larger pieces of terrain.