Freeholds and Terrain

superhero6785

Maybe I missed something from the livestream, but did they mention how Freeholds would interact with terrain? The Freehold shown was very flat, is that because it was placed on perfectly level ground, or does the ground flatten wherever you place your Freehold? Could you place your freehold on a mountain top, sacrificing useable space for more protection, or are those areas simply restricted?

Songcaller

I think the Riverlands are quite flat. I'm not sure if you can build in mountains though. Perhaps you can if the mountain isn't a point of interest.

Nerror

I think some flattening will happen, unless the plot we saw in the video just happened to be on very flat land, but either way, I would love if the original shape of the landscape was kept to at least some extent. I understand why some flattening has to occur though. Specifically about mountaintops, mountains were one of the areas not included in possible freehold land use. I hope they mean the steep mountain sides, and not the entire mountainous area.

Botagar

I don't think I've heard anywhere about having deformable terrain, and to the best of my knowledge the terrain is a handcrafted mesh/heightmap. If they build the tech to make "run time modifiable terrain", might as well make that a feature.
I doubt Intrepid would put in the (significant) engineering effort to enable terrain deformation just to only use it to flatten sections of land for freeholds.

So taking what I said as truth for now, at least when it comes to buildings, I could see them coming with stilted platforms where the terrain is slightly uneven.
For things like crops though, I haven't a clue!

In my other post too, I assumed that water and rocks wouldn't be usable terrain, but maybe there'll be options for those?
eg:
* crab pots in a river where your freehold claim covers
* aquatic plants and herbs farm

Aces_Are_Wild

I think their is predetermined spots for holds and you can't just place them any place you want

Tyranthraxus

Aces_Are_Wild wrote: »

I think their is predetermined spots for holds and you can't just place them any place you want

Sort of, yes. There are zones wherein you will be able to free-place the Freeholds.

There's some AoC: Apocalypse (Alpha One) footage wherein there was a city with a gorge and bridge over it. The planks of the bridge were destructable, as the creative director has promoted the entertainment value of destructive environments, in the past.

Would assume most flat-ish *clearings* that are not too near a dungeon-entrance, quest-location, or point-of-interest will be subject to settlement by a Freehold. Real estate will be trade-able/sell-able, so it'll be best to find areas with desirable resource spawns - or the best view of a region, such as a hilltop.

Aszkalon

superhero6785 wrote: »

Could you place your freehold on a mountain top, sacrificing useable space for more protection, or are those areas simply restricted?

You have the right Mindset on this Topic ... ... >:-]

Kilion

I made a quick search through the livestream and came across this:

Sourcing
Stream [from 01:08:30] (Edited for easier reading) "... obivously having access to an open world where you are not necessarily restricted to the locations that you can place these freeholds but (rather) allowing the players to to place them themselves. Obviously we are going to block going to block out certain areas ... like road networks and POIs but generally the intent is to provide these freeholds as layable plots in the open world.
...
you'll be able to place it in many places around the node - basically anywhere that's not a dungeon or a point of Interest with monsters; you'll be able to place in a lot of (different) areas so players will have a lot of freedom in choosing where they want to build build their Freehold and lay down their plot. It'll be big like here: we (have) the mines over there, we got the point of interest but we also have this large flat area for a lot of farming and so it was kind of a good mix..."

Discussion
So while none of that directly refers to terrain I think it has a valuable hint in it, which is that there is a system in place that will evaluate the land covered by the future freehold and allow or disallow the claim staking. It wouldn't be surprising to find that "too much, too slanted terrain" is one of these criteria. It would be possible to have an adjustment system in place that e.g. compensates up to 5% of "too slanted" terrain in the area by increasing the claim in a free direction but I think that might be a tricky thing to actually program and it would also create the necessity to provide means to overcome that impassable terrain. And I don't know if carpenters or masons are planned to be able to craft freely placeable ladders, stairs or bridge in the beginning.

Would definitely be cool but might be a bit too ambitious to expect at launch. But yeah, hope that gave you some food for thought