The problems with Menaan

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fufulames's picture
fufulames
Joined:
2016-10-23 22:58
Last seen:
6 years 3 months ago

I did a walkthrough of this town. The interiors all look great but the exterior has a number of issues:
overview
https://imgur.com/INhS6bO

1. the wall should connect to the sides of building to prevent the awkward spaces at back and sides
https://imgur.com/TYqaRNp
https://imgur.com/Hyicp3d
2. rocks and busted wall make town too crowded.  a couple of doors cant even be reached without jumping over obstacles, remove
https://imgur.com/sxfhTpQ
https://imgur.com/eCgFCaV
3. place storage / depot tower at center of town
4. gate near silt strider is pointless, place in town and use as gate for guar enclosure (see image)
https://imgur.com/CIAMJDg
5. hills and rocks make wall pointless, defensively, player can walk over the wall from rocks at the side despite huge defensive towers, remove
6. trap door on top of guard tower not linked w TR_Menaan interior_3

 

Gnomey's picture
Gnomey
Asset DeveloperWriterExterior DeveloperInterior Developer
Joined:
2015-08-10 20:50
Last seen:
1 hour 28 min ago

A lot of the issues with Menaan are probably because, as unfortunately in other cases, I didn't finish detailing the exterior.
1. I suppose the gaps should be made either narrower or wide enough to allow people to pass. For the first one, I'd probably just patch up the hole with planks to close of the yard behind it. That said, I never finished detailing Menaan, and from the texture seam there I was probably planning to put rocks or something over there to block the gap.
2. the doors that can't be reached are not supposed to be reached via the exterior; they lead from the interior into the yard of the manor. I do think the large rock in the town center could be scaled down and moved out of the way to open things up a little, at least. Or removed entirely. The yard, however, should stay.
3. I don't really like the idea of placing a building in the center of the town, and am not sure what that's supposed to achieve.
4. the gate at the siltstrider is intended as a rough barricade against the bandits, erected by the people living in those two houses. I was probably intending to extend that rough barricade to cover the gap next to it, but it's supposed to be a pitiful makeshift thing.
5. the walls are intended largely to discourage bandits and wild animals, not withstand a full-blown siege. Even so, while players can leap over the walls elsewhere, an attacking force could not effectively do so. Not to mention that there's a lot of vanilla (and real-world) precedent for not entirely effective walls.

Edit: right, and the towers are not purely there to block access into the town, in which case they would indeed be excessive considering the rest of the wall. They are essentially the 'keep' or last refuge of the town, where the townspeople and their most important goods would retreat to in the unlikely case of a larger attack. But large attacks aren't really a concern there; for the most part, the occasional thieves and wild animals are the only real threat, and the towers serve more as watchtowers than anything else.

MinerMan60101's picture
MinerMan60101
Exterior ReviewerInterior Reviewer
Joined:
2016-10-09 23:10
Last seen:
4 days 15 hours ago

Also, with Nemon going through Roth-Roryn to rework it, detailing should get better anyway.