Why is the atlas infinite? What benefit does that have?

Playing standard league daily now my altas has bloated to a comically unwieldy size and even just trying to jump from bookmark to bookmark the game can't load it and I have to manually gradually pan towards it from a revealed spot to force the game to load things tile by tile.

Why do I have to pan across hundreds, thousands of green completed maps to search for new things? I cannot possibly imagine what benefit the designers of this system were hoping to confer by creating an infinite behemoth that turns into an overwhelming bloated mess after a few weeks/months. Looking around my atlas just gives me a sense of dread and apathy, not excitement.

The idea of exploration and discovery can still be fully accomplished with other systems that are zoned, or instanced, and I see zero reason that this entire ugly, sprawling pile of clutter has to be stuffed into one "continuous" zone that isn't actually continuous because you still have to do weird stuff to get one side of it to actually load if you're on the other side.

Can we please rethink the "infinite" idea here so this isn't such a mess?

It was a gimmicky solution to compensate for lack of depth in the endgame that was rushed out.

Using zones or territories that can then be accessed in the atlas map would help, would also add the perception of accomplishment if you clear one atlas area and are rewarded with gear or bonuses.

It's not infinite. Nothing is infinite in software.

But what it is not is constrained. And the question I would give is, what would be the benefit of adding specific constraints to the Atlas? Cause all of the problems you mention are self-inflicted. It's up to you to decide to stick to one area of the Atlas. And you can just decide not to wander around. Since it's infinite, you can actually choose to ignore areas where you feel got cluttered, just keep moving in a direction.

If it had a fixed nature, it would only make that issue worse, because if you ruin an area with bad decisions for your towers or whatever, you would get locked permanently?

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vexorian#9572 wrote:

It's not infinite. Nothing is infinite in software.

But what it is not is constrained. And the question I would give is, what would be the benefit of adding specific constraints to the Atlas? Cause all of the problems you mention are self-inflicted. It's up to you to decide to stick to one area of the Atlas. And you can just decide not to wander around. Since it's infinite, you can actually choose to ignore areas where you feel got cluttered, just keep moving in a direction.

If it had a fixed nature, it would only make that issue worse, because if you ruin an area with bad decisions for your towers or whatever, you would get locked permanently?

I didn't place bad towers or fail maps. I didn't do anything to muck up the exploration area. I completed all of the maps as necessary, and now that area is just full of useless green dots that I have to pan past in order to view areas beyond it.

Priorities for where to go change over time. I don't need arbiter anymore, so while I previously scanned the whole map for citadels, now I want to scan around for different things instead like unique maps that I left alone or hideouts to get some splinters maybe. And in order to do that I have to pan across dozens, or 100+ screens full of meaningless green dots. I can bookmark things, but I can't just jump to the bookmark, because the fog won't load. I have to start from my current position and pan over to the bookmark screen by screen to get it to even load.

This isn't a problem of me wandering around. I know how I want to move to maximize my loot. But that doesn't mean that I could never, would never, want to go to the other side of the atlas or scan through areas in a different direction when my priorities change, or heck, even if I just want to play a different character for the night whose priorities are maybe XP instead of loot. This system makes me wade through an incredibly arduous amount of redundant and meaningless data to get there.

someone thought it resembles open-world lololo. they were so proud advertising this. sounds fun at first but when you play it, wtf is the point?
maps are random anyway, desert or labyrinth in a Grass biome? why not just blooming field? are these ideas from Jonathan's kids? lolol

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vexorian#9572 wrote:

It's not infinite. Nothing is infinite in software.

But what it is not is constrained. And the question I would give is, what would be the benefit of adding specific constraints to the Atlas? Cause all of the problems you mention are self-inflicted. It's up to you to decide to stick to one area of the Atlas. And you can just decide not to wander around. Since it's infinite, you can actually choose to ignore areas where you feel got cluttered, just keep moving in a direction.

If it had a fixed nature, it would only make that issue worse, because if you ruin an area with bad decisions for your towers or whatever, you would get locked permanently?

Lmao, I get a kick out of the people who will always find a way to blame any poor design/decision on the players. That's some fine mental gymnastics on display

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Feather#5383 wrote:

Playing standard league daily now my altas has bloated to a comically unwieldy size and even just trying to jump from bookmark to bookmark the game can't load it and I have to manually gradually pan towards it from a revealed spot to force the game to load things tile by tile.

Why do I have to pan across hundreds, thousands of green completed maps to search for new things? I cannot possibly imagine what benefit the designers of this system were hoping to confer by creating an infinite behemoth that turns into an overwhelming bloated mess after a few weeks/months. Looking around my atlas just gives me a sense of dread and apathy, not excitement.

The idea of exploration and discovery can still be fully accomplished with other systems that are zoned, or instanced, and I see zero reason that this entire ugly, sprawling pile of clutter has to be stuffed into one "continuous" zone that isn't actually continuous because you still have to do weird stuff to get one side of it to actually load if you're on the other side.

Can we please rethink the "infinite" idea here so this isn't such a mess?

The philosophy was to make PoE2 more down to earth, fighting monsters in the world, not gods in outer space. Part of that is the geographic map, instead of the PoE1 atlas, where maps are instances or memories, etc. They needed a way to allow people to run the same map as many times as they wanted.

They must be aware of the problems you mention. I'm curious to see how they deal with it in 0.3.

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Feather#5383 wrote:

trying to jump from bookmark to bookmark

Oh! That's a big one. Sometimes I have to manually o there, because using the bookmark shows me some fog of war... That's not good. I guess it loads in parts. It should be improved to keep bookmarks always revealed. Dunno how this may impact performance and what should be optimized to do so.

"

Feather#5383 wrote:

Playing standard league daily now my altas has bloated to a comically unwieldy size and even just trying to jump from bookmark to bookmark the game can't load it and I have to manually gradually pan towards it from a revealed spot to force the game to load things tile by tile.

Why do I have to pan across hundreds, thousands of green completed maps to search for new things? I cannot possibly imagine what benefit the designers of this system were hoping to confer by creating an infinite behemoth that turns into an overwhelming bloated mess after a few weeks/months. Looking around my atlas just gives me a sense of dread and apathy, not excitement.

The idea of exploration and discovery can still be fully accomplished with other systems that are zoned, or instanced, and I see zero reason that this entire ugly, sprawling pile of clutter has to be stuffed into one "continuous" zone that isn't actually continuous because you still have to do weird stuff to get one side of it to actually load if you're on the other side.

Can we please rethink the "infinite" idea here so this isn't such a mess?

I guess it was the fastest way to program an endgame.
I hope they revisit that choice.

The biomes are too small, they should be x5 or x10 bigger then now with some interesting stuff in them, maybe then whole map experience would feel different, because now it feels kinda samey, you probably can fit all the biomes in the game within 20 tiles. Of course it wouldn't solve problem with map stretching as OP mentioned, but at least it would give some feeling of exploration because now there's none.