Fate has a 256.000 cell worldmap (plus dungeons), but half of it is sea and even the land is mostly empty use of a simple, repetitive tileset. I was curious and I started to calculate the absolute sizes of these types of 'epic' games. The guy who made the game actually sent me the complete maps of the whole thing and it's simply an aesthetic marvel. It's not the full game, but an idea of what I mean: You can see a collage of incomplete maps. But for me the biggest appeal is in the actual aesthetics. I've read it takes around 100 hours to complete. It has a fully handcrafted world and a story, and it is TRULY massive. It's a roguelike without the random generation, so it plays more like a RPG. It reminds me this free roguelike almost no one has heard about, 'Legerdemain'.

It's a map made to fit an aesthetic of a gameworld. There doesn't seem to be a lot of handcrafted stuff.

There are an handful of actual 'tiles' and so then you just need to 'paint' the map in a way that looks realistic. They probably built it with a simple map editor. I also imagine that making a world so big shouldn't take a lot of time. I wouldn't be surprised if Fate was planned with a lot of more dedicated content, stuff to see in the rest of the world that feels unique, and so the rest of the 'real' game ended up being 'padded' and spread thin across that large map. You always have to remember that pretty much all games that are actually released have to downsize their initial ambition. Life's too short for that kind of tedium when you've got Infinity Engine games ahead of you. Fate, meanwhile, seems to be following traditional game world structure except on an absolutely ridiculous scale. Travel, join some guilds, do side-missions for cash, and in two weeks game-time maybe go to a setpiece dungeon. Daggerfall only ultimately had a small handful of locations essential to the main plot, and word of them was brought *to* you more often than not, leaving you do go do whatever you liked in the meantime. The thing that distinguishes Daggerfall from Fate, however, is that Daggerfall absolutely did not force, or even expect, you to actually cover every part of that massive game world on some fetch quest or another. I've been comparing Fate mentally to Daggerfall, the second Elder Scrolls game, which similarly had an obscenely massive, but all 'samey', game world. From what I've been reading on this blog, Fate is a game that is afraid to allow itself to be completed. The journey is well and good, but I expect a reward at the end all the same. I mean, when I say that, that there is nothing that could convince me the enjoyment of this title is worth the sheer amount of hours apparently essential to complete it.

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