More intuitive environments

Just throwing out an idea but for the layouts and environments they are beautiful, layouts themselves need improvement however and a suggestion my wife and I were talking about is how when we play on co op we both don't like using the map overlay.. we do but we hate relying on it so we both suggested it would be good if the environments had more intuitive edges to know when you've reached the furthest out you can go rather than checking the map to see how close your character is. An easy suggestion is putting walls on the outside so you automatically know that's the end but I know that wouldn't work for the difference biomes and would be alot of investment however I think for those who like to be immersed in the game such as ourselves for us it's fun over efficiency in some cases which in this is one. The areas are beautiful and the monster designs are great, having an overlay on 247 for us is just distracting and ruins the core we enjoy. Hope I explained that clear enough and would be fantastic if the team could implement this. Thank you

Staring at the map overlay or minimap instead of the game world sucks. I made a topic about this in the feedback section too:

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3907069

Feel free to leave a comment there. Maybe it’ll help get the developers’ attention on this matter, however small the chance may be.

Anyway, I’m with you on this. If they refuse to make maps smaller, as I and many others have suggested, they could at least add more environmental landmarks to help players know where they are and where they need to go.

Maybe this is a bit unrelated, but it’s something I liked about quests in vanilla World of Warcraft. Often, the quest descriptions went along the lines of: “Follow the road north until you reach a river. From there, go south until you find a large tree under which you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

That kind of design let you complete quests and navigate the environment without constantly glancing at a menu, map, or anything outside the game world itself.

I'm also a sucker for immersion.

Hey bro yeah very well said and I know what you mean vanilla wow had no quest helper so you'd have to go by the directions and environmental cues, 100% pray they do something with the map I hate heavily relying on the overlay, I'll copy and paste what I said in my original comment to yours to get some more attention, and also with the layout sizes and dead ends they really need to improve it it exponentially increases through every act at least a 30% reduction from act 2 onwards would be amazing. Immersion first for sure, can't wait streamers who have the overlay on permanently even if the build is super zoom I still toggle on it and off constantly as opposed to having it on all the time, or I just look at the corner map again wish there was improvements, I've even asked AI what it suggests for the overlay problem and it had good ideas.

Can't watch streamers ****

There are small environmental cues that exist in most zones to orient you.

You do need to pay attention and play each zone a bunch of times to notice them though.

Plus the zones themselves have a sort of "style" where you can usually tell where certain areas of interest are likely to be just based on the "flow" of things you've uncovered, not sure how else to explain it, but each zone definitely has it's own characteristics.

An example might be how in the Grelwood, the 4 points of interest spawn in a "cross" pattern relative to each other (The witch hut, the wp/tree, the grim tangle, and the purple tree chaos boss), so if you find one of the items and you can tell you're in the "North East" quadrant or whatever, you can kind of bee-line to the other points of interest.

Similarly, there can be other landmark cues, like how in Clearfell there's a giant worm-path that leads from the entrance to the Grelwood to the worm lair, or how in the 2nd interlude there's a "dried river" path that goes from the Canyon entrance and leads to the arena for the scorpion/devourer fight.

These sort of things exist all over the place if you look for them, sometimes it's as simple as a little decorative doodad so again, you've really gotta pay attention and play the zones a lot to catch them in the first place.

I'm sure at one point someone will make an informative Youtube video aggregating all of them so that the masses can finally feel like they can find their way around lol.

The racers/speedrunners will be the resources to look at now if you want to learn how to read and make inference predictions regarding zone layouts.

With all due respect you're misunderstanding what we are saying firstly your examples are both act 1 areas and zones which yes I do agree with I specifically said act 2 and onwards which is a majority opinion. Knowing where the exits and entrances are is learnt through redoing the campaign but that's not what we was discussing. The point was the edge of the layouts an example are the swamp layouts I can't remember the names when mapping but it looks like the swamp continues on the edges but you can't go further which Is why I said about the environments being more intuitive and having ways to show the limit of the perimeter of the maps difficult to do but a good example is that tower map again can't remember the name but it's the one that's linear you can only go forward examples like that are what I mean. Not so much the entrances and exits because they no longer matter in the endgame as they do in The campaign. Again to reiterate act 1 does do this very good which is why it was everyone's favourite until act 4 came out. Where in act 2 onwards that decline starts. Not sure if I'm explaining properly but for me i always go on the edge of the map (perimeter) follow it and then go inwards once it's been discovered I believe alot of people also do this. But it would be nice to have an environment cut off at the perimeters examples like walls/bushes ect difficult to implement yes but that's why Its a suggestion, to write off this fact as it's already there and watch a speed runner on YouTube I believe you've misunderstood what we are talking about, we all know where one zone leads to another due to experience in the campaign runs this isn't what we meant.