Saltmarsh is just recycled assets...

[deathsia]

At least the wilderness map is, i have yet to check out the actul quests themselves but the fields, buildings, all recycled with a slight texture alteration. Every expansion up to this has felt original, feywild itself felt like i was really walking into a damned childhood story book! I loved it! Barvonia felt like a classic yet original Dracula storyline. Sharn made me feel like i walked into a classic detective novel, I loved that too!

Each area felt original but my first impressions of saltmarch are pretty much this:



Hopefully there's more original in the quests than just the story...

[Aaabbbcccddd]

In my opinion it is the second best wilderniss area right after ravenloft. Every time I step in there I can pretty much taste the salty sea air on my tounge, the looks and the sound make it so immersive. There are a lot of new assets in it for sure and even if not I didn't notice that. Also it's not a bad thing to reuse assets I am pretty sure every developer does that, at least if it's not so obvious (mirroring, rotating, recoloring), creating new assets is a lot of work after all. In the end it's personal preference if you find something immersive or not.

[shores11]

At least the wilderness map is, i have yet to check out the actul quests themselves but the fields, buildings, all recycled with a slight texture alteration. Every expansion up to this has felt original, feywild itself felt like i was really walking into a damned childhood story book! I loved it! Barvonia felt like a classic yet original Dracula storyline. Sharn made me feel like i walked into a classic detective novel, I loved that too!

Each area felt original but my first impressions of saltmarch are pretty much this:

Hopefully there's more original in the quests than just the story...

I see some similarities with the Bavaria wilderness but only slightly. It's a medieval village how else is it supposed to look. For me it is definitely more different than recycled.

[Jaxtan]

What is it? It’s a swampy sea coast during an age of pirates and magic. It could be any little sea village in New England or the Carolina’s during the 1600’s. It’s a good wilderness area, and the quests, cosmetics and some gear go along with the theme. What is still wrong with the wilderness is the low cap on slayers and that you can’t target the mobs until you get within melee range. A ranger needs to go introduce themselves and shake hands with the enemy before filling them with arrows.

[Oxarhamar]

What is it? It’s a swampy sea coast during an age of pirates and magic. It could be any little sea village in New England or the Carolina’s during the 1600’s. It’s a good wilderness area, and the quests, cosmetics and some gear go along with the theme. What is still wrong with the wilderness is the low cap on slayers and that you can’t target the mobs until you get within melee range. A ranger needs to go introduce themselves and shake hands with the enemy before filling them with arrows.

Yep low slayer cap is trash

Also the activation mechanism is annoying

I don't mind the explorer visuals even if some of it is just reskinned models that's super common practice in games

[Strider1963]

I really dont pay attention to wilderness areas anymore, other than how to find the quests, so I cant comment on how many graphics were re-used from other quests. My main issues with these quests are the fact you have to run to them every time you do them, and the awful xp. The awful xp will really show up when the level cap goes up, it would nice to have the xp bumped up a bit. Once you do the quests a couple of times and find out the best way through them, the xp/min isnt bad (except for Danger at Dunwater which is painfully long for me. Im sure that other people have shorted it up quite a bit, but I really dont want to take the time to learn the shortcuts.

[Enderoc]

The only bad thing I could really say about the SM explorer area is it lacks a lot of interesting features/points of interest...places to take selfies.
One thing that can improve all areas in general is more random things in different houses, instances, etc that the devs could simply add in for no reason other than the fun factor...even simple things like dialog if nothing else. Breathe life into the NPCs make them more active.

[slarden]

Putting aside concerns about vip/price/value which are valid issues, the content itself if quite good and I enjoy it. It's one of the most interesting loot releases in quite some time.

[Deslen]

I really dont want to take the time to learn the shortcuts.

That sounds to me like a personal problem

There are many high xp quests that, for someone who doesn't know the way/puzzles/tricks, the xp/minute is terrible. However they are now run like crazy for xp. Looking at you, Crucible and Shadow Crypt!

Back in they day, leveling up was a journey. It took time, persistence, and yes, a little hard work. Heck, dying even slowed down your leveling progress! Then came along the TR train.

I hope they devs leave the requirement for ETR 30, and don't raise it. If that's the case, I'd be perfectly fine with it taking time and work to get to whatever the new cap is.

[Annex]

Saltmarsh is very mediocre with a lot of bad writing, poor narration, and broken continuity stuff that should never have made it past the intellectual property manager but it is a whole lot better than Sharn. It was not worth the $20 I paid for it. However, the wilderness is fine and I can tolerate the quests, which is a step up from other recent stuff.

[Oliphant]

Saltmarsh wilderness looks fantastic imo, at least by DDO standards. Very frilley, but that seemed to start with Ravenloft but I did not love the Ravenloft wilderness just due to not being a fan of dreary stuff. Feywild had a nice wilderness, also very effectively frilley but the primary red/blue sky really turned me away from accepting Feywild as anything much, just not a fantasy palette to my eye. I also did not love the CGA 16 bit Cyan color choice for Wynwood Hall, just odd to me. Saltmarsh somehow looks amazing to me, even though it's just... a... saltmarsh. That's it, just a saltmarsh.

[Epicsoul]

I think SM is great. I love the wilderness and the quests.

[GeneralDiomedes]

I think SM is great. I love the wilderness and the quests.

I think Saltmarsh is a lot more polished than Feywild. Not more original but definitely void of unfinished looking visuals. Plus they just absolutely nailed the atmosphere.

Certainly worth 20 of my hard earned dollars.

As for asset reuse in general - look carefully you will see asset reuse pretty much everywhere even Ravenloft. Ravenloft was just especially clever in how it was used and probably one of the reasons they were able to make such a great looking expansion on a DDO budget.

[GramercyRiff]

Ravenloft is also recycled assets. Saltmarsh is a lot of hit and miss with me but it's worth the $20 I spent on it. I despise how they implemented the neb frag but chasing it ironically got me to really enjoy running these quests. I even really like Danger at Dunwater after disliking it the first few times I ran it. I still think we need to do 1 or 2 steps too much in some quests, but overall it's quality content.

[Dejvid]

i did not buy saltmarsh, so i cannot comment on the quality of the content.

but recycling assets is not a bad thing per se. its what is beeing made out of said assets. think of it like LEGO. you can have the same building blocks, but with enough creativity you can have an uniqui experience every single time.

many quests, especially the early ones, use the same assets over and over, but they add enough variety in each quest that it never feels overused or eccessievly repeated.


on that note, i get it. especially when its paid content for real money. then it feels somewhat cheap.

[Isolani]

I like the SM wilderness ok. Having to get close to some of the mobs to activate them, kinda ruins slayers imo, I just go straight to the quests in SM. I had my gripes about the heroic xp in some of the SM quests when it first came out, and I still do, but I like the quests for the most part as far as content. I don't really notice things like recycled assets personally. When SM came out, I didn't even notice that the horse that I got with the bundle was the wrong color and had to be fixed in a patch...so I'm not too observant about the graphics stuff.

[Malusny]

At least the wilderness map is, i have yet to check out the actul quests themselves but the fields, buildings, all recycled with a slight texture alteration. Every expansion up to this has felt original, feywild itself felt like i was really walking into a damned childhood story book! I loved it! Barvonia felt like a classic yet original Dracula storyline. Sharn made me feel like i walked into a classic detective novel, I loved that too!

Each area felt original but my first impressions of saltmarch are pretty much this:



Hopefully there's more original in the quests than just the story...

I conplerely disagree with your post. Saltmarsh is fantastic.

[LightBear]

I do like the autumn vibe of this sea side located marsh land explorer area.
That haunted house up the hill, the mud cave, the lighthouse... they all add to it.
All mobs feel like they are in place and not just randomly tossed around.

They only thing I don't like is when it's heavy rain and fog outside because you can't see a thing.
On the other hand, if you get the heavy red evening glow, things totally burst of your screen.


I went through the quests a couple of times and they are interesting and refreshing. Some a little to big.

Perhaps it helps that I can actually relate to a sea side marsh lands as some are one bike trip away from where I live.

[Jerevth]

I like the quests, though they are low on XP.
The buildings look pretty unique to me in the town- I don't see much in the way of recycled assets (there's always something, though- 100% brand new art with every release would just be ludicrous and we'd not get new quest releases nearly as often.) I was going to point out the rowboats being new, then realized they're all over the harbor. In this case, they're on the walls. (Nice touch, but how-how-HOW do they get those rowboats out of the boat room through those little doors? (The Captives quest)

-The writing: It's a low level quest area... traditionally there isn't much plot in D&D in the low levels, is there?
-Wilderness: handshake distance to make them interactive targets is asinine. No purchase-only quest pack, and certainly not an expansion/mini-expansion, should have such a low slayer cap. So what if the player chooses to level their character by only doing wilderness slayers? Let them make that decision, Devs. (I'm salty about the slayer cap.)
-I dread only two quests- "Danger at Dunwater" (Too much back and forth for a quest that low in level) and "Swim at your own risk" (the puzzles aren't the problem- trying to manipulate the puzzles, though, is a pitb- the perspective needed to spin the tiles leaves me open to attack- annoying more than challenging.)

But I don't regret the twenty bucks spent. This time.

[Simard]

I like the explorer area well enough - it’s generic swamp is the harshest criticism I can throw at it, although when you go back to the source material that’s pretty much on brand. A teleporter should’ve been added as part of every expansion though - very glad mounts came about before this. I don’t even know how we played this game without mounts.

Ravenloft is oppressive and makes me feel as if I’m condemned to exist in a dreary and horrific pocket dimension for all time. Which sounds about right.

It’s sort of funny - my sharpest memory of my first exposure to DDO and what hooked me was a brief instant on Korthos island where I was running around killing rats on a hillside. No idea why that stands out, but there you have it. I imagine there could be someone who will have a similar memory formed killing the kelpie, standing knee deep in a marsh.