Typically it's bad to have our game's incentives be based around "fixing shitty gameplay". Yes, it will be an incentive to fix shitty gameplay, but wouldn't it be better to have the default gameplay be enjoyable, and allow players to do things to make it even moreenjoyable?
For example GTA provides relatively deep travel gameplay, and in GTA you can upgrade your car with nitrous, which both deepens the skill mastery (your car will be harder to control while using nitrous) but also the reward (you're going to move much faster.) It didn't require shallow travel to motivate players to want to purchase upgrades; players will always want to purchase upgrades.
Also to be clear, I haven't meant to imply travel, "serves no purpose."
Even a rusty non-functioning automobile serves some purpose. But it's not worth the cost if you intend to try to use it as transportation.
So travel actually serves several purposes. Just not enough to be worth the costs. (And at least one of the purposes travel serves is a developer-only benefit: travel as a timesink to sell longer subscriptions.)
A lot of survival and building games like Rust need the long distances and long travel times.
Take the game I know best from this genre, Space Engineers. It just added planets into its base game, and the planets are very large. It can take you a day of pure boredom to walk around the entire planet on foot, and it can take you an hour or more to get to a place with some useful ore that can be turned into raw materials. It can get even worse in space, where an asteriod with some resource can be tens of thousands of meters away.
But it is the distance that plays an important role in the strategy. It informs you where you need to build your stations. It gives players reasons to build trucks and aircraft. Without the time and distance, there would be no pragmatic incentive to build these things. Sure, the game would go by much more quickly, but at the cost of the challenge.
It is very important when you have FFA PvP multiplayer in a game like Space Engineers. If you are just starting out, you need to get far away from any established players and player groups, or else, you are toast.
Now is the distance mostly boring and filled with nothing? Of course. But the time and distance doesn't make these games "shitty"...quite the opposite. The games would be "shitty" if they didn't have vast distances of nothing, because it would just turn into gankfests with rocks and sticks (in the case of Rust).
I guess it is a case of what you expect from multiplayer online gaming. You seem to think that multiplayer online gaming ought to replicate the same experience as a scripted, action/adventure title like Metal Gear Solid, or a FPS like Star Wars Battlefront. But I think that the popularity of the building, strategic simulation and survival genres shows us that a not insignificant group of players exists who want less forced action, and more of a logistic or strategic challenge. There was a time when this genre catered to their needs.
Why can't this group demand more of an accommodation from MMORPGs?
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
A lot of survival and building games like Rust need the long distances and long travel times.
Take the game I know best from this genre, Space Engineers. It just added planets into its base game, and the planets are very large. It can take you a day of pure boredom to walk around the entire planet on foot, and it can take you an hour or more to get to a place with some useful ore that can be turned into raw materials. It can get even worse in space, where an asteriod with some resource can be tens of thousands of meters away.
But it is the distance that plays an important role in the strategy. It informs you where you need to build your stations. It gives players reasons to build trucks and aircraft. Without the time and distance, there would be no pragmatic incentive to build these things. Sure, the game would go by much more quickly, but at the cost of the challenge.
It is very important when you have FFA PvP multiplayer in a game like Space Engineers. If you are just starting out, you need to get far away from any established players and player groups, or else, you are toast.
Now is the distance mostly boring and filled with nothing? Of course. But the time and distance doesn't make these games "shitty"...quite the opposite. The games would be "shitty" if they didn't have vast distances of nothing, because it would just turn into gankfests with rocks and sticks (in the case of Rust).
I guess it is a case of what you expect from multiplayer online gaming. You seem to think that multiplayer online gaming ought to replicate the same experience as a scripted, action/adventure title like Metal Gear Solid, or a FPS like Star Wars Battlefront. But I think that the popularity of the building, strategic simulation and survival genres shows us that a not insignificant group of players exists who want less forced action, and more of a logistic or strategic challenge. There was a time when this genre catered to their needs.
Why can't this group demand more of an accommodation from MMORPGs?
In the 1920s a reasonable person might have said "Cars need to be cranked! How else could they start?!"
Unfortunately in games we can't make a similar statement that games must be tedious. We have too many other genres showing how tedium is never required. So it's not reasonable to claim the tedium is necessary.
For a 1920s person to understand how wrong their crank claim actually is, you merely had to explain to them what an electric starter was.
For a gamer to understand how wrong their tedium claim is, theoretically all I should have to do is explain to them the game mechanics that avoid such tedium while retaining all of the strategy. Here's such a description about Space Engineers:
The game could be played by giving you control of two characters: an engineer and a pilot. Whenever you control one, the other would be automated by an AI, so you can tell your AI to travel to that distant asteroid while you continued controlling the engineer constructing things (because constructing things is where the game's most interesting decisions lie.)
Additionally, the vehicles themselves could be made very difficult to control perfectly, which would mean that even flying through empty space would have lots of gameplay. Because the "terrain" is fundamentally less interesting in space, you'd want the act of flying that craft to be quite nuanced and involve a lot of dynamically shifting factors. On the ground you'd still want quite a lot of that nuance, and the terrain itself would be more interesting and provide further gameplay variation.
You'd want to set things up so that manually walking was almost never required; that way it wouldn't matter if walking somewhere was tedious and shallow, because it would be known as the wrong way to play the game.
We could go deeper than this, but you can see how with only a few easy rules changes the game would retain all its strategy, and actually offer deeper gameplay, without all the tedium.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
But I think that the popularity of the building, strategic simulation and survival genres shows us that a not insignificant group of players exists who want less forced action, and more of a logistic or strategic challenge. There was a time when this genre catered to their needs.
Why can't this group demand more of an accommodation from MMORPGs?
Because mmorpgs are not designed to cater to every single gameplay needs in the world?
"more logistic or strategic challenge" -> play RTS instead, or strategy games, or war games?
"Tools need to be limited in some way, it could be that they are inconsistently available. It could be that you have options A, B, and C and all of them have different uses or importance. It could be that there's a lot of cool-downs. It could be that they're just not provided to you when you need them by some mechanic. I think that's really really important, it can force players (if it's done in a way that doesn't feel arbitrary and lame, it feel's natural to the game) players naturally get into this "making do" and creativity mode."
Besides which, that's a poor analogy. You're again arguing against the notion of "empty travel" while the argument is in general for integrated travel. Distinction being, the challenges offered comes up because travel is a component utilized to bring weight to actions via making some things harder or easier to obtain/achieve, or the effort to obtain them more or less practical alongside any other gameplay factors that might influence the interim activity.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Besides which, that's a poor analogy. You're again arguing against the notion of "empty travel" while the argument is in general for integrated travel. Distinction being, the challenges offered comes up because travel is a component utilized to bring weight to actions via making some things harder or easier to obtain/achieve, or the effort to obtain them more or less practical alongside any other gameplay factors that might influence the interim activity.
so you are just defining different types of travel. The only relevant question is .. is it FUN for the audience?
I have not seen it done with enough fun that i would want to ignore fast travel (except may be the first time around).
In fact, you should have not objection putting in a fast travel option. Because, if what you says is correct .. that slow travel is fun, people will pick that anyway. If not, hey, you have not shown that slow travel is fun, no matter what you want to put in it.
Besides which, that's a poor analogy. You're again arguing against the notion of "empty travel" while the argument is in general for integrated travel. Distinction being, the challenges offered comes up because travel is a component utilized to bring weight to actions via making some things harder or easier to obtain/achieve, or the effort to obtain them more or less practical alongside any other gameplay factors that might influence the interim activity.
so you are just defining different types of travel. The only relevant question is .. is it FUN for the audience?
I have not seen it done with enough fun that i would want to ignore fast travel (except may be the first time around).
In fact, you should have not objection putting in a fast travel option. Because, if what you says is correct .. that slow travel is fun, people will pick that anyway. If not, hey, you have not shown that slow travel is fun, no matter what you want to put in it.
As said, it depends on the design of a game.
In a game where you are jumping between scripted game elements and set pieces? Then sure fast travel works.
Game where travel is used to define different scope/tiers of gameplay? Warping would have just killed that scope/depth.
So as I have said billions of times now, there are different types of games and designs wherein the use of travel in different forms can apply quite well. A virtual world can use fast travel for example, if the intention is to let players jump broad regions of the game's content and/or the content isn't reliant on the scope of a player's reach.
An example is in most early Final Fantasy games with the land travel eventually giving way to airship travel. You never simply teleported places, they used that progression of travel mechanics to define the scope of the player's reach and stage of game experience.
If you never liked the FF titles then I apologize, but those certainly were popular.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
The game could be played by giving you control of two characters: an engineer and a pilot. Whenever you control one, the other would be automated by an AI, so you can tell your AI to travel to that distant asteroid while you continued controlling the engineer constructing things (because constructing things is where the game's most interesting decisions lie.)
Additionally, the vehicles themselves could be made very difficult to control perfectly, which would mean that even flying through empty space would have lots of gameplay. Because the "terrain" is fundamentally less interesting in space, you'd want the act of flying that craft to be quite nuanced and involve a lot of dynamically shifting factors. On the ground you'd still want quite a lot of that nuance, and the terrain itself would be more interesting and provide further gameplay variation.
You'd want to set things up so that manually walking was almost never required; that way it wouldn't matter if walking somewhere was tedious and shallow, because it would be known as the wrong way to play the game.
We could go deeper than this, but you can see how with only a few easy rules changes the game would retain all its strategy, and actually offer deeper gameplay, without all the tedium.
Oh that would be a horrible set of changes, Axehilt.
Because if you made it so a vehicle would switch to an AI, it would remove every incentive for players to program their own AIs to control their constructions (and players have the ability to write programs into computers they build in Space Engineers).
Besides, I think that too much action, delivered too quickly, is probably just as tedious--if not moreso--than too little action, delivered too slowly.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
... Why can't this group demand more of an accommodation from MMORPGs?
Its because this group is tiny and the bigger niche doesn't want those features.
Tiny?
Over 22 million people have bought Minecraft on PC. Another 10 million and 1 million on XBox 360 and PS, respectively.
Historically, The Sims series is consistently one of the top selling games of all time. By 2006, it sold over 16 million copies. WoW? 14.5 million.
So it seems to me that if we are going to talk tiny, we can't talk about building gamers, strategy gamers, or simulation gamers. If anything, the tiny audience are the people who don't find that kind of gameplay appealing.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Besides, I think that too much action, delivered too quickly, is probably just as tedious--if not moreso--than too little action, delivered too slowly.
That is clearly not true for many gamers. Otherwise no one will play shooters, or ARPGs since 99% of those games are combat non-stop.
Not really. If you break down time spent in most shooters and ARPGs you're going to find running about the map consumes considerably more of the match time than actual conflict does in most cases.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Besides, I think that too much action, delivered too quickly, is probably just as tedious--if not moreso--than too little action, delivered too slowly.
That is clearly not true for many gamers. Otherwise no one will play shooters, or ARPGs since 99% of those games are combat non-stop.
Yes, but how long do they play before they have log out?
One of the reasons why a lot of new players to MMOs have no conception of downtime is because downtime is, was, and always will be the off switch to them.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
A lot of survival and building games like Rust need the long distances and long travel times.
Take the game I know best from this genre, Space Engineers. It just added planets into its base game, and the planets are very large. It can take you a day of pure boredom to walk around the entire planet on foot, and it can take you an hour or more to get to a place with some useful ore that can be turned into raw materials. It can get even worse in space, where an asteriod with some resource can be tens of thousands of meters away.
But it is the distance that plays an important role in the strategy. It informs you where you need to build your stations. It gives players reasons to build trucks and aircraft. Without the time and distance, there would be no pragmatic incentive to build these things. Sure, the game would go by much more quickly, but at the cost of the challenge.
It is very important when you have FFA PvP multiplayer in a game like Space Engineers. If you are just starting out, you need to get far away from any established players and player groups, or else, you are toast.
Now is the distance mostly boring and filled with nothing? Of course. But the time and distance doesn't make these games "shitty"...quite the opposite. The games would be "shitty" if they didn't have vast distances of nothing, because it would just turn into gankfests with rocks and sticks (in the case of Rust).
I guess it is a case of what you expect from multiplayer online gaming. You seem to think that multiplayer online gaming ought to replicate the same experience as a scripted, action/adventure title like Metal Gear Solid, or a FPS like Star Wars Battlefront. But I think that the popularity of the building, strategic simulation and survival genres shows us that a not insignificant group of players exists who want less forced action, and more of a logistic or strategic challenge. There was a time when this genre catered to their needs.
Why can't this group demand more of an accommodation from MMORPGs?
In the 1920s a reasonable person might have said "Cars need to be cranked! How else could they start?!"
Unfortunately in games we can't make a similar statement that games must be tedious. We have too many other genres showing how tedium is never required. So it's not reasonable to claim the tedium is necessary.
For a 1920s person to understand how wrong their crank claim actually is, you merely had to explain to them what an electric starter was.
For a gamer to understand how wrong their tedium claim is, theoretically all I should have to do is explain to them the game mechanics that avoid such tedium while retaining all of the strategy. Here's such a description about Space Engineers:
The game could be played by giving you control of two characters: an engineer and a pilot. Whenever you control one, the other would be automated by an AI, so you can tell your AI to travel to that distant asteroid while you continued controlling the engineer constructing things (because constructing things is where the game's most interesting decisions lie.)
Additionally, the vehicles themselves could be made very difficult to control perfectly, which would mean that even flying through empty space would have lots of gameplay. Because the "terrain" is fundamentally less interesting in space, you'd want the act of flying that craft to be quite nuanced and involve a lot of dynamically shifting factors. On the ground you'd still want quite a lot of that nuance, and the terrain itself would be more interesting and provide further gameplay variation.
You'd want to set things up so that manually walking was almost never required; that way it wouldn't matter if walking somewhere was tedious and shallow, because it would be known as the wrong way to play the game.
We could go deeper than this, but you can see how with only a few easy rules changes the game would retain all its strategy, and actually offer deeper gameplay, without all the tedium.
The funny thing about this concept is that many people are going back to doing things like farming and sewing in this day and age even though there is a faster way to get these things accomplished in many cases. Perhaps these things provided certain people something that you just can't grasp at the moment.
I think people overlook the immersion factor again. If you have an area setup well with a soft traveling tune and neat looking scenery it's not that bad to travel around. Why are people so worried about wasted time while playing games that are a waste of time? I'd rather have things mimic the world a bit more and get lost in it than have constant action. I know many people how trouble getting immersed in things. I thought that part of my being able to get immersed in modern American movies and TV shows was just me getting older for a while, but having watched some Korean Drama's recently I realize that a lot of movies and games out there have lost the art of immersion by tying music, beauty, art, and action together. It is a lost of art that stems from imagination and classical storytelling. I still have some of the songs in my head from games I played when was a kid. Having the music for adventure, music for horror, music love, music for friendship, music for sadness, music for happiness, music for mystery, music for magic, etc. adds a lot to making traveling and other elements of the game feel enjoyable. So does environment and timing things so that they capture the person playing. Some of the places in modern games look amazing, but they are lacking that something while traveling that makes it worthwhile. I think part of that is definitely not having a good traveling tune.
Do you feel the Lord of the Rings movies were immersive, or did you spend your time complaining about how travel wasn't shown in real-time?
Lord of the Rings skipped to the interesting bits, and in doing so was more immersive than it would've been if it was a tedious recount of every second of the year-long trip the characters undertook. Realism actually would've counteracted the immersion.
Games and movies are a different medium. I was talking about how music and timing can cause immersion and make something that isn't enjoyable become enjoyable. It's not just music, but everything and how it interacts (including timing and how it's utilized). I believe that old RPGs had a fair amount of traveling and it was enjoyable. Usually there was fighting of some sort, but in EQ there was also monsters and animals all over the place. It was rarely empty traveling.
Oh that would be a horrible set of changes, Axehilt.
Because if you made it so a vehicle would switch to an AI, it would remove every incentive for players to program their own AIs to control their constructions (and players have the ability to write programs into computers they build in Space Engineers).
Besides, I think that too much action, delivered too quickly, is probably just as tedious--if not moreso--than too little action, delivered too slowly.
Nothing prevents some subset of decisions from being handled by a programmable AI. But again you're assuming the steady-state should be tedium, and I'm saying it should be enjoyable gameplay (and then you add programming and gameplay is even more enjoyable.)
As for your action comments, surely you don't think Civilization is an action-packed game. Interesting decisions isn't about action (although time pressure does tend to make decisions more interesting in nearly all cases.) Interesting decisions is just about having interesting decisions. Civilization's turn-based decisions weren't tedious and Tetris' action-based decisions weren't tedious, so your assumption here is just wrong. With interesting decisions, games are the exact opposite of tedious.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Incorrect, he stated that the use of space was enabling enjoyable content by curtailing griefing and immediate failure.
It also misses the point that these mechanics exist as they do because it creates game depth when tied to using the other tools in the game to assemble your own pilot AI within the game mechanics. This is actually an example of that thing Cadwell was talking about with "imperfect tools" being designed so that it pushes players into more creativity and furthers the exploration and depth of the game.
The second assertion was about too much action, not interesting decisions. So that jab of yours was rather pointless too. Too many actions packed into a finite moment can certainly be overwhelming, and it's a quick way to ruin the cadence or pacing of any game.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
The second assertion was about too much action, not interesting decisions. So that jab of yours was rather pointless too. Too many actions packed into a finite moment can certainly be overwhelming, and it's a quick way to ruin the cadence or pacing of any game.
Games already have pacing by requiring players to port back to town to sell.
We are discussing a matter of degree. Dungeons are already breaking up into rooms that you have to walk to. Even in D3, you still have 5-10 seconds of walking, planning before the next room/fight.
The point is slow travel of walking 5-10 min is too slow. The Division's 30 second walk from fast travel points seems to be right on. In fact, if pacing is desirable, then fast travel points are the best solution because players can CHOOSE how to pace their games. If you want to walk 10 min .. be my guest. If you want to walk 30 second you can do that too. If you want to walk a little longer to "pace" your combat, port to a point a little further away.
That is clearly not true for many gamers. Otherwise no one will play shooters, or ARPGs since 99% of those games are combat non-stop.
Yes, but how long do they play before they have log out?
One of the reasons why a lot of new players to MMOs have no conception of downtime is because downtime is, was, and always will be the off switch to them.
What does that have to do with anything? Good games don't have to have long play sessions.
The problem with down-time is that it is a "forced" off-switch. It would be much better if I decide when to shut the game off.
The second assertion was about too much action, not interesting decisions. So that jab of yours was rather pointless too. Too many actions packed into a finite moment can certainly be overwhelming, and it's a quick way to ruin the cadence or pacing of any game.
Games already have pacing by requiring players to port back to town to sell.
We are discussing a matter of degree. Dungeons are already breaking up into rooms that you have to walk to. Even in D3, you still have 5-10 seconds of walking, planning before the next room/fight.
The point is slow travel of walking 5-10 min is too slow. The Division's 30 second walk from fast travel points seems to be right on. In fact, if pacing is desirable, then fast travel points are the best solution because players can CHOOSE how to pace their games. If you want to walk 10 min .. be my guest. If you want to walk 30 second you can do that too. If you want to walk a little longer to "pace" your combat, port to a point a little further away.
That did not address the point in the least, though the examples supported it.
What you just talked about are all time elements that are drawing the experience out some so that it's not one action immediately after the next. This goes even further in example by what Cadwell mentioned with using the likes of ability cooldowns for example.
Time and travel, those are one half of that equation with tools reliant on using time to generate pacing.
The point you just ignored to repeat the same inane argument that travel by itself is boring, is that travel as an integrated system and a tool has depth and we can see it's application in generating such across plenty of games.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
The funny thing about this concept is that many people are going back to doing things like farming and sewing in this day and age even though there is a faster way to get these things accomplished in many cases. Perhaps these things provided certain people something that you just can't grasp at the moment.
Are you just trying to argue, or do you honestly not understand the concepts I'm presenting?
One of the reasons people sew is to learn a skill. Any challenging sewing project involves the exact same interesting decisions I've been hammering on this whole thread.
Of course that's not the only reason people choose to sew. Sometimes it's because sewing produces a useful physical product (while gaming mostly just produces abstract skills, and relaxation.)
Relaxation is the last main reason someone would sew product. Critically, it's optional. Nobody forces you to repeat that easy, already-mastered sewing project. It was a choice you made because you wanted to go through the motions to relax (it's essentially a form of meditation.)
Critically, when you want to switch out of this relaxation mode you just start or continue one of your harder sewing projects. There's no Sewing Overseer Robot who enforces the Rules of Sewing where you must finish that easy project to work on a harder one.
And yet in some poorly designed games, the game rules do force you through a period of shallow tedium in order to reach the deep gameplay you care about. That's a bad design.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
"Generally in Roguelikes players have diverse challenges and diverse tools, and often those diverse tools are imperfect tools." "By designing for this, you really encourage player activity and reward." "By incensing players to learn these tools, by putting them in situations where they have to use these tools, you actually get these players to sample in a way they actually excited about a larger percent of your content."
Besides which, the argument made has been that travel can and does offer deep gameplay when integrated into a game properly, not to mention travel and time being rather fundamental to making any kind of game at all through pacing, as has been shown with multiple examples now.
Of course there's an issue when you isolate a gameplay mechanic and it has no interactivity with any other system. But depending on the type of game you design it can have a huge impact in the world it's integrated in (the game scope example being a rather fundamental means that access to travel has defined gameplay in the past).
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
The funny thing about this concept is that many people are going back to doing things like farming and sewing in this day and age even though there is a faster way to get these things accomplished in many cases. Perhaps these things provided certain people something that you just can't grasp at the moment.
Are you just trying to argue, or do you honestly not understand the concepts I'm presenting?
One of the reasons people sew is to learn a skill. Any challenging sewing project involves the exact same interesting decisions I've been hammering on this whole thread.
Of course that's not the only reason people choose to sew. Sometimes it's because sewing produces a useful physical product (while gaming mostly just produces abstract skills, and relaxation.)
Relaxation is the last main reason someone would sew product. Critically, it's optional. Nobody forces you to repeat that easy, already-mastered sewing project. It was a choice you made because you wanted to go through the motions to relax (it's essentially a form of meditation.)
Critically, when you want to switch out of this relaxation mode you just start or continue one of your harder sewing projects. There's no Sewing Overseer Robot who enforces the Rules of Sewing where you must finish that easy project to work on a harder one.
And yet in some poorly designed games, the game rules do force you through a period of shallow tedium in order to reach the deep gameplay you care about. That's a bad design.
I'm willing to be relaxation is one of the man motivators in learning to sew. Some do learn to sew because it can be useful to know, but in today's world it's not needed any more than long travel times in a game. Someone else can be paid a cheap price to do it or you can replace whatever is ripped. As I said there may be unseen benefits to travel that you simple can't see, but refuse to accept that perhaps there is something there that you or others haven't been able to work out with logic at this point in time.
Sorry but the some of the arguments come down to 'my opinion is more important than yours' but you are missing the more important argument which is 'is the game is designed FOR slow or fast travel'.
I personally prefer games where travel isn't an afterthought and is actually part of the games design.
Given the choice between an MMORPG with fast travel or no fast travel I will look at what the game is trying to be and choose accordingly. Some MMORPG's NEED fast travel because there is nothing to do between travel points. Some MMORPG's NEED slow travel because without it certain game mechanics are not able to function.
YOU might prefer fast travel and see no reason for it not to be in the game but that doesn't mean the game is for you or that slow travel is wasted time.
An example. The game has a quest where you have to prevent a spy from reaching the enemies castle. If the game had fast travel when you just click a button and wait outside the enemy castle then it is a pointless quest and the game mechanics and game design is BAD. If you have to look at the map and take one of the routes to pick up the trail and hope to beat the spy on the journey then the quest is now exciting and there is risk that you might fail.
If you listened to some people everyone would need to be turned into identical clones without the ability to think for there to only be 1 design of game so that they can finally be happy. No thanks!
I'm willing to be relaxation is one of the man motivators in learning to sew. Some do learn to sew because it can be useful to know, but in today's world it's not needed any more than long travel times in a game. Someone else can be paid a cheap price to do it or you can replace whatever is ripped. As I said there may be unseen benefits to travel that you simple can't see, but refuse to accept that perhaps there is something there that you or others haven't been able to work out with logic at this point in time.
You seem to be ignoring the arbitrary emotional value we attach to hand-made things. In some cases it's also superior utility too (mass produced goods aren't always the pinnacle of quality, and sometimes hand-made goods are actually superior.) Also in this "I can make things" motivation, I'm lumping in the psychological concept of autonomy -- whether fears of a breakdown of our economy prove true or not, this person gains comfort knowing they're not as reliant on that economy.
I'm not trying to claim that all of that put together is a bigger motivation than the other two motivations, but it's all still a factor.
As for your last bit:
We haven't consistently seen tedious-slow-travel games topping the charts. So there's no logical reason to float this "unknown benefit" idea.
This makes it sound like you're saying, "there may be some way you're wrong." Well sure...but without logic or evidence that possibility doesn't feel very real, does it? So why bring it up?
Conversely, the thing that's been called "Axehilt's opinion" in this thread isn't actually my opinion but the opinion of the general gamer population*, because I'm describing traits of the games which have consistently been successful. (*Or more accurately: the way they've been voting with their wallets.)
They skip to the interesting bits.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Comments
Take the game I know best from this genre, Space Engineers. It just added planets into its base game, and the planets are very large. It can take you a day of pure boredom to walk around the entire planet on foot, and it can take you an hour or more to get to a place with some useful ore that can be turned into raw materials. It can get even worse in space, where an asteriod with some resource can be tens of thousands of meters away.
But it is the distance that plays an important role in the strategy. It informs you where you need to build your stations. It gives players reasons to build trucks and aircraft. Without the time and distance, there would be no pragmatic incentive to build these things. Sure, the game would go by much more quickly, but at the cost of the challenge.
It is very important when you have FFA PvP multiplayer in a game like Space Engineers. If you are just starting out, you need to get far away from any established players and player groups, or else, you are toast.
Now is the distance mostly boring and filled with nothing? Of course. But the time and distance doesn't make these games "shitty"...quite the opposite. The games would be "shitty" if they didn't have vast distances of nothing, because it would just turn into gankfests with rocks and sticks (in the case of Rust).
I guess it is a case of what you expect from multiplayer online gaming. You seem to think that multiplayer online gaming ought to replicate the same experience as a scripted, action/adventure title like Metal Gear Solid, or a FPS like Star Wars Battlefront. But I think that the popularity of the building, strategic simulation and survival genres shows us that a not insignificant group of players exists who want less forced action, and more of a logistic or strategic challenge. There was a time when this genre catered to their needs.
Why can't this group demand more of an accommodation from MMORPGs?
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Unfortunately in games we can't make a similar statement that games must be tedious. We have too many other genres showing how tedium is never required. So it's not reasonable to claim the tedium is necessary.
For a 1920s person to understand how wrong their crank claim actually is, you merely had to explain to them what an electric starter was.
For a gamer to understand how wrong their tedium claim is, theoretically all I should have to do is explain to them the game mechanics that avoid such tedium while retaining all of the strategy. Here's such a description about Space Engineers:
The game could be played by giving you control of two characters: an engineer and a pilot. Whenever you control one, the other would be automated by an AI, so you can tell your AI to travel to that distant asteroid while you continued controlling the engineer constructing things (because constructing things is where the game's most interesting decisions lie.)
Additionally, the vehicles themselves could be made very difficult to control perfectly, which would mean that even flying through empty space would have lots of gameplay. Because the "terrain" is fundamentally less interesting in space, you'd want the act of flying that craft to be quite nuanced and involve a lot of dynamically shifting factors. On the ground you'd still want quite a lot of that nuance, and the terrain itself would be more interesting and provide further gameplay variation.
You'd want to set things up so that manually walking was almost never required; that way it wouldn't matter if walking somewhere was tedious and shallow, because it would be known as the wrong way to play the game.
We could go deeper than this, but you can see how with only a few easy rules changes the game would retain all its strategy, and actually offer deeper gameplay, without all the tedium.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
"more logistic or strategic challenge" -> play RTS instead, or strategy games, or war games?
"Tools need to be limited in some way, it could be that they are inconsistently available. It could be that you have options A, B, and C and all of them have different uses or importance. It could be that there's a lot of cool-downs. It could be that they're just not provided to you when you need them by some mechanic. I think that's really really important, it can force players (if it's done in a way that doesn't feel arbitrary and lame, it feel's natural to the game) players naturally get into this "making do" and creativity mode."
Besides which, that's a poor analogy. You're again arguing against the notion of "empty travel" while the argument is in general for integrated travel. Distinction being, the challenges offered comes up because travel is a component utilized to bring weight to actions via making some things harder or easier to obtain/achieve, or the effort to obtain them more or less practical alongside any other gameplay factors that might influence the interim activity.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
so you are just defining different types of travel. The only relevant question is .. is it FUN for the audience?
I have not seen it done with enough fun that i would want to ignore fast travel (except may be the first time around).
In fact, you should have not objection putting in a fast travel option. Because, if what you says is correct .. that slow travel is fun, people will pick that anyway. If not, hey, you have not shown that slow travel is fun, no matter what you want to put in it.
In a game where you are jumping between scripted game elements and set pieces? Then sure fast travel works.
Game where travel is used to define different scope/tiers of gameplay? Warping would have just killed that scope/depth.
So as I have said billions of times now, there are different types of games and designs wherein the use of travel in different forms can apply quite well. A virtual world can use fast travel for example, if the intention is to let players jump broad regions of the game's content and/or the content isn't reliant on the scope of a player's reach.
An example is in most early Final Fantasy games with the land travel eventually giving way to airship travel. You never simply teleported places, they used that progression of travel mechanics to define the scope of the player's reach and stage of game experience.
If you never liked the FF titles then I apologize, but those certainly were popular.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Because if you made it so a vehicle would switch to an AI, it would remove every incentive for players to program their own AIs to control their constructions (and players have the ability to write programs into computers they build in Space Engineers).
Besides, I think that too much action, delivered too quickly, is probably just as tedious--if not moreso--than too little action, delivered too slowly.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Tiny?
Over 22 million people have bought Minecraft on PC. Another 10 million and 1 million on XBox 360 and PS, respectively.
Historically, The Sims series is consistently one of the top selling games of all time. By 2006, it sold over 16 million copies. WoW? 14.5 million.
So it seems to me that if we are going to talk tiny, we can't talk about building gamers, strategy gamers, or simulation gamers. If anything, the tiny audience are the people who don't find that kind of gameplay appealing.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
One of the reasons why a lot of new players to MMOs have no conception of downtime is because downtime is, was, and always will be the off switch to them.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
As for your action comments, surely you don't think Civilization is an action-packed game. Interesting decisions isn't about action (although time pressure does tend to make decisions more interesting in nearly all cases.) Interesting decisions is just about having interesting decisions. Civilization's turn-based decisions weren't tedious and Tetris' action-based decisions weren't tedious, so your assumption here is just wrong. With interesting decisions, games are the exact opposite of tedious.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
It also misses the point that these mechanics exist as they do because it creates game depth when tied to using the other tools in the game to assemble your own pilot AI within the game mechanics. This is actually an example of that thing Cadwell was talking about with "imperfect tools" being designed so that it pushes players into more creativity and furthers the exploration and depth of the game.
The second assertion was about too much action, not interesting decisions. So that jab of yours was rather pointless too. Too many actions packed into a finite moment can certainly be overwhelming, and it's a quick way to ruin the cadence or pacing of any game.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
We are discussing a matter of degree. Dungeons are already breaking up into rooms that you have to walk to. Even in D3, you still have 5-10 seconds of walking, planning before the next room/fight.
The point is slow travel of walking 5-10 min is too slow. The Division's 30 second walk from fast travel points seems to be right on. In fact, if pacing is desirable, then fast travel points are the best solution because players can CHOOSE how to pace their games. If you want to walk 10 min .. be my guest. If you want to walk 30 second you can do that too. If you want to walk a little longer to "pace" your combat, port to a point a little further away.
The problem with down-time is that it is a "forced" off-switch. It would be much better if I decide when to shut the game off.
What you just talked about are all time elements that are drawing the experience out some so that it's not one action immediately after the next. This goes even further in example by what Cadwell mentioned with using the likes of ability cooldowns for example.
Time and travel, those are one half of that equation with tools reliant on using time to generate pacing.
The point you just ignored to repeat the same inane argument that travel by itself is boring, is that travel as an integrated system and a tool has depth and we can see it's application in generating such across plenty of games.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
One of the reasons people sew is to learn a skill. Any challenging sewing project involves the exact same interesting decisions I've been hammering on this whole thread.
Of course that's not the only reason people choose to sew. Sometimes it's because sewing produces a useful physical product (while gaming mostly just produces abstract skills, and relaxation.)
Relaxation is the last main reason someone would sew product. Critically, it's optional. Nobody forces you to repeat that easy, already-mastered sewing project. It was a choice you made because you wanted to go through the motions to relax (it's essentially a form of meditation.)
Critically, when you want to switch out of this relaxation mode you just start or continue one of your harder sewing projects. There's no Sewing Overseer Robot who enforces the Rules of Sewing where you must finish that easy project to work on a harder one.
And yet in some poorly designed games, the game rules do force you through a period of shallow tedium in order to reach the deep gameplay you care about. That's a bad design.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
"Generally in Roguelikes players have diverse challenges and diverse tools, and often those diverse tools are imperfect tools."
"By designing for this, you really encourage player activity and reward."
"By incensing players to learn these tools, by putting them in situations where they have to use these tools, you actually get these players to sample in a way they actually excited about a larger percent of your content."
Besides which, the argument made has been that travel can and does offer deep gameplay when integrated into a game properly, not to mention travel and time being rather fundamental to making any kind of game at all through pacing, as has been shown with multiple examples now.
Of course there's an issue when you isolate a gameplay mechanic and it has no interactivity with any other system. But depending on the type of game you design it can have a huge impact in the world it's integrated in (the game scope example being a rather fundamental means that access to travel has defined gameplay in the past).
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
I personally prefer games where travel isn't an afterthought and is actually part of the games design.
Given the choice between an MMORPG with fast travel or no fast travel I will look at what the game is trying to be and choose accordingly. Some MMORPG's NEED fast travel because there is nothing to do between travel points. Some MMORPG's NEED slow travel because without it certain game mechanics are not able to function.
YOU might prefer fast travel and see no reason for it not to be in the game but that doesn't mean the game is for you or that slow travel is wasted time.
An example. The game has a quest where you have to prevent a spy from reaching the enemies castle. If the game had fast travel when you just click a button and wait outside the enemy castle then it is a pointless quest and the game mechanics and game design is BAD. If you have to look at the map and take one of the routes to pick up the trail and hope to beat the spy on the journey then the quest is now exciting and there is risk that you might fail.
If you listened to some people everyone would need to be turned into identical clones without the ability to think for there to only be 1 design of game so that they can finally be happy. No thanks!
I'm not trying to claim that all of that put together is a bigger motivation than the other two motivations, but it's all still a factor.
As for your last bit:
- We haven't consistently seen tedious-slow-travel games topping the charts. So there's no logical reason to float this "unknown benefit" idea.
- This makes it sound like you're saying, "there may be some way you're wrong." Well sure...but without logic or evidence that possibility doesn't feel very real, does it? So why bring it up?
Conversely, the thing that's been called "Axehilt's opinion" in this thread isn't actually my opinion but the opinion of the general gamer population*, because I'm describing traits of the games which have consistently been successful. (*Or more accurately: the way they've been voting with their wallets.)They skip to the interesting bits.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver