As long as you're making those comments with the understanding that those possibilities are not currently the reality of slow travel in MMORPGs, then a lot of what you're saying makes sense.
UO, ArcheAge, EVE, BDO, ATitD, Ryzom, AoW, Planetside, APB, Darkfall, Entropia, and many other titles exist that directly disproves that statement.
Travel has, and continues to, provide many choices and generate depth in gameplay.
We should also be clear your version of fast travel does not represent the myriad of ways in which it is utilized. In the game you tout so often, WoW, players get portaled straight into dungeon and raid content. The game world has finite travel paths largely because the game world is neglected, and when we do talk about the modern zones we can generally see a lot of portal and recall options.
Even in older games which you constantly enjoy misrepresenting, examples can be drawn up in the likes of Asheron's Call where you could literally mark just about anywhere in the world as a place you could later portal to.
The giant and the raiders decision requires travel because that is the means to generate balance in risk, reward, and challenge. They are loctional events that you now have the option to approach or avoid within the environment, and can bear consequences that you can experience as part of that world. If you remove the "travel" then you also remove the context and framework for the world along with any potential variances and alternatives provided by other players in that same environment.
Your continued mistake is claiming there is no decision making taking place, when travel has many values attached. If all you want is a lobby game where travel has been minimized to it's utmost, then stop talking about MMOs as you are in the wrong genre.
That final statement is true. I don't know how many times while traveling I ran across other players and my plans changed. For good or for bad. Sometimes it was PKers, other times it was someone who needed help with something or helped me out, or maybe I just got some new information that I decided to check out. I made new friends, got to know a new guild, was invited to player run events, all sorts of things. And that made for a much more interesting game, in my opinion.
As long as you're making those comments with the understanding that those possibilities are not currently the reality of slow travel in MMORPGs, then a lot of what you're saying makes sense.
UO, ArcheAge, EVE, BDO, ATitD, Ryzom, AoW, Planetside, APB, Darkfall, Entropia, and many other titles exist that directly disproves that statement.
Anecdotal. I'd say Planetside was the only one where I wasn't bored when traveling from point A to B.
How about walking 15 minutes and not knowing what's around the corner? You like to take the surprise out? The anticipation of the unexpected? No wonder games are so boring these days.
You wasted 15 min then.
Simply add a random chance to drop you at a corner when you hit the fast travel button. That is as surprising and as unexpected as spending 15 min walking first .. the only difference is that the boring 15 min walking is gone.
No wonder games are so much fun & convenient these days. Devs figure out how to surprise players without bore them to death first.
By removing the world. Just a bunch of "rooms". Is that the future of MMO's? EA used to say "We Build Worlds." Now it would be "We Build Rooms."
I hope so. Fun rooms (or we can call them levels) beat boring world. Granted .. some open world single player games (with fast travel, of course) are fun. But i guess you will call that a huge big room, instead of a world, because there is no persistency.
Ya know, we're trying to promote exciting worlds. Not boring ones. Your industry only designs boring worlds (or stagnant and boring after the first, second, or third pass), and then you want to take the entire idea of "world" away from us because you made them boring.
What a racket.
hmm .. who are "we"? I certainly want exciting GAMES, not worlds.
And if games are made up of exciting levels, thre is no "boring world" because there is no world.
I did not make anything ... i just find the idea of a persistant world boring. I much rather have exciting levels/instances, or fast travelled enabled single player open world.
UO, ArcheAge, EVE, BDO, ATitD, Ryzom, AoW, Planetside, APB, Darkfall, Entropia, and many other titles exist that directly disproves that statement.
Travel has, and continues to, provide many choices and generate depth in gameplay.
nah .. none of those games hold candles, in terms of player numbers, or money made, compared to games with fast, or no travel (WoW, LoL, TOR, WoT ....).
You don't need travel to have depth in gameplay, as shown in MANY single player games.
I don't think this concept has every been done in MMOs. I have actually been looking for this type of immersion in single player games, but usually the games are open world now and don't concentrate as much on the immersion factor. Some of the older MMOs made attempts at immersion through things like scripting NPCs to walk from town to town or town to forest at certain times of the day or even week. They also attempted this through things like darkness and lighting. Music can also be used in a way to add immersion and make things feel like time is slowing down. I haven't seen music used to set the stage much. In EQ the music was fairly good. In games like Final Fantasy IV or Dragon Quest VII the music and lighting would often overcome the not so great graphics.
I've been watching some Korean movies and TV shows. They generally do a much better job at utilizing music, lighting, and the slowing down of time in order to create immersion. Asian movies in general seem to be much better at telling a romance, adventure, or comedy in this day and age. I used to like a lot of American movies and TV shows when I was a kid, but I'm not to thrilled with the last decade or so and the direction things have been going.
Time can be easily simulated by hunger and fatigue like in older rpgs.
Space is probably harder to simulate, but I'd make a huge wilderness to where I'd program many different kinds of random spawn random placed events, some very rare some common. When you add hunger and fatigue to that equation and perhaps pvp, you might get a good mix of gameplay. Though I would create abilities with which players could easily avoid pvp, if not their cup of tea. Also I'd allow players to set up operations into the wilderness like mining and lumbering for example.
In some other thread some guy suggested an idea of a big MOBA. That would be a good idea in my view. Perhaps something where players could (with automatically summoned minions) push their factions outposts into the wilderness and into enemy territory and loot enemy players banks and warehouses and make their own base where the enemy's base was. And all this would happen in open world.
Talking about games where thousands of players exist simultaneously in a single instance and mechanics related to such games.
That final statement is true. I don't know how many times while traveling I ran across other players and my plans changed. For good or for bad. Sometimes it was PKers, other times it was someone who needed help with something or helped me out, or maybe I just got some new information that I decided to check out. I made new friends, got to know a new guild, was invited to player run events, all sorts of things. And that made for a much more interesting game, in my opinion.
Again, here in reality travel is not deep.
Deep gameplay implies a high skill cap. It implies a game where you could legitimately say, "Wow that player is extremely skilled! I'm impressed!"
Anyone who claims they thought someone was "very skilled at travel in MMORPGs" is lying for the sake of continuing the argument.
No, the reality is that slow travel is shallow. Saying travel "has many values attached" is a uselessly vague statement. Sure there are factors like move speed, obstructing terrain, and plotting a course on a map. You could call those "many values" if you wanted. But the reality is those factors don't combine to create deep gameplay. They combine to create very shallow gameplay where the idea that someone could be "very skilled at travel" is so ridiculous that you'd assume someone was joking if they said it.
Bringing up things that can happen without slow travel (like running into PKers) has no relevance to the discussion. That can happen with slow or fast travel.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
We should also be clear that fast travel is the node-based travel you see in games. It's not a teleport to any location anywhere. (So with fast travel you do get that react/adjust decision.)
...
And therein lies the point. If there are many nodes scattered across the world, with one node next to each spawn point or event point, then it essentially does become a teleport anywhere (of interest, at least). But if the nodes are more sparse, with one node serving several separate spawn or event points, then there will be some "slow travel" from the node to the actual event site. The fewer the node "density", the more spaced out the nodes are from each other and the map locations around them, the more players will have to "slow travel" from the closest node to the actual event.
Implementing a fast travel system with nodes doesn't necessarily eliminated all aspects of "slow travel", but rather breaks it up into pieces. The question becomes: how many nodes are too many? How few are too few? The answer here is not simply based on the virtues of one form of travel vs. the other, but how this design ties into the player's experience of the game (decision making, choice, scale, etc..), and that fits right back into the original discussion of flow and pacing.
How about walking 15 minutes and not knowing what's around the corner? You like to take the surprise out? The anticipation of the unexpected? No wonder games are so boring these days.
You wasted 15 min then.
Simply add a random chance to drop you at a corner when you hit the fast travel button. That is as surprising and as unexpected as spending 15 min walking first .. the only difference is that the boring 15 min walking is gone.
No wonder games are so much fun & convenient these days. Devs figure out how to surprise players without bore them to death first.
By removing the world. Just a bunch of "rooms". Is that the future of MMO's? EA used to say "We Build Worlds." Now it would be "We Build Rooms."
I hope so. Fun rooms (or we can call them levels) beat boring world. Granted .. some open world single player games (with fast travel, of course) are fun. But i guess you will call that a huge big room, instead of a world, because there is no persistency.
Have you ever thought you simply don't like MMORPG?
Travel can be challenging depending on how things are laid out. In some older MMOs and going even further to single player RPGs things were not laid out in a straight logical order. Often times things were setup in a haphazard manner where you would have to go through dangers zones or even areas in a zone to get to another place. There were also things blocking you at times (puzzles) where you would have to find out how to circumvent. It seems that adventure and exploration had danger and risk associated with them for a reason in the past and even in the present. How risky is it to try and fly to and live on Mars? It would be even riskier to try to leave the solar system. Travel is only easy if it is setup to be so. Long travel times don't make things harder, but they are part of what adds up to making things harder. Fast travel is what makes things easier and safe. I like fast travel sometimes, but I really haven't played a game without it in a very long time. Most people just don't have the patience.
And therein lies the point. If there are many nodes scattered across the world, with one node next to each spawn point or event point, then it essentially does become a teleport anywhere (of interest, at least). But if the nodes are more sparse, with one node serving several separate spawn or event points, then there will be some "slow travel" from the node to the actual event site. The fewer the node "density", the more spaced out the nodes are from each other and the map locations around them, the more players will have to "slow travel" from the closest node to the actual event.
Implementing a fast travel system with nodes doesn't necessarily eliminated all aspects of "slow travel", but rather breaks it up into pieces. The question becomes: how many nodes are too many? How few are too few? The answer here is not simply based on the virtues of one form of travel vs. the other, but how this design ties into the player's experience of the game (decision making, choice, scale, etc..), and that fits right back into the original discussion of flow and pacing.
Well that does move the conversation forward (since usually slow vs. fast travel lingers as a broader comparison between the two, and only rarely gets down to the details of how frequent fast travel nodes should be.)
The right answer again has to do with purpose and pacing. This scene of Gandalf riding to meet with Saruman is about 25 seconds of travel and 252 seconds of the event itself (meaning travel was ~9% of the overall scene.) The travel's purpose is a combination of (a) deliberately slow-paced scene transition from whatever happened before, (b) establishment of the new setting, and (c) providing some nice visuals in the process (for some of the cuts at least...the top-down shot always seemed kinda silly to me.)
So there isn't just one right answer, because the right travel duration will change relative to the purpose and pacing required. When travel provides the three purposes that it did in that LOTR scene, then a brief amount (~9% of playtime) of travel is probably justified. If it provides less purpose (like if there isn't a particularly nice visual you're traveling to) then maybe it should be shorter than that. If it provides more purpose (like the train dungeon in WOW where you're doing a full dungeon on a train, so it's chock-full of gameplay) then it can occupy more time.
It's worth repeating that the problem isn't travel itself, but the emptiness that travel typically represents in MMORPGs. Many movies have a very high proportion of travel, like the comedy Airplane or all the chase scenes in a Mad Max movie, but this works specifically because there are a lot of interesting things to see (which is the purpose of non-interactive entertainment). The purpose of interactive entertainment is there should be a lot of interesting things to do (to interact with), so examples like WOW's train dungeon show how travel can be fun.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I liked the way travel was handled in Fallen Earth.
First, you had to have traveled to a spot before you could fast travel there. An important point that prevented you from just jumping to wherever at the start.
Second, the nodes were nicely spaced apart, mostly in major cities and a few outlying areas. Even with fast travel there was still travel involved.
Third, the vehicles supplied also gave varying speeds to travel in a realistic way, and were fun to boot.
Fourth, travel was not free and depending on your choice could get expensive.
And finally, because of all the above it was neither boring or at least minimally so for me, and it provided depth and immersion to the game that added to my experience playing it.
But I think we all agree, it is a fine line to getting it right for the majority of players. You have to enjoy a bit of role playing or stopping to smell the roses, to enjoy the gameplay that travel offers. ADD types need not apply.
FFA Nonconsentual Full Loot PvP ...You know you want it!!
Anecdotal. I'd say Planetside was the only one where I wasn't bored when traveling from point A to B.
So let me get this straight.
UO where there was a myriad of things to do around the game world.
ArcheAge where you have trade routes, farmlands/homes, territory control, pirates, etc.
EVE and BDO where you have similar content.
ATitD where you have a focus on economy, trade, commerce, crafting, etc managed through the players running about.
Ryzom where creatures had migratory cycles, resources spread in somewhat randomized patterns and would shift over time so players would actually migrate about as well.
Age of Wushu where you have some law and crime stuff attached to regions and job mechanics for working in particular locales, alongside roaming to discover new training/techniques.
APB where the very act of getting in a vehicle is an invitation to being blown up or body slammed by a dump-truck.
Darkfall where important locations and routes were perpetual targets.
Entropia where pretty much everything in the game is something you can harvest/hunt, craft, etc.
In all the games (that you seem to have played by your claim) and the most depth you experienced was only in Planetside? If you want to fling the word "anecdotal" around then perhaps apply it to yourself first, because the very mechanics of most of these games begs to differ.
As for Nariu's comment, it's a niche genre. Aside from that however, the games you mentioned all use travel and time as an intrinsic part of their game design.
Even in WoT and LoL there is much ado about time, the cool down on abilities, the movement speed of characters, the charge-up and telegraph of attacks, the tie it takes to respawn after a death, etc. Time and travel is immensely important to these games, and forms the fundamental pacing of events so that there is a distinct value to the "rush" generated in brief moments of the gameplay and conflict.
Seriously, go ahead and time in those games how much of it is non-combat or killing lane/jungle units as opposed to fighting the other players, which comes in bursts. You'll find that the majority of activity is not the player combat. And yet it's those are "fast paced" games.
It's the disconnect Axe displays overall too. Like he attacks by writing " Saying travel "has many values attached" is a uselessly vague statement.", yet the paragraph right before the phrase he references has the non-vague answer he seeks. He neglects it because he doesn't want an objective truth that refutes him however.
"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 there isn't just one right answer, because the right travel duration will change relative to the purpose and pacing required.
It's worth repeating that the problem isn't travel itself...
It's nice you finally admit my argument was right at least, even if you apparently don't realize you just finally came to the conclusion I laid out against your original claim that "travel is not interesting gameplay".
Way to move those goalposts. But thank you for agreeing for once, even if back-handed.
"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
Well that does move the conversation forward (since usually slow vs. fast travel lingers as a broader comparison between the two, and only rarely gets down to the details of how frequent fast travel nodes should be.)
The right answer again has to do with purpose and pacing. This scene of Gandalf riding to meet with Saruman is about 25 seconds of travel and 252 seconds of the event itself (meaning travel was ~9% of the overall scene.) The travel's purpose is a combination of (a) deliberately slow-paced scene transition from whatever happened before, (b) establishment of the new setting, and (c) providing some nice visuals in the process (for some of the cuts at least...the top-down shot always seemed kinda silly to me.)
So there isn't just one right answer, because the right travel duration will change relative to the purpose and pacing required. When travel provides the three purposes that it did in that LOTR scene, then a brief amount (~9% of playtime) of travel is probably justified. If it provides less purpose (like if there isn't a particularly nice visual you're traveling to) then maybe it should be shorter than that. If it provides more purpose (like the train dungeon in WOW where you're doing a full dungeon on a train, so it's chock-full of gameplay) then it can occupy more time.
It's worth repeating that the problem isn't travel itself, but the emptiness that travel typically represents in MMORPGs. Many movies have a very high proportion of travel, like the comedy Airplane or all the chase scenes in a Mad Max movie, but this works specifically because there are a lot of interesting things to see (which is the purpose of non-interactive entertainment). The purpose of interactive entertainment is there should be a lot of interesting things to do (to interact with), so examples like WOW's train dungeon show how travel can be fun.
That Gandalf scene you linked actually lets us be more clear about this discussion. See, in reality, Gandalf's "trip" doesn't start from the beginning of that scene, but from whenever he is last seen in the movie (leaving Frodo in the shire?). Meanwhile, the viewer watched as Frodo and the hobbits escaped the ring wraiths, and so on. By the time we come to this scene, the opening ride up to the tower not only serves as establishing a setting, but reminds us that Gandalf has been traveling this whole time. He JUST arrived at his destination, despite all the time that passed since we last saw him, and the passing of time was felt, not in minutes, but by the many events we witnessed on screen in between his departure and arrival scenes. This creates the illusion of space and time.
As you mention and I attempted to express in the OP, games are interactive, changing the way this entire process is experienced. Instead of "interesting things to see", as you put it, we have "interesting things to do". So to me, the equivalent of having Gandalf leave the shire, then seeing the hobbits escape, then catching up with Gandalf in Isengard, is me sending my units out of my base (to attack some point on the map, let's say), then using their travel time to assign some build commands, manage the base and train more units, before catching up with the units just as they arrive at their destination.
This works great for games in which the player is some type of overseer, controlling many units. It's analogous to a movie where you jump back and forth from many different characters, following each character's journey. However, in an RPG where you control a single character, this same tool that can provide pacing and give the illusion of scale is lost. If we are talking about MMORPGs, where the game is also filled with other players to interact with and who can interact with you, this additional degree of interactivity complicates this illusion.
Some may feel that the solution is to do away with the illusion altogether, and simply build a virtual world to scale. Now there is no need for making things feel distant, since you'll feel it riding your horse from one village to the next. If I understand you correctly, this is the notion you disagree with, that large amounts of virtual space be traveled simply for it to feel large, especially if traveling is simply holding down a key and watching virtual scenery pass by.
I suppose one question may be, is it even necessary to have a game world that feels large and vast? While certainly not for every game, I think you'd agree that certain experiences need to play out on an epic scale. Given that, then some element or combination of elements are needed to foster that illusion, and this is especially true with regards to fast travel. This has really been the question I've been trying to get at. How to create the illusion of scale, in space and time, in games where you are always following/controlling one character among many (MMORPGs)?
That Gandalf scene you linked actually lets us be more clear about this discussion. See, in reality, Gandalf's "trip" doesn't start from the beginning of that scene, but from whenever he is last seen in the movie (leaving Frodo in the shire?). Meanwhile, the viewer watched as Frodo and the hobbits escaped the ring wraiths, and so on. By the time we come to this scene, the opening ride up to the tower not only serves as establishing a setting, but reminds us that Gandalf has been traveling this whole time. He JUST arrived at his destination, despite all the time that passed since we last saw him, and the passing of time was felt, not in minutes, but by the many events we witnessed on screen in between his departure and arrival scenes. This creates the illusion of space and time.
As you mention and I attempted to express in the OP, games are interactive, changing the way this entire process is experienced. Instead of "interesting things to see", as you put it, we have "interesting things to do". So to me, the equivalent of having Gandalf leave the shire, then seeing the hobbits escape, then catching up with Gandalf in Isengard, is me sending my units out of my base (to attack some point on the map, let's say), then using their travel time to assign some build commands, manage the base and train more units, before catching up with the units just as they arrive at their destination.
This works great for games in which the player is some type of overseer, controlling many units. It's analogous to a movie where you jump back and forth from many different characters, following each character's journey. However, in an RPG where you control a single character, this same tool that can provide pacing and give the illusion of scale is lost. If we are talking about MMORPGs, where the game is also filled with other players to interact with and who can interact with you, this additional degree of interactivity complicates this illusion.
Some may feel that the solution is to do away with the illusion altogether, and simply build a virtual world to scale. Now there is no need for making things feel distant, since you'll feel it riding your horse from one village to the next. If I understand you correctly, this is the notion you disagree with, that large amounts of virtual space be traveled simply for it to feel large, especially if traveling is simply holding down a key and watching virtual scenery pass by.
I suppose one question may be, is it even necessary to have a game world that feels large and vast? While certainly not for every game, I think you'd agree that certain experiences need to play out on an epic scale. Given that, then some element or combination of elements are needed to foster that illusion, and this is especially true with regards to fast travel. This has really been the question I've been trying to get at. How to create the illusion of scale, in space and time, in games where you are always following/controlling one character among many (MMORPGs)?
Sure, when other characters' events are available movies use those other scenes to give the travel a greater sense of time and distance. But when those events aren't available, travel is still kept precisely as short as it needs to be. Almost no movies show travel fully in real-time because unless there's a specific reason to do so it would be empty and boring.
This doesn't mean you can't have a movie like Birdman which is essentially one giant continuous shot (so any travel which happened happened in realtime), but in that case every part of every scene had purpose.
So the problem is empty travel. Travel (nearly) devoid of gameplay.
It's true that a world doesn't necessarily need to feel large. Some do though, and in those you would want to show the size the way a good movie shows its world's size. There are a lot of techniques which indicate vastness without excessive tedium. And it's true that even with those techniques you're never going to appreciate the size as much as if you walked the entire thing yourself in real-time, but the cost in tedium just isn't worth the gain in 'vastness'.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
That Gandalf scene you linked actually lets us be more clear about this discussion. [...]
Sure, when other characters' events are available movies use those other scenes to give the travel a greater sense of time and distance. [...]
Good points on both sides. I think the disagreement is based on a simple fact, you can't compare the two. Or three. Book, movie, and game, three very different medium, with different tools and mechanics and structure. (Man, if only the course would be available, this was the main "dish" of it, how to remediate the same story between different media)
Movie has a very harsh barrier right at the start, the timeframe. You can't really make movies longer than 3 hours nowadays (except some experimental movies ), so you need to squeeze everything in that frame. Sure, you can split up the story, making three 3-hours long movies from a single, short book (cough*Hobbit*cough, right, Jackson? ), but even then you need to make each one "valid", working on its own too. That's why, if you want to present space, time, movement and travel, there are some "default" technics you can use, in camera movement, in cutting, etc. (Btw. there's a whole genre where travel is the centre of the plot... and also there are movies, which are presenting a story, revolving around travel, like The Way with Sheen)
As for games (and gameplay), I used to say option is king. Travelling is great, both the sightseeing part, the exploration, the small details, etc. But it's also good if there's an option for fast travel for those who wants the quick action. I admit sometimes I too use the fast travel option... but mostly I like to take my time, smell the roses, and enjoying the vista. Actually when LotRO launched, you couldn't even get a horse until level 35, so more than half of the game you just walked around - and it's a huge world. You could use the stables, but even with those fast rented steeds the travel from Bree to Rivendell could take 10-15 minutes. Hunters and faction reputation was more important than now Now you can jump around the world like an energizer bunny, but there are still roleplay events like the Ride, where players marching through Middle-earth. You may see it as empty gameplay and a tedium... I think that's why giving options is the best, everyone can play according to their playstyle.
Fast travel is mostly a themepark mechanic. In a sandbox where other players are part of the content fast travel is not that desirable. Like in survival games(haven't played many of those) fast travel would just be pointless.
Talking about games where thousands of players exist simultaneously in a single instance and mechanics related to such games.
Anecdotal. I'd say Planetside was the only one where I wasn't bored when traveling from point A to B.
So let me get this straight.
UO where there was a myriad of things to do around the game world.
ArcheAge where you have trade routes, farmlands/homes, territory control, pirates, etc.
EVE and BDO where you have similar content.
ATitD where you have a focus on economy, trade, commerce, crafting, etc managed through the players running about.
Ryzom where creatures had migratory cycles, resources spread in somewhat randomized patterns and would shift over time so players would actually migrate about as well.
Age of Wushu where you have some law and crime stuff attached to regions and job mechanics for working in particular locales, alongside roaming to discover new training/techniques.
APB where the very act of getting in a vehicle is an invitation to being blown up or body slammed by a dump-truck.
Darkfall where important locations and routes were perpetual targets.
Entropia where pretty much everything in the game is something you can harvest/hunt, craft, etc.
In all the games (that you seem to have played by your claim) and the most depth you experienced was only in Planetside? If you want to fling the word "anecdotal" around then perhaps apply it to yourself first, because the very mechanics of most of these games begs to differ.
I really wasn't talking about depth, I'm talking about interesting things that happen from point A to B. Like Axe, I don't consider traveling to be deep or complex.
Unless you're using the word depth as a synonym for interesting?
I'm not saying interesting stuff didn't happen when traveling in the games you listed, it just happened few and far between. And it mostly centered around PvP. PvP isn't why I came into this genre back in the 90's. There were other deep,complex PvP games out at the time.
I came to this genre to explore interesting worlds and play along side others, not against. The worlds/PVE devs created just fell way short of single player RPGs. They did the MMO thing ok, the RPG they didn't.
I can totally understand why fast travel was implemented because the worlds created by devs back then were dull.
Now I'm finding I don't want to fast travel as the worlds I'm playing in a more interesting to explore and bump into players to help them out in.
I really wasn't talking about depth, I'm talking about interesting things that happen from point A to B. Like Axe, I don't consider traveling to be deep or complex.
Unless you're using the word depth as a synonym for interesting?
I'm not saying interesting stuff didn't happen when traveling in the games you listed, it just happened few and far between. And it mostly centered around PvP. PvP isn't why I came into this genre back in the 90's. There were other deep,complex PvP games out at the time.
I came to this genre to explore interesting worlds and play along side others, not against. The worlds/PVE devs created just fell way short of single player RPGs. They did the MMO thing ok, the RPG they didn't.
I can totally understand why fast travel was implemented because the worlds created by devs back then were dull.
Now I'm finding I don't want to fast travel as the worlds I'm playing in a more interesting to explore and bump into players to help them out in.
In general, yeah, depth equates to "interesting" thing happening, and game mechanics that are tied to the presence/act of travel.
The problem as you describe it seems to be less of travel being the problem and more that a poor overall game quality left other elements to be symptom to exposed flaws from lack of support.
The more that could be done to flesh out the game world, the more secondary events and activities that could be engaged in, the better the narrative, suddenly that travel is ok, even though fundamentally it's the same.
I would disagree that travel is not itself utilized to create a lot of the core depth and complexity in games. As I mentioned in an example previously, even fast paced games have much ado about pacing, travel time, etc. The respawn timer, character speed, ability cast time and cooldown time, recall speed, teleport speed, etc in LoL are all important aspects that keenly define the experience the user is having and how the flow of the game works, and players learn many of those components in order to know how to best time actions, maneuver around the map, make predictions about enemies, and when to move themselves.
Without travel, that is all lost. Dungeons would be little more than cut-scene skips between fights and combat itself would be reduced to the most basic of number games. Entire game worlds would simply not exist.
That is a lot of depth intrinsically tied to time and travel.
"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
This is a good video to show how immersion can be achieved even with limited graphics. If you have the right lighting, sound, and game play you can create the illusion of fear, loneliness, and despair to an extent. Nektulos Forest from Everquest can make you feel that way when you enter it. It doesn't slow down or speed up time, but it does make you feel like time has slowed down or speed up.
I hope so. Fun rooms (or we can call them levels) beat boring world. Granted .. some open world single player games (with fast travel, of course) are fun. But i guess you will call that a huge big room, instead of a world, because there is no persistency.
Have you ever thought you simply don't like MMORPG?
Of course I don't like the old style classical MMORPG. That is *not* a secret.
However, I do like new evolved MMOs like Marvel Heroes, or the new Division (whatever it is classified as). You don't think I will be here if this site has not broadened the definition of MMOs, do you?
Even in WoT and LoL there is much ado about time, the cool down on abilities, the movement speed of characters, the charge-up and telegraph of attacks, the tie it takes to respawn after a death, etc. Time and travel is immensely important to these games, and forms the fundamental pacing of events so that there is a distinct value to the "rush" generated in brief moments of the gameplay and conflict.
Seriously, go ahead and time in those games how much of it is non-combat or killing lane/jungle units as opposed to fighting the other players, which comes in bursts. You'll find that the majority of activity is not the player combat. And yet it's those are "fast paced" games.
Of course all games uses time as a gameplay element. In fact, even in action games, you can run away, wait for regen, and come back.
But that is obviouly NOT the same as walking 15 min from point A to point B.
Without travel, that is all lost. Dungeons would be little more than cut-scene skips between fights and combat itself would be reduced to the most basic of number games. Entire game worlds would simply not exist.
We are talking about slow travel here. Walking 5 seconds from one room to the next in a dungeon does not count.
And clearly game world (not a persistent one though) exists in games like AC Syndicate, Fallout 4 ... with FAST travel.
If you are arguing there is a place for "travelling" 5 second to get to melee range of the mob .. sure .. there are tons of "travelling" in combat .. including to move into position to stealth kill, move to cover, move in range ...and so on.
But certainly there is no place (at least in mainstream games) to ask a player to walk 15 min (heck, even 5) on the SAME route again, again,and again. In fact, there is a name for that .. backtracking, and it was viewed as a BAD thing in most reviews.
A facetious argument that doesn't even hold up in classic MMOs isn't a valid argument.
Which game(s) are you set to take 15 minutes walking without any kind of input in the interim? ones in EQ aren't even big enough for that to be plausible.
And again, how much time are do you spend fighting in LoL than you spend traveling or waiting? The time it takes to walk up and down a lane I can guarantee takes consistently more time than a fight itself does, and that's a very intentional thing. If players were getting into fights every five seconds they would be wiping themselves out in these games. Not even shooters like CoD/CS has gameplay that dense.
"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
Comments
I don't know how many times while traveling I ran across other players and my plans changed.
For good or for bad. Sometimes it was PKers, other times it was someone who needed help with something or helped me out, or maybe I just got some new information that I decided to check out.
I made new friends, got to know a new guild, was invited to player run events, all sorts of things.
And that made for a much more interesting game, in my opinion.
Once upon a time....
And if games are made up of exciting levels, thre is no "boring world" because there is no world.
I did not make anything ... i just find the idea of a persistant world boring. I much rather have exciting levels/instances, or fast travelled enabled single player open world.
You don't need travel to have depth in gameplay, as shown in MANY single player games.
I've been watching some Korean movies and TV shows. They generally do a much better job at utilizing music, lighting, and the slowing down of time in order to create immersion. Asian movies in general seem to be much better at telling a romance, adventure, or comedy in this day and age. I used to like a lot of American movies and TV shows when I was a kid, but I'm not to thrilled with the last decade or so and the direction things have been going.
Space is probably harder to simulate, but I'd make a huge wilderness to where I'd program many different kinds of random spawn random placed events, some very rare some common. When you add hunger and fatigue to that equation and perhaps pvp, you might get a good mix of gameplay. Though I would create abilities with which players could easily avoid pvp, if not their cup of tea. Also I'd allow players to set up operations into the wilderness like mining and lumbering for example.
In some other thread some guy suggested an idea of a big MOBA. That would be a good idea in my view. Perhaps something where players could (with automatically summoned minions) push their factions outposts into the wilderness and into enemy territory and loot enemy players banks and warehouses and make their own base where the enemy's base was. And all this would happen in open world.
Deep gameplay implies a high skill cap. It implies a game where you could legitimately say, "Wow that player is extremely skilled! I'm impressed!"
Anyone who claims they thought someone was "very skilled at travel in MMORPGs" is lying for the sake of continuing the argument.
No, the reality is that slow travel is shallow. Saying travel "has many values attached" is a uselessly vague statement. Sure there are factors like move speed, obstructing terrain, and plotting a course on a map. You could call those "many values" if you wanted. But the reality is those factors don't combine to create deep gameplay. They combine to create very shallow gameplay where the idea that someone could be "very skilled at travel" is so ridiculous that you'd assume someone was joking if they said it.
Bringing up things that can happen without slow travel (like running into PKers) has no relevance to the discussion. That can happen with slow or fast travel.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
And therein lies the point. If there are many nodes scattered across the world, with one node next to each spawn point or event point, then it essentially does become a teleport anywhere (of interest, at least). But if the nodes are more sparse, with one node serving several separate spawn or event points, then there will be some "slow travel" from the node to the actual event site. The fewer the node "density", the more spaced out the nodes are from each other and the map locations around them, the more players will have to "slow travel" from the closest node to the actual event.
Implementing a fast travel system with nodes doesn't necessarily eliminated all aspects of "slow travel", but rather breaks it up into pieces. The question becomes: how many nodes are too many? How few are too few? The answer here is not simply based on the virtues of one form of travel vs. the other, but how this design ties into the player's experience of the game (decision making, choice, scale, etc..), and that fits right back into the original discussion of flow and pacing.
The right answer again has to do with purpose and pacing. This scene of Gandalf riding to meet with Saruman is about 25 seconds of travel and 252 seconds of the event itself (meaning travel was ~9% of the overall scene.) The travel's purpose is a combination of (a) deliberately slow-paced scene transition from whatever happened before, (b) establishment of the new setting, and (c) providing some nice visuals in the process (for some of the cuts at least...the top-down shot always seemed kinda silly to me.)
So there isn't just one right answer, because the right travel duration will change relative to the purpose and pacing required. When travel provides the three purposes that it did in that LOTR scene, then a brief amount (~9% of playtime) of travel is probably justified. If it provides less purpose (like if there isn't a particularly nice visual you're traveling to) then maybe it should be shorter than that. If it provides more purpose (like the train dungeon in WOW where you're doing a full dungeon on a train, so it's chock-full of gameplay) then it can occupy more time.
It's worth repeating that the problem isn't travel itself, but the emptiness that travel typically represents in MMORPGs. Many movies have a very high proportion of travel, like the comedy Airplane or all the chase scenes in a Mad Max movie, but this works specifically because there are a lot of interesting things to see (which is the purpose of non-interactive entertainment). The purpose of interactive entertainment is there should be a lot of interesting things to do (to interact with), so examples like WOW's train dungeon show how travel can be fun.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
First, you had to have traveled to a spot before you could fast travel there. An important point that prevented you from just jumping to wherever at the start.
Second, the nodes were nicely spaced apart, mostly in major cities and a few outlying areas. Even with fast travel there was still travel involved.
Third, the vehicles supplied also gave varying speeds to travel in a realistic way, and were fun to boot.
Fourth, travel was not free and depending on your choice could get expensive.
And finally, because of all the above it was neither boring or at least minimally so for me, and it provided depth and immersion to the game that added to my experience playing it.
But I think we all agree, it is a fine line to getting it right for the majority of players. You have to enjoy a bit of role playing or stopping to smell the roses, to enjoy the gameplay that travel offers. ADD types need not apply.
FFA Nonconsentual Full Loot PvP ...You know you want it!!
UO where there was a myriad of things to do around the game world.
ArcheAge where you have trade routes, farmlands/homes, territory control, pirates, etc.
EVE and BDO where you have similar content.
ATitD where you have a focus on economy, trade, commerce, crafting, etc managed through the players running about.
Ryzom where creatures had migratory cycles, resources spread in somewhat randomized patterns and would shift over time so players would actually migrate about as well.
Age of Wushu where you have some law and crime stuff attached to regions and job mechanics for working in particular locales, alongside roaming to discover new training/techniques.
APB where the very act of getting in a vehicle is an invitation to being blown up or body slammed by a dump-truck.
Darkfall where important locations and routes were perpetual targets.
Entropia where pretty much everything in the game is something you can harvest/hunt, craft, etc.
In all the games (that you seem to have played by your claim) and the most depth you experienced was only in Planetside? If you want to fling the word "anecdotal" around then perhaps apply it to yourself first, because the very mechanics of most of these games begs to differ.
As for Nariu's comment, it's a niche genre. Aside from that however, the games you mentioned all use travel and time as an intrinsic part of their game design.
Even in WoT and LoL there is much ado about time, the cool down on abilities, the movement speed of characters, the charge-up and telegraph of attacks, the tie it takes to respawn after a death, etc. Time and travel is immensely important to these games, and forms the fundamental pacing of events so that there is a distinct value to the "rush" generated in brief moments of the gameplay and conflict.
Seriously, go ahead and time in those games how much of it is non-combat or killing lane/jungle units as opposed to fighting the other players, which comes in bursts. You'll find that the majority of activity is not the player combat. And yet it's those are "fast paced" games.
It's the disconnect Axe displays overall too. Like he attacks by writing " Saying travel "has many values attached" is a uselessly vague statement.", yet the paragraph right before the phrase he references has the non-vague answer he seeks. He neglects it because he doesn't want an objective truth that refutes him however.
"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
Way to move those goalposts. But thank you for agreeing for once, even if back-handed.
"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
As you mention and I attempted to express in the OP, games are interactive, changing the way this entire process is experienced. Instead of "interesting things to see", as you put it, we have "interesting things to do". So to me, the equivalent of having Gandalf leave the shire, then seeing the hobbits escape, then catching up with Gandalf in Isengard, is me sending my units out of my base (to attack some point on the map, let's say), then using their travel time to assign some build commands, manage the base and train more units, before catching up with the units just as they arrive at their destination.
This works great for games in which the player is some type of overseer, controlling many units. It's analogous to a movie where you jump back and forth from many different characters, following each character's journey. However, in an RPG where you control a single character, this same tool that can provide pacing and give the illusion of scale is lost. If we are talking about MMORPGs, where the game is also filled with other players to interact with and who can interact with you, this additional degree of interactivity complicates this illusion.
Some may feel that the solution is to do away with the illusion altogether, and simply build a virtual world to scale. Now there is no need for making things feel distant, since you'll feel it riding your horse from one village to the next. If I understand you correctly, this is the notion you disagree with, that large amounts of virtual space be traveled simply for it to feel large, especially if traveling is simply holding down a key and watching virtual scenery pass by.
I suppose one question may be, is it even necessary to have a game world that feels large and vast? While certainly not for every game, I think you'd agree that certain experiences need to play out on an epic scale. Given that, then some element or combination of elements are needed to foster that illusion, and this is especially true with regards to fast travel. This has really been the question I've been trying to get at. How to create the illusion of scale, in space and time, in games where you are always following/controlling one character among many (MMORPGs)?
This doesn't mean you can't have a movie like Birdman which is essentially one giant continuous shot (so any travel which happened happened in realtime), but in that case every part of every scene had purpose.
So the problem is empty travel. Travel (nearly) devoid of gameplay.
It's true that a world doesn't necessarily need to feel large. Some do though, and in those you would want to show the size the way a good movie shows its world's size. There are a lot of techniques which indicate vastness without excessive tedium. And it's true that even with those techniques you're never going to appreciate the size as much as if you walked the entire thing yourself in real-time, but the cost in tedium just isn't worth the gain in 'vastness'.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Movie has a very harsh barrier right at the start, the timeframe. You can't really make movies longer than 3 hours nowadays (except some experimental movies
That's why, if you want to present space, time, movement and travel, there are some "default" technics you can use, in camera movement, in cutting, etc.
(Btw. there's a whole genre where travel is the centre of the plot... and also there are movies, which are presenting a story, revolving around travel, like The Way with Sheen)
As for games (and gameplay), I used to say option is king. Travelling is great, both the sightseeing part, the exploration, the small details, etc. But it's also good if there's an option for fast travel for those who wants the quick action. I admit sometimes I too use the fast travel option... but mostly I like to take my time, smell the roses, and enjoying the vista.
Actually when LotRO launched, you couldn't even get a horse until level 35, so more than half of the game you just walked around - and it's a huge world. You could use the stables, but even with those fast rented steeds the travel from Bree to Rivendell could take 10-15 minutes. Hunters and faction reputation was more important than now
Now you can jump around the world like an energizer bunny, but there are still roleplay events like the Ride, where players marching through Middle-earth. You may see it as empty gameplay and a tedium... I think that's why giving options is the best, everyone can play according to their playstyle.
Unless you're using the word depth as a synonym for interesting?
I'm not saying interesting stuff didn't happen when traveling in the games you listed, it just happened few and far between. And it mostly centered around PvP. PvP isn't why I came into this genre back in the 90's. There were other deep,complex PvP games out at the time.
I came to this genre to explore interesting worlds and play along side others, not against. The worlds/PVE devs created just fell way short of single player RPGs. They did the MMO thing ok, the RPG they didn't.
I can totally understand why fast travel was implemented because the worlds created by devs back then were dull.
Now I'm finding I don't want to fast travel as the worlds I'm playing in a more interesting to explore and bump into players to help them out in.
The problem as you describe it seems to be less of travel being the problem and more that a poor overall game quality left other elements to be symptom to exposed flaws from lack of support.
The more that could be done to flesh out the game world, the more secondary events and activities that could be engaged in, the better the narrative, suddenly that travel is ok, even though fundamentally it's the same.
I would disagree that travel is not itself utilized to create a lot of the core depth and complexity in games. As I mentioned in an example previously, even fast paced games have much ado about pacing, travel time, etc. The respawn timer, character speed, ability cast time and cooldown time, recall speed, teleport speed, etc in LoL are all important aspects that keenly define the experience the user is having and how the flow of the game works, and players learn many of those components in order to know how to best time actions, maneuver around the map, make predictions about enemies, and when to move themselves.
Without travel, that is all lost. Dungeons would be little more than cut-scene skips between fights and combat itself would be reduced to the most basic of number games. Entire game worlds would simply not exist.
That is a lot of depth intrinsically tied to time and travel.
"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
However, I do like new evolved MMOs like Marvel Heroes, or the new Division (whatever it is classified as). You don't think I will be here if this site has not broadened the definition of MMOs, do you?
If you are arguing there is a place for "travelling" 5 second to get to melee range of the mob .. sure .. there are tons of "travelling" in combat .. including to move into position to stealth kill, move to cover, move in range ...and so on.
But certainly there is no place (at least in mainstream games) to ask a player to walk 15 min (heck, even 5) on the SAME route again, again,and again. In fact, there is a name for that .. backtracking, and it was viewed as a BAD thing in most reviews.
Which game(s) are you set to take 15 minutes walking without any kind of input in the interim? ones in EQ aren't even big enough for that to be plausible.
And again, how much time are do you spend fighting in LoL than you spend traveling or waiting? The time it takes to walk up and down a lane I can guarantee takes consistently more time than a fight itself does, and that's a very intentional thing. If players were getting into fights every five seconds they would be wiping themselves out in these games. Not even shooters like CoD/CS has gameplay that dense.
"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