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.
EQ .. did you ever take the 20 min boat trip? Or just run across low level zones ignoring everything? Heck, you have to FLY to your dungeon in WOW before they put in instanced port to dungeons. That is 15 min (if the dungeon is far away) of non-interactive flying (which is SLOW by comparison to portals).
And rightfully .. all these mandatory slow travel is now extinct .. except may be the first time to a teleport point in an open world single player game.
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.
"Don't waste the audience's time" applies universally to all entertainment. Doesn't matter what medium it is. Which is why TV shows (which get more than just 3 hours) use these same techniques to avoid wasting the audiences time. There simply wouldn't be a purpose to showing a 3-hour plane flight in real-time if nothing noteworthy happens during the flight.
As for options, not sure we need to discuss that yeah? What game forces fast travel on you? Every game out there with fast travel you're able to slow travel too. (It's just almost nobody generally chooses this, because why would they?)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
"Don't waste the audience's time" applies universally to all entertainment. Doesn't matter what medium it is. Which is why TV shows (which get more than just 3 hours) use these same techniques to avoid wasting the audiences time. There simply wouldn't be a purpose to showing a 3-hour plane flight in real-time if nothing noteworthy happens during the flight.
As for options, not sure we need to discuss that yeah? What game forces fast travel on you? Every game out there with fast travel you're able to slow travel too. (It's just almost nobody generally chooses this, because why would they?)
Pretty much this.
MMO should (and they have) adopt the same design as open world single player games. First time you have to explore. Once you reach a landmark, you can fast travel to it from then on.
And clearly that is optional. If you want to just walk around in Fallout 4, or AC Syndicate, or Far Cry 3 ... you still CAN.
The fact that pretty much all AAA games have this feature tell you that no one wants to walk around endlessly, whether it is in a MMO or not.
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.
EQ .. did you ever take the 20 min boat trip? Or just run across low level zones ignoring everything? Heck, you have to FLY to your dungeon in WOW before they put in instanced port to dungeons. That is 15 min (if the dungeon is far away) of non-interactive flying (which is SLOW by comparison to portals).
And rightfully .. all these mandatory slow travel is now extinct .. except may be the first time to a teleport point in an open world single player game.
In EQ boats launched on a 20m schedule. the trips themselves were not 20 minutes between each locale unless you were staying on the boat for a round trip (in which case why did you get on the boat?).
In WoW there were stones outside dungeons for summoning team members and even prior to that there were spells for summoning team members. That game has always been easy on players and it only got more so with time. Ignoring all that, you can go from the top of one of the main continents to the bottom in just under 11 minutes. Unless you're engaging in flight patterns for an extra ten minutes before wherever you're going, it's physically impossible for your travel to take that much time between any location within a continent. The only reason a boat ride would be long in either game is by missing the schedule and having to wait on the boat to cycle.
Also like noted, "mandatory slow travel" still has a pretty common place even in high action games. You can't portal everywhere in LoL, and you still spend a majority of time running up and down lanes. Units still have a lot of travel time in RTS games with a majority of the game actually being non-combat. Even in Diablo 3, a good chunk of time in the adventure mode is just running to the objectives.
Hence too why apparently yours and axe's argument has shifted away from "travel is not interesting gameplay" to "Travel (nearly) devoid of gameplay."
You see those goalposts shifting there? When the original argument put forth was that travel is counter to gameplay, and that got proven false, the fallback to complain about "empty travel" is laughable at best. You and axe went from making a flawed argument of game mechanics to stating the stupidly obvious.
Which is great, because what you guys are saying now is basically footnotes of what I responded to Axe with originally.
Arguing that "empty gameplay is boring" is a no-shit argument that no one has disagreed with. What people disagreed with was the sentiment that travel and time were unnecessary components of a game world. My address to that point has so far only been correcting that failure in reasoning.
So do you actually agree with Axe's original claim that travel has no value in gaming, which is an objectively false argument? Or, do you agree with the claims being made now which is what I had corrected him with a while ago?
"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
In EQ boats launched on a 20m schedule. the trips themselves were not 20 minutes between each locale unless you were staying on the boat for a round trip.
In WoW there were stones outside dungeons for summoning team members and even prior to that there were spells for summoning team members.
Arguing that "empty gameplay is boring" is a no-shit argument that no one has disagreed with. What people disagreed with was the sentiment that travel and time were unnecessary components of a game world.
1) Whatever the amount of time on the EQ boat was ... it is too long. Doing nothing on a boat for even 1 min is too long .. and certainly. It is not 1 min. And yes, you have to wait for the boat on the dock. That is stupid.
2) Yes, there were stones ... but you have to wait for at least ONE member of the group to fly there before the stone can be used. And again, even 1 min of that wait is too long.
3) I never argue that time and some walking (as part of combat gameplay) is not a part of gameplay. I am specifically calling out "slow travel". It is disingenuous to equate waiting for a boat to figuring out how to get into position to stealth kill a guard. [mod edit]
So again ... are you for or against 20 min boat schedules that requires a combination of waiting on the dock, and waiting on the boat? Or taking away fast travel in games like Fallout 4 (so that you have to backtrack lots of miles)?
So your only meaningful point of dispute is number 3, which has been prior stated as a point no one is disputing because it's mind-numbingly obvious.
What seems to not be getting through is the point that there are lots of things that can be done where travel is an integral component to provide a deeper 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
What seems to not be getting through is the point that there are lots of things that can be done where travel is an integral component to provide a deeper game.
nah ...
What is getting through is that you call every movement "travel" .. which is silly.
In fact, let's use examples ... are you in favor of 20 min boat rides? 10 min of walking to the same place again and again? and get rid of fast travel like those in Fallout 4?
Those design concepts (which can be called slow travel) are obsolete, and few devs would force them on players. Wouldn't you agree?
What seems to not be getting through is the point that there are lots of things that can be done where travel is an integral component to provide a deeper game.
nah ...
What is getting through is that you call every movement "travel" .. which is silly.
In fact, let's use examples ... are you in favor of 20 min boat rides? 10 min of walking to the same place again and again? and get rid of fast travel like those in Fallout 4?
Those design concepts (which can be called slow travel) are obsolete, and few devs would force them on players. Wouldn't you agree?
Deivos, isn't it fun how this game is played by the industry people here? Same thing happens elsewhere, for that matter. And it's been that way for years.
What seems to not be getting through is the point that there are lots of things that can be done where travel is an integral component to provide a deeper game.
nah ...
What is getting through is that you call every movement "travel" .. which is silly.
In fact, let's use examples ... are you in favor of 20 min boat rides? 10 min of walking to the same place again and again? and get rid of fast travel like those in Fallout 4?
Those design concepts (which can be called slow travel) are obsolete, and few devs would force them on players. Wouldn't you agree?
I addressed this very subject in my last comment. How did you not get that what you are arguing for is a non-argument, and that what is actually being argued about was the original argument that axe had posed of, in his own words, "travel is not interesting gameplay", where he dismissed the idea that travel has any wright on game mechanics.
That's why my commentary is pointing out travel and time (note both of those things, as those were both the subject of the thread alongside questions of what mechanics makes travel interesting) are intrinsic components of gameplay.
You are now a random variable that has walked into that conversation and is attempting to hijacking it in an utterly useless direction by arguing one of the most meaningless points you could present.
No shit doing nothing for a long time is going to be boring. No one ever disagreed with that and your persistence in trolling the thread with such stupid arguments does nothing to further any conversations.
What people have been arguing for the longest damn time now is that extended travel has game value in the other aspects that can be attached to it to create more depth. The caravaning, raids, territory control, resource capture and scarcity, commerce between locations, etc, are all features that require time and travel to be emulated in some manner at least in order to function. Even in games where you're not micromanaging units and focusing on the high-concept of the economy like Capitalism 2 you have much ado about control of grid space and the time actions take to complete which not only affects pacing but how you plan events long-term.
Hell take one of the first responses to Axe.
"...it's a fine balance between allowing players to jump from action to action and losing a sense of flow for your character in the world. While there's definitely a place for games that focus on the action, the question is whether there's a place for games that focus on the world and your place in it, without becoming too tedious and impractical on the one end and too narrow in scope and freedom on the other."
That's from page one, and it took a week of bickering with him to get him to concede that such is the case.
Or this statement (also from page one).
"The right answer is to make travel into interesting game play. "
This was a counterargument to the statement posed by axe that travel is not good gameplay.
[mod edit]
Post edited by Amana on
"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
Deivos, isn't it fun how this game is played by the industry people here? Same thing happens elsewhere, for that matter. And it's been that way for years.
If you have a point, make one. Otherwise don't make these vague complaints.
The state of the conversation is basically:
The state of travel in games is it isn't interesting gameplay. This doesn't mean it couldn't be, if infused with a lot of gameplay decisions.
The features that "require" slow travel don't actually require slow travel.
Forcing players to endure significant periods of slow travel is bad entertainment. The point of games is interaction or at least non-interactive entertainment, and slow travel fails at both.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Good game design is just like any good narrative design: it skips to the interesting bits.
I believe it is important to make the distinction between "skips to the interesting bits" and "skips to the combat." Because that's more or less what we are arguing here, right? I mean, we aren't talking about roleplay on the way to a dungeon as an "interesting bit" are we?
Even though most of the time spent in the Hobbit and LotR films are these sorts of roleplaying scenes without combat. Tell me. If Peter Jackson was a good film director for skipping to "the interesting bits," why did these interesting bits include the intrigue at Gondor palace? Or the pub at the Shire? Or long, thoughtful dialogues with Frodo and Sam? Or the dwarves at Bilbo's cottage? Why didn't he just cut out all that stuff and get to orc bashing and dragon slaying?
If you were a film director, Axehilt, I fear that it would hurt to sit through 90 minutes of it. I'd imagine there would just be explosions after explosions, car crashes after car crashes, fight scene on top of fight scene. After all, given that your philosophy is to get people into combat ASAP, with as little time as possible between combats, those action scenes in the films are the "interesting bits" that make for a good narrative, no?
But thank God films aren't built this way. We will find, in an average action film, perhaps less than a quarter of the total time is an actual action scene. The rest of the time is slow drama, character drama, comic relief and romance. What's the point of all that stuff if it has nothing to do with the central reason people see an action film?
There's a reason you need all that stuff in there. The human attention span is very pattern-oriented. Places where you want high tension won't seem all that high unless preceded by a period of low tension and succeeded by a period of low tension. And since combat is, by definition, an activity that ought to be interpreted as high tension affair, the combat will just feel boring if there's no periods of low tension.
That's the big problem in MMOs from a narrative standpoint these days. Unlike action-adventure titles, MMOs cannot do cutscenes well. MMOs used to build downtime into their systems through things like travel and roleplay. But in an attempt to satisfy the FPS and action-oriented crowd, they cut out nearly every source of downtime and, with it, opportunities for creative character play. And so, while they get you to the combat quicker, the combat doesn't feel very special. There's just no referent to normalcy to make the combat feel like a special thing.
Even though an action film might have 100' explosions and epic CGI battles, those impressive special effects start to lose their epic quality when it is just series after series of them. Fight scenes might be brutal, but they won't seem brutal if the film is punch after punch, without any return to normalcy to make the fights seem brutal.
Without some oscillation between high tension and low tension, the highs just don't feel very high. It just feels boring. It's probably why churn is higher today on games and its why, despite having more action and dazzling graphics than ever, people are just getting tired of the fast action MMO format.
The main problem I have with this "skip to the interesting bits" analogy is because there are no interesting bits to MMO developers but combat encounters. But when we look at other media--heck, even other video games--there's a whole lot of memorable scenes and interesting bits that have nothing to do with combat. Imagine playing Mass Effect or Metal Gear Solid without the cutscenes and non-combat narrative scenes...it wouldn't be nearly as memorable.
__________________________ "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
Axehilt said: The features that "require" slow travel don't actually require slow travel.
Claiming something is true does not make it true. There have been plenty of examples proving this opinion wrong already using games you brought up in the first place.
"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
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) [...]
"Don't waste the audience's time" applies universally to all entertainment. Doesn't matter what medium it is. Which is why TV shows (which get more than just 3 hours) use these same techniques to avoid wasting the audiences time. There simply wouldn't be a purpose to showing a 3-hour plane flight in real-time if nothing noteworthy happens during the flight.
on a side-note: TV is also a separate medium with different toolset (though straight-to-TV films are closer to movies, even those are different enough, and series are a whole different school).
3-hour plane flights: I know Flight sim addicts, who used to fly
intercontinental simulated flights, 6-8 hours, real-time. And guess
what, they're happy if "nothing noteworthy happens during the flight" as you wrote.
That's the whole point, no such thing as "audience" as a well-defined group. You can try to target a selected group of people from the audience, based on a list of criteria, but as a whole, there are many different "tastes" in the audience. As @Beatnik59 wrote
Good game design is just like any good narrative design: it skips to the interesting bits.
If you were a film director, Axehilt, I fear that it would hurt to sit through 90 minutes of it. I'd imagine there would just be explosions after explosions, car crashes after car crashes, fight scene on top of fight scene. After all, given that your philosophy is to get people into combat ASAP, with as little time as possible between combats, those action scenes in the films are the "interesting bits" that make for a good narrative, no?
True, there's an avid fan group of exploitation, but that's only a marginal group, and definitely not the majority. That's the point, everyone has their own idea about "interesting bits". As general, a good narrative is NOT about "skips to the interesting bits". It can be, if that's your goal as a director / writer / game designer, for reaching your target audience who are into that. But it definitely is NOT an overall narrative rule.
What I'm trying to point out with my lame english, no such thing as "wasting the audiences time". There's bad design, there's failed audience targeting, but every kinda solution has its own audience, since audience is not a homogeneous mass. Just check the latest, golden statue -covered flick "Leo crawls in snow for Oscar". By your terms that should've been a 30 minutes short film
As for options, not sure we need to discuss that yeah? What game forces fast travel on you? Every game out there with fast travel you're able to slow travel too. (It's just almost nobody generally chooses this, because why would they?)
It needs to discuss, because it is a noticeable trend in games, smaller and smaller worlds, or skipping the world entirely and just porting from action to action. Which is fine, if it's an action game... but for an RPG, world and travelling is an important aspect - at least imo, but I'm a roleplayer / adventurer, and not a diablo-clone lover combat addict "almost nobody generally chooses this" there's still quite a crowd (just check in LotRO for example), but true, the numbers and even moreso the ratio within the gaming community is diminishing slowly. (aging out, whilst population is expanded by the iWant generation, small and empty zones in new games because majority wants quick action and devs are focusing onto their money, etc.) But this would lead to a whole new off-topic discussion about art versus profit, and I hate that topic...
So let's just stop here, and summarise the above with: nope, good narrative is not about jumping from interesting* bits to interesting bits. * : whatever stuff may be interesting to the targeted audience.
I believe it is important to make the distinction between "skips to the interesting bits" and "skips to the combat." Because that's more or less what we are arguing here, right? I mean, we aren't talking about roleplay on the way to a dungeon as an "interesting bit" are we?
Even though most of the time spent in the Hobbit and LotR films are these sorts of roleplaying scenes without combat. Tell me. If Peter Jackson was a good film director for skipping to "the interesting bits," why did these interesting bits include the intrigue at Gondor palace? Or the pub at the Shire? Or long, thoughtful dialogues with Frodo and Sam? Or the dwarves at Bilbo's cottage? Why didn't he just cut out all that stuff and get to orc bashing and dragon slaying?
If you were a film director, Axehilt, I fear that it would hurt to sit through 90 minutes of it. I'd imagine there would just be explosions after explosions, car crashes after car crashes, fight scene on top of fight scene. After all, given that your philosophy is to get people into combat ASAP, with as little time as possible between combats, those action scenes in the films are the "interesting bits" that make for a good narrative, no?
But thank God films aren't built this way. We will find, in an average action film, perhaps less than a quarter of the total time is an actual action scene. The rest of the time is slow drama, character drama, comic relief and romance. What's the point of all that stuff if it has nothing to do with the central reason people see an action film?
There's a reason you need all that stuff in there. The human attention span is very pattern-oriented. Places where you want high tension won't seem all that high unless preceded by a period of low tension and succeeded by a period of low tension. And since combat is, by definition, an activity that ought to be interpreted as high tension affair, the combat will just feel boring if there's no periods of low tension.
That's the big problem in MMOs from a narrative standpoint these days. Unlike action-adventure titles, MMOs cannot do cutscenes well. MMOs used to build downtime into their systems through things like travel and roleplay. But in an attempt to satisfy the FPS and action-oriented crowd, they cut out nearly every source of downtime and, with it, opportunities for creative character play. And so, while they get you to the combat quicker, the combat doesn't feel very special. There's just no referent to normalcy to make the combat feel like a special thing.
Even though an action film might have 100' explosions and epic CGI battles, those impressive special effects start to lose their epic quality when it is just series after series of them. Fight scenes might be brutal, but they won't seem brutal if the film is punch after punch, without any return to normalcy to make the fights seem brutal.
Without some oscillation between high tension and low tension, the highs just don't feel very high. It just feels boring. It's probably why churn is higher today on games and its why, despite having more action and dazzling graphics than ever, people are just getting tired of the fast action MMO format.
The main problem I have with this "skip to the interesting bits" analogy is because there are no interesting bits to MMO developers but combat encounters. But when we look at other media--heck, even other video games--there's a whole lot of memorable scenes and interesting bits that have nothing to do with combat. Imagine playing Mass Effect or Metal Gear Solid without the cutscenes and non-combat narrative scenes...it wouldn't be nearly as memorable.
No, by "skips to the interesting bits" that's what I mean.
In fact I mean it even broader than it sounds, since the horror movie examples I used earlier in the thread have deliberately slow segments whose purpose is to build anticipation in order to achieve a satisfying scare moment. Those slow segments aren't "interesting", but they serve a clear purpose which is beneficial to the entertainment and isn't something that can be accomplished any other way.
With your LOTR examples, each scene serves a purpose. (Or if any of them don't, then they legitimately are poor decisions. Peter Jackson isn't necessarily the perfect director, after all.) The purpose is typically plot advancement or character development.
So your post is largely just a waste, jumping to a false conclusion.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I can see to an extent why certain things are getting gutted out of RPGs and they are becoming more about combat.
I believe it's because of attempting to please everyone. For instance some people might want a more classic story with a strong male character and a pretty romantic/funny girl as a love interest. A gay person would want a different type of romance. Others might want a strong female character story. If you pick just one of these you can't appeal to a large audience.
Thus we have many things taken out of the games in order to try to find a common ground and hit the big numbers. This has the side effect in many cases of making games that are a bit less interesting for everyone, but is interesting enough to draw a large audience to play for small amounts of time.
on a side-note: TV is also a separate medium with different toolset (though straight-to-TV films are closer to movies, even those are different enough, and series are a whole different school).
3-hour plane flights: I know Flight sim addicts, who used to fly
intercontinental simulated flights, 6-8 hours, real-time. And guess
what, they're happy if "nothing noteworthy happens during the flight" as you wrote.
That's the whole point, no such thing as "audience" as a well-defined group. You can try to target a selected group of people from the audience, based on a list of criteria, but as a whole, there are many different "tastes" in the audience. As @Beatnik59 wrote
True, there's an avid fan group of exploitation, but that's only a marginal group, and definitely not the majority. That's the point, everyone has their own idea about "interesting bits". As general, a good narrative is NOT about "skips to the interesting bits". It can be, if that's your goal as a director / writer / game designer, for reaching your target audience who are into that. But it definitely is NOT an overall narrative rule.
What I'm trying to point out with my lame english, no such thing as "wasting the audiences time". There's bad design, there's failed audience targeting, but every kinda solution has its own audience, since audience is not a homogeneous mass. Just check the latest, golden statue -covered flick "Leo crawls in snow for Oscar". By your terms that should've been a 30 minutes short film
It needs to discuss, because it is a noticeable trend in games, smaller and smaller worlds, or skipping the world entirely and just porting from action to action. Which is fine, if it's an action game... but for an RPG, world and travelling is an important aspect - at least imo, but I'm a roleplayer / adventurer, and not a diablo-clone lover combat addict "almost nobody generally chooses this" there's still quite a crowd (just check in LotRO for example), but true, the numbers and even moreso the ratio within the gaming community is diminishing slowly. (aging out, whilst population is expanded by the iWant generation, small and empty zones in new games because majority wants quick action and devs are focusing onto their money, etc.) But this would lead to a whole new off-topic discussion about art versus profit, and I hate that topic...
So let's just stop here, and summarise the above with: nope, good narrative is not about jumping from interesting* bits to interesting bits. * : whatever stuff may be interesting to the targeted audience.
The vast majority of gamers aren't simulator fans who would accept hours upon hours of uneventful nothingness. The majority of gamers want gameplay.
Movies/shows DO skip to the interesting bits.
Name a single successful narrative-based movie that portrays 10+ minutes of uneventful travel. You can't. Any movie stupid enough to do that wouldn't be successful. Anything you tried to name would involve some flavor of action, plot development, or character development which would be the actual purpose for the scene.
So essentially you've bought into Beatnik's false assumption. Try discussing the actual points being made instead of the false straw man argument he invents.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I can see to an extent why certain things are getting gutted out of RPGs and they are becoming more about combat.
Well there's an important distinction to which things get gutted.
Any element of a game must justify itself by either gameplay or exhibition. Those that don't deserve to be cut.
In the vast majority of games, travel provides insufficient gameplay or exhibition. It involves few decisions (bad gameplay) which are shallow (bad gameplay), and often fails to provide great visuals (bad exhibition) and even if it does those visuals are only interesting the first few times and not subsequent times (bad exhibition.)
Whereas other things which are gutted aren't as well-justified. Story-related decisions can provide excellent gameplay and exhibition (a'la Mass Effect), but these decisions are somewhat rare in MMORPGs.
In the former case, features are gutted because they're legitimately bad ideas (because they're bad entertainment.) In the latter, they're gutted to target a different demographic.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
You are now a random variable that has walked into that conversation and is attempting to hijacking it in an utterly useless direction by arguing one of the most meaningless points you could present.
No shit doing nothing for a long time is going to be boring. No one ever disagreed with that and your persistence in trolling the thread with such stupid arguments does nothing to further any conversations.
Really? you didn't see those who argue that down-time "foster social interactions" and want those 20 min boat rides back?
Basically, you have to agree with me, and call me names just because that is the only way not to lose face?
But thank God films aren't built this way. We will find, in an average action film, perhaps less than a quarter of the total time is an actual action scene. The rest of the time is slow drama, character drama, comic relief and romance. What's the point of all that stuff if it has nothing to do with the central reason people see an action film?
The main problem I have with this "skip to the interesting bits" analogy is because there are no interesting bits to MMO developers but combat encounters. But when we look at other media--heck, even other video games--there's a whole lot of memorable scenes and interesting bits that have nothing to do with combat. Imagine playing Mass Effect or Metal Gear Solid without the cutscenes and non-combat narrative scenes...it wouldn't be nearly as memorable.
Games are not movies.
And what is wrong with "interesting bits" being combat? There are lots of successful games with nothing but combat ... Diablo, LoL, World of Tanks, ... a lot don't even pretend to have a story.
And again, you don't need slow travel in games. If you want story & character development, just jump to a cutscene. Or jump to a non-combat puzzle. Or jump to a dialogue mini-game. There is no point walking 10 min to any of those things.
[...] But this would lead to a whole new off-topic discussion about art versus profit, and I hate that topic...
So let's just stop here, and summarise the above with: nope, good narrative is not about jumping from interesting* bits to interesting bits. * : whatever stuff may be interesting to the targeted audience.
The vast majority of gamers aren't simulator fans who would accept hours upon hours of uneventful nothingness. The majority of gamers want gameplay.
Movies/shows DO skip to the interesting bits.
Name a single successful narrative-based movie that portrays 10+ minutes of uneventful travel. You can't. Any movie stupid enough to do that wouldn't be successful. Anything you tried to name would involve some flavor of action, plot development, or character development which would be the actual purpose for the scene.
We're talking past by each other... plus now you invoke into the nice theoretical discussion the profits too, sadly. OP raised a good, general notion, and that has nothing to do with chasing the money and caring about what the so-called majority wants.
Then you switch back to general speak with "Movies/shows DO skip to the interesting bits." which is simply not true, even if we cite "interesting" in a much broader sense than you use it, since everyone has different views of interesting. I could list truckloads of experimental, art, modern, student, etc. movies to support that statement.
Then you switch back again to the profits "Any movie stupid enough to do that wouldn't be successful." Everyone defines "success" differently, and also not everyone's chasing any success in the first place... Also, "name a movie with 10+minutes of uneventful travel", as I've tried to shed some light on it in the previous post, no such thing as uneventful. What's uneventful for you, may be valuable and interesting to others.
But for not avoiding your request, here's one: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111341/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 Great movie, but you'd bore yourself to death on it most likely (and not only because of the lenght). Still, it's a successful one - success even by your terms with money and fame and critical success. And nope, none of your last sentence's parts are valid for a bunch of scenes in there (action, character development or plot).
I'd suggest let's just finish this off-topic detour, and go back to OP's original idea of narrative within a multiplayer environment
(and yep, I agree that the masses want fast action. It will be even worse as time goes forward, based on how society (d)evolves. But that has nothing to do with the whole medium of book / movie / game. If something doesn't taste for the masses, so what? That still can be valid, viable, and in a lot of cases even more valuable, than the regular, fit-to-masses merchandising "products". And to be honest, and totally off-topic, this "the majority wants <insert anything here>" statement is one of the most harmful ideas of mankind. Read some Brave New World from Huxley)
Deivos, isn't it fun how this game is played by the industry people here? Same thing happens elsewhere, for that matter. And it's been that way for years.
If you have a point, make one. Otherwise don't make these vague complaints.
The state of the conversation is basically:
The state of travel in games is it isn't interesting gameplay. This doesn't mean it couldn't be, if infused with a lot of gameplay decisions.
The features that "require" slow travel don't actually require slow travel.
Forcing players to endure significant periods of slow travel is bad entertainment. The point of games is interaction or at least non-interactive entertainment, and slow travel fails at both.
There you go again.
We say: "Slow travel is boring and we want to change that and make it more interesting."
You say: "Slow travel is boring, that doesn't mean it has to be, but we're just removing it."
We say: "But we want it, and we want it to be interesting game play."
You say: "Tough shit. We're removing it and that's all you're going to get. And we're here on forums to make sure these conversations don't go anywhere."
[...] As such, we exploit this control in story telling, whether in books, film, or even games, to great effect. [...]. But how does this play out with MMOs?
[...] unlike a movie or book, where you are simply along for the ride, a game is interactive in a way that links imagination to the real world. After all, your imaginary self may move as fast as lightning, but your keyboard reflexes remain (to varying degrees) human. [...]
[...] I'm curious how well you feel MMOs have convinced you of the scale and history of their world through gameplay and storytelling elements, or how you think they could do better?
I'm quoting my original post here to highlight a few points in this conversation. To begin with, the purpose of referring to narrative in books and movies has been to establish an idea, not suggest that all of these media are the same. As noted by essentially everyone at some point or another in this thread, games are interactive and require active, not passive, participation. This leads to what "active" participation is, which seems to be a key point of contention.
Again, it is clear to everyone that "active" is relative to different games and people. Twitch combat is "active", but so is a thought provoking puzzle. Many games balance (or try to balance) multiple elements into a cohesive experience, and each element will have its own natural pace of "activity". Often it is how these different elements are used in conjunction with each other that makes a game fun, even if an element on its own is simply an obstacle.
By gating unit abilities and upgrades behind research timers, and limiting those by resource costs and resource gathering times, RTS games foster a depth of strategy that makes them enjoyable. These games are still much faster than turn-based strategy games, but not necessarily more fun (it's subjective, after all).
My point is, any element taken on its own, out of its context in a broader game design, becomes simply meaningless. The question is how these elements can be used in the context of other elements to create a compelling sense of world in MMORPGs?
For example, @Axehilt, say that terrain becomes a factor in travel, so that some characters (those not weighed down by heavy armor, or with special skills and/or equipment) can climb a cliff wall while others cannot. Say there is a castle (fort, whatever) surrounded by a cliff with only one side facing a plateau. For your sake, Axe, the game designers put fast travel nodes in game. By putting one node close to the castle, but at the bottom of the cliff, while placing another node on the plateau but substantially farther off, the game designers can create a compelling decision. Do we, the players rushing to sack or save the castle, forgo our heavy defenses to scale the cliff wall and sneak in quickly, or do we traverse a greater distance across the plateau but come with our full force and armor? Say there's some time element involved, or even that the longer we take to arrive the more the castle shores up its defenses.
Is being forced to travel a greater distance if you can't climb an inconvenience? Sure. Is that part, the part where you have to trek from the node all the way to the castle, on its own, compelling gameplay? Are you doing anything along the way other than travel? No. But without it, without a significant distance that makes this decision to climb or trek a meaningful and strategic one, the actual fun of this particular game element is lost. Why have skills or tools that let you climb when you can just as easily run? I bring this up, particularly, because it does not preclude the use of fast travel nodes. It's just that no matter how you travel, the basis of any decision making is a cost-benefit analysis, and eliminating costs because they are not as fun as benefits eliminates the need for decision making.
We say: "Slow travel is boring and we want to change that and make it more interesting."
You say: "Slow travel is boring, that doesn't mean it has to be, but we're just removing it."
We say: "But we want it, and we want it to be interesting game play."
and the dev said ...
a) we can add the interesting gameplay without the boring slow travel part, and b) slow travel is still there, don't teleport and walk, you choice!
I don't really understand this logic.
If we are going to have fast travel then why not just has a nice focused and linear experience? One devoid of needing to click on NPCs, accept quests, and walk around. One where a story just unfolds naturally as you play the game.
An open world and traveling should serve a purpose of some sort. It may be trying to convey how dangerous the world is going from point a to point b or how large the world is.
I actually do use fast travel in games because I'm looking for the path of least resistance, but I also feel that the experience of exploration is cheapened a lot.
It's a bit annoying when people say the option is there to turn something off. One possible point of a game is to challenge people. Finding the path of least resistance should be something you have to find. It shouldn't be the default option in all games IMO. Especially open world games.
We say: "Slow travel is boring and we want to change that and make it more interesting."
You say: "Slow travel is boring, that doesn't mean it has to be, but we're just removing it."
We say: "But we want it, and we want it to be interesting game play."
and the dev said ...
a) we can add the interesting gameplay without the boring slow travel part, and b) slow travel is still there, don't teleport and walk, you choice!
Explain how you'd do that again, please? Because you're still leaving travel as it has been when actually traveling. And turning "slow travel" into random room encounters is one of the crappiest idea's I've ever heard of for a game with a world.
Comments
And rightfully .. all these mandatory slow travel is now extinct .. except may be the first time to a teleport point in an open world single player game.
As for options, not sure we need to discuss that yeah? What game forces fast travel on you? Every game out there with fast travel you're able to slow travel too. (It's just almost nobody generally chooses this, because why would they?)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
MMO should (and they have) adopt the same design as open world single player games. First time you have to explore. Once you reach a landmark, you can fast travel to it from then on.
And clearly that is optional. If you want to just walk around in Fallout 4, or AC Syndicate, or Far Cry 3 ... you still CAN.
The fact that pretty much all AAA games have this feature tell you that no one wants to walk around endlessly, whether it is in a MMO or not.
In WoW there were stones outside dungeons for summoning team members and even prior to that there were spells for summoning team members. That game has always been easy on players and it only got more so with time. Ignoring all that, you can go from the top of one of the main continents to the bottom in just under 11 minutes. Unless you're engaging in flight patterns for an extra ten minutes before wherever you're going, it's physically impossible for your travel to take that much time between any location within a continent. The only reason a boat ride would be long in either game is by missing the schedule and having to wait on the boat to cycle.
Also like noted, "mandatory slow travel" still has a pretty common place even in high action games. You can't portal everywhere in LoL, and you still spend a majority of time running up and down lanes. Units still have a lot of travel time in RTS games with a majority of the game actually being non-combat. Even in Diablo 3, a good chunk of time in the adventure mode is just running to the objectives.
Hence too why apparently yours and axe's argument has shifted away from "travel is not interesting gameplay" to "Travel (nearly) devoid of gameplay."
You see those goalposts shifting there? When the original argument put forth was that travel is counter to gameplay, and that got proven false, the fallback to complain about "empty travel" is laughable at best. You and axe went from making a flawed argument of game mechanics to stating the stupidly obvious.
Which is great, because what you guys are saying now is basically footnotes of what I responded to Axe with originally.
Arguing that "empty gameplay is boring" is a no-shit argument that no one has disagreed with. What people disagreed with was the sentiment that travel and time were unnecessary components of a game world. My address to that point has so far only been correcting that failure in reasoning.
So do you actually agree with Axe's original claim that travel has no value in gaming, which is an objectively false argument? Or, do you agree with the claims being made now which is what I had corrected him with a while ago?
"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
2) Yes, there were stones ... but you have to wait for at least ONE member of the group to fly there before the stone can be used. And again, even 1 min of that wait is too long.
3) I never argue that time and some walking (as part of combat gameplay) is not a part of gameplay. I am specifically calling out "slow travel". It is disingenuous to equate waiting for a boat to figuring out how to get into position to stealth kill a guard. [mod edit]
So again ... are you for or against 20 min boat schedules that requires a combination of waiting on the dock, and waiting on the boat? Or taking away fast travel in games like Fallout 4 (so that you have to backtrack lots of miles)?
What seems to not be getting through is the point that there are lots of things that can be done where travel is an integral component to provide a deeper 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
What is getting through is that you call every movement "travel" .. which is silly.
In fact, let's use examples ... are you in favor of 20 min boat rides? 10 min of walking to the same place again and again? and get rid of fast travel like those in Fallout 4?
Those design concepts (which can be called slow travel) are obsolete, and few devs would force them on players. Wouldn't you agree?
Same thing happens elsewhere, for that matter. And it's been that way for years.
Once upon a time....
That's why my commentary is pointing out travel and time (note both of those things, as those were both the subject of the thread alongside questions of what mechanics makes travel interesting) are intrinsic components of gameplay.
You are now a random variable that has walked into that conversation and is attempting to hijacking it in an utterly useless direction by arguing one of the most meaningless points you could present.
No shit doing nothing for a long time is going to be boring. No one ever disagreed with that and your persistence in trolling the thread with such stupid arguments does nothing to further any conversations.
What people have been arguing for the longest damn time now is that extended travel has game value in the other aspects that can be attached to it to create more depth. The caravaning, raids, territory control, resource capture and scarcity, commerce between locations, etc, are all features that require time and travel to be emulated in some manner at least in order to function. Even in games where you're not micromanaging units and focusing on the high-concept of the economy like Capitalism 2 you have much ado about control of grid space and the time actions take to complete which not only affects pacing but how you plan events long-term.
Hell take one of the first responses to Axe.
"...it's a fine balance between allowing players to jump from action to action and losing a sense of flow for your character in the world. While there's definitely a place for games that focus on the action, the question is whether there's a place for games that focus on the world and your place in it, without becoming too tedious and impractical on the one end and too narrow in scope and freedom on the other."
That's from page one, and it took a week of bickering with him to get him to concede that such is the case.
Or this statement (also from page one).
"The right answer is to make travel into interesting game play. "
This was a counterargument to the statement posed by axe that travel is not good gameplay.
[mod edit]
"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 state of the conversation is basically:
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Even though most of the time spent in the Hobbit and LotR films are these sorts of roleplaying scenes without combat. Tell me. If Peter Jackson was a good film director for skipping to "the interesting bits," why did these interesting bits include the intrigue at Gondor palace? Or the pub at the Shire? Or long, thoughtful dialogues with Frodo and Sam? Or the dwarves at Bilbo's cottage? Why didn't he just cut out all that stuff and get to orc bashing and dragon slaying?
If you were a film director, Axehilt, I fear that it would hurt to sit through 90 minutes of it. I'd imagine there would just be explosions after explosions, car crashes after car crashes, fight scene on top of fight scene. After all, given that your philosophy is to get people into combat ASAP, with as little time as possible between combats, those action scenes in the films are the "interesting bits" that make for a good narrative, no?
But thank God films aren't built this way. We will find, in an average action film, perhaps less than a quarter of the total time is an actual action scene. The rest of the time is slow drama, character drama, comic relief and romance. What's the point of all that stuff if it has nothing to do with the central reason people see an action film?
There's a reason you need all that stuff in there. The human attention span is very pattern-oriented. Places where you want high tension won't seem all that high unless preceded by a period of low tension and succeeded by a period of low tension. And since combat is, by definition, an activity that ought to be interpreted as high tension affair, the combat will just feel boring if there's no periods of low tension.
That's the big problem in MMOs from a narrative standpoint these days. Unlike action-adventure titles, MMOs cannot do cutscenes well. MMOs used to build downtime into their systems through things like travel and roleplay. But in an attempt to satisfy the FPS and action-oriented crowd, they cut out nearly every source of downtime and, with it, opportunities for creative character play. And so, while they get you to the combat quicker, the combat doesn't feel very special. There's just no referent to normalcy to make the combat feel like a special thing.
Even though an action film might have 100' explosions and epic CGI battles, those impressive special effects start to lose their epic quality when it is just series after series of them. Fight scenes might be brutal, but they won't seem brutal if the film is punch after punch, without any return to normalcy to make the fights seem brutal.
Without some oscillation between high tension and low tension, the highs just don't feel very high. It just feels boring. It's probably why churn is higher today on games and its why, despite having more action and dazzling graphics than ever, people are just getting tired of the fast action MMO format.
The main problem I have with this "skip to the interesting bits" analogy is because there are no interesting bits to MMO developers but combat encounters. But when we look at other media--heck, even other video games--there's a whole lot of memorable scenes and interesting bits that have nothing to do with combat. Imagine playing Mass Effect or Metal Gear Solid without the cutscenes and non-combat narrative scenes...it wouldn't be nearly as memorable.
__________________________
"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
3-hour plane flights: I know Flight sim addicts, who used to fly intercontinental simulated flights, 6-8 hours, real-time. And guess what, they're happy if "nothing noteworthy happens during the flight" as you wrote.
That's the whole point, no such thing as "audience" as a well-defined group. You can try to target a selected group of people from the audience, based on a list of criteria, but as a whole, there are many different "tastes" in the audience. As @Beatnik59 wrote
True, there's an avid fan group of exploitation, but that's only a marginal group, and definitely not the majority. That's the point, everyone has their own idea about "interesting bits". As general, a good narrative is NOT about "skips to the interesting bits". It can be, if that's your goal as a director / writer / game designer, for reaching your target audience who are into that. But it definitely is NOT an overall narrative rule.
What I'm trying to point out with my lame english, no such thing as "wasting the audiences time". There's bad design, there's failed audience targeting, but every kinda solution has its own audience, since audience is not a homogeneous mass.
Just check the latest, golden statue -covered flick "Leo crawls in snow for Oscar". By your terms that should've been a 30 minutes short film
It needs to discuss, because it is a noticeable trend in games, smaller and smaller worlds, or skipping the world entirely and just porting from action to action. Which is fine, if it's an action game... but for an RPG, world and travelling is an important aspect - at least imo, but I'm a roleplayer / adventurer, and not a diablo-clone lover combat addict
"almost nobody generally chooses this" there's still quite a crowd (just check in LotRO for example), but true, the numbers and even moreso the ratio within the gaming community is diminishing slowly. (aging out, whilst population is expanded by the iWant generation, small and empty zones in new games because majority wants quick action and devs are focusing onto their money, etc.)
But this would lead to a whole new off-topic discussion about art versus profit, and I hate that topic...
So let's just stop here, and summarise the above with:
nope, good narrative is not about jumping from interesting* bits to interesting bits.
* : whatever stuff may be interesting to the targeted audience.
In fact I mean it even broader than it sounds, since the horror movie examples I used earlier in the thread have deliberately slow segments whose purpose is to build anticipation in order to achieve a satisfying scare moment. Those slow segments aren't "interesting", but they serve a clear purpose which is beneficial to the entertainment and isn't something that can be accomplished any other way.
With your LOTR examples, each scene serves a purpose. (Or if any of them don't, then they legitimately are poor decisions. Peter Jackson isn't necessarily the perfect director, after all.) The purpose is typically plot advancement or character development.
So your post is largely just a waste, jumping to a false conclusion.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I believe it's because of attempting to please everyone. For instance some people might want a more classic story with a strong male character and a pretty romantic/funny girl as a love interest. A gay person would want a different type of romance. Others might want a strong female character story. If you pick just one of these you can't appeal to a large audience.
Thus we have many things taken out of the games in order to try to find a common ground and hit the big numbers. This has the side effect in many cases of making games that are a bit less interesting for everyone, but is interesting enough to draw a large audience to play for small amounts of time.
Movies/shows DO skip to the interesting bits.
Name a single successful narrative-based movie that portrays 10+ minutes of uneventful travel. You can't. Any movie stupid enough to do that wouldn't be successful. Anything you tried to name would involve some flavor of action, plot development, or character development which would be the actual purpose for the scene.
So essentially you've bought into Beatnik's false assumption. Try discussing the actual points being made instead of the false straw man argument he invents.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Well there's an important distinction to which things get gutted.
Any element of a game must justify itself by either gameplay or exhibition. Those that don't deserve to be cut.
In the vast majority of games, travel provides insufficient gameplay or exhibition. It involves few decisions (bad gameplay) which are shallow (bad gameplay), and often fails to provide great visuals (bad exhibition) and even if it does those visuals are only interesting the first few times and not subsequent times (bad exhibition.)
Whereas other things which are gutted aren't as well-justified. Story-related decisions can provide excellent gameplay and exhibition (a'la Mass Effect), but these decisions are somewhat rare in MMORPGs.
In the former case, features are gutted because they're legitimately bad ideas (because they're bad entertainment.) In the latter, they're gutted to target a different demographic.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Basically, you have to agree with me, and call me names just because that is the only way not to lose face?
And what is wrong with "interesting bits" being combat? There are lots of successful games with nothing but combat ... Diablo, LoL, World of Tanks, ... a lot don't even pretend to have a story.
And again, you don't need slow travel in games. If you want story & character development, just jump to a cutscene. Or jump to a non-combat puzzle. Or jump to a dialogue mini-game. There is no point walking 10 min to any of those things.
Then you switch back to general speak with "Movies/shows DO skip to the interesting bits." which is simply not true, even if we cite "interesting" in a much broader sense than you use it, since everyone has different views of interesting. I could list truckloads of experimental, art, modern, student, etc. movies to support that statement.
Then you switch back again to the profits "Any movie stupid enough to do that wouldn't be successful." Everyone defines "success" differently, and also not everyone's chasing any success in the first place... Also, "name a movie with 10+minutes of uneventful travel", as I've tried to shed some light on it in the previous post, no such thing as uneventful. What's uneventful for you, may be valuable and interesting to others.
But for not avoiding your request, here's one: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111341/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Great movie, but you'd bore yourself to death on it most likely (and not only because of the lenght). Still, it's a successful one - success even by your terms with money and fame and critical success.
And nope, none of your last sentence's parts are valid for a bunch of scenes in there (action, character development or plot).
I'd suggest let's just finish this off-topic detour, and go back to OP's original idea of narrative within a multiplayer environment
(and yep, I agree that the masses want fast action. It will be even worse as time goes forward, based on how society (d)evolves. But that has nothing to do with the whole medium of book / movie / game. If something doesn't taste for the masses, so what? That still can be valid, viable, and in a lot of cases even more valuable, than the regular, fit-to-masses merchandising "products".
And to be honest, and totally off-topic, this "the majority wants <insert anything here>" statement is one of the most harmful ideas of mankind. Read some Brave New World from Huxley)
We say: "Slow travel is boring and we want to change that and make it more interesting."
You say: "Slow travel is boring, that doesn't mean it has to be, but we're just removing it."
We say: "But we want it, and we want it to be interesting game play."
You say: "Tough shit. We're removing it and that's all you're going to get. And we're here on forums to make sure these conversations don't go anywhere."
You industry people suck melons.
Once upon a time....
Again, it is clear to everyone that "active" is relative to different games and people. Twitch combat is "active", but so is a thought provoking puzzle. Many games balance (or try to balance) multiple elements into a cohesive experience, and each element will have its own natural pace of "activity". Often it is how these different elements are used in conjunction with each other that makes a game fun, even if an element on its own is simply an obstacle.
By gating unit abilities and upgrades behind research timers, and limiting those by resource costs and resource gathering times, RTS games foster a depth of strategy that makes them enjoyable. These games are still much faster than turn-based strategy games, but not necessarily more fun (it's subjective, after all).
My point is, any element taken on its own, out of its context in a broader game design, becomes simply meaningless. The question is how these elements can be used in the context of other elements to create a compelling sense of world in MMORPGs?
For example, @Axehilt, say that terrain becomes a factor in travel, so that some characters (those not weighed down by heavy armor, or with special skills and/or equipment) can climb a cliff wall while others cannot. Say there is a castle (fort, whatever) surrounded by a cliff with only one side facing a plateau. For your sake, Axe, the game designers put fast travel nodes in game. By putting one node close to the castle, but at the bottom of the cliff, while placing another node on the plateau but substantially farther off, the game designers can create a compelling decision. Do we, the players rushing to sack or save the castle, forgo our heavy defenses to scale the cliff wall and sneak in quickly, or do we traverse a greater distance across the plateau but come with our full force and armor? Say there's some time element involved, or even that the longer we take to arrive the more the castle shores up its defenses.
Is being forced to travel a greater distance if you can't climb an inconvenience? Sure. Is that part, the part where you have to trek from the node all the way to the castle, on its own, compelling gameplay? Are you doing anything along the way other than travel? No. But without it, without a significant distance that makes this decision to climb or trek a meaningful and strategic one, the actual fun of this particular game element is lost. Why have skills or tools that let you climb when you can just as easily run? I bring this up, particularly, because it does not preclude the use of fast travel nodes. It's just that no matter how you travel, the basis of any decision making is a cost-benefit analysis, and eliminating costs because they are not as fun as benefits eliminates the need for decision making.
a) we can add the interesting gameplay without the boring slow travel part, and
b) slow travel is still there, don't teleport and walk, you choice!
If we are going to have fast travel then why not just has a nice focused and linear experience? One devoid of needing to click on NPCs, accept quests, and walk around. One where a story just unfolds naturally as you play the game.
An open world and traveling should serve a purpose of some sort. It may be trying to convey how dangerous the world is going from point a to point b or how large the world is.
I actually do use fast travel in games because I'm looking for the path of least resistance, but I also feel that the experience of exploration is cheapened a lot.
It's a bit annoying when people say the option is there to turn something off. One possible point of a game is to challenge people. Finding the path of least resistance should be something you have to find. It shouldn't be the default option in all games IMO. Especially open world games.
Because you're still leaving travel as it has been when actually traveling.
And turning "slow travel" into random room encounters is one of the crappiest idea's I've ever heard of for a game with a world.
Once upon a time....