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Travel systems - which do you like the best?
Coltaine00
Member Posts: 52
So I've had a fair amount of experience playing MMORPGs and had quite a bit of experience with the travel systems. Some of them are down right terrible, while others seem to enhance your playing experience.
Best: UO - recall rune system. You could mark 'runes' almost any spot in the game and recall to it at any time (with the exception of dungeons year later). This system developed over time from having runes which you could lose when you die, to blessed runebooks which stayed with you. It allowed you to travel instantly to help friends and meet up with other groups of players for PvP fights and raids.
Pretty Cool: Shadowbane - It had a portal system which allowed certain classes to "summon" you to a certain location (with cooldowns), but a large portion of the travel was actually walking / running from point to point, through a lot of open PvP warzones.
Downright horrid: SWTOR / WoW - Rail to Rail on safe nodes. I remember 20 minute long griffin rides in WoW which you couldn't do a single thing except go AFK. One of the biggest reasons that I left the game as I really didn't appreciate the game "extending" your game artificially.
So which do you think are the best?
Comments
I like the bus system. Like the old EQ ships, SWG shuttles and WoW blimps. Gives players time to talk to each other, trade, duel, whatever they want. So instead of spending minutes on a mount or summon a portal by yourself you spend that time interacting with other players and then once it arrives you quickly port to where ever your going.
I hate flightpaths they deattach you from the rest of the world and help to create the solo MMO feel. I also hate instance travel it makes the world feel smaller then it is and also adds the to solo mmo feel as you don't see other players questing as much when you just port back and forth willy nilly bewteen quest areas and npcs towns. (well... town scrolls anrt that bad, but perfer mounts with mostly clear roads/paths.)
I will not play a game with a cash shop ever again. A dev job should be to make the game better not make me pay so it sucks less.
I didn't have a problem with WoW that much..Yeah there were times you just went....."ENOUGH ALREADY!"
making the mistake of flying from Booty Bay to Inron Forge use snack time.
But there are other games that are even worse.
But it wasn't all bad. instant ports kinda break the immersion of the game.
+1. Absolutely. I think a lot of times people can't see the forest for the trees. Sometimes the game needs things like this to help take things down a notch, so it is not always go go go go quest quest quest quest.... I think the bus systems add a lot that you don't really appreciate at the time. Now, I also agree with the OP that the solo 20 min taxi rides were ridiculous. But at the same time, I remember when my wow addiction was pretty heavy and everytime I needed to use a gryphon my bladder cheered.
City of heroes travel powers.
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Personally, I like the system in Mortal Online, which is no fast travel anywhere. If I want to travel somewhere, I have to get there myself. To me, it's one of the things that makes the game so immersive.
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Mortal Online's horseback riding.
The feel of it is amazing, as you bob and weave along with the horse's motion. Plus, the horse is set to a given running speed, allowing you to go straight without inputs, and therefore soak up the sights, or be more focused in mounted combat itself. Best iteration of mounted travel, ever... imo.
I do miss the SWG/FFXI "bus" system as well, but perhaps in a masochistic way. Games were much more social when you were forced to wait along with strangers for 5-10 minutes for a ship to show up. There a a few that still do oit, but the days of chatting it up while waiting is dead. People will put you on ignore if you try and talk to them at a bus stop these days... a product of being spoiled by the loss of such systems in the first place.
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Diablo 2 or Guild Wars. Once I've made the trip, don't force me to waste time again.
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I prefer open-world with "vehicle" traveling. "Instant" traveling destroys game immersion. Once you can instantly travel, the world becomes infinitely smaller.
"Fast" or "Instant Travel" is a product of the "I want it now" mindset that has grown out of the "WoW" mentality.
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I'm afraid there is no going back. The "modern" systems are convenient, I have to admit - instant travel is nice and all, and even flightpaths where I don't need any interaction and just need to wait until I arrive at Point B are spoiling.
But I am nostaligic for the old "Get there yourself" methods - I still remember the trips from Freeport to Qeynos at L10... timing it so you avoided Kithicor at night, running from griffons, making sure RV and HHK guards didn't see me sneaking about. Not to mention standing around waiting on boats.
It was frustrating, and infuriating at times. But it forced you to stay in an area longer, and microcommunities to pop up. I remember a couple of druids that would come around Rathe Mtns to buy fine steel, and to trade out copper/silver/gold for plat (so we could keep farming those hill giants - it's hard to kite when your weighted down). I remember sitting on the edge of the zone in OT, with probably 2 dozen other groups also sitting in their various spots, and we were there grinding it out, chatting in /OOC, and generally having a good time for a good several weeks - same thing Velks Lab, or in Great Divide, or SolB, or LGuk, or name any other zone where it was such a royal PITA to get there, but the rewards (loot & XP) were so worthwhile that you just went there and hung out there for days at a time.
That doesn't exist anymore. In SWTOR, there are times when I spend less than 2 hours on a planet, never to return, and I bounce between everyplace at, well, lightspeed. It makes it really hard to find any sense of community. That being said, if I had to make the 3-hour trek between Freeport and Qeynos in a new game, I'd probably be pulling my hair out crying about how dumb it is that I can't just get a taxi.
I prefer the travel powers granted in the superhero MMO's, myself. Leaping a hundred feet into the air and bounding from building to building is just awesome. Or travelling at supersonic speed down the street, zooming past everything before it can even react to your presence. Good times.
Barring that, flying mounts, or any sort of flying transportation I can control.
Mount travel, but not pocket ponies. If you ride your horse to an area, get off and leave it there, walk back to town, you've lost your horse. Maybe not so far as horse theiving, that could just open up griefing. Horse rentals would be okay with me. Ride it where you're going and it walks home.
Non combat run speed (sprinting) for the athletic classes with low encumberance
As far as public transportation, WoW blimp and ships are something I like. Windriders are probably my least favorite transport.
I like mage portals and summons. In fact, I'd rather see player mages providing transportation instead of NPCs, maybe.
If there's not a reason why travel needs to be hard, then just give me Guild Wars map travel and be done with it. If there is a reason why travel needs to be hard, then you do something appropriate to the game.
My ideal travel system has a couple of different levels based on what you are carrying.
Exploring the world, you have various speeds of travel that grow faster; weather and season may restrict travel options. Resources nodes, camps, lairs and other temporary spawns exist that can only be discovered while exploring.
Quest hubs: once discovered and unlocked, you can teleport between them (however, there are restrictions on what you can have in your backpack as you teleport).
Gathering bulk resources, you cannot teleport around the world with a backpack full of wood or iron - harvesting gathers to a local hub (wagon, ship, encampment) then have to send bulk resources through the world to get it to market/mills. You don't have to personally escort your caravan/ship/etc, but it takes actual time for it to cross the world and is vulnerable to random encounters while in transit.
Artifacts: cannot be teleported. If you find one, you have to decide whether to carry it personally to safety through the world or whether to map its location and return for it later.
I'll trade the feeling of world becoming smaller (which is completely irrelevant to me as I never get that feeling knowing that I can simply chose to explore anywhere thoroughly if I feel like it) for instantly coming back to where I left off and continuing my journey to unexplorable lands or joining a nearby DE anyday.
In the long-run, coming back to interesting parts in the shortest time possible is all that matters for me and that is exactly how the ArenaNet devs want you to think about waypoints and teleportation portals.
Looking forward to EQL and EQN.
I really like "Call to Group" or instant travel that puts you with the raid so that waiting is minimized.
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Waypoints and telportation portals are simply lazy. No other way to say it. If ArenaNet truly wanted to encourage exploration, do away with those things altogether, and add a faster form of land travel like mounts. For a developer that claims to be innovative, they took the path of least resistance in terms of travel systems. Big immersion-breaker.
Mounts would probably interfere with sidekicking by putting lower levels in a situation where they can't keep up with the higher levels during questing. It would also present issues such as how they will dismount players by NPCs or griefers blocking intractable objects.
Personally, I think a huge immersion breaker is when every character has a mount. When I play MMOs with mounts it always feels like the cavalry is in town. It also promotes silly things like dismounting and remounting for picking up every herb.
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I also loved the UO travel system. Some say it makes the world smaller, but I feel it makes it seem larger. No matter what I wanted to do, it was a simple recall away. If I had to take 2 hours to travel like in EQ, then my time was spent traveling, not playing.
Granted I did spend a lot of time just running around, unlocked full loot houses made it worth the time hehe. But seriously, some times I felt like exploring, other times I felt like killing air elementals, and others I was looking for a good PvP battle. With the recall system I could do what I wanted, when I wanted. You could truely do something in 20 mins, or spend hours depending on what you wanted.
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Any kind of mounts--horses, bikes, tanks, space ships, speeders, tigers. Only not a instant teleports because that is for soulless games
I like to lean towards faster travel, which supports having more players on a massive scale. Slow travel tends to be on the roleplaying side of things, because realism clashes with convenience much of the time. MMO > RP when it comes to MMORPGs for me.
To me that makes the game boring and un-needlessly anti-immersive. Immersive is somewhere I want to be not dred being. and walking for 15-30 mins to play a game is as immersive breaking as a game can be.
I prefer the Asherons Call style. Every character had the option to learn a skill (AC was a skill based game not a class based which I enjoy the best) called Item Magic. In the Item Magic school you had several different modes of fast travel.
You could Tie to a portal, almost every city and every dungeon had a portal (non-instanced) and then cast a spell to fast travel to up too 2 portal ties.
You could bind to a lifestone (rez spot) or Tie to a (spell ability) So you could cast a spell to return to a Lifestone or type /lifestone and return to a lifestone. SO in essence you had 2 lifestones that you could fast travel too.
You could fast travel to the subway (dungeon with portals to every city on the map and could be at any spot on the map within 5 mins or less.
And lastly you could complete very difficult and time consuming quests where some had as a reward a spell to fast travel to that specific area or dungeon freeing up LS and Portal ties for more predestrian uses.
Love this system the best and made it fast to get to where the action was or travel to far off corners of the maps to explore. The thing I love MOST about Asherons Call is that it took an entirely different approach for stringing a person along to continue to pay a sub. Unlike games like EQ, WoW or any other themepark the carrot is always the gear and the destination was the end. Instead in AC the journey was long, like ive been playing for 12 years and havnt maxxed a character out yet. The journey was fullfilling and rewarding and did not have artificial time sinks in place, instead the time sink was the entire game taking a long time to advance.
In games like WoW you are artificially slowed or hindred by such things as travel, grinding for gear, grinding rep, or any myriad of other anti-fun things to slow the player down to keep them subscribed. In AC you were if you wanted too, constantly playing for fun with NO artificial time sinks to slow you down instead the game was naturally long in completing but enjoyable because it was action packed. If another developer was to ever take a risk and copy Asheron Call's core principle I feel that company would strike gold.
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I prefer immersive forms of travel, like in WoW, to instant teleports.
I dont think anyone has done it as well as EQ1.
You could run from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world with enough time and patience by using boats to get from continent to continent. They didn't have mounts until Shadows of Luclin expansion as far as I can remember. But Druids, Shamans, and Bards all had buffs that could increase your run speed drastically with bards being the most ridiculous literally allowing you to go hyperspeed.
You could play a druid or Wizard and use your ports to shorten those travel times. But it wasnt always instant because of the limited locations those ports spells allowed.
You could pay a Wizard or Druid to port you closer to where you wanted to go if you were a different class. This actually added an interesting bit of depth to the game by allowing players to create transportation businesses.
This system worked great for years until the introduction of Planes of Power when they added the Plane of Knowledge and the Portals to all the major connector zones. But I dont agree that this was the downfall of the game due to the fact that it is still probably the single hardest game to progress in industry wide. And because of this has held on to a decent base of players somewhere in the 100k - 200k range that want to play something that takes a real investment of time, and in some cases blood, sweat, and tears..
Map travel to places I've already explored.
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I stopped playing WoW a while ago, but I was really excited to see that they finally added flying mount access to the entire game with Cataclysm.
I find the Hyperspace travel a fun sort of diversion in SWTOR, even though Speeder travel is painfully slow once you actually land on the planet. Every major hub should have the potential to be a Space Port in my opinion, but you should have to unlock that area first by reaching it safely, that way you aren't having to fly to the starter point every time you want to re-explore the planet.
What I really miss are the Pirate attacks and random elite monsters that people would fish up on FFXI Airships. You had your choice of staying safely below deck, or joining in the battle topside.
Then there is my all-time favorite way of traveling; taming your own mount and riding practically any creature in UO with the correct level of skill and maintenance.