Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
The Death of Immersion: Travel and the Rabble.
Dracheir
Member UncommonPosts: 62
I feel like the major allure for MMORPGs was originally the depth. That is why many MMO gamers prefer MMOs. They want a deeper, more engaging, long-term place to play. This feel of immersion has slowly dwindled away from games. Whether subconsciously or consciously I believe that this is a major reason for games feeling stale or like they are missing something we've previously experienced in classic titles.
We're always longing to relive that old experience in a long lost game, whether it be Ultima Online, EverQuest or something in that timeframe. We search and search for that depth and imagination absorbing fantasy world we once knew. The first act of removing immersion, in my opinion, lies in travel methods. Previously, we used to have to travel long distanced across vast worlds through use of a mount, sometimes by foot, or maybe finding some sort of wagon-driver or griffon to take from post to post. The necessity to travel long distances added to the immersion of a game whether we liked it or not.
Further, we seem to be subjected to toxic communities in the new standard that is "global" or "server-wide" chat channels. These channels cause toxic communities to develop and trolls to flourish. While it's easy to say, " just turn it off, " it generally is the first line of help for many players. Additionally, it seems to turn the whole server into one major guild and robs us of the necessity to help our guildmates in some capacity. While not entirely demolishing the function of a guild it does hinder it. Moreover, it's biggest concern - to me, is the way it removes immersion from the game. I feel like it brings too many people together at once, making a game feel like it's a glorified chat room, instead of a fantasy immersion experience. Many of us will try to avoid it but there are quite a few of us that end up trapped into some worldly discussion about Chuck Norris or Politics that defeats the whole purpose of the escapism we're seeking.
Let me know what you think about immersion in todays MMOs. I feel like I've hit the nail on the head on what seems to be "lacking" or "missing" from games these days. It's that "thing" we couldn't ever put our finger on but always felt like something was amiss.
Comments
Some people do just want a glorified chat room with an avatar. Some people want an immersive roleplay experience such that they organize cliques to do it. Some people want a numbers game and instead of chat they read parses and spreadsheets. Some people don't care, just want to kill things, or build things, or heal people, or melt face, or ....
I probably want a more immersive experience via talented writing, but I don't imagine my immersive experience is spoiled by chat channels, on or off, and I'm not entirely sure having to escort "fred the powerleveled barbarian" to localities each time because they're in disparate regions to which Fred's never ventured, and the group was impatient 5 minutes ago, waiting at the door, is my idea of a good time.
Maybe in general you're right and these things will make people snap more to attention. I have no clue anymore, apparently, what should make a good game to many people.
Travel.... I know people are going to say that it is immersive. Maybe for them it is, but for me it is boring. When I have only a hour or 2 to play I do not want to spend half of that time trying to get from one place to another. Most (not all) MMOs that are out now you can choose how you want to travel. Want to run, then run, need to get there faster then (fly, teleport, whatever).
So to me travel is not an immersion breaker, there are plenty of other things that area and chat channels are one of them. I turn them off when I can. When I am in a guild I only monitor that channel and have the others off. If I need a group and can't get it from the guild then I will jump over to the other channels but that is about it.
Travel isn't immersive.
If travel was exciting/fun/whatever America would be the thinnest country in the world as we took up fun and exciting hobbies like cross country running/skiing, bicycling, and similar.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
This is about video games not IRL.
Still traveling isn't fun.
All those outstanding memories you're having with traveling aren't about the travel. It's about the content you were "shoved into" while traveling. The choke point where you narrowly escaped PvPers as a newbie, and later were one yourself. The pass where you ended up forming a fast PUG to get through, with people who were just as trapped 'before it' as you were without a group. The points where you needed to form "sub-optimal" groups with other classes that were useless in one area to get to the next.
For every Washington DC you visited and enjoyed, you're forgetting the 5 empty Texas'es that had to go through. Since you aren't going to remember something as boring as traveling through Texas, you remember the good area's/travels instead.
___________
Lets be perfectly honest MMO devs are treating their games more like "games" which means they need to control their pacing. With travel there is a far larger variation of how different people will be in/use an area. Which means developers lose control of their ability to pace the game.
So when it comes to how developers are going to deliver and pace their content, the last thing they're going to choose is probably going to be travel. Also all those good things your remembered about traveling are also far easier to deliver through other ways to give players content.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
I think "immersion" in todays MMO is not as important as convenience, and good gameplay elements. Heck, look at the popular online games (D3, MOBAs, hearthstones ...) where there is no world, no travel, and people can jump into the gameplay right away. It says fun is important ... feeling like a world, not so much. Otherwise, people won't be using the open world in WOW mainly as a lobby.
These things are not "missing". These things are eliminated to make better games. I don't know about you ... but I don't want long travel .. because walking most of the time is boring. If i want danger, pop into a dungeon is the best way to go.
Hate to break it to you, but way back in the day, the frist EQ was often called 'a 3d chat room with monsters', so not much changed in that regard.
What really changed is the community, and what they want and how. In the past it was a small group on geeks, and they were playing niche games designed by geeks for geeks.
Now everyone and their dog plays WoW, or CoD or some other online game, bringing the overall quality of the community down... a lot. Ten year olds, screeming into the built in VO what they'll do/did to your mom was not the norm in the old days.
Games also changed to accommodate for the new crowd, mostly for the worse I'm afraid.
Anyway, the curent games and the people that play them are just as much a product of their time, as the old ones were. As they say, 'times they are a changin' hymm... say isn't that a song?
People dislike travel because of bad game design, nothing more. If you have more randomised mob spawning, roaming mobs types and less specific quest hubs travelling could be improved massively. People want fast travel for the instant action hit, well that is NOT what an MMORPG used to be, its what it has become after years of devs pandering to whiney kids. At that time the ability to have more involved AI and mob scripting was more resource intensive compared to these days. There is no reason for zoning like WoW, or indeed scaling content just more thought process when it comes to how you deal with spawning and pathing. There is no reason every part of the world cannot have content for every level of player mixing low difficulty mobs such as a dog or a goat with less common ogres or dragons. This would mean higher level players with mounts can hunt the harder mobs with their mount and the low level players have a real sense of adventure and risk. Grouping would be encouraged by simple design choices, however developers CHOOSE to take the simple route. This also encourages pvp as players are in every area of the world, not just camping a flight path, city gate or afk waiting for some unrealistc battleground/arena to pop.
In terms of chat, thats a personal thing, just like mail systems that allow items to be posted. You can go anywhere on the scale of whats possible and someone wont be happy.
One mans perfection is another mans hell.... sadly we now have cookie cutter game design thats is only good if you are mr average
A modern EQ would have more players now than it had when the original was at its peak, however if it cant be done in a very profitable way it will never happen. I know plenty of people that would pay $25 a month for a updated EQ or UO, sadly its a pipe dream as investors aim for millions of players that they can nickle and dime through cash-shops.
I've thought about this before: nestle a safe spot (town?) in an area reachable only by a mandatory 2-3 hour "wilderness dungeon crawl" and make such a place a springboard for other group content. I think too many people would cry foul, because you know, nowadays multiplayer games fail unless they can be "won" in single-player mode. People just do not like forced grouping, and especially if they're forced to group to reach content for which they group, well, you might as well be trying to divide by 0.
They wouldn't cry foul. Because the people who were to find it would not have anyone around to group with to see the content. There would be no guides written for the area, meaning no one would go to it for the content. So it'd be a quiet little no where and a waste of developer resources, since it wouldn't really exist anyways.
There has been one game where I enjoyed the travel though. WurmOnline. Each map is 256 KM squared and is the only MMO that I've really managed to get lost in(for hours at a time). But then again a survival crafting game where travel makes sense is very different when compared to a world of everclone game.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
This is kind of a misconception I feel. Many players were college kids, many were moms, many were just random people from all walks of life. The media kind of portrayed MMO players as geeks, but the reality I experienced in guilds was very different.
I'd argue newer MMO have more geeks playing them than before. I don't really find many of my friends playing recent MMO, since recent MMO are far more E-Sport oriented than before.
You could get into a game like EQ as an adult, it was a mature game with a good behaving community. That's a far cry from the confrontational E-sports MMO we have now, which does cater to geeks. Especially the PVP games, which tend to incorporate tournaments, rankings, and many things that would be a turnoff to the PVE players of EQ, and to non-geeks who just want to have fun.
There are people who don't mind longer travel, they tend to be the EQ / Vanguard audience that isn't into instant gratification and isn't in any rush. Slow leveling and longer travel is something many current MMO players can't stand, it has to happen now or they lose interest.
Anything that requires any effort or is difficult to do, is immediately shouted down by most players.
It isn't about the travel. Travel itself does not contribute to immersion, challenge, grouping or anything else.
It's about what happens while your travelling. Are there interesting mobs/sights? yes travel can be interesting. No. Travel is boring.
What's the purpose of travel? Just to get from A to B? long travel is a pain then. To explore? Long travel can be very interesting.
In most games unfortunately travel is just get from A to B with nothing else and virtually no interesting mobs/sights to see. In that case get rid of long travel.
People do not travel in the US during holidays? Weird country.
No insta travel would only add stuff to the game IF its done properly. Its not possible to have a working sandbox economy without open world pvp, local banking and regional resources as well. Then you would have merchants transporting goods between cities for a profit, and bandits on the roads trying to rob them, and before you say "oh theyre just sheep going to the slaughter", remember you can use less travelled trade routes or simply hire some ppl to help you (guildmates too).
If you remove insta travel on a themepark its just gonna be pointless and a hassle instead of a feature.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
Agree.
Also it seems the OP wasn't playing EQ in the early days before POP when you needed a wizard or druid to get around the world. Anyone who says that EQ old system didn't make for a better player based didn't play the same game as me. Nothing wrong with long travel times.
Going through a zone that has mobs that can one shot you adds that bit of danger that is missing in mmo's today. Games like ESO and GW2 are prime example of pathetic mmo's of today.
The view on travel is very idealized. Even if something could happen the chances of something interesting happening is very low; so by and large, travel feels like a commute. It is a chore and an inconvenience most of the time. That is the reality.
Fast travel is not an obstacle for immersion. You're just looking for excuses if you think so.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
It is your opinion. What many MMO players do not enjoy though! Is when people join games where there is slow travel and then whine whine whine on the official forums because they have to spend 5 minutes walking somewhere!
Stick to WoW!
Ok, maybe 'geek' wasn't the right word to use, but what I mean is that it took a specific type of person to be interested in MMORPG back in the day in the first place. We were still using dial up, and that wasn't cheap, not to mention information wasnt' as readily avaiable like it is right now, so simply very many people didn't even know about those games. So on and so forth. I don't feel like giving a history lesson right now, but I was there, I know how it looked like. It was most definitely a niche.
Now it's just about anybody, really.
P.S Who said a house wife can't be a geek?
I don't whine on the forums about long travel times nor do I play WoW.
You're in a minority. Get used to it already. Vote with your wallet.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Travel is an aspect of the virtual role playing world, and as i said earlier if you look at it in isolation as with most things then you don't see its value within a bigger system. This is an old old debate done to death, it boils down to those who enjoy travelling in the virtual world to get somewhere and those who don't get it. At one end of the spectrum you have slow travel, on the other you have hubs and lobbies.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
And just like in the real world if the only purpose is to get from A to B and/or there is very little chance of something interesting happening then we choose the fastest option available most times.
Frankly, the decline of travel time coincides with the decline of places to travel to. Reinstating the long travel times of old will do little unless we reinstate the variety of places to go.
Unless you can place a house or a structure out in the sticks...there's no reason to even have the sticks...might as well insta-warp everywhere.
And unless people can create places to go outside of PvE dungeons, there's no reason to even travel there.
So the moral of the story, I suppose, is that you allow players to make the world interesting in order to provide a compelling interest to have large worlds. This implies, also, that the games (and the players who play them) are about more than looting items at POIs.
__________________________
"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 one shot to kill you mobs turn the game into a stealth survival game, instead of a mob grinding click fest.
Darkfall, at least the original game, had a similar effect, travel across Agon was pretty epic, and you had to watch out for gankers, who often rolled in squads. Or, your gang would happen across some hapless traveler, and chase him over half the map.