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Let's talk about travel time
Zindaihas
Member UncommonPosts: 3,662
I certainly will admit that long travel times in a game can be one of the more tedious aspects of playing an MMORPG, however, it is an aspect that is more than offset by the benefits. The alternative, apart from being able to teleport, is to create a common zone or zones from which the other zones branch (as in D&D online). Condensing a world is one of the easiest ways to destroy the feeling of immersion.
Few things can awe a gamer like a graphically aesthetic landscape with mountains or ocean as far as the eye can see. It inspires you to go out into that world and explore the unknown. A large world allows developers to establish numerous cultures in the game that makes traveling to these lands more wonderous. It makes a city feel like a place of refuge after a long day of adventuring. A large world that requires some travel time creates a sense of accomplishment when you finally make it to that remote dungeon. And finally, it lets you get away from the the crowded areas and perhaps be the first to venture into a land of mystery.
No, this should never be sacrificed for the sake of short travel time. Because when it is, you are no longer living in a world, you are simply playing a game that gets repetitve fast.
I am a big fan of porting to reduce travel time without reducing the size of the world and think this is probably the best solution to the problem.
Comments
I loved the travel system in UO. You could recall to an exact location that a mage had marked on a recall rune. It was fast and highly convenient, but you had to get to the place first. I wish someone would just re-make UO with wicked graphics.
All that having been said, I appreciate slow travel too in terms of immersion into that particular games world.
I'm okay with long boughts of getting from point A to B, so long as there are things to do at every point. I do not want to finish leveling in one area, just to have to travel fourty minutes to the next leveling ground.
According to the devs, this will not happen, traveling will be fun and carrivans will allow you to travel when off line.
-W.
When I played WoW, I was first amazed by the griffons...I loved looking at the passing terrain....6 months later, I wouldn't exactly say I cared that much. One year later, I realized how it was effecting the gameplay, you start to notice how unlike an adventure it is...and how it doens't even have the semblance of travel. It's just a delayed teleport...and teleport systems make large, interesting worlds seem very very small and insignificant.
Yeah...I quit right as they introduced the advanced griffon system, where you didn't even have to stop and pick a new destination when you landed...it just kept going to wherever you wanted to go. I assume in the near future...you can pinpoint a place on your map and parachute down to it, so that you don't even need to walk from the griffon point to where you need to go. And then...when they realize how tedious this is, you'll just click a point on the map and a flash of text will pop up as you appear in the zone you wanted that says:
"You walked to the griffon master and flew to the docks, waited for the boat, got on another griffon and parachuted to this spot"
I have no problem with long travel times, so long as the end goal is worth it.
I really don't want to spend an hour running across terrain, trying to avoid being killed, so I can "Kill 10 wolves in the Black Mountains". If I am on a quest that actually has a good storyline and makes good use of the game mechanics, long travel times are fine. But if all you are doing is a boring Kill/loot/return mission, there really isnt any immersion anyway, so you aren't really breaking the immersion with shorter travel times.
I am hoping (though maybe not *expecting*) that this game will provide a worthy goal at the end of the journey, so that we are so excited to get there that we don't care how long it takes.