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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Fast Travel
It looks like there will be fairly limited fast travel options in this game, ie there is a public transport taxi system, horses, and scientific metropolis's offer some limited fast travel. While this is all well and good to make people go out and explore the world, I would like to see some sort of fast travel back to my freehold. Travelling back home is something that can be very time consuming without fast travel mechanics, and the vast majority of the time you are travelling home, you are taking a safe, known route. You are rarely exploring new areas when going home and if free-holds are going to be as important in this game as I think they are (both socially and economically) I can see there being a lot of play time being lost just travelling home.
Does anyone else have ideas on this matter?
Does anyone else have ideas on this matter?
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Comments
An alternative to this would be some courier functionality which reduces the frequency you may need to travel to your freehold (with some risk potentially). People starting talking it about it here:
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/40985/no-fast-travel-weight-limits-and-blank-maps#latest
I think this would also make crafting a much more significant feature of the game, as it would essentially half the amount of tedious travel time spent gathering those hard-to-get materials.
As a side note, I know there is no map in this game. This means you actually have to know and understand the land. People are going to get lost. It's inevitable. Having a fast-travel to get home, or even just a compass with the direction of your home marked on it, would save a lot of people a lot of headache.
I actually think the resource gathering argument is the opposite of what IS wants. Their whole caravan system depends on the fact that it is both difficult and risky to gather and transport far away resources.
Sieges will need to be declared ahead of time and give all citizens sufficient notice to prepare and defend their node and freeholds.
Teleporting to join your friends is also the opposite of what IS wants as it can be abused through e.g. "zerging". To give people the ability to fast travel makes that possible. Imagine a large guild that develops and populates a node. They could go all over the world and be back for PvP events or some easy congregation rapidly making them hard to assail while allowing them to explore, gather etc all over the world still.
I'm also curious how this will play out and feel but due to the little info we have we are basically making assumptions about why and how frequently you may even need to visit your home node or freehold. We don't even have details of all of the storage mechanics in game.
1. Gathering:
Who would need to use caravans or mules if you can just fasttravel around the world for recources?
So you kill off the caravan system.
Also no fasttravel means localized markets for recources. You would kill that aspect of the game too if you would introduce fasttravel.
2. "Join up with friends":
Your friends having trouble defending a caravan or a settlement?
No problem just fasttravel to somewhere near them.
So you kill off fair Open-World PvP with fast travel.
3. Sieges:
Your city will be sieged? No Problem just log in to the game and fasttravel to your city during the siege to support your city.
Totally not unfair if multiple defenders of the city suddenly appear during the attack.
Additionaly about the "people getting lost"-part. I miss this really bad in games. In current games there is nearly zero motivation to just explore the vast world because quests tell you exactly where to go and for traveling you can use fasttravel. In my my opinion getting lost is a good thing.
I do not think this would be an issue with the caravan system. A single person cannot carry many items at a time, and they can only fast travel in a single direction, and it would always be to the same node (where their freehold is). It might globalize the world economy a little bit, but definitely not enough to prevent caravans from being necessary.
As far as zerging goes, I could definitely see this being an issue. I'm much more of a solo / small group player so I was not thinking about how large groups could abuse it.
I guess a fast travel home is not a good solution as it can be abused by groups of players who really want to abuse it. I guess I really hope that physically going to your freehold is not something that is often necessary, or IS comes up with another solution to the backtracking problem that plagues so many MMOs. I just really hate wasting hours of time travelling through regions I've already traveled through several times.
At the very least I hope the devs provide some sort of compass that can point you home. Because of the lack of maps, I do see it being a problem where players build their freeholds in places that they can't figure out how to get back to.
Yeah, again, we just don't know why and how frequently you may even need to visit your home node or freehold. We also still need to know more about storage, and... WE NEED MORE INFO ahhhh the excitement of this game makes it hard to wait
if they have an app that you can sync your account to so you can manage your sales and farms, then down time is zero. cash mone-.....GOLD COINS Y'ALL ($_$)
Yeah sorry I should have linked a source for all of that:
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Mobile/web_interface
On another point, I would assume that most versions of public transportation will be safe. Since most public transportation systems in MMOs have set routes and travel at faster than average speeds (otherwise why pay for the service?) you should be able to simply out-run the vast majority of threats. Well, unless they want to include mounted combat or they make horses outrageously easy to kill, but I haven't seen anything that alludes to either of those.
Back to the idea of fast-travelling, I wonder if IS will add teleportation scrolls. One-time-use items with set destinations that are fairly difficult to craft or cost a non-trivial amount, and then they have some mechanic to prevent teleportation to nodes under-siege and prevent teleportation out of a combat zone. Limited supply + non-trivial cost + pre-set destinations should be enough to prevent any effective zerging. It could be a decent way to give those willing to pay a premium the ability to save a 40 minute horse ride back home.
There is very little teleportation in the world. Some of that does get unlocked through metropolises of a certain type. Additionally there are mounts that are faster travel and there are services that are fast travel between nodes.[4] – Steven Sharif