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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.
Limit mobility?
GrizCO
Member
Over the years I feel MMORPGs have become more of a race and less of an adventure. Graphics have gotten so beautiful but games lack the opportunity to appreciate it.
I lose the immersion watching a village with players sprinting around towns like they are all on sugar crack. Or doing a quest that you have to rush through the NPC dialogue because your group just clicked through it. I think once the game reaches the stage of becoming a race to endgame, it becomes like any other game.
Could slowing down mobility by limiting running to short bursts, removing armor to swim, armor weight effecting run burst duration, etc. make questing more meaningful, or would the real time needed make it more tedious?
The slowness of foot travel could make mounted travel, horseshoes, animal maintenance, etc a necessity to become a professional adventurer.
I think this would add a lot to PvP, having cavalry vs foot troops, ranged attacks would be more effective, rivers are effective choke points, etc.
I lose the immersion watching a village with players sprinting around towns like they are all on sugar crack. Or doing a quest that you have to rush through the NPC dialogue because your group just clicked through it. I think once the game reaches the stage of becoming a race to endgame, it becomes like any other game.
Could slowing down mobility by limiting running to short bursts, removing armor to swim, armor weight effecting run burst duration, etc. make questing more meaningful, or would the real time needed make it more tedious?
The slowness of foot travel could make mounted travel, horseshoes, animal maintenance, etc a necessity to become a professional adventurer.
I think this would add a lot to PvP, having cavalry vs foot troops, ranged attacks would be more effective, rivers are effective choke points, etc.
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Comments
you know you can just walk?
He wants others to slow down as well for immersion.
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I don't think the people with limited time would like it. Unless they're really into admiring the looks of the world like you.
Conan Exiles is one game I can think of that did a massive overhaul of the combat and movment system and got the game very right. Unfortunately you never find people for PvP and the fights need to be staged.
Adding low risk jobs like tending a garden or guarding a field would probably slow people down some.
It would be kind of funny if they had options of a Mayer to make sprinting inside town illegal. Then people would constantly bet fined by the guards if they started running too fast.
Also hit box collision could be a new spin on combat if they wanted to add a grappling or wrestling skill for bumping into people or knocking them down if they run into them.
Loads of stuff should probably be considered, but it all comes down to how a majority of people will want to play so people will see this features as annoying at best.
Steven said in one of the interviews the other day that it's gonna take "multiple multiple" hours (by foot) to get from top left corner to bottom right corner of the map
I would personally like to know the exact movespeed and distance for that. Because I imagine that he made that statement with the assumption of a player moving naturally through the world, but to give people a proper scope of things, it would be nice to know what the unreal movespeed and distance is, so that at a constant movement speed in a straight line from top left to top right, how long would that take ya know? I think that's useful information. If that took 1 hour, we'd know the world was itself insanely huge, even before environment design is considered. If it only took 15 minutes, then well it's pretty small, and so we could infer that there's a LOT of environment between points A and B.
Also, i'd suggest joining an RP guild, i know a couple of them on here wants to take over entire nodes, where they likely will have people walking about instead of running and similar things, so that might cover you for immersion.
U.S. East
Slowing down the pace of the game is a valid concern. A slower pace tends to make a more relaxed experience. That slower pace can be brought about by methods other than gimping player movement.
Good framing can catch the eye and make players stop, simply amazed at the scenery before them. e.g. Hyper Light Drifter With a free cam like AoC has, the framing will have to be done by the environment rather than the camera placement itself. Stuff like the rule of 3s or cliffs/walls funneling vision onto a single spot. This really comes down to strong art direction to make it shine.
Directionless objectives force slower pacing. When the next step has to be deducted rather than spelt out in a quest journal, players are prompted to closely examine their environment, which will turn cause them to appreciate it a bit more. Simply shying away from objective markers, explicit instructions and general hand holding navigation tactics will force players to "smell the roses."
Hazardous areas, already hinted at with more holistic enemy scaling and lack of fixed level zones, will demand caution from players. That caution can manifest in a slower pace through the world, as one wrong turn could spell death. While more stressful than relaxing in most cases, it creates a nice tension -> relief curve, which makes for memorable moments.
All this instead of 'make movement slower and clunkier'
*error sounds*
"I can't do that yet. I need more butt durability!"
When playing an mmo for the first time, I watch all the dialogs (Elder Scrolls Online has every quest voiced over) which works really good for the immersion, at some point I just don't want to read anymore. The second time I get there with an alt I skip through them.
Also about the appreciation of the environment, If the game will have for example treasure chests you tend to explore the world more as you travel through them. For me in ESO that got ruined when I installed a addon that showed me alle the possible locations where a treasure chest could spawn (yeah I can uninstall it but for some reason I whished Zenimax would just ban those kind of addons (fear of missing out)).
And sometimes personally I just stop for a moment to apperiacite the beauty of the game but that is also something not every player does, not everyone plays and enjoys a game in the same way.
My point is that so many MMOs allow you to sprint, heck most don't even allow you to sit in chairs. This game seems immersive on so many levels that maybe it doesn't need a full-time run mechanic. Maybe limited running, except thief mechanic, in towns and settlements. Outdoors limited burst speed accompanied by a jog AKA Airborne Shuffle.
As an RP player I admit I'm more about creating a character that helps me escape my daily reality than I am about hitting level cap and end game. I think the RP is too often overlooked in MMORPGs and I feel that is their undoing. When games just become a race to end game, they just become like every other game, with just a different environment. When you have games with such in depth structure as this, combined with a majority of the player base being at level cap, it's hard for new players to come into that. One of the best MMOs I ever played was SWG. I got my Jedi after mastering Doctor and Dancer. Dancer wasn't a choice, it was a holycron thing. Being a dancer forced me to step back from my normal killing grind. Spending most of my time in cantinas, I learned to socialize and take in the sites. SWG was not a graphic marvel but the scale and the time it took to travel distances made you feel really small but part of something bigger. Games since have made me feel like a cold war soviet Olympic athlete. Don't have fun, be the best, be first or you are last, grind, grind, grind.