Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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.
Comments
the only auto travel im okay with is a very slow moving bimp or ship to take me over the other continent.
Everquest had a ship that allowed players to get across the continent. There was only 1 ship and it took 40 minutes to do a full cycle. 20 mins to travel to the other side. THAT I AM OK with.
A bimp ride that takes however long, at a slow pace to reach the other continent, I am fine. But recalling, like u said - no.
or MAYBE but it wont allow you to take materials with you. So you can teleport but drop all those goods on the ground for someone to pick up. So you don't get to take those rare blueprints, craft mats or rare mats. and have a MASSIVE cooldown to it.
Would you look at that! Good going, IPS! x]
"It's ridiculous, short-sighted, selfish behavior." it's a bit much, no? He has a valid point. You don't have to shitalk people
Thank god
Home
Your choice of location is not a hearthstone, you are making a conscious decision to play in this part of the world. Consequently, you will start to recognize the same guilds, the same players. Conflicts and drama will be fairly localized so it will feel personal and affect you directly. Obviously leaving home means that you will a tourist, unfamiliar with both the land and the people there. Stories will be nice and exciting, their history will invoke a sense of curiosity.
- Perhaps its worth your time to use Alpha to explore the whole world, see different biomes and study the world map. Playing in biomes you particularly like will make a substantial difference in enjoyment of your daily tasks.
Modes of Travel
The casual player will have a casual mount where as an experienced or dedicated player will have a luxury mount. Luxury defined as rare to have, hard to obtain, or expensive to purchase. The choice of mount is as personal as the car you choose to own in real life. Does this person value their time? They will choose a fast mount. Value being able to carry a lot of materials? A mount with more storage. Some players will place value in getting a very cool looking mount like people want to own a ferrari.
Of course, because 99.5% of players you pass will be on a ground mount - when you see a flying mount you will know who that individual is and it will provoke a feeling of amazement as you watch their dragon fly off over the mountains while you are running away from wolves. That alone is quite the different experience in an MMO.
Scientific nodes will encourage travelers from far away to travel through their vassal system due to the speed of travel. In the same way that throughout history towns expanded first on rivers then highways, now on high speed monorails, the same will happen within a scientific node & vassal system. Of course this brings economic opportunities, as travelers travel throughout the node system they will naturally stock up on rations, suppliess, and use your benches which will pay taxes to your local area, enriching every citizen in the node system.
Lifestyle choices
Unlike any MMO I have played, if the world stays to this scale and speed of travel the idea of owning an Inn & Tavern to travelers or playing as a wandering merchant makes a lot of sense. I have never played an MMO where someone could get the largest mount inventory and bags and actually travel the world and sell good from one place to another as well selling goods to players traveling on the roads or outside of dungeons.
Freeholds
Seeing the scope of the world and land, it makes a lot of sense why freeholds are the penultimate goal for crafters. Putting down a house in a node establishes your very real footprint and presence in the node. People will certainly become familiar with your home, your goods, and your services. People will seek out your homestead due to its location or other benefits directly benefiting you as a player.
With a freehold, you won't be a wandering traveler whom no one knows on a personal level. There will be a relationship formed over time with the residents of the node.
Caravan and Naval trade routes
The sheer distance needed to be covered by the caravans and naval ships for trade routes gives you a scale of how profitable a successful trade route would be and also why they would be huge targets for players to attack.
Getting late but the answers Steven has given during the Q&A make a lot of sense now. This is an absolutely intended structure of the world. You could even go as far to say that the sheer size of the world is the foundation of everything that will lay on top of it, everything from crafting and trading to guild relationships and node wars.
Again, like I stated in my earlier post, don't argue for travel to be removed, argue for it to be improved.
Auto navigate mechanics are no different than auto battle mechanics.
Navigation and being present within the world are both part of the game and gameplay. Paying attention to surroundings, figuring out the path you should take, avoiding obstacles and possible ambush locations is part of the game.
People in here are arguing that these parts of the game should be diminished or removed because they (like I stated in my earlier comment) do not fully comprehend the consequences of their desires.
Inconvenience is gameplay. A game without inconvenience has zero gameplay and will not hold anyone's attention.
There's a game that close minded people like to meme on called Death Stranding by calling it a walking simulator. While true, it is a huge oversimplification. Kojima, a developer known for pushing the limits on what games can be, understood that travel is just another avenue of gameplay, so he created a game about traveling, navigating and finding clever solutions to get from point a to b. This game is appreciated most by the gamers who understand that the journey is far more important than the destination. These gamers aren't rushing to get to the next mindless objective, they are present in the world and partaking in it.
Elder scrolls fans also can understand this concept. Morrowind players will have all kinds of stories and memories of their travels between towns in Vvardenfell and traversing the red mountain. Then they play oblivion and Skyrim with their easy fast travel and you will find that they lack those same stories and memories.
People who complain about travel times only complain because they think it's a barrier to the actual gameplay. Sometimes it is. Some developers share in that short sighted opinion and fail to even consider innovating or embellishing the traveling in their games. Then you have developers like Santa Monica studio who, while not really embellishing the gameplay of travel, used travel to embellish the story by having relevant conversations play out as the player navigate the gorgeous locales.
This kind of got off track a bit, but I guess to summarize, inconvenience is gameplay. Travel is inconvenience, and a game letting you handle that inconvenience in your own way is what makes for good gameplay. Auto-pathing isnt inconvenience.
If you're not playing, why are you playing?
This is especially true when you take account distance. Imagine you have little to no competition in your less-popular processing artisan skill in your region of the world. You can charge MUCH more for your services since most people won't want to spend half an hour to get to a node where some other processor would charge less.
Consider also that distance is a great mitigation tool against zerg guilds. If it takes an hour to cross the world, then you might have time to do a valuable caravan run or raid boss before the zerg guild of the server gets there.
Yes, it feels cumbersome in the short term, but it opens up a lot of gameplay avenues in the long term, which is something the MMORPG world hasn't seen in a very long time, if ever.
PS: Mounts will be much faster, and with faster abilities such as dash. Even now you can buy a 165% mount for 36g I believe at the NPC.
Some public transportation might be implemented.
Scientific Metropolis will also have teleports within their zone of influence.
Commerce Metropolis will have auction house networks for their market.
I'm hyped.
This is already in. Store your mats in whatever closest node you're at and just die to get back to your home Emberspring