[Design Discussion] Long Distance Travel

From what I heard in interviews, the long distance travel design (lack of portals) has to do with limiting zerging during node wars.
Still, from a high level design perspective the main point here is that it's a design decision that was made to solve certain kind of problems, but ends up having big negative effect on the playing exerience of a good portion of the possible playerbase: those with limited free time.

I would like to advocate for a different solution, which can accomodate both needs.
For clarity, my objective is not to propose one specific approach, but to propose a re-evaluation of long distance travel design.

Motivating Example
If you play 2 hours per night and you need to spend 40 minutes to travel between two location, which become 60+ if you are unlucky and encounter bigger and higher level teams that kill you, your playing experience is clearly worse than it could have been if you could have just skipped the 40+ minutes walk - and you can still enjoy getting ganked while you do stuff at your desired location.
Sure, for some people the travel is more important than the destination ("it feels like adventuring"), but people with limited time tend to be more objective focused ("I want to do X today"), and spending ~50% of your time to get to where you "can do X" usually ends up being unenjoyable (you are having some fun while you play, but you're not playing the thing you wanted: "content X").

Alternative Solutions
There are various possibilities, but to give at least one example: assume the emberthing where you resurrect are set to work as portal, you can add cooldowns, add locking of portals during events (it might even be a defensive option for the node, that the node has to pay for in resources), etc.

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Comments

xDrac

Honestly, on paper not having any (or very limited) fast travel might sound nice.
However, right now we pretty much only have the Riverlands (which is ONE biome out of many). And ALREADY I dread running from the eastern part of the zone to the western one if I want to visit a different point of interest or something.
It takes a while and it's like you said: if I want to login for an hour or two and have to spend half the time just running from A to B, that is more frustrating than enjoyable. It's not fun. And I see that as a big potential issue that will only become larger once we have more and more landmass added into this already gigantic world.

apocrisy

I agree with the suggestion, even archeage had teleport books, WoW has gryphons, every MMO has a way to at least get you within 10 minutes of travel from a location you want to be in and this game shouldn't be an exception. Traveling for hours on a horse across all the biomes would create a more static meta where players will try to create hotspots to optimize their time with their activity trying to get most out of the smallest area possible. Convenience in faster travel options make adventuring more accessible.

Dalenor

Several fast travel options are planned already for long-distance travels:

WoW-style automated flights between certain nodes
Family summons that teleport you to any member of your "family" (basically a size-limited friend list)
Portals between vassal nodes of a scientific metropolis

All details can be found here. Note that you won't be able to move materials with those travel options.

Chicago

I personally would like to see something like the blimp system they use in wow classic between different cities and continents, I find it relaxing and you get to admire the world from above

They could even make it on a timer so they only leave every 20 minutes or so to still make it not possible to instantly get your entire guild to a poi fast but I can definitely agree going from the tropics to the desert was only fun once or twice, now it's just a chore

MincVinyl

Just for reference, one big issue in ESO that has ruined most of the overworld experience is that there are too many teleport locations. On top of that the mount speed has 4x since launch through creep and lack of balance. 90% of my time spent in ESO involves just waiting in loading screens to teleport around.

Too much speed and too many teleports undermines the level building and what it means to be in a location. Which leads to the overworld feeling hollow.

A taxi service that still requires some time would be better. Where you can get a cart or boat ride at an increased speed 2x 3x or 4x speed to and from select locations.

Butkus

I like it. It feels like EQ1 again. You can actually die in an mmo while traveling! Interesting concept.

CROW3

The blimp system assumes fixed cities. This may not be the case in Ashes, and node development may take time. Scientific nodes have some travel options available, but I hope you like your horse in the meantime.

novercalis

The game design isn't about constantly exploring the world. It's about settling in an territory, claiming it as yours and fighting for it.

There are multiple layers of "factions" / Socializing that people will be a part of.

In order of small to large

- Family (8)
- Guild
- Citizenship
- Node

Most players, once freehold comes into play are not going to venture far away from their home node. You will fight for your family, you will fight for your guild, you are incentive to fight for your city due to freehold and lastly, you will be called upon and fight for your node as well.

From time to time, you will be an adventurer and leave your node and explore you're neighbor nodes and on rare occasion, go very far far away for awhile. But in the end, you will come back home, to your node, to your freehold.

Every major node affects it's surrounding nodes and when nodes level up, places like Carphin, Remnants, Steel Bloom will open up respectively across the world.

One place may be called Steel Bloom, another place far away from you might have their equivalent Steel Bloom called Iron Dome, dropping the same type of gear. The only major geographical difference will be resources, to incentives long term caravan / trading and PvP over Caravans entering territories. You can Attempt to move from 1 continent to another in a single day OR slowly move from node to node until you finally reach your end location. You don't have to Unpack but can enter the safety of a town and move your caravan the next day. This can easily be done in an hour gameplay, might take you 5-6 real life days to reach you're end location but the reward will be waiting for you.

that is perfectly fine. don't assume, ahhh shucks, I only got 3 hours, I will never make it from Point A to Point Z in 1 sitting. It's not meant to be like that. it's meant you're going to stop at point D, I, M, Q, U before reaching Point Z.

dirich

Dalenor wrote: »

Several fast travel options are planned already for long-distance travels:
WoW-style automated flights between certain nodes

Family summons that teleport you to any member of your "family" (basically a size-limited friend list)

Portals between vassal nodes of a scientific metropolis

All details can be found here. Note that you won't be able to move materials with those travel options.

Better than nothing, but still a bit short in terms of allowing people to explore the world.
The following also counts as reply to @novercalis point that the design of the game is of a certain kind.

What is the point of a massive world if you're only gonna see 0.5% of it? According to the map I saw, the current playing field is a tiny part of the global map.

Good long travel options are not just about enabling people with a different playstyle, due to desires or needs, compared to the main purpose of the game, but also about leveraging the good points of such a massive world.

Examples:

What about creating a trading business that imports resources from a different continent?
What about massive wars between continents, maybe for glory or maybe for rare resoures located in areas where no node exists.

Bottom line, if you're ever gonna only play with/against neighbouring nodes, what's even the point of a massive world? you could just keep the map at the size it's now.

The massive size would suggest to me that there's way more planned for the future than what the devs are comfortable sharing right now. But leveraging those opportunities requires appropriate transportation options.

P.S.
In regards to the points about taking a wow-gryphon flight between points - with flight times in the order of minutes or tens of minutes: sure, the first time is cool, but I can't recall a single guy that enjoyed it after using it a couple of times. Everybody would just afk while on flight, because the scenery is nice to see only occasionally.

The problem with fixed route gryphon-flight is that you can't actually play when using such a travel option.

If I am gonna take the gryphon and go afk or log off, what's the point of implementing the feature to begin with? A teleport/portal would take less development time and would be a better design compared to that.

Fippy

Butkus wrote: »

I like it. It feels like EQ1 again. You can actually die in an mmo while traveling! Interesting concept.

Original Everquest to me is perfect. You want to go to another continent? Look forward to your 60 minute run and boat ride, or pay a druid/wizard to take time out of their day to teleport you. And even then after the teleport it's another 20 mins of running. Now that you're in that area, you want to make the MOST of the area. You can't just pop back across the entire game world real fast. When you get a bunch of players committed to an area, they explore the entire area, rather than just following the exact min/max route for the fastest experience.

Take Faydwer in P99 for instance... Alright you've got Level 5-20 options in Crushbone, Level 10-30 at Unrest, 20-50 options in Mistmoore, 1-20 at various bandit camps, undead rings, minotaurs in Butcherblock, Greater faydark, and Steamfont. Don't even fucking look at Lesser Faydark unless you enjoy getting murdered by brownies or need to go there for quests or on your way to MM, that always makes a nice sense of danger. Headed to the boats at BB? I know there's a faster way through these mountains but, shit, is this the right path? Better just keep to the road. High levels have Kedge. You don't need to leave the continent. Everyone making Faydwer their home base is gonna SEE Faydwer. They're gonna FEEL Faydwer.

Contrast that to the current iterations of the EQ progression servers. No one camps minos in Steamfont, not a single person bothers with Kedge outside of their instanced raid or epic camp. No one even does Mistmoor because Lower Guk is the best camps, travel is extremely easy, and there's no reason to do anything other than the exact perfect route with zones that have the best exp modifiers. No one's camping KFC or Paw, or Kerra Island, everyone goes Unrest at 10, LGuk at 25, and SolB or the hole to finish out 50.

You don't even have to worry about faction anymore. Plat is so easy to come by you can just load up your two 40 slot 100% WR bags with everything you need for lthe next 16 levels, and if you do need to get spells or sell stuff, just use your self teleport to your home city real fast. I mean the boats were replaced by teleporters.

Long story short, difficult travel makes a game better. It forces players to engage with the game world. Yes, I would love to see options like teleportation spells, boat/airship routes, paid flight paths, etc. BUT they should all have a high cost to make up for them. Boats and airships should move in real time, no loading screen and lookie there, you're on the other side of the world. It would be amazing if there were airship caravans you had to defend on your flying mounts lmao. Imagine you booked passage on an airship but it got destroyed by air pirates... Teleportation spells should be functionally expensive, along the lines of the caster either having a large cooldown, or people going through a portal having a long debuff, or spellcasting reagents being expensive... Flight path style mechanisms should have a large up front gold cost that makes the prospect of riding your mount just as worthwhile, or have limitations like you can't hold anything in your materials inventory.

I completely sympathize with having limited game time. I have an **extremely** busy life myself, and the kind of time I have available does absolutely affect the kinds of things I do while I'm online, but that isn't neccesarily a bad thing. When I have limited playtime and I know I will be distracted easily, I will craft or gather. When I have the rare 3 hour chunk with no distractions, I will group, but that's maybe 20% of my playtime. IMO We've all gotten spoiled with fast travel, group finders, and gear tokens. I can log into WoW and have everything I need to "play the game" within 10 seconds, but you know what, I just don't actually find that game world engaging at all, because it's so easy I don't need to do the MMO part of MMORPG.

dirich

Fippy wrote: »

... Long story short, difficult travel makes a game better. It forces players to engage with the game world...

This is the conclusion you drew from the observation that, given the chance to optimize, and given the existence of an absolute optimum, people will optimize.

The other conclusion you could draw from the very same observation, is that a well designed world avoids the creation of such absolute optimal locations. If every place is as good as any other, your choice will be based on other factors: what loot you want, what you like to fight, what enemies are more suitable for your current build, what environment you feel like visiting today, etc.

Both conclusions are valid, but if we stick with yours we will have to sacrifice something else - the many things mentioned in this thread, for examples - but if you decide to go with mine, then it's not about making a choice between the lesser of two evils: the choice becomes purely making a better, more balanced, world experience.

Essentially the level designer has a though job to do, and if he can succeed, then he can sapre the game designer from having to make suboptimal choices.

BRAD_AoC

Dalenor wrote: »

Several fast travel options are planned already for long-distance travels:
WoW-style automated flights between certain nodes

Family summons that teleport you to any member of your "family" (basically a size-limited friend list)

Portals between vassal nodes of a scientific metropolis

All details can be found here. Note that you won't be able to move materials with those travel options.

I specifically hope for WoW-style flight pathing, as I think it both keeps the integrity of the world design in tact, making it feel vast, while also respecting the player's time. I think if Mounts and very limited fast travel would be the only means of getting around the map, there would be a lot of fatigue building up very very quickly among the playerbase.

Fippy

dirich wrote: »

Essentially the level designer has a though job to do, and if he can succeed, then he can sapre the game designer from having to make suboptimal choices.

Limiting travel is not inherently a sub optimal choice. It can be used to cover up poor design if poor design exists, but I don't get the feeling that's the case here. It's not zero sum. Both conclusions are valid. You can have a completely optimized game without an objectively better area on paper and players will still form opinions about which is better, because human psychology isn't a string of 1's and 0's. For example, take the servers. There was *no objective difference* between servers, and yet the US servers each immediately took on their own attributes before they even launched. EG: the streamer server, The PVP server, the RP server.

Let's say our spherical cow is a perfectly balanced game, and the binary is extremely easy travel vs limited travel. Limited travel slows down the meta gaming and negative feedback loops that the devs can't stop because the internet exists. They can't stop the "More people are here, it's easier to group here. If I want to level quickly, I need to look for groups in this area" that all players are subject to whether they intend to meta game or not.

Limited travel serves to preserve the games identity because it doesn't exist in a void. Part of its identity is that everything is meant to take effort, including navigating the game world. It being more difficult doesn't mean you can't experience the whole game. I did your 40 minute walk example this weekend, from Miraleth to New Aela because I needed to upgrade my hunting bow. My playing experience was not worse to me because I couldn't hop on a flight path. Quite the opposite. That 40 minute walk to my end goal left me feeling like I'd accomplished something, and I had fun doing it.

Czeris

Oh look, the 47th of the next 1000 posts begging for fast travel. Perhaps we can follow up with a post about how penalties for dying are unfair, and round out with one about how not everyone wants to pvp.

MikeBalzary

I love the lack of fast travel. Maybe because i am a compulsive gatherer. But adding any form of easy to use and safe travel system will rip the game of the risk of traveling, like transporting resources between nodes. If your pack are full, death have a pretty big consequence. This is why they have a mechanic to transport materials using the slow AF but well protected caravan.

The maximum i would settle for would be a raft system that float to ports winouth imput, but can be raided.

Still, i enjoy the stakes the game has now. Gathering people to escort a high value cargo is pretty cool

Veeshan

Butkus wrote: »

I like it. It feels like EQ1 again. You can actually die in an mmo while traveling! Interesting concept.

agree i rather like it,
Also with node evolving the world around them cause high and low level area around them to accomodate larger level ranges i dont think your suppose to travel far from your node you call home so most people wont be traveling across the map (unless for specific things like trade/resource collection that doesnt exsist in your area) however with player stores/marketplaces that may not be needed for people since other will do it for them.

either way i love the lack of fast travel and hoping to see how it develops as the world get larger and nodes get spread out (not having 5 vilages right next door for example when vassel system come online in phase 2

Finnley

Fast travel kills open world interactions and ruins the game in the long run.

novercalis

I'd like less Ember springs - there is too many. Death and running back should have more ample weight.

Just like EQ - man it fucking sucked if you died in LGUK and you had to run back all the way from Freeport. Now you have to find a port or SoW to get back. it's impactful. Makes you play differently. You begin to take risk assessments to avoid the downtime. Regardless it also creates memorable times.

Emer Springs should just be at Towns and maybe 2-3 random places.
Not at Oakenbane, Carphin, Remnants, and other poi mob grind spots (farm, graveyard, church, titan, Halls) and there is like 3 ember near Ursin within few mins away from each other.

With that said - keeping Ember Springs to towns would also need to change how unstuck works, so it's not abused to fast travel and just rewind a player by 1-2 minute or forced teleport to a random direction within 5m.

xDrac

I mean, we're not talking instant teleports to anywhere, I'd already appreciate "fast travel" between biomes or something. It feels to me like many people enjoy the concept but will loathe the reality of having to run hours on end to get where they want to go.

nanfoodle

Steven has already talked about air ships, portals between science nodes, flight paths between nodes and family summoning. As long as all that is implemented Im fine with no fast travel. What I would like to see if the low level game needs help. Mount at higher levels are up to 180% speed. At low level taking 30-40 min to get across a map is not helpful. Should be about 30% faster mounts at low level. Or make the mount upgrade easier to get and cost less.

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