Intrepid - Time spent travelling?

I know that large map size is a defining feature of Ashes of Creation and serves multiple functions which are important to many of the interconnected systems. Travel time, and lack of fast travel, are also major core features since the beginning of the game concept.

Part of the reason is due to the time sink and inconvenience of travelling across the map. Maybe you only have an hour to play so you don't want to spend 30m of that travelling. Maybe you think 30m of holding W and steering a char is boring AF. It's not something most people like doing.

Just think about what often constitutes as "punishment" in these types of games, typically at least running back to your body after death. And it is considered "punishment" because running across a map feels tedious and boring.

Now doesn't this pose a bit of a problem? How much time are we really spending travelling as opposed to combat or town stuff?

Does Intrepid have a good sense of what a typical player time % will be spent travelling or straight W running from A to B? Maybe the first time it is a fun adventure through an area but the 5th time you do it and you are running for 5-10 mins straight it starts to lose its appeal.

If its something like more than 70% of time spent is travelling rather than combat, then travelling MUST be fun somehow. Otherwise most of the game time is spent doing something considered a punishment lol. Our whole progression paths and MMO efforts are spent on things we are only doing 30% of the time or whatever.

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Depraved

Xeeg wrote: »

I know that large map size is a defining feature of Ashes of Creation and serves multiple functions which are important to many of the interconnected systems. Travel time, and lack of fast travel, are also major core features since the beginning of the game concept.

Part of the reason is due to the time sink and inconvenience of travelling across the map. Maybe you only have an hour to play so you don't want to spend 30m of that travelling. Maybe you think 30m of holding W and steering a char is boring AF. It's not something most people like doing.

Just think about what often constitutes as "punishment" in these types of games, typically at least running back to your body after death. And it is considered "punishment" because running across a map feels tedious and boring.

Now doesn't this pose a bit of a problem? How much time are we really spending travelling as opposed to combat or town stuff?

Does Intrepid have a good sense of what a typical player time % will be spent travelling or straight W running from A to B? Maybe the first time it is a fun adventure through an area but the 5th time you do it and you are running for 5-10 mins straight it starts to lose its appeal.

If its something like more than 70% of time spent is travelling rather than combat, then travelling MUST be fun somehow. Otherwise most of the game time is spent doing something considered a punishment lol. Our whole progression paths and MMO efforts are spent on things we are only doing 30% of the time or whatever.

well, I agree with you in a sense. i prefer spending time in combat than holding w (same goes for questing ahhaha) but I can see why no instant traveling would be good for aoc.

the issue isn't instant traveling itself for players who don't have many hours to play every day, the issue is the necessity of having to move great distances. if you can only play for a couple of hours a day, and then you can simply do everything you want to do within your vicinity, then traveling times arent an issue.

Aszkalon

Nerror wrote: »

So you can just hop on a mount and go pee and make coffee, and hope you won't get attacked.

Once again the Idea and Concept (lol) of "Others" who may defend your Character, becomes a very enticing thought.

Or Escort NPC's like with some Caravans. Personally i hope there "WILL" be Bandit-like Players who may attack "Travel-Carts" or whatever even if the Inside is not Wares but other Players. 😁

It might give Players something to do who thirst for PvP all the time. Like some PvP-Guilds offering their Service against Coin to escort People who want to "Afk" during being travelled somewhere.

Noaani

Nerror wrote: »

Ashes will have public transportation:

There are multiple types of public transportation services where players can go AFK and be driven somewhere.
Players can visit a node building and pay a fee to be driven via road to another node on their land mount of choice.

The node building can be upgraded to become a flight path, which allows longer direct connections to other nodes within a specific region that also have a flight path.

Airships between metropolises.[4] This was previously stated to be between scientific metropolises.

It is possible that some public transportation services could be player-driven.

So you can just hop on a mount and go pee and make coffee, and hope you won't get attacked.

I mean, if you are still subject to PvP here (which I assume to be the case), I wouldn't be using this.

Otr

Nerror wrote: »

Ashes will have public transportation:

There are multiple types of public transportation services where players can go AFK and be driven somewhere.
It is possible that some public transportation services could be player-driven.

So you can just hop on a mount and go pee and make coffee, and hope you won't get attacked.

Noaani wrote: »

I mean, if you are still subject to PvP here (which I assume to be the case), I wouldn't be using this.

You log in and you get the message:

"The caravan was destroyed 5 hours ago. You are in a crate. If you are a bard you can try singing."
or
"The caravan was destroyed. Resource sink (HR) disposed you. You have +1 free alt slots."

Arya_Yeshe

It will be pretty crazy when you decide to travel far and then you won't see for friends for maybe weeks or even months

Aszkalon

Arya_Yeshe wrote: »

It will be pretty crazy when you decide to travel far and then you won't see for friends for maybe weeks or even months

Welp, if you can travel a few Hours in one Piece - you may catch up to them. If things like hostile NPC's and Players don't block your Path repeatedly.

Drezden

My God, how much of a gaming impotent do you have to be to ask to be entertained while you move? Traveling in the Ashes is an adventure and a risk, and no one should make it fun for you. Finding the unknown is part of the game's design.

Xeeg

Drezden wrote: »

My God, how much of a gaming impotent do you have to be to ask to be entertained while you move?

Insulting someone because your game is boring doesn't make it more enjoyable to play. You sound like the mortal online community.

Spif

Talking about travel like it's a one-time thing that you do to go meet your friends in another node is very far from the point.

Going back to town to sell, train, turn in/get quests, deposit mats, etc are the real travel time sink. This happens over and over, and are likely to be crossing the same territory you've already crossed over and over. This is the boredom we want to avoid. And it's possible to do quest/farming loops that land you back at town at the end. But at that point your entire gameplay is more boring because you're in a preset loop.

Corpse runs are part of this too, but that's a punishment run and has it's own distance set by the location of rez points.

It's possible that the terrain will change often enough via various mechanics like nodes leveling up and zone quests starting and completing that travel won't suck.

Hopefully Intrepid will implement some kind of Town-recall feature with sufficient penalty. IE, you burn 2x death penalty (maybe only gather-stuff lost, not xp penalty) as a sacrifice to the Gods to go to town.

CROW3

I doubt it. Restricting fast travel has been an intended constraint since very early in Ashes ideation.

You’re going to know every inch of your home node just by the volume of travel between adventures, gathering, and node events. This is a good thing in the long run as the node develops and other nodes start encroaching on your home.

Given the craftsmanship of the natural environments, I’m looking forward to slowing down to actually enjoy taking a look around. Since I don’t plan on settling anywhere for a while, Verra will be novel and interesting for quite some time.

blat

Arya_Yeshe wrote: »

It will be pretty crazy when you decide to travel far and then you won't see for friends for maybe weeks or even months

CROW3 wrote: »

Restricting fast travel has been an intended constraint since very early in Ashes ideation.

You’re going to know every inch of your home node just by the volume of travel between adventures, gathering, and node events. This is a good thing in the long run as the node develops and other nodes start encroaching on your home.

I love this and really hope it is the case. I want far travel to feel far, for the world to feel big not just be big.

Dygz

My main issue with restricted travel is not being able to make it to impromptu social events - especially with devs.

Obviously, socializing is more important to me than zergs.

Xeeg

Dygz wrote: »

My main issue with restricted travel is not being able to impromptu social events - especially with devs.

Obviously, socializing is more important to me than zergs.

Well it looks like travelling through a node by mount will take about 3.5min. So if your friends are 3 nodes away that's a 10.5min run by mount. It's a lot of running, but probably not that bad. It's a bathroom break, small snack and getting the coffee made with a fresh cup. Achievable in a 2 hour session.

A 3-5min queue time for many games is reasonable, from when you boot up the game to when you get in the action.

If you only want to socialize online with a group of people then that is what discord is for, and can be done at any time everyone is around. Ashes of Creation is a game first, and games are fun because of the rules/restrictions. If you only want to socialize/roleplay with a 3d character running around in a virtual world there are plenty of Roblox games that are free to play, have open worlds with 0 combat, and you can RP all day without any interference. Pick your theme; wolves, horses, western, medieval, magical...There is no real "game" there, but that isn't required for roleplay.

My belief is that for the "game" designers, the game play should come first.

The vast majority of Ashes players aren't going to be setting up impromptu social events with the devs. They are going to be playing "the game".

It's like sitting down to play a game of cribbage with a friend. The game's rules don't have anything to do about socializing or talking or anything. It is simply how the cards work and the pegs move, that's "the game". The players create the socializing while playing "the game".

If "the game" results in pvp zergs, as many games have, it can be next to impossible for a small group of players to even play most of the content in the game. It's the game of cribbage, but the other side gets more cards every round. Now "the game" starts to lose its appeal to many players. This has happened enough in other games that they are trying to limit the prevalence in Ashes.

I'd say this is a much more important aspect to deal with, for the health of "the game", than impromptu social events.

akabear

Actually, I never expected to enjoy the casual journey from point a to point b until I played New World.
As a casual MMORPG, when able to be side tracked multiple times and/or just pickup unplanned things on the way made the journey all the more enjoyable.

Xeeg

akabear wrote: »

Actually, I never expected to enjoy the casual journey from point a to point b until I played New World.
As a casual MMORPG, when able to be side tracked multiple times and/or just pickup unplanned things on the way made the journey all the more enjoyable.

Do you mean that you enjoyed the journey in New World? I didn't play it at launch (thankfully), but when I did pick it up recently I actually quite liked it. The world felt full of things to pick up/gather, and it felt like doing so was a good thing to do. So yeah, travel didn't feel that bad.

But also, there was instant travel to different waypoints on the map. I'm sure if that wasn't there the travel would have felt more like a slog at some point.

Azherae

For me, it's no different than BDO, as long as that Node-to-Node autopathing that Steven planned is still happening.

Travel times are 'long' only for people who have very strict access to game time. For a person with 'a need to do other things', 'Travel Assist' is sufficient in my experience.

And if we choose to believe that corruption will be a meaningful deterrent to standard unprompted kills, I'd assume 'nonhostile person obviously using Travel Assist' would be one of the safest, so we could just divide the 'expected attack rate' by 2 or 3 for them.

SirChancelot

I've wondered how many people will want to push scientific nodes to max for the better fast travel options.

Tahiti02

I totally disagree and don't see any issue with the current design. You're not really supposed to travel from one corner of the map to the other all the time. Each node and the surrounding area will be its own little region where you will spend most of your time. Yes, you will have caravans that travel across the map, but big risk = big reward, and obviously a bigger time commitment.

We don't need fast travel or reduced traveling time, we have that in WoW and most modern MMORPGs where you just teleport where you need to go and do the stuff and that's it. What's the point of the world in that case?

In Ashes traveling will be a journey, it will allow players to feel like going from one corner to another has a purpose and is an accomplishment on its own. Fast travel would also kill pvp since big guilds would be allowed to instantly get to any conflict within a short time, thus giving them even more power.

NO FAST TRAVEL AND NO REDUCTION OF TRAVEL TIMES.

Xeeg

Tahiti02 wrote: »

I totally disagree and don't see any issue with the current design. You're not really supposed to travel from one corner of the map to the other all the time. Each node and the surrounding area will be its own little region where you will spend most of your time. Yes, you will have caravans that travel across the map, but big risk = big reward, and obviously a bigger time commitment.

We don't need fast travel or reduced traveling time, we have that in WoW and most modern MMORPGs where you just teleport where you need to go and do the stuff and that's it. What's the point of the world in that case?

In Ashes traveling will be a journey, it will allow players to feel like going from one corner to another has a purpose and is an accomplishment on its own. Fast travel would also kill pvp since big guilds would be allowed to instantly get to any conflict within a short time, thus giving them even more power.

NO FAST TRAVEL AND NO REDUCTION OF TRAVEL TIMES.

My argument here is not against the current design of travel times. It's more about how travelling time ends up being a large % of player time.

If its 250 hours to level 50, and 125 hours of that is just pure travelling, then the game designers should be just as invested in making that content enjoyable and fun and not just the combat aspect, which could be 75 hours of it.

Mario cart is fun, racing games are fun, roblox jumping obbies are fun, controlling mounts with abilities is fun... There are lots of ways to make travelling/movement fun. That's the point I am trying to make.

People can complain about WOW all they want, but the dragonflight expansion was very well designed and the travelling was great AND FUN. The flightpaths aren't "teleports" and I mostly used them when I wanted to go to the bathroom or the dragon's abilities were on cooldown. Otherwise the dragon flying was even better than the flight paths!

Sounds like Ashes may have some fun systems with their mounts too. I am fine with that.

A HUGE part of this game is travelling. That is fundamental to the game design. It should be fun, or we are spending most of our time not having fun.

All of these other systems they are showing are things that we aren't even expected to be spending the majority of our time doing.

Otr

SirChancelot wrote: »

I've wondered how many people will want to push scientific nodes to max for the better fast travel options.

I wonder if their democratic vote style will prove superior compared to the other ones.

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