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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Dygz

blat wrote: »

Although in this example the scale can be appreciated visually in the moment, unlike the sense of scale that you have after traveling for a period of time across the globe.

In that latter case, there's no real frame of reference so the experience feels diminished.
Whereas travelling over time builds that sense cumulatively.

Not quite.
I'm fine with riding in a plane for 14 hours to get from DC to Tokyo.
I'm fine with riding in a plane for 12 hours to get from LA to Moscow.
I'm perfectly content with riding in plane for 2 hours to get from LA to Denver.
And, it's always fun to look down and marvel over the diversity of landscapes and biomes.

I am ecstatic that I don't have to travel weeks over the sea by ship to visit Tokyo or Moscow.
Or by mule or horse to visit Denver.
I have no interest in arduous travel - just like I have no interest in personally engaging in extreme sports.

In a game world - once I've walked up to the top of Mt. Hyjal 2 or 3 times, it doesn't give me any sense of wonder to walk up there a 4th or 5th time. Especially not with the same character.

blat wrote: »

It's not just time though. Slight deviation here but; there is nothing like travelling broad distances over land.
Eg W Europe to Asia, feeling the geography & climate change gradually, watching as architectural styles slowly blend into one another. It is a real experience.

If I had to do that in the real world, I just wouldn't travel.

blat wrote: »

Teleportation (which going to an airport near home then emerging from an airport on the other side may as well be) is incredibly bland and forgettable by comparison.

I dunno why everyone is so focused on Teleportation as the only method of Fast Travel, but...
Instant teleportation is inherently forgetable in a game where we have no physical sensation.
But, after I already have the memories of traversing the land by foot or Mount in a static game, Slow Travel is just a tedious time sink. It's the Slow Travel that becomes bland because my character will have already been there done that.
Of course, that being said... Ashes is not a static game.
So... it should be fun to Slow Travel across Verra several times and marvel at what has changed since the last time you made that trek.

And Ashes is a competitive PvP that has a valid concern about facilitating Zergs.
And there are plenty of gamers concerned about how FAst Travel would impact Economic Warfare.

Ultimately... depends on the Target Audience and the specific (MMO)RPG playstyles the game intends to support.

Dygz

CROW3 wrote: »

Yep. Flying and portals destroyed the 'wow' of WoW for me. Even in DF I tend to use my horse than my dragon. This is one of those design principles where I am damn near 100% on w/Intrepid: the world needs to feel big - in every sense - and wonderous and dangerous like Bilbo stepping out of the Shire.

Yeah, but I am a Casual-Challenge/Hardcore-Time player.
I love the wonder of shapeshifting to flight-form and flying through the trees or shapeshifting to water-form and swimming under the sea.
My main in WoW, Catya, is a Druid cat who typically Stealths or races across terrain in her natural form and then shapeshifts to Tauren -form when she needs to speak to Humanoids.
WoW never feels small to me. If I want the world of Azeroth to feel dangerous, I know how to make it feel dangerous for me.
I run out of a sense of wonder after 2+ alts have uncovered the entire map and they have no more quests available at Max Level.

CROW3 wrote: »

Huh - interesting. I feel the opposite, but for kind of the same reasons. Being on top of Mt. Whitney is breathtaking and awesome, but part of the reason is that I spent 8 days walking a hundred miles to enjoy the view. My gut tells me I'd appreciate it less and feel like it's much closer to me if I could just teleport there, chill for 10 min, then teleport to Costco to run errands.

Walking a hundred miles would add nothing to the beauty of any mountain - for me.
I would just be highly annoyed by the discomfort every second.
And I never have the feeling that discomfort or effort makes the goal a better experience.
And, yeah, if all you do is teleport and spend 10 minutes at the location - the location is obviously not particularly interesting.
If I spend 8 days of travel, I hope to spend at least 8 days marveling at the diversity associated with the specific location.
If I take a plane to Tokyo, I'm hoping to spend more than a day marveling at how different it is there. Probably hoping I can spend more than a couple weeks there.
Taking an 8 day trip by ship is not going to make the experience more fun - for me. Especially not if I travel to and from Tokyo from LA mulitple times.

But, this why Steven's obsession with Risk v Reward acts as anti-hype for me.
And also why Risk v Reward for the Open Seas is a deal-breaker for me.
Adding more difficulty or Risk or even Reward... doesn't add more enjoyment for me.
If it's a hassle - I'd rather just avoid it and do something else that is not so arduous.
I prefer to play; rather than game.

Depraved

Dygz wrote: »

Walking a hundred miles would add nothing to the beauty of any mountain - for me.
I would just be highly annoyed by the discomfort every second.
And I never have the feeling that discomfort or effort makes the goal a better experience.

but you are an explorer

plus you arent walking in a barren land. you have gatherables and other things that make the travel fun, as you mentioned before. walking a long distance shouldn't be a problem for someone who is an explorer first.

Xeeg

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

Also, your enemies! =D

Maybe your guildies spot an enemy tank a few nodes away and you know that they can't come interfere with your dungeon run planned.

Creates another reason for good spy networks... Alt characters in different towns keeping track of the comings and goings of various players. Maybe some players become notorious in the game and are tracked by many guilds. Maybe they have to grind out secret spots just to get by in the busy hours. =D

Since they can't fast travel, knowing an enemy team's location is actually pretty huge in planning a safe caravan run, or a boss fight.

Xeeg

Dygz wrote: »

My main in WoW, Catya, is a Druid cat who typically Stealths or races across terrain in her natural form and then shapeshifts to Tauren -form when she needs to speak to Humanoids.

I do this with my kid in dragonflight. We have a couple dracthyrs who aren't ready to reveal our true forms to humanoids so we always change back to human form before entering towns or interacting with NPCS. At least until we trust them. Our current story arc is trying to find our lost parents/family.

Made our characters when dragonflight came out and we have only gained 5 levels lol. We have fun just role playing and picking random side quests we find interesting, like helping the dragon whelp daycare in Valdrakken. =D

CROW3

Xeeg wrote: »

Dygz wrote: »

My main in WoW, Catya, is a Druid cat who typically Stealths or races across terrain in her natural form and then shapeshifts to Tauren -form when she needs to speak to Humanoids.

I do this with my kid in dragonflight. We have a couple dracthyrs who aren't ready to reveal our true forms to humanoids so we always change back to human form before entering towns or interacting with NPCS. At least until we trust them. Our current story arc is trying to find our lost parents/family.

Made our characters when dragonflight came out and we have only gained 5 levels lol. We have fun just role playing and picking random side quests we find interesting, like helping the dragon whelp daycare in Valdrakken. =D

That’s cute. I did something similar with my daughters when they were young. We pretended that a spell had been cast over Azeroth that prevented a number of beasts from getting any sleep. So in all of our adventures we helped put the monsters back to “sleep.” 🤗

Dygz

Depraved wrote: »

but you are an explorer plus you arent walking in a barren land. you have gatherables and other things that make the travel fun, as you mentioned before. walking a long distance shouldn't be a problem for someone who is an explorer first.

Explorer 87%; Socializer 73% ; Achiever 47%; Killer 0%

I am an Explorer 1st and a Socializer 2nd.
Which is why I uncover the entire map via Slow Travel first, for several different characters.
And then rely on Fast Travel - especially when I'm trying to meet up with other players for social events.
Gathering is irrelevant when I want to quickly arrive at a social event.

Restricted to always walking long distances can sometimes be highly annoying.

Depraved

CROW3 wrote: »

Xeeg wrote: »

Dygz wrote: »

My main in WoW, Catya, is a Druid cat who typically Stealths or races across terrain in her natural form and then shapeshifts to Tauren -form when she needs to speak to Humanoids.

I do this with my kid in dragonflight. We have a couple dracthyrs who aren't ready to reveal our true forms to humanoids so we always change back to human form before entering towns or interacting with NPCS. At least until we trust them. Our current story arc is trying to find our lost parents/family.

Made our characters when dragonflight came out and we have only gained 5 levels lol. We have fun just role playing and picking random side quests we find interesting, like helping the dragon whelp daycare in Valdrakken. =D

That’s cute. I did something similar with my daughters when they were young. We pretended that a spell had been cast over Azeroth that prevented a number of beasts from getting any sleep. So in all of our adventures we helped put the monsters back to “sleep.” 🤗

LMAOOO. "dad look, that car just helped that kitten sleep!"
😭💀

Noaani

blat wrote: »

Apok wrote: »

I like there to be decent travel times, makes for a decent economy. If things are to easy to obtain then prices will crash on alot of items then you'll be left with one of those market places where half the items are dirt cheap and the other half are overly expensive

Same.
Tbh also just to keep the world big. It's an obvious point but also amazes me how often it's overlooked; "let's build a huge world.. and then zip around it at 100mph making it small again". Pointless.

The point of a large world is for it to have more content. The only way to have a lot of content in a small world is to instance it.

The notion that the point of a large world is so that it takes longer to get to content is just flat out wrong.

akabear

Noaani wrote: »

The only way to have a lot of content in a small world is to instance it.

Or to move away from mostly 2 dimensional worlds to 3 dimensional. (up or down)

Noaani

akabear wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

The only way to have a lot of content in a small world is to instance it.

Or to move away from mostly 2 dimensional worlds to 3 dimensional. (up or down)

From a theoretical perspective, this is true.

From a practical perspective, I don't see this working for a game like Ashes.

Depraved

Noaani wrote: »

akabear wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

The only way to have a lot of content in a small world is to instance it.

Or to move away from mostly 2 dimensional worlds to 3 dimensional. (up or down)

From a theoretical perspective, this is true.

From a practical perspective, I don't see this working for a game like Ashes.

we not? we already have the tower of carphin, for example. we have open world dungeons (which are literally vertical/3d). we have the underrealm too .-.

Noaani

Depraved wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

akabear wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

The only way to have a lot of content in a small world is to instance it.

Or to move away from mostly 2 dimensional worlds to 3 dimensional. (up or down)

From a theoretical perspective, this is true.

From a practical perspective, I don't see this working for a game like Ashes.

we not? we already have the tower of carphin, for example. we have open world dungeons (which are literally vertical/3d). we have the underrealm too .-.

What is it you think you are arguing here?

It seems like you are arguing me saying something along the lines of "Ashes won't have vertical content" - but as that is not something that has been said, I really have no idea what your actual argument here is.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

It seems like you are arguing me saying something along the lines of "Ashes won't have vertical content" - but as that is not something that has been said, I really have no idea what your actual argument here is.

What did you mean by "not working out in practice" then?

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

It seems like you are arguing me saying something along the lines of "Ashes won't have vertical content" - but as that is not something that has been said, I really have no idea what your actual argument here is.

What did you mean by "not working out in practice" then?

In practice, if you are going to use the Y-axis as a means of adding content in a way where it lowers traveling time, you are talking about adding in content for flying player characters, not occasional towers.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

In practice, if you are going to use the Y-axis as a means of adding content in a way where it lowers traveling time, you are talking about adding in content for flying player characters, not occasional towers.

Depraved was simply talking about dungeons that go down and up. That's the "verticality". If you have a single dungeon that's both above and below ground - you've multiplied the amount of content that the piece of land could contain by how many layers/floors you add to the dungeon. No need for flying or whatever.

We already have this in Ashes, because it's using dungeons as the main means of content presentation. And if we get more tower-like structures - we'll have even more verticality in the world.

Noaani

NiKr wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

In practice, if you are going to use the Y-axis as a means of adding content in a way where it lowers traveling time, you are talking about adding in content for flying player characters, not occasional towers.

Depraved was simply talking about dungeons that go down and up. That's the "verticality". If you have a single dungeon that's both above and below ground - you've multiplied the amount of content that the piece of land could contain by how many layers/floors you add to the dungeon. No need for flying or whatever.

We already have this in Ashes, because it's using dungeons as the main means of content presentation. And if we get more tower-like structures - we'll have even more verticality in the world.

It's almost as if you are missing the point on purpose.

Having a tower or dungeon that goes up or down is not using the Y-axis in a way that reduces travel - which is what we are talking about.

We are not talking about whether Ashes has vertical content or not, we are talking about travel times.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

It's almost as if you are missing the point on purpose.

Having a tower or dungeon that goes up or down is not using the Y-axis in a way that reduces travel - which is what we are talking about.

We are not talking about whether Ashes has vertical content or not, we are talking about travel times.

Unless the instances at the start of this part of the discussion are all located in towns - you'd need to still travel to them. And then you'd be traveling through the instance itself. So, functionally, floors of a tower are no different from going to an instance.

Also, we'll supposedly have air travel in science metros so I don't see why we couldn't have some way to go up the tower in a quicker manner (obviously once you've done some prep for this), and I definitely expect underground dungeons to have paths that can skip you a few layers, if you have the proper tools to access to paths.

This part of the conversation started with you saying "only way to have a small world and a ton of content is instances". I guess by "smaller world" you literally meant "a tiny piece of land with a shitton of instanced content", rather than "not a huge fields-filled world where mobs gotta be separated by at least several square meters of space".

When people hear "big world" they usually don't think "a huge vertical tower-like structure", and instead think of fields and sprawling landscapes. In other words, Breath of the Wild was a "big world" already, but then Tears of the Kingdom became "bigger", but in a vertical way w/o expanding the map outwards.

And they gave ways to travel vertically as well. I'd definitely expect similar ways in Ashes too. We could have air currents that we can ride on gliders, we could have mechanical machines that elevate us higher, we could have trebuchet-like throwing mechanisms (both magical and mechanical) and we could have some jumping "puzzles" that take us up a tower in a quicker manner, while also providing some fun in the meantime.

Otr

There are some concepts which AoC is missing: Cross-realm zones and Sharding.

If IS will add a zone in a biome the entire map will rush to see that new content and then sharding will be needed.
And the other zones will feel deserted.

NiKr wrote: »

And they gave ways to travel vertically as well. I'd definitely expect similar ways in Ashes too. We could have air currents that we can ride on gliders,

GW2 has such maps but those are designed with this concept from start in order to be fun. You cannot just add a layer above or below and make them work nicely together. If they are connected then is a single more complex map. If they are not, then they should be considered as 2 separate areas and with normal open world travel between them.

Elevators can also be portals.
We come through portals, maybe we will through portals to where the corruption comes from. But those could be just zones without nodes where nodes give us quests (commissions) to do.

Better to change existing areas gradually but often, with something new at each in-game year. And events could be triggered, not only by a dragon but also by volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, invasions from other planes, wars between the Seven and the Others...
After all this environment is for the inter-node interaction so is better to change that environment slightly with new "secret" passages and choke points and stories than move players away.

Dygz

Ashes doesn't need to add a new Zone to have new content.
That's the entire point of the Nodes system.

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