Why The Game Needs Fast Travel

I know it's been said that the game will not have point-to=point fast travel.

However, I feel like this is a mistake. The points of not having fast travel are o encourage world exploration and open world PvP. Given that there are PvP areas, large scale wars, and a node spawn system that is dynamic, these reasons are already covered. We will have plenty of reason to go exploring the world.

There's simply no point in making us take 20 minutes or more just to cross the map. This is further exacerbated by all the different leveling areas being very spread out and not having any kind of combined storage. If you add in the fact that the map is nowhere near completed, and you'll have players spending the bulk of their time just to get from point A to point B.

Case in point was making a group for Oakenhold tonight. We invited a cleric who was in the upper left of the map - it literally took him 25 minutes just to get over to us. That's a lot of wasting 7 other peoples' time.

At the very least, we need what EverQuest had - classes with the ability to create portals and gates to other locations. Druids and Wizards both had the ability to travel around, and at later levels they could do so for groups.

Many of your players are going to be people with limited time. We're going to want to spend the time we have doing what we want to do, not auto running and staring at your mount's backside.

So, please, consider throwing us a bone or two here.

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Comments

Ludullu

I haven't truly played EVE, so I'm not sure if I'm right here, but isn't it pretty much the biggest mmo world and has no fast travel?

Even the alpha testing that I did for an upcoming EVE project had a way smaller world, but it still had no fast travel and going to the other side of the map was a wholeass adventure, with dangerous mobs camping gates, people controlling systems and killing anyone who's not with them, proper planning of jumps cause you had to control fuel expenditure (and stations for refueling weren't present in each system) and in a later update you even needed an item that would jump you through unconnected systems, which had its own radius so you'd need to plan for that as well.

And I fucking loved that part of the game

Songcaller

Wth is a 'jump' if it is not fast travel? Just because you travel at lightspeed in a universe does not mean lightspeed is not fast travel.

Ludullu

Songcaller wrote: »

Wth is a 'jump' if it is not fast travel? Just because you travel at lightspeed in a universe does not mean lightspeed is not fast travel.

Can you go from one side of the EVE map to the other in one jump? Cause that's fast travel.

Hell, can you go 5 systems over? L2 had TPs, but even those were limited on town connections, so, at least in earlier versions, you'd have to jump through several towns if you wanted to go from one end of the map to the other. And this is not even counting the fact that you'd often need to run quite far, if you wanted to farm some deep point in a dungeon, cause you'd rarely have direct TPs to all of them, let alone deep into them.

But at least from my example of the EVE alpha testing, you could not skip systems, so there was no fast travel relative to the size of the game. And afaik og EVE is waaaay bigger, but still doesn't have direct fast travel (I thiiink wormholes can bring you to far places? not sure though).

In other words, if you had to be at the other side of the map for some big event - you'd better get going way ahead of that event starting. Ashes is planning on being the same. Distance matters and good planning is crucial.

Songcaller

Yes. Distance does matter. Yes. A Star system is still fast travel. Do you see Elon Musk 'jumping' to Mars? Elon Musk cannot skip the ozone layer, the asteroid debris fields, the spacial void or the cessation of speed without friction or resistance. Thus, the ships are still fast travel much akin to the ships in SWG. Though unfortunately, said ships in SWG were on rails. Much like Ashes.

Ludullu

Songcaller wrote: »

Yes. Distance does matter. Yes. A Star system is still fast travel. Do you see Elon Musk 'jumping' to Mars?

Who cares about real life? I'm talking about relative scales of games. EVE is absolutely massive, yet it doesn't allow you to just jump from a system in the lower left part of the map to the one in upper right.

Ashes is also a big game and will also not allow you to do that same action. We'll have Scientific Metros with their local TPing, we'll have family TPs (fucking hopefully they won't let us jump all over the map), we'll have respawn mechanics - but none of that should (and supposedly won't) allow us to just disregard travel times.

Songcaller

I don't know any game with fast travel that let's you do what you describe. Fast travel is not tacked on as an afterthought. It is integral to environment design. I am talking game fundamentals. Eve is full of game physics but you boil the sci-fi breakthroughs as 'little ships go jump-jump'.

Ludullu

Songcaller wrote: »

I don't know any game with fast travel that let's you do what you describe. Fast travel is not tacked on as an afterthought. It is integral to environment design. I am talking game fundamentals. Eve is full of game physics but you boil the sci-fi breakthroughs as 'little ships go jump-jump'.

Later updates of L2 let the player do that

Directly TP between cities that are on the nearly-opposite sides of the map.

Afaik WoW's dungeons are accessible from towns, even if the dungeon itself is god knows where. That's pretty much a form of fast travel, especially in the context of getting yourself to content.

But even w/o true direct TPs, in L2 you could move across the entire map within under a minute. To me, THAT's "fast travel". I asked ChatGPT and it says that in EVE, even if you use a super fast ship, travel from one corner to the other would take 30-60 mins. I could definitely see how using the fastest mounts in Ashes would let you cross the map diagonally in roughly the same amount of time.

And it also said that in SWG you could literally cross the map in hyperspacae in seconds. Sounds like real fast travel to me. And even if you went planet to planet through Starports - that's still just a few minutes. Is this true, or did it hallucinate the info? Cause you say you don't know any games that let the player do what I'm talking about, yet you've talked about SWG as an example of games with some quick traveling.

Songcaller

SWG map was small in space. Like not even a fraction of eve in comparison. I referred to the portal gateways which yeah did you get from ship or other planet to a planet but you would have to get your land speeder out to get to places. Like anywhere. Both ways. Land speeder was called rapid deployment in the pvp circles.

Ludullu

Songcaller wrote: »

SWG map was small in space. Like not even a fraction of eve in comparison. I referred to the portal gateways which yeah did you get from ship or other planet to a planet but you would have to get your land speeder out to get to places. Like anywhere. Both ways. Land speeder was called rapid deployment in the pvp circles.

So sounds like EVE, but with fast travel across the systems instead of hopping from one to the next. Afaik EVE's systems are still massive where you'd still need to travel in local space if you wanted to do something specific (or, at least I had to in the alpha testing, especially in the more dangerous spots).

And pretty much like L2, where you TP to the nearest TPable location, but then still gotta run for a while to get somewhere valuable.

If Ashes had the same kind of fast travel - the map would be tiny, because any point on it would be accessible within 10min tops, instead of proper long travel.

Volgaris

Kallysha wrote: »

MDS wrote: »

Is it a bummer I cant TP home before I log off at the end of the night? yes
is it a bummer it takes a while to run to a dungeon? yes
Are there more negatives of not having fast travel? yes

Do I want fast travel? NO

All modern MMOs have fast travel and it guts the whole experience of adventuring in a world. We all need to stop asking for instant gratification. Teleport me here so can do a thing so I can quickly get home to do another thing quickly..... Traveling is content and while not always exciting, has the potential to be so fun. Lets try something different. Keep fast travel to an extreme min in Ashes, please.

So im going to put this scenario happens your node and guild are set on the riverlands right but you are on the other half of the map all the way up there in the north of it, suddenly you get a call that your node is getting attacked! When you finally manage to arrive there, war is over and the node its gone lost! « this will 100% happen btw

Yes that can happen and it will happen probably a few times. Your travel should be planned, and a consequence to traveling far is not being around your node to defend it. The point of a system like this is so you CAN NOT be anywhere anytime you want. All pvp games have some form of tactical planning, some have strategic planning, very few have logistical planning. Ashes seems to aim to have some forms of logistical mechanics such as caravans and nodes and the events around them. If fast travel is implement to too high a degree you'll break a lot of what they're trying to make.

Noaani

Ludullu wrote: »

And pretty much like L2, where you TP to the nearest TPable location, but then still gotta run for a while to get somewhere valuable.

This is the sort of fast travel Ashes should have. It is what EQ2 had, though due to the insanely large size of the world after 20 expansions, EQ2 does have far too many teleport locations now.

IMO fast travel locations in Ashes should be specifically removed from the node system. They locations should exist where they exist, end of story. If players build up a node close to such a location, that is on them.

With a total of 100 or so nodes in Ashes, I'd want to see about 12 - 15 teleport points around the world - but I would want them to function in a way where you need to travel to one of these teleport locations in order to teleport to another location (puts in a trade off of building up a node near one vs far away from one).

A lot of people think something like WoW or ESO when they hear fast travel, and are adamantly against it. However, you don't need that level of fast travel in order to actually fulfill the function that fast travel is supposed to fill. It doesn't need to take you directly to your content, it just needs to make that traveling time more manageable.

Arya_Yeshe

Ludullu wrote: »

I haven't truly played EVE, so I'm not sure if I'm right here, but isn't it pretty much the biggest mmo world and has no fast travel?

Even the alpha testing that I did for an upcoming EVE project had a way smaller world, but it still had no fast travel and going to the other side of the map was a wholeass adventure, with dangerous mobs camping gates, people controlling systems and killing anyone who's not with them, proper planning of jumps cause you had to control fuel expenditure (and stations for refueling weren't present in each system) and in a later update you even needed an item that would jump you through unconnected systems, which had its own radius so you'd need to plan for that as well.

And I fucking loved that part of the game

there's some fast travel in EVE these days, but it is not as simple as in RPG MMOs, in eve you gotta send a guy alone against all odds and infiltrate enemy lines and then he lits a cyno, the cyno is like litting up a beacon that everybody can see and works as a one way magic portal. However, all your enemies will warp to your cyno if they want too, everybody can see the cyno on their UIs lol

you can also build a structure that works as gate travel, people can destroy it tough

so EVE, has a bit of fast travle, but it is limited to certain conditions, ship types, theres fuel consumption, there are also timers you cant just keep teleporting at all

Noaani

Arya_Yeshe wrote: »

Ludullu wrote: »

I haven't truly played EVE, so I'm not sure if I'm right here, but isn't it pretty much the biggest mmo world and has no fast travel?

Even the alpha testing that I did for an upcoming EVE project had a way smaller world, but it still had no fast travel and going to the other side of the map was a wholeass adventure, with dangerous mobs camping gates, people controlling systems and killing anyone who's not with them, proper planning of jumps cause you had to control fuel expenditure (and stations for refueling weren't present in each system) and in a later update you even needed an item that would jump you through unconnected systems, which had its own radius so you'd need to plan for that as well.

And I fucking loved that part of the game

there's some fast travel in EVE these days, but it is not as simple as in RPG MMOs, in eve you gotta send a guy alone against all odds and infiltrate enemy lines and then he lits a cyno, the cyno is like litting up a beacon that everybody can see and works as a one way magic portal. However, all your enemies will warp to your cyno if they want too, everybody can see the cyno on their UIs lol

you can also build a structure that works as gate travel, people can destroy it tough

so EVE, has a bit of fast travle, but it is limited to certain conditions, ship types, theres fuel consumption, there are also timers you cant just keep teleporting at all

This isn't a bad idea for a way to counter a zerg, tbh.

If guilds are given a 12 hour cooldown port to any location the caster is at, where once activated the guild members can port to it for the next minute, but anyone else can port to it for the next 5 minutes (and get a notification, and can see it on their map), this could actually be a type of fast travel that creates good PvP scenarios rather than bad ones.

It doesn't replace the type of fast travel talked about above where the idea is to get people to content in a reasonable amount of time, but it could be valuable to have regardless.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

With a total of 100 or so nodes in Ashes, I'd want to see about 12 - 15 teleport points around the world - but I would want them to function in a way where you need to travel to one of these teleport locations in order to teleport to another location (puts in a trade off of building up a node near one vs far away from one).

I miiight be fine with one per continent (with obvious inventory limitations and all), but even more than 5 for the whole realm feels like too much to me.

Mainly cause the current A2 map is 2/3 of the horizontal length of a continent and you can cross it fairly quickly even with the current mounts. Even just 10 teleports would mean 5 per continent, which would cover nearly the whole length of the continent, at which point you're roughly 10-15 minutes away from any point on the map, cause it'd be ~6-7 min to the closest Gate and then the same amount to your goal.

And while the dungeons themselves might (and should) take way longer to go through, this still doesn't stop zergs from gathering in one spot real quickly. And maybe you could add some throughput limitations or some "overloaded" mechanics, and some convoluted inventory restrictions - but then what's the good balance to let normal people use these frequently enough to not feel the super far travel impact as much, while also limiting the zerg's ability to just dominate the map.

Saabynator

Maybe there could be an oxcart kind of thing, where it just goes from city to city, and you can be safely afk the whole way. So people with limited time can make dinner or whatever, if they are going from one city to the next. It could be a building a city choose to build or not, maybe. Then it takes a bit of time, and you can do whatever you need to do in the mean time, RL. But its slow enough, that people who are at the computer wont use it.

Songcaller

Anyone down for barrels in rivers and rapids for fast travel like The Hobbit?

Kallysha

Volgaris wrote: »

Kallysha wrote: »

MDS wrote: »

Is it a bummer I cant TP home before I log off at the end of the night? yes
is it a bummer it takes a while to run to a dungeon? yes
Are there more negatives of not having fast travel? yes

Do I want fast travel? NO

All modern MMOs have fast travel and it guts the whole experience of adventuring in a world. We all need to stop asking for instant gratification. Teleport me here so can do a thing so I can quickly get home to do another thing quickly..... Traveling is content and while not always exciting, has the potential to be so fun. Lets try something different. Keep fast travel to an extreme min in Ashes, please.

So im going to put this scenario happens your node and guild are set on the riverlands right but you are on the other half of the map all the way up there in the north of it, suddenly you get a call that your node is getting attacked! When you finally manage to arrive there, war is over and the node its gone lost! « this will 100% happen btw

Yes that can happen and it will happen probably a few times. Your travel should be planned, and a consequence to traveling far is not being around your node to defend it. The point of a system like this is so you CAN NOT be anywhere anytime you want. All pvp games have some form of tactical planning, some have strategic planning, very few have logistical planning. Ashes seems to aim to have some forms of logistical mechanics such as caravans and nodes and the events around them. If fast travel is implement to too high a degree you'll break a lot of what they're trying to make.

what i would like at least, when in the case you being far away from your node and not aware it will get attacked, to implement something like an emergency waypoint ( like existed in gw2). You had to install it (which takes 3 minutes to spawn) and would create a temporarily emergency waypoint at the objective, once activated, it would be an uncontestable waypoint, which lasts for 40 seconds and can be reused indefinitely until it expires with a 20 minute cooldown. Even thought trolls and spies did exist and they did like to abuse and waste the ewp (it could be set to instead anyone can activate to only the person that installed and its guild members can activate it).
Also someone mentioned a situation involving a dungeon, well in throne and liberty there are few waypoints when a dungeon has multiple layers, you cant use them out of it only when inside and you need to interact with a respective one to select which floor you want to get to so then you can get to another (tl dungeons wps).

Songcaller

Let's take Eve as an example. Some 30,000 active on the mega server. Most people running alts. That makes about 15,000 or less actual independent people. All private servers for the other mentioned games have even less. Let's keep going to the most hollow game designs rather than adding actual functional gameplay. You might be happy to die deep behind enemy lines, down several floors of a dungeon, no hope of getting a single ore out of the place because you wanted the harshest corruption penalties, the longest levelling, the biggest map, the slowest active response times, the artificial progress of the node system, the procedural generation for the localised events, the world bosses that give no world buffs and 90% of people need not even attempt. Oh. And to top it all off the biggest concern is how to limit a fast travel system to only 2 locations when a science node transport network already has the best chances of defence and active responses because the same people were happy to limit flying mounts, home hearthing and of course, player housing. An absolutely stunning defence of why fast travel is not needed.

Volgaris

Kallysha wrote: »

Volgaris wrote: »

Kallysha wrote: »

MDS wrote: »

Is it a bummer I cant TP home before I log off at the end of the night? yes
is it a bummer it takes a while to run to a dungeon? yes
Are there more negatives of not having fast travel? yes

Do I want fast travel? NO

All modern MMOs have fast travel and it guts the whole experience of adventuring in a world. We all need to stop asking for instant gratification. Teleport me here so can do a thing so I can quickly get home to do another thing quickly..... Traveling is content and while not always exciting, has the potential to be so fun. Lets try something different. Keep fast travel to an extreme min in Ashes, please.

So im going to put this scenario happens your node and guild are set on the riverlands right but you are on the other half of the map all the way up there in the north of it, suddenly you get a call that your node is getting attacked! When you finally manage to arrive there, war is over and the node its gone lost! « this will 100% happen btw

Yes that can happen and it will happen probably a few times. Your travel should be planned, and a consequence to traveling far is not being around your node to defend it. The point of a system like this is so you CAN NOT be anywhere anytime you want. All pvp games have some form of tactical planning, some have strategic planning, very few have logistical planning. Ashes seems to aim to have some forms of logistical mechanics such as caravans and nodes and the events around them. If fast travel is implement to too high a degree you'll break a lot of what they're trying to make.

what i would like at least, when in the case you being far away from your node and not aware it will get attacked, to implement something like an emergency waypoint ( like existed in gw2). You had to install it (which takes 3 minutes to spawn) and would create a temporarily emergency waypoint at the objective, once activated, it would be an uncontestable waypoint, which lasts for 40 seconds and can be reused indefinitely until it expires with a 20 minute cooldown. Even thought trolls and spies did exist and they did like to abuse and waste the ewp (it could be set to instead anyone can activate to only the person that installed and its guild members can activate it).
Also someone mentioned a situation involving a dungeon, well in throne and liberty there are few waypoints when a dungeon has multiple layers, you cant use them out of it only when inside and you need to interact with a respective one to select which floor you want to get to so then you can get to another (tl dungeons wps).

I think that'd break a lot of stuff. I'd use that way point to get across the map fast to gather and run back. I'd use it to attack a Node with my guild too that's across the map. Fast travel in this fashion would make this game suck. It'd be a never ending stream of massive attack after massive attack from enemies across the map. Distance would no longer be a safety variable. For guilds that want to focus on attacking and never build up Nodes this would be a great boon. I could find myself in a guild that would "abuse" this feature and I'm still against it. Attacking a Node far away should be a challenge more so than one in the same Zone.

It's hard to say what the game needs because so much is missing or a placeholder, and it's a mistake to compare it to other games, or say that Ashes needs something from GW, TL, WoW, or whatever. Because we don't know what it needs yet really. Fast travel has a purpose in some games, but in general it waters down the experience. It'll turn a massive open world game like Ashes into a Lobby/Loading screen game. Some people want that lobby based system to quickly get to the action, and that's a fair point, but others don't want it. And when you have so much of the game's competitive systems based around travel, if you implement fast travel that solves your problem then why even have the travel problem for the player to solve?

Songcaller

Omg. Apparently flight simulator is the most competitive game in the world because *News Flash* travel has been stated to be competitive.

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