I have a bunch of questions about gaming that tend to begin, “Why can’t I…” Today I was wondering such a thought. Here’s the thing about videogames: they’re games. Let’s just make sure we’re all clear on this. They’re games. Not work. Not obligations. But games. So just exactly why is it so many of them behave like some sort of strict teacher who will only let me run around in the playground once all my work is finished? If I want to go hit the Giant Elves of Elvington on the other side of the Countryland, why the bleeding heck can’t I just be there?
I love big, explorable worlds. They’re by far one of my most favourite things about games. Running off in a direction without any idea what I might encounter is a rare pleasure, and one far more likely to result in an exciting discovery in a game’s world than the real one. In the real world you’re more likely to reach a barbed wire fence, impassable road, or a murderer. In a game, you might discover a magical castle, sea of floating islands or enormous dungeon full of unicorns. Not knowing what’s coming up is huge and exciting, and I’d not want to take it away from gaming, not ever.
But you know what? Once I’ve been there, that moment’s gone. I’ve discovered it already. I did the exploring. I don’t need to spend half an hour of my time that I’ve allocated for playing games trudging at whatever stupidly slow speed a game’s decided to impose upon me. There is no good reason, whatsoever, to not just let me be there.
And we all know this already. In fact, worse, developers know this already. So desirable is the ability to just teleport to any location in an MMO world that we’re teased with silly, tiny morsels of it, a little amuse-bouche for a meal that’s never coming. Soul stones, heart pebbles, hometown rocks, whatever they may be called, it’s possible to bind yourself to a location and then instantly beam yourself there. It can be done! It doesn’t destroy the game! But oh good heavens, you greedy little pig, you want to do it a second time? Wait an hour!
No! Stop being so utterly ridiculous. Stop treating me like your subject, your employee, who has to run around endlessly to get to do anything fun. Treat me like a paying customer who just wants to enjoy himself right now, but not necessarily right where he is.
There are of course examples of games that let you do this. All Guild Wars fans will be very angrily pointing out that their game lets you. (And all praise to it for this. Now add jumping and walking on inclines and you’ve got my attention*.) And of course City Of Heroes eventually lets people willing to train in the power to teleport their buddies. But the vast majority certainly do not. Thinking about why not I come up with two suggestions.
1) They want to slow you down so you spend longer in the game and thus spend more money on it.
2) They’re just being dicks.
I’m fairly certain it’s not 1. It’s far too tin-foil-hat, and doesn’t seem enormously realistic. And it certainly doesn’t work in my case. Even with paying through the nose to ride on a pretend griffenbat’s back to sit through an in-game cutscene of the same scenery I’ve seen ninety million times already to speed things up, the whole process is so agonisingly drawn out that I’m far more likely to turn it off and play something single player that will let me enjoy myself immediately. But number 2 doesn’t make much sense either. I’ve met all sorts of MMO developers, and in the main they’ve been splendidly friendly types, not the sort who seem likely to pour milk in your gym bag, or kick a tramp.
So what’s the missing 3? Is it because most the others don’t let you, so they won’t either? That’s not a reason. That’s just silly. I decided to ask whichever industry types were on my MSN on a Friday night to see if they knew, without warning them or giving them time to think of an answer. This is journalism, people. Why don’t they let me teleport?
First I pestered Gamasutra and Sexy Videogameland’s Leigh Alexander:
“Because they don’t want me to play them, ever. I think it’s old level design sensibilities at work. Ones that people don’t realize don’t apply in open worlds like that. With GTA, say, part of the gameplay is the travel. You are supposed to drive from place to place, that’s how you play the game. So I guess MMO designers are like, ‘Well why don’t you run from place to place so that it feels REAL?’ There’s been a failure in general to understand what about console design principles don’t work online. And then if Blizzard does something, everyone else does it exactly like that.”
Then I nagged Splash Damage’s Ed Stern, who I appeared to catch unawares.
“What are you doing in my bathroom. And what are you doing with/to my towel. And are those real?”
He calmed down and continued.
“From what I can understand, the infrastructure/backend/serverthings are just very very very complex and complicacious. So once a player is somewhere, you want ‘em to stay there a while, I suppose. It should be made very very clear that I have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m the least tech-savvy employee of a completely other kind of dev. I burn salad and spill Marmite. Machines are not my friend. And you’re asking me about MMO back-ends? You’re just cruel.”
Ste Curran of One Life Left fame came next. After this question apparently caused him to fall over he recovered and replied.
“MMOs are thinly-painted stat-grinds, right? What you do at level 1 is the same as what you do at level 30, only with fewer buttons and fewer sparkles. So you have to make those sparkles as pretty as possible, spin out the journey from 1 to 30 for as long as you can. because as soon as there’s no more reward, no more illusion of the next-great-thing-around-the-corner, the players lose interest. I would imagine. I guess also there’s the second life thing. Which is second life in lower case, not the furry-fucking dystopia of the capitalised version. These places are meant to be otherworldly. Players subscribe to them, either with their time or actual cash, to feel part of something vast. If they could just click their way to wherever they wanted in half a second, not only would they experience everything the subscription has to offer in a heartbeat, this world they have to conquer would seem much, much smaller too. And who wants to be the hero in a shoebox? Also there’s probably some clever psychology point about spreading out the excitement with periods of monotony. Because if you let the players just have the ‘action’ bits all the time those will become the monotonous bits.”
So why do you think it is? Why can I insta-hop to any part of Fallout 3 once I’ve trekked there, but not when a game goes online? Surely as a customer I should be offered the most fun, the most immediately? Especially when I might want to meet up with my friends who are growing increasingly impatient at the entrance to a dungeon as I sluggishly wheeze along some path through a distant field in another realm. “I’m coming! Don’t start yet! I’m (pant pant) coming!”
*Sorry Guild Wars fans.
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Let me start by being clear that I don’t believe in the reasoning I will present below – I certainly think we’re doing MMOs completely wrong! That said, I think I can shed a little light on how MMOs are made now.
While a lot of the above people alluded to “continuity of experience” – the fact that the travel bookmarks an experience that helps it set properly in the mind, the real reason for any system (and I mean ANY system) is simply this: MMOs are built like prisons – and prisons work on the principle of “time served.”
For the most part, a prison doesn’t care what you do during your sentence. You go in a murderer and if you read lots of books and convert to religion and get your GED and a college degree, you get out in 10 years. If you join a prison gang and spend your days lifting weights, blaming society, and plotting to kill the guards you may get out in 12 years.
MMOs are exactly the same thing. While there is a slight gradation between the time-sentence of an expert player and a new player, it is only slight – and many, many orders of magnitude above that of other genres of games.
MMOs are about time served, just like the criminal justice system. And like the criminal justice system, the bones you throw a prisoner/player must never greatly reduce the time the player spends in the game client.
Travel is a great example of this. The design of an MMO requires that the running speed be as low as you can possibly justify (I’m looking at you, LOTRO!). In addition to using this pitiful speed as a carrot for progression (more time! more time!), you are value-adding ALL of your game’s content, larding it with an extra sprinkle of time that for the most part goes unnoticed by the player-base. Imagine – the aggregate running time likely adds 1 minute average for every 5 minutes of quest. Forcing your player to spend 16% of each quest moving is a huge win for the prison system of MMOs!
Do I think this is right? Hell no. Exploration should be an added bonus to the game, not a painful requirement that makes every new area stale and old by the second time you run through it!
Until the MMO finally comes that stops building from the same horribly flawed first principles, we’re stuck in our prison theme parks serving time for the crime of wanting to have fun.
Have you played Divine Divinity? I loved the teleportation pyramid system along with the waypoints. I wonder if that could work in an MMO as well?
it worked great in ultima online, I don’t know why other mmos didn’t follow suit
I like the city system with MMO’s, it’s a happy middle ground where you can port freely or at relatively low expense from all major cities but to still get in the middle of nowhere requires you to hoof it some.
Also it’s worth noting that when teleportation itself is a class perk (caster types vs. fighters etc) then limiting it to some extent makes sense in order for that skill to be truly useful to the person choosing that class. I think Lineage II handled it well, giving all players a recall to cities with like a 20 minute cool down, but giving some caster classes unlimited self and party recalls and also some summon spells. For those that wanted to actually hoof it, the roads between cities wer not twisted myriads of geographic torture; they’re pretty straightforward paths of mostly safe zone.
“I’m coming! Don’t start yet! I’m (pant pant) coming!”.
Heh.
What about how Everquest is now? You can travel practically everywhere in the game with the combo of the Plane of Knowledge and the Guild Hall.
You know what happens when you can insta-port?
Oblivion. With Morrowind, a lot more attention had to be put into the world since you hoofed it most of the time; and it was absolutely captivating, for me anyway.
Oblivion? A generic forests, plains, and mountains.
The problem is less the walking, and more the places your walking around, in most MMO’s
I don’t play MMOs, these days, but I dunno, in a well developed world, making travel take time is a good way of establishing the reality of a place. It’s one thing zapping between do this zone and do that zone, but quite another to trek along with friends over the Spine of the World, the sun setting in the background, and seeing the city light up in coming darkness of the night beneath you. As long as you aren’t doing it too often, and for too trivial a reason, the idea that players occupy haunts, and that it’s a big deal when you move from one locality to another, adds a lot of flavour.
My favourite part of Knytt was the home stretch – the last walk all the way across the map, having done everything. Makes you sad to leave.
In most cases the transportation doesn’t matter so they could implement all kinds of instant travel.
But in games like EVE complete instant travel would ruin the immersion, and also make it far too safe ;)
Yup, Hunters can port themselves and their fellowship to a whole host of places and Captains can port people in their fellowship to the captain’s location wherever it may be. Furthermore there are summoning horns outside most of the big instance dungeons so anyone can summon others to their location.
Also, in addition to a one-hour cooldown port to a bound Milestone, if you buy a home you also get a port to there and each race has an earnable trait that allows you to port to their home zone too.
It’s not as unrestricted as John might like, but you never feel like you can’t get around and it rarely takes a long time to get anywhere.
Late to the party, but for my 2 cents i’d say that teleportation does add one important thing to some MMOs, response time.
If your MMO is a very heavy PvP experience, especially with anything to control or destroy, then the fact your enemy is delayed is important. If they can all instantly turn up on their doorstep and go “What up, I see you’re trying to storm our castle” then it spoils it somewhat. Even if you impose some distance restriction, the fact they can still instantaneously drop everything and come to you makes your assault far less effective, and makes the whole thing less “real” too.
Many a happy hour was spent camped out outside Mos Eisley with my friend sniping Rebels into the dirt. If they could just teleport to a different planet, we’d never have been able to control one of the main routes out of their base, ganking them for daring to disobey the Empire.
This kind of control of movement reaches it’s peak with EVE. Ask Rossignol why it’s important that people can’t just teleport about at a whim.
The other factor is somewhat to do with making things longer. MMOs need lots of quests, they need lots of ways to fill your time. Every quest needs time to create, maintain, and balance. And they all need to be of a certain length most importantly.
If your basic quest to kill 10 rats didn’t require you to walk for 10 minutes to the sewers, walk around the sewers for 10 minutes killing rats and then walk back again, then the actual quest time would be about 30 seconds.
This also ties in with the sense of narrative. We’re retelling stories of great adventures. How fun is it to play at Lord of the Rings if the quest to drop the ring into Mount Doom requires you to click on the magic teleport stone once and 30 seconds later you’re done. The journey can be important, and it adds gravitas to the situation. A hard trek up a mountain swarming with the enemy makes the reason you went up there all the more important.
I’m kind of looking forward to APB because clearly given the game is set within a City, and with a much smaller player population per server than you normally find in a MMO these issues probably won’t even feature, or be dealt with in a similar manner to GTA IV.
Perhaps I’ve missed some posts after skipping. But wouldn’t it create a large PvP issue for games such as WoW or WAR, where world PvP is possible, if you could instantly travel?
You attack a capital city in WoW in a raid to try and kill the leader, if everyone could teleport to that city after seeing the “X place is under attack!” message, then the invading force would be absolutely swamped by the sheer numbers of people who instantly responded and arrived to the invasion message.
RuneScape is similar. It allows you to teleport to cities (costs; hardly ever worth it), but most the time you have to run everywhere. Worse yet, you can only run so far before you run out of energy and have to rest.
Bleck. That’s the only reason I hate it. If I could just… appear where I had to be, well, I’d have beaten it already. >_<
I’ve had spent limited time in WoW and some grind-heavy MMOs, so I’m not the best to judge the traveling systems, but Fallout 3’s mention is pretty good as an example of fast traveling. I’ve spent 120hrs in the game, been everywhere on the map just for the exploration (I’ve reached lvl30 long before finishing the main quest), but if a new quest popped up, requiring me to go to the opposite side of the huge map where I’ve already been before, spending time to go there on foot would just be annoying.
There’s four things MMOs could ever offer, those being social interaction, world exploration, achievement gathering (skills & equipment belong here) and learning combat tactics. None of the above would suffer from fast-traveling to a place or predetermined places you’ve already visited before. As for those that argue that immersion is lost; grinding your way through re-spawning mobs and pelt&tooth-gathering quests ruin it for me a thousandfold. Cities remaining the same size in a static world when the player population has grown to 100 times that of when the game first came out, makes it less realistic than using “magic” or some other well-implemented way to travel. I’d like to also point out that MMOs are games and nothing more than that. Their goal isn’t about being realistic but exciting to play.
PVP issues with fast-traveling could be a factor, even if I always considered it should be confined to specific areas of a game. I mostly played for the co-op aspect of PVE in such games and being killed by passing-by high level opposing faction players while travelling to meet my party for an instance or quest was a great annoyance. In WoW, for example, there could never be a way to add fast-travel without changing the game’s basic notions of where everyone is free to go and raid.
Technical issues I’d understand and accept, though. Game client crashing, server stalling and such would ruin the experience for everyone, so that can be an excuse.
Honestly, I don’t plan on playing any MMO again, because of the thin stories, repeating quests and most of all, the amazing amount of immature players. If there ever was such a game that was adults-only and perhaps people would act as such, I’d give this genre another shot…
If Blizzard would do something like Portal to Dalaran in Stormwind and Orgrimmar, travel times would be cut by 90%.
Now imagine that someone shouts “RAID at Ogrimar” and the whole Realm teleports there….
I couldn’t disagree more. Travelling is fun, and adds considerable immersion.
Everquest 1 felt a lot more epic when you had to travel through dangerous areas to get to where you wanted to be, before they added the Plane of Knowledge.
World of Warcraft felt a lot more epic before they added flying mounts. There is no sense of danger or immersion in the outside world if you can just bypass every danger with ease; Where is the sense of danger as you fly over the Lich King’s citadel? Make people fight through or try to ride past the hordes of undead and it feels a lot more fun.
I don’t like wasting my time on the off chance that I might get a percentage of enjoyment from a largely pointless experience, which is why I don’t play MMOs.
Developers, if you need boring crap to make your mediocre bits look good, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.
Games should just be smaller. Gothic (1 & 2) had a good balance: a fair amount of navigation, but the world was compact enough to keep it from becoming a chore (not to mention every inch of the landscape was unique). Teleports or faster means of travel are nice but only if it doesn’t break the fiction and really, a well-constructed game shouldn’t even need it.
You just got slashdotted : http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/06/28/0459209/Why-Dont-MMOs-Allow-Easier-Transportation
The goals of game developers differ across MMORPGs. The philosophies, approach, and the idea of what they want their payers to take away from their game lead developers to approach game mechanics differently. Instant teleportation is one these areas of difference.
I began playing MMORPGs with Legends of Kesmai — a graphical interface crammed on top of a MUD, more or less. Legends had no instant teleportation. You walked everywhere.
Walking meant either using your mouse, your arrow keys, or even manually typing “n, w, w” and hitting enter. Nevertheless, the world was immersive and at least seemed to be “big.” (It was not, but that’s another thing.)
When EA bought Kesmai and canceled Legends, all of us Legends players were given free Ultima Online disks. Thus, I began playing Ultima Online.
Ultima Online possessed instant travel. All you needed was a Rune marking a location and the traveling spell (which required a certain level of magical skill).
At first, not everyone in UO had magical abilities high enough to travel. Soon, everyone leveled up their magic to the point of being able to instantly travel. EA/Origins even got into the game by creating a new skill type, Paladin abilities, that offered another route for instant travel.
People used Runes for traveling everywhere. You could put Runes into books and create “Rune books.” People collected libraries for these Rune books. Dungeon crawling but have to go to work/dinner/a date? Easy, inscribe a Rune where you are and come back when you have time.
UO was a much large world than Legends of Kesmai. Even so, it seemed so much smaller. In three years time I possessed upwards of 6 runebooks per character, my own Runebook library, and have Rune for nearly every interesting spot in the game and many uninteresting ones. I even had Runes for the middle of the ocean on boats. Seriously.
The came World of Warcraft. No Runes. There is, actually, instant travel. It’s teleporting and, once again, requires a mage. Still, it’s different.
WoW only allows you to teleport to a capital city. You can’t mark a rune and later teleport back to a dungeon or other area.
Sometimes, on WoW, you actually have to spend half an hour getting somewhere. (You can actually take longer in many circumstances — especially at a low level.)
I love it. The world feels larger. It feels more real. You have ot make real world decisions as to what you want to do based upon where you are. (Well, I can’t go help out in Silithus because I’m up in Icecrown. That would take like half an hour to get there!)
Blizzard, I think, has struck a good balance. They are increasingly adding little additions to the ability to instantly travel. (I think Warlocks always had some summon ability — but I know little about Warlocks, honestly, except I hate them in PvP.) Dungeons have summoning stones. Recruit a friend and you can summon each other once every hour.
So, why don’t MMORPGs allow easier travel? Many previous commentators have already pointed it out — greater immersion. They don’t allow it out of choice — the overall user experience is improved, they believe, by not allowing this.
Compare the attitude of WoW players to UO players after 3 years of playing. People are out and about in the world. Even the most remote places have people traveling to them.
In UO, everyone holed up in their houses or castles and, when they wanted to go out, just teleported somewhere.
The community is much more vibrant in WoW than it ever was in UO. Stormwind? People actually visit it. No one visited Britain, much less Trinsic in UO.
Sure, player-made communities were, perhaps, more robust . . . but these isolated groups and individuals from the overall UO community — it was a balkinization of the game’s community into little fiefdoms. This happens to a lesser degree in WoW.
Lack of instant travel is a big reason why. (So is the lack of housing.)
Just my 240 cents.
I should probably qualify above statement by saying I don’t believe MMOs are altogether bad, just that the ratio of interesting gameplay to grind is entirely skewed. Perhaps they could stand to learn something from singleplayer games when it comes to pacing.
Though I should note most singleplayer RPGs fall into the same trap. If Portal and World of Goo have taught us anything it should be that VARIETY and quality over quantity can make a good game great.
in WoW at least, let the engeniers to make some sort of portable Teleport, that way the raids dont depends of one particular class (Warlocks) to cut de summon waste time.
Dang… Now I _have_ to install Morrowind again! Everytime I read something about the game I get a flashback and a twinge of longing. Its odd that the new Bethesta titels never manage to make me feel the same, maybe Im just getting old?
Crosspost from slashdot.
In classic Everquest, before the ‘01 Luclin expansion, travel was phenomenally difficult and time-consuming.
1. Teleportation required the direct intervention of one of the two teleport-capable classes, and largely had to be done person-by-person. Furthermore, many of the teleport sites were a moderate distance from most of the higher-level content (North Karana as a druid/wizard transit hub? Imagine the Barrens, but without the NPCs, the hordes of newbies, the varied terrain(!), the easy access to major racial hubs, or the interesting monster spawns.)
2. Travel WITHOUT teleportation was unforgettably painful at low levels, and was tedious at any level. First off, THE BOATS. The boats were on ~20 minute timers IIRC, and took a long time themselves to pass through aqueous transit zones once one was actually aboard. Add sketchy collision detection, which regularly dropped characters’ corpses (and all their equipment) to watery graves at the bottom of the ocean, and the fact that the people using the boats most probably had the worst “swimming” skill (read: newbies) and were likely to have trouble swimming down to their bodies without drowning.
3. Say, why were the newbies on the boats in the first place, anyhow? Perhaps it could have something to do with the fact that many spells were sold at only one racial hometown. Consider that many races started on one of the useless islands to the east or west of the mainland, devoid of leveling opportunities beyond, say, level 20 (or, then, there was the Estate of Unrest…if Crushbone’s Ambassador D’Vinn didn’t teach folks the meaning of the word “train,” then Garanel Rucksif was likely to do so, as that dratted ghost liked to take the LONG route back after being brought to the front door…)
4. Then again, the casters were lucky, since they could readily “bind” themselves in a variety of somewhat handy locations, which controlled where they respawned upon death and gave them a place to Recall to. Melee classes got no such handy contrivances. It was accepted practice, even with EQ’s massive XP penalties, for a traveling melee classed character below about level 30 to enter a distant town’s bank, deposit all their equipment, then attack the bank guards to get a “cheap” ride to their rather-inflexible bind point. “Cheap” meaning that even though experience was a pain in the butt to get and required a semi-competent group AT LEVEL FRICKIN’ 30, traveling home took EVEN LONGER.
5. No mounts. Yup. Wanna go faster than a slow trot? Well, there’s Spirit of Wolf, castable by Druids, Shamans, and Rangers. It’s a 34% to 50% speed boost for about half an hour, which was unbelievably handy back in the day, since while it only shaved a few minutes off travel time directly, it was enough to let someone outrun the most common bats and bugs, which let you take a more direct path through many zones. Once one learned where the caster mobs were situated (caster mobs liked to charm, root, snare, and stun in those days), one could travel through much of the outer world with little fear (save running out of SoW midway and not being able to find a replacement). There were Journeyman Boots. About a 35% boost, if one could manage to spawn the Ancient Cyclops — getting that spawn to occur has been a legendary challenge from the annals of MMO history. Then there was Selo’s Accelerando. I am convinced that there were precisely two motives for having a high-level bard. One, filling out an account with one member of every class. Two, Selo’s Accelerando. At level 6, bards were the first class to get a run-speed buff. It started at a piddly 21% bonus, but increased linearly from then on, and benefitted from equipment. Every other run-speed buff capped out at 75% or so at level 60 in optimum conditions. Selo’s capped at 158%. So, yeah.
Maybe I’m getting to be a gaming curmudgeon. Maybe I’m out of touch. But, frankly, anyone griping about travel in WoW is a whiny little snot. Back in my day, it WAS uphill both ways, because you had to climb a mountain in the middle. A big one. With monsters. And dead ends. And deep, hard-to-see, will-kill-a-level-50-pally chasms on the path back down. And several races didn’t have infravision, so if they got there at night, they couldn’t see jack (turning up gamma correction just made the inky black blur into an inky gray wash). Never mind the horrors that awaited you if you attempted to cross the forests leading up to the mountain at night (a low-level newbie zone full of bats and pixies turned into one of the end-game epic weapon raid zones EVERY NIGHT). And lord help you if you died to an overleveled, moves-faster-than-run-speed (hey, guess what?) GRIFFIN in the Karanas, because then you got to do it all again, NAKED, then you got to try to find your pathetic corpse and all of your equipment in the middle of a 4-zone region so devoid of landmarks and human activity that it made the Barrens look like NYC during rush hour. Lest you forget, this was all leading up to the purchase of some account-drainingly expensive skills or spells, after which you were likely to commit suicide to get your character back home? I didn’t even have it bad…I didn’t play an evil casting class. I knew that doing THAT was going to be a REAL pain in the butt.
Hey. Pay your Gryphon fare, bring a frickin’ book or a browser window, and get off of my lawn. You’re not impressing me. WoW has a reasonable mix of travel options, and it becomes a MOOT POINT with flying mounts — players are always 10 minutes from anywhere, easily. The only way to make it easier is to just set up a teleporter hub/waypoint world map where people touch a glowing button and instantly appear where they want to be.
One example that I found fun and intriguing was Ragnarok Online’s warp portal spell.
An acolyte could get this spell then type a command at the spot they wanted to be their teleport place (up to 3), then they could cast their spell to create a warp to that area.
What I liked about it was that anyone could take it… it just had a maximum number of uses. Therefor you would often see people in cities waiting for a warp portal to pop up, and hope it takes them to where they want to go. At the same time it could be used to transport people to random places. it was a fun mechanic.
I suppose more relevant to this article is simply the fact that transportation is something that could encourage interaction between players. So with the warp portal people would talk to an acolyte and then trade the acolyte some zeny. Or in FFXI a person would shout for a whm to teleport them to one of the crystals. Although FFXI sorta went the streamline cheated method and brought in rings that do the same teleport.
On the note of WoW compared to FFXI. I like that FFXI has a warp cudgel that allows you to cast warp, and each one has it’s own timer. My mithra personally carries around 4 warp cudgels =P. As well if you do the quests you can do outpost teleports to various outposts aroudn teh world for a fee. and teleport to your home city through those outposts. Then you got random people who teleport you to random places, and random items that seem to teleport you to various palces.
If I could add warp portal to FFXI, and take away the teleport rings. I think that would be perfect =). Warp portal and going to an unknown location was just too much fun.
I want to to travel because I don’t want the experience of being in a world to be cheapened.
In the days before commercial airlines and combustion engines, traveling meant something unique, special and life-affirming. Now it does not.
If gaming is a matter of mere convenience why bother at all? Presumably everything can be calculated and resolved without you touching the keyboard. Perhaps MMOs are the last method for teaching an attention-deficit generation how to appreciate the journey and not simply the outcome.
I think the travel system in WoW has greatly improved since I first started playing. There are fairly easy routes to all capital cities, there are flight masters for both factions in nearly every zone (and many zones have had new flight points installed over the course of years), 30 minute hearthstone, portals outside every instance, mages who can port to capital cities as well as certain towns. There are also multi-player mounts (mammoths) and I have seen many people offering taxi service in game, free of charge to low level players. An upcoming patch promises ground mounts at level 20 (lowered from 30, originally level 40), and flying mounts at level 60 (down from 70). Additionally the PTR patch notes reveal that regular mounted flight speed will be increased to 150% (up from 60%).
If you are venturing into WoW for the first time, of course it seems to take forever to get from place to place walking, but to the beginner, this is how you learn find quests and their objectives, as well as gain xp from discovering and perhaps find an easter egg or 2. If you’re starting an alt, you already know where most everything is anyway, and more than likely the fastest way to get there. Why rush? Stop to smell the
rosesPeacebloom.Well WoW has instant teleportation on a smaller scale than Guild Wars (mages). It also has something Guild Wars doesn’t even have – summoning people to places they have never been before (warlocks).
Now that we’ve cleared that up, the real questions concerning those features in WoW are
1) should both forms be removed since they fly in the face of the people that say instant teleportation breaks immersion and makes a world smaller. In both cases the caster can’t go anywhere he/she hasn’t been to already (aka Guild Wars), HOWEVER, they can surely take anyone else to somewhere that other person has never been to before.
2) If these features are fine in WoW (lore or whatever), then why are they fine when given to two specific classes and not to everyone else? For the lore folks out there, I can completely understand. Of course, changing the lore could solve the problem by having teleportation stones. However, for all the people that have said instant teleportation makes games smaller and still think WoW Mages and Warlocks should have them, then why? In that case, lore has nothing to do with the argument. Instant teleportation makes the world smaller. Warlocks and Mages have instant teleportation. In these cases, I think there may just be some people that wish to keep those particular features to certain classes of characters. If you realy think about it, for these people (the people that think teleportation shrinks the world and yet still believe mages and warlocks should keep it) – you just don’t understand what you want, since it’s a lore reason and not a size reason.
The folks that believe teleportation in all forms makes the world smaller and shouldn’t be allowed should be the ones that support removing said features from warlocks and mages. They’ve made it clear that keeping the world large and vast is more important than lore – otherwise lore can explain just about anything reasonably – see characters in WoW riding steam powered motorcycles and other things such as aliens arriving in magical spaceships.
As far as the Frodo example people keep using, that’s crap anyways. One – Frodo had never been to Mt Doom before therefore would not be able to teleport there under most current MMO teleportation schemes. Second, books and movies do things to intentionally draw out and make a better story – not to expediate things. Many MMOs aren’t popular because of their grade A stories.
Automatic travel in games like WoW equate themselves to commercial breaks. Anyone that sits through a flight from Aberdine to Gadgetzan to enjoy the immersion and lore should be considered to speak for everyone (around an 11 minute flight btw if I recall) – similar to flying from Winterspring to Gadgetzan for a particular toy yeti quest.
Take it with the game in question.
WoW – no, not because of immersion, making the world larger, or whatever – purely because Blizzard decided to incorporate world PvP into the game.
EVE – no, for reasons mentioned above.
Guild Wars – yes, no world pvp and it was done nicely
Warhammer – World/Realm PvP-centric game, of course not
Shadowbane – pvp-only game – no
Tabula Rasa – yes it could have worked well, in fact it had a de facto insta travel since portals were cheap and freely available – and no that’s not what killed TR
other games not designed around world PvP or with world PvP in mind, certainly, again DEPENDING upon the game. There’s no one-size-fits-all. In fact there’s room for not all games to be identical to one another, which seems to be what people here really want – every game to be the same as the first one they played.
If I want real immersion, I’ll play a game where I don’t here people ERPing and talking about politics/religion/etc in the city trade chat or guild/clan/characters named after who knows what.
“Automatic travel in games like WoW equate themselves to commercial breaks. Anyone that sits through a flight from Aberdine to Gadgetzan to enjoy the immersion and lore should be considered to speak for everyone (around an 11 minute flight btw if I recall) – similar to flying from Winterspring to Gadgetzan for a particular toy yeti quest.”
That was a typo. I meant they should NOT be considered to speak for everyone.
as an add, for the person above that mentioned the release of TBC and the crowding around the Dark Portal crashing servers – well you just tried to expain why instant telportation shouldn’t be allowed by providing an example of a crash where instant teleportation was NOT allowed. In other words, instant teleportation isn’t even in that equation nor would it change the outcome. Many cases where players have protested or had meetings on particular servers at particular times have crashed said servers in the past. This was always without everyone having instant teleportation. Wintergrasp is being competely re-worked because of overcrowding – all without instant teleportation. Overcrowding an area in spikes is going to happen with or without instant teleportation.
Teleporting anywhere suddenly becomes a weapon if you include it in the game.
Imagine attacking what you think is a lone player wandering through the woods (a significant, though undesirable if you’re the receiving end, part of most online games.) And suddenly 3, or 90, of his guildmates teleport in, and grind you into mincemeat.
In some games with dedicated teleport locations, if you didn’t move off the teleport platform fast enough, you got telefragged.
And, there’s teleport campers.
All of those make teleporting is a weapon, and it now needs to be balanced with some sort of other non-teleport spell or something.
There’s a bit more to it than just moving from place to place.
Think about how much it could suck if 90 opponents suddenly spawned the next time you’re wandering around in WoW or something similar.
courtesy of wiki’s Timeline of Arda (guess the comment system doesn’t like links so I am re-posting my message).
3018
April 11 – Gandalf reaches Hobbiton. He returns to the Shire, telling Frodo Baggins he must take the Ring away
December 25 – The Fellowship of the Ring sets out in the evening from Rivendell
3019
March 25 – The Host is surrounded on the Slag-hills. Frodo and Sam reach the Sammath Naur. Gollum (Sméagol) seizes the One Ring and falls into the Cracks of Doom. Downfall of Barad-dûr and the passing of the Dark Lord Sauron.
However, I will point out that all three of the recent movies totaled less than or around 12 hours, not close to a year. Also, in the last movie Frodo has almost instant travel back to Gondor from Mt Doom, the hobbits have instant travel to the boats from Gondor, they have further instant travel back to the Shire from the boats. Even though it all seems like it was a very long trip, all you really saw (or read) were the important/non-tedious events. It is similar to the near insta-travel that Warhammer and LOTRO provide in the case of their flight points and swift travel. They do it just like in the movie and books – cut out the tedium. Nobody would watch a 12-month long movie about Lord of the Rings. Hours upon hours of watching them walk or ride just would not be interesting. The way it is presented you only think that it takes 12 months when in actuality it only took a few hours on the television/movie screen.
Comparing instant travel to lord of the rings or anything else is not a true comparison because with the exception of The Chase, most books and movies do not show most of the tedium. You see what happens before, you read or see a bit about them driving/riding off somewhere, then you see what happens afterwards.
‘he looks around for the last time then he boards the ship. Twelve months later he finally arrives at his destination at xx.’
that didn’t take 12 months. It took around 5-10 seconds and implied 12 months. some people can’t recognize the difference. I argue that Lord of the Rings (just sticking to the movies since everyone reads at different speeds) was more epic due to it being around 12 hours than it would have been had it lasted the full 11-12 months.
Stretching things out by including the tedium, in most cases, makes something much less epic than it could be. It only figures that LORTO would get this idea to a point whereas a game like WoW doesn’t.
I think this only really applies to non-world pvp games, though for the reasons already mentioned. However, even Warhammer Online uses it to a point since flying from one location to another is merely a cut-scene… I don’t think it would be good in EVE at all. It works really good in Guild Wars. After all, you see the events of the trip to Mount Doom, but the trip back is pretty much avoided in the movies. Imagine three more movies just to cover the really boring trip back (well, plus the scouring of the shire)…
Well, Lineage 2 has a very good teleport option :
- you may recall to the nearest city with a scroll of escape
- from a city, you may teleport to other cities (sometimes requires 2 teleports or more)
- from a city, you may teleport to a few keypoints around it
Travelling is quite fast but you still have to do the “last mile” walking. It don’t remove fully the need for walking but makes it very acceptable (a few minutes instead of 1/2h or more).
Also, Lineage 2 is quite PvP-oriented (clan wars, sieges, … and PK if you want).
Guild Wars allows you to intant-travel… but it’s focused on the storyline and it has some bonuses for exploring the world.
WoW’s travel are way to tedious… Griffins are too slow, boats are annoying (why not auto-disembark you when you reach your destination)… “provinces” are often quite big and only have one griffin halt… And mounts are expensive and only come after lots of grinding and levelling…
I tried to read as many comments as possible so forgive me if I am restating something someone else has already said.
Lack of instant travel is simply put bad design. No matter if it is server load, PVP, grinding, mob spawns, or “the experience” it simply boils down to design.
For the analogy people have refered to a couple times with Lord of the Rings. According to the Guild Wars system they couldn’t have traveled there immediately as they hadn’t been there before. Something that is more a kin to GW however is how long it took Merry and Pippin to reach Isengard when there was adventure to be had, and how long it didn’t take for Aragorn and company to reach them from Helms Deep since there was no adventure. I note that above I saw a comment saying that the travel time is implied in stories when there isn’t anything of interest. Achieving this in a game is difficult game design, but not impossible.
Amusing to consider the way the giant eagles saved people so many times, and yet they didn’t simply ride those to Mordor, (search youtube for “the way it should have ended”).
This is actually a very simple, hopefully very obvious overarching design issue: the Time Sink(tm).
Subscription-based games – especially massively multiplayer ones – provide professionally-created content in exchange for a monthly subscription fee. Professional content creation costs money – a lot of it – so a developer ideally wants to make sure that whenever they fork out the dough to create something, that something generates a maximum return in the form of subscription fees. If your content is experienced too quickly, then you have to pay to create NEW content earlier than you’d like, and the business model begins to lag (or in the worst cases fall apart).
So how do you squeeze the most subscription revenue out of the least possible new content? You slo-o-o-o-w things down. Spread them out. Stretch that content out so that it eats up a maximum number of monthly payments while your playerbase is experiencing it. At the most obvious levels, this is done with experience requirements versus experience rewards, but there are more insidious mechanisms underneath that.
Travel time is one of those. It may not seem like much, but all those Barrens runs at low level (“gotta run to Thunder Bluff to get the FP”), all those flightpaths, all those graveyard runs back to your corpse, those add up from minutes to hours, hours to days. They also tire you out – if you turn in a quest and the next leg sends you hoofing it across the world for the next breadcrumb, it introduces a high chance that you’ll say “well, that’s enough for tonight” and log out in the inn – thus ending your gaming day and stretching out the experience until you log in again.
Tradeskilling is another great example. Let’s say that ore is piling up in your bag and you’re running out of space. Forges are scattered around, sure, but generally speaking you have to head back to a town to find one. And every time you get back to a town, do some commerce, do some housekeeping, that’s a chance you’ll log off and take a break.
Breaks from gaming are healthy and very recommended – but they’re also the win condition for the MMO publisher. The more time you spend in any given month NOT progressing through content is time the content spends generating effort-free money. WoW is at its most profitable, in essence, while you’re sleeping or eating dinner or going to Grandma’s house – or the collective downtime you spend warming the saddle of a gryphon or wind rider.
This is why I like games like Jade Dynasty, and Perfect World to a lesser extent. Not only can I pay a small fee to teleport, but they have auto routing so when you have a long run you can just go afk or play one off their mini-games. It preserves the appearance of a vast world without punishing the user for it. WHen I play WoW and I go AFK while flying in the general direction of my destination on a mount I always end up dying
@Magnut- Those things are also what BURN you out.
I end up quitting games when the quests and travel time get too tedious to deal with anymore. Sometimes I come back a year or so later when my memories of the frustration of getting a quest at x, turning in a quest at y after 20m run, followed by being sent back to x… over and over and over. Once in a while, especially when changing areas you expect it and its beneficial. Ping pong is not.
“teleport home” items, should be on a 5s refresh. Locations should be locked till you get there at least once. After that you should be able to transport to a central location of that area anytime… for a fee, however it needs massively faster than wow griffons, which would help take care of a secondary problem– massive inflation.
It’s only a matter of time till worlds get so big being an ‘explorer’ can be a full class in them even with teleportation.
(OK, I tried to read all the coments, but I failed and “teleported” to the bottom. Take that!)
You kids and your insta-travel. In my day, we rolled 2d12 on the random encounter table for every hex of overland travel before we even got to the dungeon, and we liked it! We loved it!
Wow, are we so impatient about everything in society today that even our fantasy worlds must give us immediate gratification. Why can’t I become a level 300 grand master of ass kicking now! I mean really. Take the game for what it is. It’s a distraction to keep you from going out and killing your neighbors dog for barking too loudly last night. Enjoy the time spent running from one point to another.
Seriously though. If you allowed people in MMO’s to jump from any point to any other point at any time in the game gameplay and balance would be thrown out the window. The main reason for travel is so that when you get to the other side of the map with your giant zerg of people and you get wiped out, you can’t just pop right back in and fight again. You have to reorganize, travel back to your destination and mount another attack.
John Walker, you asked “Why can´t I teleport in MMOs?”. Well, they aren´t just MMOs. They´re also RPGs. Teleporting is a magical power that is out of place in World of Warcraft, except in the hands of characters who have specialist magical powers, such as mages. They shouldn´t be for everybody. When they are, a little bit of the magic of the game is lost.
Every time I teleport, I wonder why, if I can use this magical power freely, can´t I just blow up kobolds or Flame Leviathans for free. After all, the power to transport me from Thunder bluff to Stormwind is free and at my disposal. Hell, innkeepers appear to have these magical hearthstones. How about taking some of that power and weaponizing it! If I can use a heathstone as a warrior, why can´t I at least use a wand?
So in my ideal RPG, I´d remove hearthstones and make sure that any teleport devices cost lots of money.
It already takes very little time to run the length of Kalimdor. The World of Warcraft is a small world, indeed. Teleporting just makes it smaller, and introduces a jolt in the RPG experience. I´d rather it wasn´t made worse.
WoW uses the simple ability to move fast as part of its reward system, and to add to time in-game, and to add to the grind for gold.
Who would have thought that a simple increase in movement speed would feel like such an accomplishment! It’s obvious there is no technical problem with letting characters move faster – everyone gets to eventually, once you get to the proper level and shell out ever-increasing piles of gold for learning the skill and buying the steed. There’s also no technical problem with teleport-on-demand – mages get to do it eventually, and warlocks can summon eventually.
It’s like starting out with a 100-lb pack on your back. When you finally get to take it off you feel light as a feather! It’s a cheap way to feel like you are being rewarded, when really they are just taking off the burden they started you out with.
Slow travel is what keeps an MMO from feeling like an FPS; especially at the beginning, when you want to keep your beginning and advanced players more seperated, and introduce them to the rules of the world. This is more important in non-phased games.
The problem is that at the higher levels, this falls down a bit, as the most advanced players just want to *get there* and aren’t concerned with what’s in-between.
One thing I enjoyed about Asheron’s Call all those many years ago was that not only was the world truly huge, but it also *felt* huge, with the restrictions on travel. And it also utilized a trick that WoW (and maybe others) don’t seem to use – the day was not 24 hours. If you ran from Yaraq to Rithwic directly, it’s likely the sun would set at least once during the journey. It’s a trick, but it’s an easy and useful one. And it’s a shame more designers don’t try to make the game more “epic” in ways like that.
One of the Wow.com chaps has written an article after reading this.
http://www.wow.com/2009/06/30/fast-travel-and-why-its-hard-to-find-in-mmo-games/
MMOs never ever were about fun!
It’s the single most annoying genre of games ever created when you think hard about it.
They try to get you hooked to something you don’t need. It’s like fastfood. It never truly tastes good (except for people with pathetically low standards perhaps), but for some reason people keep buying it.
Just like fastfood, playing MMOs tends to be unhealthy. The whole reward thing through stat-grinding is pathetic from a game designer’s point of few. ( Of course, Jon Blow argued more or less the exact same thing and to no-one’s surprise I agree fully with him here. )
It’s potentially a great genre, because people could do a lot of crazy stuff with open-ended worlds and lots of lots of people. But so far all MMOs have been doing the same annoying thing.
Also, to be honest, no fast-travel wouldn’t be an issue if normal travel wouldn’t be boring people to death.
In the case of WoW, Blizzard needs only look at an earlier game for the solution:
Diablo 1.
Town portal scroll. (Creating them for any town would cut down on travelling times enough to please people who don’t have the alt-button and tab-button on their keyboard) ;) Similarly the time to open a portal could ”warn” server of incoming spikes that need be loadbalanced.
My favorite method of transportation in any game is the use of Levitate and Slow Fall spells in Morrowind. Why teleport when you can Levitate as high as you can and then glide into town on Slow Fall spells with a flock of Cliff Racers in hot persuit?
Sigh.
Why do about 90% of the comments read the title not as it is actually writte “Why Can’t I… Teleport In MMOs?” but as “Why Can’t I… Teleport In World of Warcraft?”
Go play something else less formulaic, like EVE-Online, first then come back & try whining about how travelling from generic fantasy town x to high level XP/loot/quest farming area y is too boring.
You wonder why developers don’t put a useful teleport mechanism into their game.
1) They want to slow you down so you spend longer in the game and thus spend more money on it.
2) They’re just being dicks.
Might I add:
3. They don’t get to decide that
In the end it’s the suits who get to decide. So, it comes down to:
What’s the business case – If we put this in, will people spend more of their time or money with us?
From a business perspective, either is good. Money is obvious, time may be less so, but time spent in your game is time not spent in another’s. This is why MMOs are like softdrinks and their ‘taste panels’ – the business does not care about what people say, but what they do. If people say they prefer the taste of A over B, but they actually drink more of B, which of the two versions will go on the market?
Perhaps the best MMO travel system I have encountered is in a F2P MMO called Shaiya by SonoV. In this game there a number of “free” fast-travel options:
Every major town will have a Gate Keeper that lets you teleport instantly to another town. Not all Gate Keepers will let you go to every other Gate Keeper, but the vast majority of the time you do not need this. These Gate Keepers do cost a small amount of in-game Gold, but it not exactly hard to get.
In later episodes of the game there is a Guild House, which has several Gate Keepers to many strategic locations [Dungeons, PvP zones etc] and these are free. Although it does require maintenance on the guilds behalf.
/return and /town commands. When typed into the chat window a 10 second countdown begins, when the time is up you are teleported back to the nearest major town on the map. Brilliant. Whats more, if you move or are attacked in the 10 second countdown period it will be aborted – so you can’t abuse it to escape from a fight.
Movement and Party Member Summon runes. The Movements let you teleport [after a short "casting" period] to a member of your party. The Summon runes have the opposite effect, when used they [again after a short "casting" period] teleport your entire party to your current location. The cast time prevents you instantly moving/teleporting people to you [it can be interrupted by moving/being attacked] and the runes themselves have a cooldown period, meaning you can’t spam them.
Teleportation Stones. These stones allow you to set up to 4 locations as bookmarks. Think of it as a portable Gate Keeper with destinations of your choosing. There are some limitations on the bookmarks – for instance you cannot save locations in most dungeons so you cannot use them to instantly warp to a boss spawn etc.
Mounts, as with any MMO, are available and these do a good job of getting you places a Gate Keeper can’t take you in a short amount of time.
There are a lot of options there for getting to places quickly, and in some versions of the game a lot of those items are available only from the Item Mall. So their “abuse” is somewhat limited.
But as people have said so many times, once you have seen a place, there is no point trudging there each and every time thereafter.