By John Walker on June 26th, 2009 at 11:35 pm.
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.
26/06/2009 at 23:45 Gurrah says:
Morrowind had the best mix of transportation systems in any game. Ships/Silt striders, mage guild teleports, divine intervention, almsivi intervention and the mark/recall combo. Genius. And it made so much sense, it fitted perfectly into the gameworld.
26/06/2009 at 23:48 Gurrah says:
Oh and I totally forgot the propylon chambers used by the Dunmer. I say it again. Genius.
26/06/2009 at 23:54 Jeremy says:
Hmm, I would think it is probably more along the lines of what Ste Curran, but you make a great point with Fallout 3. Sure you can zip and zoom wherever you want to, but only once you’ve been there the first time. Even after I had the option though, I still liked trudging around, checking out the Wasteland. It was interesting and part of the excitement was in traveling on foot and seeing everything. The only difference is this: In Fallout 3, you’re a loner, you have nobody to group with, it is not a community experience. I don’t suddenly need to be 1000 game kms away to group with some guys running an instance. I’m taking the game at my pace, on my schedule, killing whatever I want. In WoW, getting a group is a tough thing sometimes, and you can get the boot if the leader knows you’re on the wrong continent 10 minutes away from the nearest flight point.
The hearthstone set to 60 minutes is so ridiculous it shatters my mind. Why can’t someone immediately teleport their friend so they can quest / instance / trade / grief whoever they want? In my mind, a community game should give the community instant access to itself. It’s more about who you can be around, not necessarily where it takes place. If it takes me 15 minutes to travel to my friend to do a 5 minute quest… it’s not worth it.
26/06/2009 at 23:55 Rich_P says:
I like how TF2 has teleporters, just in case walking an extra 30 seconds is too much work.
Teleportation, or rather the lack thereof, is a usability issue, especially when it comes to assembling parties. In UO, for example, I’d often sail around the game world, hauling cotton to far-flung merchants, but could easily use ruin stones to teleport to my friends. Best of both worlds.
Incidentally, two of my favorite MMOs (PlanetSide, Guild Wars) have robust teleportation systems that cut the crap and let you enjoy the game.
26/06/2009 at 23:56 Duoae says:
I think if you limited it to places you’ve already been then that almost eliminates what Mr. Curran was talking about.
Other than that…. the only reason i can think of to make people slog around without a tin-foil-esque thought would be that Mr. Stern’s reasoning is correct. Load-bearing on ‘sectors’ of the game world would have to be drastically re-written in games that didn’t previously support it. If everyone and anyone could just jump around instantaneously it’s probable and possible that a sudden spike in connections might overload the server node before it could balance it out with another identical node or somesuch.
26/06/2009 at 23:57 Joseph says:
Originally I only had ideas very similar to your 1 and 2 ideas.
By the end of reading this, I see the most sense in Ste Curran’s reasons. Players don’t want to be the master of a shoebox, and devs don’t want to risk the player’s fix of action bits to be realised as monotonous. Leaving in the travel ensures players compare the action to something totally pointless and crap.
26/06/2009 at 23:58 Joseph says:
But that might even also be tinfoil-hat material.
27/06/2009 at 00:02 Gideon says:
Guild Wars actually had a click-travel system. I liked it at first but then found the experience to be a little disjointed.
27/06/2009 at 00:08 Devan says:
Hmmm
I guess it whether or not unlimited teleportation would cause the game to break down depends a lot on how the game provides ‘fun’. I think Ste Curran’s explanation is pretty accurate. Certainly most MMOs would make a poor single-player game even though superficially they are in the same vein as Fallout 3 etc.
What MMOs lack in action and story they attempt to make up for with multiplayer teamwork and social prestige. Like Ste said, nobody wants to be a hero in a shoebox, and since “large open world spaces” can only be measured by the time it takes to traverse it, the developers feel the understandable need to limit teleportation.
27/06/2009 at 00:09 Wulf says:
I completely agree with you John.
What if, in World of Warcraft, after running around and collecting flight points, you had the option of having someone teleport you instead of waiting for the long flight? And what if that teleport was free of charge, i.e.: not costing any money, in-game or real?
That’s exactly what SOE did with Free Realms.
Whatever the hell possesses MMO developers to think we want to run around a squiggly set of roads that look like they were directed by a drunken barfly being followed around by road-laying and bridge-building teams I’ll never know.
“No, you can’t even walk in a straight like, stick to the zig-zaggy roads where it’s safe. Even though this road goes in almost concentric circles where it could just run a straight path. Sorry, we’re MMO developers, not Romans!”
fffff
Well Free Realms has proper roads, too.
And it actually makes the game more fun and less stressful because of the straight roads and the free teleporters, and it was one of the reasons I’ve had more fun with Free Realms than most MMOS at late, because teleporting makes sense!
It’s not just the new kids on the block, either. One of the earliest MMOs, Ultima Online, had moongates! Even back then tehy knew that people wouldn’t want to walk/gallop their horses along the same patch of land time and again.
And if a friend logs in and PMs you with “fffffff, I logged out in a bad area, please come and help me!”, then it’d be nice if you could just warp over to them and help.
Again, in Free Realms you can.
Why the hell can’t you in other MMOs?!
So I’m with you, John, and I think other MMOs should really start building their structure based on the Free Realms idea, and if they’re inventive enough then they can figure out a way, I mean, even I can pull something out of my arse.
For example: Dragon paths (or leylines) flow all around the planet, the spirit energy of a person can be magically pulled along with the paths given the right sort of gateway, and the physical body simply is wherever the spirit is. Once one has entered the paths, one can rematerialise wherever there’s a gateway for the spirit to exit again.
Give the players the ability to setup temporary gateways and you have a system similar to Free Realms with half-arsed lore that could match most of that in Warcraft.
There’s just no excuse.
(This post was brought to you by: Free Realms. -Ed)
27/06/2009 at 00:10 Ging says:
I suspect Mr Stern has it on the head in the majority of cases – teleportation is clearly a possibility as GMs and the like do it all the time (and can do it to players as well) but to have mass teleportation by the player base may well add an extra huage strain on the back end as it tries to keep up with which zone you’re in and hence, which bit of the server cluster you’re part of.
Of course, it’s probably just them being dicks.
27/06/2009 at 00:12 SlappyBag says:
It’s all about peaks and lulls isn’t it. Though travel should be made easier in such cases I don’t think it should be instantaneous. As Joseph said, you need something crap to compare the good things to to make them good.
27/06/2009 at 00:14 DK says:
It’s a game design issue. Do you want your game to be obviously “gamey” – bring on the teleports.
Do you want your MMO world to feel realistic-ish cut down the insta-port to a minimum.
Take Vanguard – if there’s one thing it does well it’s knowing what it wants. It’s travel system is unforgiving, but because of that, you really appreciate the sheer scale of it.
WoW’s World feels tiny, more so the more expansion they bring out (since they cut down the travel time more and more), while Vanguard’s World feels like the entirety of Middle Earth (ironically, completely unlike Lord of the Rings Online).
27/06/2009 at 00:15 Steve says:
Actually as far as WoW’s is concerned, the hearthstone is down to 30min and they’ve added a lot of ways to jump around a bit easier over the months/years (summoning stones outside instances, portal hubs in dalaran and shattrath, changed the way warlock summons work, etc). Plus they are reducing the level limits on normal / epic mounts in the next patch, so it doesn’t take as long to get a speed boost.
As to why they are like this? perhaps its just to damned disorienting (or demanding on a server) to have hundreds of players zipping about all over the place instantly. That and if your trying to build a believable world they might think that it would mess with the lore and “break immersion” or something.
27/06/2009 at 00:19 Steve says:
It’s number 2. You don’t have to be tinfoil-hatted to think that. The developers of most MMO’s want you to spend as much time as possible trying to accomplish things in the game. The more time spent arsing around walking from place to place is more subscription fees for them. It’s always been like that, and probably always will be.
Glad I stopped playing treadmill games long ago.
27/06/2009 at 00:22 Riotpoll says:
I like fast travel, walking to where the fun is wasting time I could be having fun.
27/06/2009 at 00:27 Captain Haplo says:
Even if WoW wanted to change, I might have my doubts. I’m not a WoW player, but I played a little, and my dad is one, so I have to wonder: by making teleportation free and full, would you obselete mounts?
I can imagine a lot of people angry, even if the change is a good one. If people created a insta-teleport machine today, they’d probably piss a lot of people off by driving nearly three or four transit industries into immediate ruin. (This is a hypothetical scenario so etc, but you know).
27/06/2009 at 00:29 elias says:
It’s so that if a tree falls in one of the forests between points of interest, it will make a sound.
27/06/2009 at 00:32 DrazharLn says:
I think Ste Curran has it right. The travel is about pacing the game.
On the other hand, there is more than one way to pace a game, and I can imagine that not being able to teleport could be really annoying.
However, I imagine someone needs to have a look at whether this pacing is more beneficial to the experience than teleportation
27/06/2009 at 00:35 EbeneezerSquid says:
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*.)
Which is the reason given for why they abandoned the Utopia Campaign, and are starting fresh with GW2 -A new engine that can do such things that the present one can’t.
27/06/2009 at 00:35 DrazharLn says:
As DK says, some games benefit more from the pacing and feel of size.
I don’t think WoW is that game though. It’s hardly an immersive game (or so I hear).
27/06/2009 at 00:36 Penn says:
This is why I play City of Villains.
Travel powers mean that even without teleporting, you move around far far faster than in any other game I’ve seen, and by whatever method you like. Once you get Ouroboros access or an equipped superbase, you can almost instantly warp to any zone in the game.
City of Heroes isn’t as well laid out, but has most of the same advantages. :)
The ‘fast’ travel method (griffons and the like) in WoW is incredibly slow in comparison.
27/06/2009 at 00:38 superking208 says:
@Gurrah:
Exactly, so where was it in Oblivion?! Or Fallout 3? All you got was a fuck-immersion button…
27/06/2009 at 00:38 Kelron says:
Thinking along the same lines as Ste Curran, tedious travel gives players something to aim for to speed it up, whether that be mounts or limited teleportation systems. Getting your first mount seems to be a major goal for players in many MMOs, because it’s so damn boring retreading the same ground over and over. I doubt many players stop to question why they have to retread it at all.
I don’t think making players travel is always a bad thing, however. In my highly biased opinion, it’s essential to the gameplay of EVE Online. The game is often criticised for its slow pace and the travelling time involved with any action, but if players could just teleport to anywhere in the galaxy it would fall apart. PvP combat is as much about outmaneuvering your enemy as it is about the actual fight. If reinforcements could arrive from anywhere with no warning, it would simply come down to who has the most pilots online.
On the more peaceful side of the game, EVE’s economy is regional. The galaxy is split up into a number of regions, within a region you can only see prices of and buy items from systems in that region. Players can make fortunes identifying large price differences between regions and hauling a freighter full of good across the galaxy. Another thing instant travel would destroy.
27/06/2009 at 00:40 Hunam says:
I can’t really agree on the sentiment here, ignoring that if a thousand players all teleported to the same zone at the same time would probably crash the server outright, it would just make the pvp aspect of WoW useless when it comes to raiding. If you’re trying to take stormwind etc, you kind of need the element of surprise to get through the gate, then resistance trickles through and you take it down, now imagine if your storming the bridge and suddenly 100 lvl 80 mother fuckers, angry as hell appear from no where, you’ll all be dead very fast till your troops warp in and turn the thing into mass chaos with people zapping in and out all the time.
Maybe something like a friendstone etc with a 15 min cool down would help the situation better, so one sets it off to mark the location and the other sets his off to warp to his friend. But free warping would just be a mess.
27/06/2009 at 00:41 Some Guy says:
runescape dose telaports well, or it did when i played.
it had teleports to various locations become avalable as you leveled up magic, saving time but the runes needed were made expensive enough that you notice the cost. this ment that you would travel particualy for long distances after earning them and you could esaly get to where you needed to go for your level but there was stil the carrot of more teleports.
27/06/2009 at 00:42 Captain Haplo says:
I found the Morrowind system to be neat… If you knew the routes and such. Since it wasn’t a 100% travel-everywhere system, you’d have to make a stopover in one place to go to another place… Which is actually fairly neat, even if I proceeded to spend a lot of my money on useless trips trying to figure out where I was going. :\
But I prefer the fast-travel button anyway. You don’t *need* to walk every inch of land to be immersed.
27/06/2009 at 00:48 unwize says:
I think travelling is an important immersive element to inhabiting a virtual world with other people. If you allow players to just zip about as they please, you drastically reduce the chance of random player encounters out in the wilderness, and the world consequently feels smaller and less populated.
And yes, MMOs are all about giving players incentives to spend an obscene amount of hours playing them. If you dangle the carrot of quicker travelling options in front of the player’s noses, then they are likely to put in the time to earn them.
It should be noted that in LotRO, there are many ‘swift-travel’ routes (teleportation by a different name) between major hubs, and more of these open up as you complete content within relevant zones. You basically earn the right to skip through a zone when you’ve completed the content within it, which seems a sensible way to do things.
27/06/2009 at 00:50 Kadayi says:
Mr Stern is near the mark.
Basically its a lot of effort for the game to handle sudden player relocation, rather than transitional (between adjoining locations), therefore by applying time limits the developers can ensure that the server doesn’t get overloaded, because they know what the maximum strain should be. If they reduced the limits or removed them full stop, then invariably they’d be opening up the floodgates to people whose idea of fun is crashing servers and ruining everyone elses fun by rapid teleporting on mass. The same sort of people who given the chance will drop say 100,000 duped items into a populated zone and thus turn everyones game into unresponsive slideshows (for the lulz).
27/06/2009 at 00:50 mandrill says:
This only holds as a true criticism of the theme park type MMOs IMO. In EVE, travel is half the fun. Getting into somwhere you’re really not welcome, causing some havoc, and then getting out again is what the basic core of the game is about for an awful lot of people. Roaming is a big part of piracy, and trade. Controlling who gets in and out of your territory is important. Instant teleportation is available but it is necessarily limited, often by the players themselves. Making it universal and without cost would completely destroy the game.
In theme park games such as WoW and its bretheren I see no reason other than possibly a technical one for allowing instant transportation from place to place.
27/06/2009 at 00:55 Rabbitsoup says:
I think the main problem right now are the environments you grind in being large but monotonous and as a rule not effecting gameplay beyond a basic cover system meaning you will just port to the best grind spot if you get teleportation. A failing with the games not the teleport idea though.
Changing the environments to make them visually stunning and full of unique discoveries is a lot of work and probably beyond most devs. The way forward seems to be the way of E.V.E and LOVE allow the players to shape the environment and make more then a sand box ( remember sandbox does not equal non-linear see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1rWkqTzOJ4 ) if you teleport a in these games you will find something that effects you.
27/06/2009 at 01:02 Sulkdodds says:
Wait, can there be ‘tinfoil-hat material’ when we’re talking about intentional products, explicitly DESIGNED for a purpose? I mean it’s not like it’s History or anything.
OR IS IT
27/06/2009 at 01:07 parabolic hat says:
If you removed the tedium from an MMO, you’d have no game left.
27/06/2009 at 01:11 Matt W says:
For whatever my tuppence is worth, I’d point the finger at two things:
1) Travel times are usually fairly fundamental to – or at least contributory to – a whole bunch of other fairly critical stuff in the design. If you mess around with how fast players can move around it can have potentially huge knock-on effects in other, seemingly-unrelated areas of the game. If you’re going to allow, for example, teleportation, it really should be part of your fundamental design and it probably places a lot of soft constraints on other areas of the design, which may prevent you from realizing other, more important goals.
I don’t see it being unreasonable to suggest that some MMO concepts (or indeed even whole classes of MMO) simply aren’t properly compatible with instant travel (although this isn’t something I’ve had a proper ponder about, I’m just speculating here). It’s probably telling that one of the only traditional “MMOs” that does allow this is Guild Wars, which is a fairly radical departure from other titles in its putative genre (trad fantasty MMOs) in plenty of other ways too – although I wouldn’t want to commit to whether this is because the underlying design is more teleport-amenable or just because it’s much clearer about what the target market really wants.
Which brings us to the second point:
2) Most players don’t know what they actually want.
(For example and without diving in too closely, players say they want “fun”. Huge swathes of them actually don’t, at least not in the traditional sense of the word.)
27/06/2009 at 01:15 Sonic Goo says:
Imagine if Frodo and his fellowship could’ve just teleported to mount Doom. The time we would’ve saved!
27/06/2009 at 01:15 The_B says:
If Star Trek Online does not have teleporting of some form, I will be most displeased.
27/06/2009 at 01:17 Leelad says:
Reroll mage.
27/06/2009 at 01:19 Persus-9 says:
I agree with Ste Curran’s reasoning for the most part.
I actually don’t like the fast travelling in Fallout 3 and Oblivion, I think it hurts the pacing and it’s a cheat, I always enjoy games less if I use it. It also ruins the immersion because instant travel is jarring and takes me out of the story so I’d rather not have it unless it’s sufficiently explained away in game.
However I don’t think the same applies to MMOs. Ultimately in the case of MMOs I think this is just a sub-question of why MMOs have so much grind and the bottom line to that is that the grind is the game. The grind is also the enemy, but that’s normal isn’t it? It’s almost always the enemy that defines the game be it real people in Team Fortress, geometry in Tetris, the puzzles of some crazed game design in point and click or text adventures or just AI with guns in countless single player games. In WoW at least and I think most other MMOs the ultimate enemy is the grind, that’s what we’re ultimately battling against, that’s what we win against when we gain levels or new armour sets and what we battle against when we try and work out which quest will be most interesting or whether we can pick up more items or talk to more NPC before heading to a new location so as to avoid having to make the same trip or kill the same mobs twice or of course team up with other players to give us a social game to play while grinding. We all deeply hate the grind but that’s what makes the optimisation exercise a compelling one because we care whether we have to spend 30 or only 5 minutes getting from A to B or have to kill the same set of 50 mobs twice.
If we could fast-travel we have the ultimate weapon again the grind of travelling and so that aspect of the grind is all but defeated leaving us with what? Killing a mobs? Clicking on NPCs? Running instances? Fighting in battlegrounds? When push comes to shove it’s all grind after the novelty wears off but as it stands it’s a complicated grind and travelling is a complicating factor and the complexity is what makes it an interesting enemy that’s (in a certain perverse sense) fun to battle against so removing travel grind from the equation would only make the grind simpler, less interesting and thus ultimately more annoying. Take it to extremes, imagine if the only thing between the newbie and level 80 was killing murlocs, endless murlocs so getting to level 80 was similarly challenging? Could anything be more boring? Variety is the spice of grind and MMOs are grind based games so paradoxically removing grind just makes the rest worse.
27/06/2009 at 01:22 Willy359 says:
Normally I like the immersion of having to move through the world to get where I want to be, but there are times when instant teleport is very welcome. Fallout 3 is a prime example. I see no reason to wear down my weapons and use up valuable ammo killing 47 radscorpions just so I can schlepp these cola bottles to a shack waaay the hell over on the other side of the map. Again. And again. Ping! I’m there. Ping! I’m gone. Much better.
27/06/2009 at 01:22 Theoban says:
If you walk around in an MMO, even run, even fly, the game data is loaded into your RAM and the area behind you is unloaded. This leads to MMOs being very RAM intensive, more than any other genre of game out there.
If you port however, it has to remove all that data and reload all the other data of the next region. It’s almost like logging out then logging back in again for the amount of information that has to pass not only from your RAM but through your network adapter.
I thnk the lack of porting in MMOs is frankly because the average user’s internet connection isn’t up to it yet, and neither is their RAM (meaning they’ll have to wait ages for the loading/unloading of data). Remember, we’re only just getting to the area where 2gb of RAM is considered normal.
Give it a few years and I can see this happening. Just not yet.
27/06/2009 at 01:25 Dennis-SGMM says:
Sierra’s excellent and inexplicably never revisited steampunk RPG “Arcanum” allowed those who chose the path of magic to teleport their character and their party. Again, though only to places whose map location you already knew.
27/06/2009 at 01:36 Dukkha says:
Without the travel-breaks a lot of wow-players would never get time to eat/shower/visit toilet. Thats the reason long traveltimes are needed in highly addictive games.
27/06/2009 at 01:41 flo says:
I think it has a lot to do with game mechanics. And, possibly also hardware things. Game mechanics cause it would make flash mob attacks/kills on say, ogrimmar/stormwind much more easiert, thus annoy uninvolved players. Also just anybody teleporting anywhere would make somehow make things less real … i mean even if it would be introduced at the highest lvl in say, WoW, by now it would not be highest lvl anymore … and dunno, it would feel way too much like some stupid static flash adventure game, where you only jump from one static location to the next. Yes, I know what you mean, and I’ve felt the same, but I think totally free teleportation would really screw WoW (or lotr online, onlw 2 mmoprgs I’ve played) up. The hardware part could play a role if one realm is spread across multiple servers (you don’t want everyone to jump to the other immediately) but this is the part that could maybe be fixed easiest, game mechanic screw ups are way more important. To “they’re only games”: that’s true, but if they don’t create some artificial world,
27/06/2009 at 01:45 Christopher Weeks says:
Wow. I can only imagine that a game in which you could teleport anywhere, any time wouldn’t reasonably count as a virtual world. Without travel time, the notion of “distance” is meaningless. Worldliness and verisimilitude demand travel time in virtual worlds. One of the games that I’m playing, A Tale in the Desert would be helped by removing the teleportation that exists.
Also, does anyone think it’s possible that the devs actually know more than you do about what’s fun? I don’t personally grok the fun in WoW, but with bazillions of happy users, how can I fault them too much? How can you?
27/06/2009 at 02:02 Neil says:
Everquest Plane of Knowledge. Not teleport anywhere, but close to all the cities. Good enough.
27/06/2009 at 02:04 Zach Marx says:
Dennis-SGMM:
Arcanum was never revisted because it was a Troika game, and Troika’s last project was Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. Rumour has it that the project immediately to follow that was an Arcanum sequel on the Source engine, but they didn’t survive long enough to make it.
For more on what happened to Troika, see any of the articles on V:TM:B on this site.
27/06/2009 at 02:07 Chiablo says:
The faster you can go from one side of the gameworld to the other, the smaller that world becomes.
How big was the original EQ? Huge, right? That’s because there was no real fast transportation until the Luclin expansion. The same thing with Vanguard when it first came out… the world was unbelievably big, until they made teleportation possible.
WoW seems insignificant now that you can just hearthstone to Dalaran or Shatterath and instantly teleport to any of the major cities. But when we were exploring it for the first time, it was huge.
I belong to the camp that believes that fast travel should be minimal in games of this scale. It makes the world feel bigger than it really is, and getting to a new land gives you a sense of accomplishment and exploring can be fun.
27/06/2009 at 02:11 Wulf says:
@The ubiquitously anonymous editor: Ahem. <.<
I actually just thought it was relevant to the topic at hand, because everything I said was true. Apparently I can't make a point now about when a game does something right without the implication of working for the company in question.
Are you selling those tinfoil hats, ed? :p
27/06/2009 at 02:13 TheArmyOfNone says:
Ah, I love you RPS, and you as well, RPS commentators. I think that travel is actually key to a lot of experiences– many humorous stories are shared of trying to make it through a hazardous zone and various mishaps. The planning and execution of said travel plans is, lame as it sounds, sort of fun. Sneaking by a town full to the brim of enemy players is an experience not to be discounted.
On another note, EVE Online. Hardly a traditional MMO, but travel is so key to the game! Gatecamps and trading routes, hauling tritanium across the galaxy. Yes, it can be monotonous at times, but it’s essential to the core game
27/06/2009 at 02:33 Tonic says:
Because MMO’s derive from MUDs which take largely from Fantasy RPG’s which are based mostly on Tolkien’s works in which the characters spend long weeks winding their way through the countryside. Gracefully, the readers are able to digest ‘they traveled far’ in a few pages of narration and maybe some flavor dialogue. Fart.
27/06/2009 at 03:00 undead dolphin hacker says:
Depends entirely on whether the environment itself is a challenge enough to justify insta-port.
WoW: No challenge, no reason not to allow insta-port except to hide the grind.
WAR: Same.
Really any modern MMO is the same.
The last game I remember which had a difficult, unpredictable environment that made travel a challenge was Everquest. Traveling around the world safely was quite a challenge due to the fact that areas weren’t clearly defined as “all the level 5-7 mobs are here” like it is in WoW. Teleportation was available from Wizards and Druids, the ports could be cast anywhere but only had a limited number of landing spots.
In the original release there was also a secret chamber at the bottom of a specific spot in the Ocean of Tears (the largest zone in the game, it separated the two continents and took an hour or more to traverse if you stayed on the liner that ran back and forth between the continents). It worked like the propowhatever chamber in Morrowind. Considering you could cast a spell in EQ (at least for awhile, they mostly neutered everything cool about that game after the fifth or sixth expansion) that would set your respawn/Gate (ie Hearthstone) point to wherever you wanted to in the entire world. So if you were one of the few that knew about the spot (no Thottbot in those days, many people on 56k, alt-tabbing would probably crash you), you could be very, very powerful. Granted, you had to be a caster with access to Bind and Gate, but oh well.
And… that’s about the only game that warrants no insta-port.
27/06/2009 at 03:21 Rich_P says:
Imagine if Frodo and his fellowship could’ve just teleported to mount Doom. The time we would’ve saved!
Heh, let’s not give WoW and other MMOs too much credit, at least until epic journeys a la LOTR are possible.
Until then, I think you should be able to teleport to any city you’ve visited before, preserving a sense of exploration and providing a much-needed convenience to players. Remember, you don’t have to use teleportation devices…
Mandrill makes a good point: themepark games like GW practically beg for teleportation. EVE is an entirely different story.
27/06/2009 at 03:34 Chryso says:
Fundamentally there is no justification outside of open world PvP; players can crash a server just fine at a walking pace.
Unfortunately, too many MMO’s still consider pointless, time-sucking grind an effective way of extending subscriptions. The only games I’ve gotten into that at least justify themselves are gank-happy sandboxers like UO and EvE.
27/06/2009 at 03:42 jalf says:
Because MMO’s are not, as a general rule, thought through.
That is why The Old Republic is making a MMO by cramming it full of single-player content. MMO designers generally don’t realize that what they’re doing is just a wee bit different from a singleplayer game. Most people who play MMO’s have realized that the key aspect of the genre is the social one, that you’re not just playing through pregenerated content, but creating your own, along with thousands of other players. And yet MMO game designers keep trying to suppress this, and offer more pregenerated static content.
And that is why travel is limited, to make the world seem bigger, and take longer to explore. It is essentially your #1 reason, but I don’t think it’s very tinfoily at all. All games have an aspect of trying to slow you down. That’s why you don’t start out facing the end boss. It’s why you don’t get a big “WIN!” button on the main menu. Games are all about slowing you down.
The problem is that making you spend hours and days trekking across a MMO world isn’t a very meaningful way to keep people playing. But again, most MMO designers don’t seem to think about this. They have access to thousands of actors who, with the slightest prompting, can keep players busy in the game almost indefinitely. And yet they choose to keep players busy doing trivial tasks, such as running for 40 minutes through a forest to get to your destination.
Very few MMO’s actually *use* the concept of distance for anything. Frodo doesn’t really need to go to mount Doom. At most, he’ll be missing out on a quest, a unique knife and 200xp if he doesn’t go.
The obvious exception here is Eve, where distance and travel are vital parts of the game. The entire PVP aspect would fall apart if you could just teleport into the middle of enemy territory. The reason you can make money trading is essentially that the distance makes it nontrivial to buy goods from other parts of the galaxy. Non-traders simply won’t bother doing it, which opens up a lucrative market for those who have a big ship and some time to spare.
I think the big question is not “why won’t MMO designers let me teleport”, but “why don’t MMO designers actually think about the gameplay they’re creating?”
The day MMO designers stop trying to mindlessly provide singleplayer experiences in MMO’s is the day when they’ll become worth playing.
27/06/2009 at 03:54 tWB says:
Although load-balancing goes to hell in clustered MMO designs when you introduce unlimited ‘porting, this is really just a symptom of the old content-burn problem: Content is hard to create, and easy to burn through. Thus, if you allow unlimited ‘porting, two things will happen: players will congregate where the content is (and, being the pissy little min-maxers they are, where the most rewarding content is); and they will burn through your content faster than you can put new stuff out there.
The first problem is really serious, especially if your back end is designed around load-balancing that can’t dynamically subdivide regions. From a dev perspective, giant areas of your world will end up underpopulated, since everyone is going to be hanging around Geezer’s Big Ol’ Dungeon of Everdropping Loot while all your lovingly handcrafted, tearjerking content at the Distant Castle of Broken Hearts and Redeemed Love is ignored.
For the second problem, there are three groups of strategies to reduce the speed of content burn: slow down access to the content (Throttling); have the game create new content (Autogeneration and Simulation); and have the players create their own content (Empowerment and Socialization).
Raph Koster is a great example of a dev who likes socialization and simulation. Unfortunately, simulation is hard to do (UO’s ecosystems collapse), and socialization is hard to sustain at high subscriber levels, as well as prone to griefing.
COX is giving Empowerment a shot, but quickly found out that they weren’t immune to the pissy little min-maxers problem. In retrospect, the full XP for player-generated content was not a good idea (or, alternatively, opening up the mission architect to all players); the ticket drops *were*, however.
Autogeneration of quests is also a hard problem, though lots of interesting and highly theoretical work has been done in recent years. Autogeneration of enemies is easy, especially if you decouple it from simulation. (But then you get into camping problems.) Throttling is perhaps the simplest of methods, forcing players to take time to get from one piece of content to another. The easiest way to do this? Travel times plus spawned enemies.
Some devs have suggested that adversarial travel conditions could *improve* gameplay, by creating “trade city” areas that players are likely to move into and homestead. I approve on a theoretical level, but I have reservations about how that would actually play out. Nonetheless, an interesting theory.
The old MUD-DEV list was chockablock with interesting discussions about these sorts of things: content generation, automated map creation, better AIs, user command queuing (“dig trench for eight-seven days west” — a man, a plan, a canal, Panama!), and so on. Good times, good times.
27/06/2009 at 03:58 Nalano says:
I agree that part of it is the tedium of the areas you’ve already been through. WoW is ridiculously large but most content is pointless after you’ve outleveled it – there’s never any reason to return to a location once the quests are done. Even rare crafting materials tend not to be in low-level areas.
That, and running through an area even at your level is tedium: Mobs (creatures, spawns) are practically on a cartesian plane, exactly spaced throughout the landscape such that if you’re not on a road you cannot – cannot – avoid having to hack a path through the landscape, leaving a wake of corpses behind you. Tedium defined.
I say that instead of artificially lengthening the time it takes to progress in the game through tedious travel, either get rid of “leveled zones”, so that mastering an environment has a lasting usefulness other than just the gateway to the next place, get rid of static mobs (hunting would be interesting if you had to FIND the herd of caribou on the plains) or allow for random NPCs that people might actually want to deal with to wander about the highways and byways between the fast-travel nodes.
Or all of the above, really.
27/06/2009 at 04:12 Moonracer says:
Strange that my memories of playing Everquest (long, long ago) mostly involve traveling and how well I remember some of the landscape because of traveling back and forth so much through a particular path. Also, that one time I fell off the automated boat and had to wait a ridiculous amount of time in the middle of the sea for the boat to come around again.
27/06/2009 at 04:17 the affront says:
I’ve never understood why no one has blatantly copied Ultima Online’s system, which always took my #1 spot on the MMO travel ranking. Marking your own locations and then teleporting to them (alone or with however many people you wish), and eventually ending up with player-run rune libraries publicly available to anyone to teleport to virtually any landmark/location/dungeon one could wish? YES PLEASE.
Although I have to say that I _would_ like a balance with this, that is to say that you can’t just teleport straight to the PVE bosses/your enemy’s keep courtyard (/comparable content), so just make a few areas unable to teleport to, like UO Ilshenar, or blockable by players like cyno jammers in Eve.
That said, I do enjoy traveling past people/groups just doing their thing for the social/immersion aspect of it, but if it has enough other opportunities for this it’s not really needed. UO worked just fine with you just meeting people right at the spawn you teleported to or hanging out at the bank or on a shopping spree between 50 player-run vendors in some player-built house.
(Another thing I never understood.. I can’t be alone in enjoying the hunt for that one bargain item in some dingy little shop I’d never heard of before (and thus couldn’t teleport to) that took me half an hour to find riding through some forest instead of just standing absently at the auctioneer and refreshing the “sorted by price” list every minute? IT’S UNPOSSIBLE, so why didn’t anyone pick up on it apart from Eastern MMOs with their turn-your-afk-character-into-a-shop system and DAoC (which they later broke, and which didn’t work that good in the first place without teleporting straight to your favorite shop once you had found it and with its housing limited to designated zones)?)
PS: We need more sandbox, (character-, although player- wouldn’t hurt either) skill-based MMOs without static faction association decided once upon creation. Oh, and MMOFPS. Can’t forget those :P
27/06/2009 at 04:32 Caiman says:
I just watched Jumper last night. Fairly average stuff, but clearly exactly what we need: when you visit a place for the first time, you can remember it and jump back there at will (even if you need a photo or something to remind you of it).
27/06/2009 at 04:33 Vinraith says:
The fundamental design philosophy of any fee-based MMO is “keep the player playing as long as possible,” which in practice translates to “waste as much of the player’s time as possible.” You can immediately see the contrast in a game like Guild Wars, which shares a lot in common with MMO’s but, lacking a fee, has no reason NOT to provide fast travel options. In fact, a comparison of WoW and GW is VERY illuminating on this point, as there are hundreds of aspects of WoW’s design that are explicitly designed to waste as much of your time as possible. I’ve never entirely understood why so much of the population simply fails to notice they’re being jerked around.
27/06/2009 at 04:55 shiggz says:
A vocal group play MMO for a pseudo-life purpose and accomplishment. I just wanted to play for open world fun with random strangers exploring and adventuring collecting cool loot. I Abandoned them once i realized their model was hell-bent on catering to the former and ignoring those like myself. I’ve stopped buying them canceled subscriptions. And no longer plan on trying new ones. A few things that really hamstring the already tedious grind and cockblock fun:
-forced class balance for group makeup.
(if you have 5 friends and all want to be hunters, then you should be able to)
-forced dependence on rare healers, and the healer class being the most tedious one to play
-locked into a class, want to change forced tostart over from level 1
I would mention my first mmo SWG did not initially suffer from these things. Now they basically all do.
27/06/2009 at 05:01 AlexMax says:
If you ask me, if an MMO needs fast travel to be fun, it probably wasn’t a very good MMO in the first place.
27/06/2009 at 05:08 An Innocuous Coin says:
I’ve only just read the article, but playing XI recently – my god does travel in that game suck 99 percent of the time.
Then, you get a chocobo. And suddenly, running from place to place becomes FUN, because you’re riding a chocobo. This one time, I was riding a boat ride across one of the oceans, and everyone else on the ship was part of a guild, fishing, and drunk. My fondest memory of that game.
My point is, I suppose, why not make the travel part of the experience, rather than a dull slog? Adventurers running from town to town on foot continuously without ever stopping is a bit silly anyway, to be honest.
27/06/2009 at 05:14 Aphotique says:
@the affront
I loved UO’s traveling system. I loved UO in general, probably my favorite MMO to date, and one of my top five games to date. Staying on topic though, and sticking to travel, it was always fun running around filling up rune books full of locations to sell to other players; tamer books, dungeon books, city books, the occasional book full of mundane locations with one ‘mis-named’ location of doom…etc. I swear, I just want someone to remake UO with better graphics and I’d probably never play anything else.
I was a bit sad when they put Riftstones in Vanguard, given how integral to the game travel was, but they are nice to have, and I can still go riding around, and sailing around if it strikes my fancy.
27/06/2009 at 05:24 JKjoker says:
I think that they are afraid of places getting unpopulated so they make traveling a hassle so that you think twice before doing it, even if it defeats the whole idea of “play with your friends”
imho i would either make a gathering point town/nexus, something that is very easy to get to (either free or very cheap item/spells everyone can use) where you can pair up with your friends and then get directed to a proper level area, or i would make it so that once you set a party you can teleport to the location of any member at will (you would still need some kind of sidekick system to allow newbie friends to pair up with the awesome lvl50 guys)
sadly many players would abuse of this ability, creating complains and there is also the *puts Al-Foil hat on* micropayments for quick enhancements and services wet dream even mmos without implemented systems are always planning for, giving stuff for free or easy would bite them in the ass if they ever set their little BS up
but, i should point out i hate mmos so what do i know … *shrug*
27/06/2009 at 05:43 Mad Doc MacRae says:
I really enjoyed the images in the article for some reason. ^_^ Maybe I’m just tired…
27/06/2009 at 05:48 Jambe says:
I can’t believe you don’t grasp such simple concept, John! Ste Curran hit the nail on the head — some games attempt to simulate realistic travel and thus forbid teleportation. It’s that simple. Indeed, in some games, realistic transportation is essential to the functioning of the game universe — EVE Online is a great example.
I thought you were the RPS writer who plays EVE Online, and I was shocked, but then I realized it must be Jim Rossignol. Anybody that’s played EVE extensively enough to have “lead 100+ man EVE fleets” or some such thing must to understand why some MMOs don’t let you teleport around.
27/06/2009 at 06:03 andrew says:
wow has a fair number of methods for transportation — everyone has a hearth stone to recall to any 1 town of your choice, every instance has a summoning stone outside to bring in other members of the group, mages can teleport themselves/others in the same group to any major city (6 destinations, iirc), and several skills/classes have specific teleport destinations.
Although, having played both wow and EVE online, i agree with Jambe, you just don’t get the same sense of achievement, location, etc when you can just wave your hand and be wherever you want. (although eve now has jump clones, so once a day you can jump to a specific pre-prepaired location, but you can’t carry any gear with you)
27/06/2009 at 06:03 Mad Doc MacRae says:
The best part of EVE is you can progress without actually playing the game.
:/
27/06/2009 at 06:35 Dave says:
As a former MMO developer and current MMO engine developer,I asked this same question back in the days when text was state of the art. The answer I got was that it would ruin the sense of scale of the game. I didn’t quite like the answer, but it does make a certain amount of sense.
I can see some argument for technical limitations. Would “you can teleport, but you have to wait for some unpredictable amount of load time while you do it” work?
If you have to run from point A to point B, you’re going to go through known choke points and S-turns. Your client usually has time to stream stuff in before you get there. The server usually has time to deal with whatever handoff it needs to do to keep things seamless.
If you teleport from a swamp to a city, though, none of that can happen. Your client goes through almost as much load time as when you first logged in, and depending on server architecture, there could be a lot going on there too.
Second, and probably bigger: you really don’t want everyone in a world to teleport to the same place. Neither server nor client will deal with that very well. Some games spawn new instances of an area to deal with that sort of thing, but that has its own downsides as well.
27/06/2009 at 06:57 Aphotique says:
I wonder if another reason why it isn’t so prevalent (at least large amounts of it, especially at will travel) is due to the separation of PVE and PVP in most MMO’s.
In a game like EVE, one huge world where PVP is essentially activated everywhere travel is everything.
In most MMO’s though, in particular those MMO’s that have multiple PVE and PVP servers, PVP server rules seem to apply to both. I know there are a few MMO’s out there that try balancing PVE/PVP servers differently, changing skills around and the like, but most of them don’t. All balance on those is done on the PVP server and replicated on the others. Traveling on the PVP server, much like in EVE, becomes an integral part of the game. You have to be on your guard at all times, always wary of the next attacker hiding behind the next tree. In a case like that, cutting down the travel in any way actually defeats the purpose of the PVP server, at the very least lowering overall activity.
At the same time, if you were to institute ‘fast travel’ on the PVE server, but leave it out on the PVP server despite your good intentions of trying to keep the PVP server active, you’d end up inviting thousands/millions of complaints from crying players.
27/06/2009 at 07:07 po says:
Got to love multiboxing. I’ve always got a warlock and 2 alts handy in Dalaran for a quick summon, then it’s only a portal journey to any capital city. I can also take my 3 mains to any flight point to summon lowbies there, and save myself a lot of walking.
And mages hate me, because I like to go:
“/2 free warlock summons to Dalaran for the next 5 minutes!”
Right after they go:
“/2 mage portals. Dalaran 10G anywhere else 5G.”
27/06/2009 at 07:08 bhlaab says:
My first couple of guesses are:
-mounts tend to be a big deal
-if everyone is just teleporting everywhere they want to go, everywhere that isn’t a hot spot is going to look incredibly empty
27/06/2009 at 07:11 Melf_Himself says:
I don’t know why you think reason #1 was being too “tin foil hat”… if the rest of the game is designed that way, why not getting around as well?
Guild Wars 2 will solve all our problems, have no fear.
27/06/2009 at 07:32 Jambe says:
Can’t edit the superfluous “to” from my post. What’s with the random “now you can, now you can’t” nature of comment editing here? Anyway… I didn’t expand on the concept of locality in games because I thought the issue was clear as day. I’ll go into a bit more detail:
In WoW and sharded MMOs like it, being able to jump instantly between cities or between strategically-placed “teleport markers” wouldn’t hurt much of anything and the developers should probably enable this functionality. But you obviously wouldn’t want to allow teleporting between any two locations at any time, because this could be exploited economically and during combat (you could get loads of valuable stuff moved around quickly and teleport to or away from enemies).
In EVE Online, having the ability to teleport about the galaxy frequently would cripple the game. This is how travel works currently: you must use your ship’s “warp drive” to travel between celestial objects within a solar system — it’s impossible to travel between solar systems with the warp drive. To get from solar system to solar system you can instantly transfer your avatar’s consciousness between any two stations with vat bays once every 24 hours (provided you have been to your target station beforehand and installed a clone there). Not all stations have vat bays, though, and not all solar systems have stations. If you can’t clone jump you have to jump from system to system via “jump gates” which link all of New Eden in a big web or you must pilot or accompany advanced ships which have “jump drives” allowing system-to-system travel (these drives are limited in how many systems they can jump across, though — you can’t go from one end of the galaxy to the other, for example). The entire game is built around these finite travel mechanics.
27/06/2009 at 07:54 Gygaxis says:
Consider also the factors on economy in an MMO. I was at one time a hardcore raider in WoW. The game is organized around resources, among them are player time. If it takes you 1 minute to fly to a place that has a high frequency of monster spawns (monster spawns are after all one of the most critical resources in the game, they aren’t profession specific, EVERY player has legitimate uses for killing them) you have made an investment into that decision. From there it might take you 5-10m to get to one of the other 3-4 really good areas to farm that mob.
Now when you get there, they could be totally empty or they could be full up of friendly or hostile players too. On a server with open pvp if you can’t fight them off perhaps you have to abandon this site and try elsewhere, or maybe there is just one hostile there and you think you can take them on and secure the farming spot for yourself. This opens up a variety of game play options to the player that add onto the original plan of “Go to A kill B till X amount of Y’s drop and go home.”
In a scenario with fast travel to say even 30s away, or worse, directly too, suddenly this is a far different design. You show up to start a fight, it will get escalated almost instantly. It takes very little commitment from friends and guild members to instantly pop in stab someone a few times and warp back to what they were doing a few minutes later. How many more resources do you have to spawn if the player can just pop between them?
What are the design considerations that you have to consider when laying out resources with different kinds of travel? How fast do you have to spawn things? What kind of player traffic can you expect where? I expect that a model where every player can appear at any resource area they would like to farm inside 1m dramatically alters the type of conflicts, and importance of the choice.
There are also issues of contrasting intensity for pacing and for survival stuff as well.
Another issue is rewarding long term players too for learning skills within the design structure of the game. There is a feeling of reward for a player when they can perceive that their choices and planning lead them to take a more efficient path in whatever respect. Fast travel could substantially flatten the differences between a skilled player who plans out their trips to accomplish goals along the way (Say do quests in a circle order that ends up back where they all turn in) vs a disjointed running back and forth. It is definitely a carrot and stick approach to rewarding good play by inversely punishing under informed newer players who haven’t yet learned how to optimize whatever they need to do.
That all said, I don’t know anything about the server demands of tossing players around the world frequently, though WoW certainly offers up versatile ways to travel faster than on foot. Enchantments that increase running speed or riding speed slightly. Major cities are connected to one another via instant portals, or in other cases boats, and airships. Mages can generate portals around. Hearthstones to return to bound location are down to 30m cooldown’s now, and there were ways to game the system previously. Shaman’s can return to their bound location up to 6 times in a 45 minute period. Battle ground queues formerly would return a player to their queue location when the battle ended and you could run around doing whatever you wanted before hand or join into a party with an appropriate leveled friend near a battlemaster and have them queue you in. Mounts are available at substantially lower levels for a smaller investment and flying mounts will increase your travel speed 270% or more and enable you to travel in a unbroken path to wherever you need to go. And there is the tried and true scenic bird flight that sends you to a prediscovered location over the span of 1-10 minutes for an especially long journey. And every instance in the game features a level keyed summoning stone that 2 friends can summon you too. A warlock and another friend can summon you to anywhere they are.
There are places that the travel could be accelerated and likely be greeted positively by the player base, but the current system is what is specifically designed around in terms of every single map and resource allocation done within the game, it was a significant time investment to make and changes to a travel system would need to be balanced accordingly. Lastly, other games ape WoW because WoW has delivered astonishingly high returns and continues to and MMO’s are a huge huge investment to make and that generally leads to the follow the leader mentality.
27/06/2009 at 08:04 Chris says:
What happens if everyone in the world decides to teleport to the exact same place at the exact same time?
That might seem like a ridiculous hypothetical but consider the launch of Burning Crusade. Almost every player on every realm decided to go through the Dark Portal at the same time. And what happened? The game choked.
I think that the limitations are fundamentally about avoiding bottle-necking. However I also think part of it comes down to deliberately limiting the player in order to create a reward structure (eg. you have a mount, now you go faster) and part of it is just to stop players from doing things too quickly.
But even that doesn’t really hold up for me anymore… atleast in the example of WOW Blizzard have done SOOO much to speed up the levelling curve. At a certain point I have to believe that it’s a technical limitation connected to the amount of time it takes for the server to re-calculate everything surrounding a player everytime they jump around.
Limiting the ability of the player to teleport quickly is a way of minimizing the amount of information travelling back and forth across the network. I know people probably don’t think this should be an issue given Blizzard’s mountains of money but server load will ALWAYS be an issue in MMOs. It’s why they limit inventory size, bank size, e-mail numbers, characters per account etc. As soon as you add one more inventory slot that’s 14 million more slots overall assuming each player has only one character… which we all know isn’t true.
So you can see how the need to keep the server loads balanced becomes very important.
27/06/2009 at 08:10 Chris says:
… forgot to mention another thing. It’s also about keeping the economy balanced. If anyone could be anywhere they wanted to be, buying whatever they wanted then everyone would run out of money. Auction prices would go down etc.
Simultaneoulsy you don’t want everyone to get too rich otherwise it inflates the prices on the auction house.
By forcing players to play through content and earn money and then spend that money travelling across the world a more natural flow is created.
There are also reasons related to PVP. How do you raid a city if every enemy player can instantly teleport to the destination to defend it? Raiding relies on catching the enemy unaware or at a time when they are unable to amass to defend themselves.
27/06/2009 at 08:12 the affront says:
Jambe: PVP/PVE combat (not overall strategy/territory control, think POSs in Eve etc) isn’t hard to balance with teleporting. Just make it so you can’t do it while in combat, have a long casting time, or whatever, really. Maybe also implement something like a “portable cyno jammer” (in “traditional” fantasy MMOs probably a spell/buff) making it impossible to instantly teleport to the immediate area around your buddies when they’re in a fight, in trouble, and their enemy has one of those (bonus points if it were a viable tactic to try to disable it to hotdrop the crap out of them). And if it’s somewhat fast paced, group-centric PVP (think DAoC) a group that runs around without teleporting will be much better off, because if it’s not perfectly coordinated synchronous teleporting the one just arriving will be totally slaughtered (if that’s not enough, make buffs drop after teleport / debuff people coming out of it for a short while). Basically make it a method of transportation (to non-critical areas) ONLY, with no benefit to immediate tactics (if the game allows).
Also I think it’s obvious that there are exceptions to the “teleporting, FUCK YEAH!” rule that applies to, I’d think, all “big” MMOs today – with Eve being one of the exceptions, basing a large part of the economy and PVP strategy on it as it is.
Aphotique: Completely agreed about the UO part.
I quit Vanguard too early to comment, though. Although it’s world/environments were superb. Also, actual current in rivers – more games need this, it was hilarious if one of your group drifted away because he chose the wrong angle to cross.
Also, brackets.
27/06/2009 at 08:15 Anthony Damiani says:
I think ready access to teleportation destroys the illusion of space; it makes the world feel less like a place and more like a discontinuous series of encounters. It’s not like nobody’s ever thought of it before– we saw it in Oblivion and Guild Wars, among other places.
I think there’s also a bit of a time-sink element, from a publisher’s perspective. Part of it is probably also blind tradition.
Less cynically, there’s a desire to control the flow of the game experience, in ways that enhance the enjoyability of play. the traditional player “types” are Achiever, Socializer, Killer and *explorer* — being able to teleport at will undermines the latter, robbing the journey of, well, the journey. It sends a message that the stuff along the way doesn’t matter, only the destination. That actually matters to a lot of people.
27/06/2009 at 08:20 the affront says:
Chris: “What happens if everyone in the world decides to teleport to the exact same place at the exact same time?”
If testing shows the server can’t handle it simply place a limit on incoming teleports per zone, if it says “x teleports/y time reached, wait a few seconds” you’re SOL and need to wait a little. Can’t imagine that would be too complicated to implement, although I don’t have a single clue about actually balancing this in reality.
And about the travel=moneysink point… you just don’t make teleporting free, if you really needed that sink in the first place.
27/06/2009 at 08:28 the affront says:
Anthony Damiani: “being able to teleport at will undermines the latter, robbing the journey of, well, the journey”
The point is that it doesn’t _have_ to. Exploring doesn’t mean riding the same path for the hundredth time, but for the first.
So you just make it a requirement to mark your own teleportation coordinates (so you have to get there the first time the old fashioned way) and/or make the method of transferring these coordinates between characters expensive (if it’s money or effort doesn’t matter imho), so there’s still an incentive apart from the basic exploration one for players to get there themselves for the first time – yet it also allows your fifth alt to just click a button and skip the tedium you’d without teleporting experience a mind-numbingly huge number of times and would probably be able to draw to scale a topographical map of 3 years later.
27/06/2009 at 08:53 Kadayi says:
@Jalf
“The day MMO designers stop trying to mindlessly provide singleplayer experiences in MMO’s is the day when they’ll become worth playing.”
MMOs are social experiences by and large (and that is the hook for many people), but without there being SPC its highly unlikely that you’d get anyone coming to the party in the first place. Something like 30% of WoW players play solo or with casual hook ups rather than commit to a clan/guild/faction. You cut the SP exclusive content you effectively kick 1/3rd of your player base to the dust.
As regards teleportation. The necessity for it really depends a lot upon the nature of the MMO. Where there is a lack of persistence/consequence (such as WoW) then teleportation is a perfectly valid way for players to navigate the theme park. However with a persistent MMOs (such as Eve) large distance teleportation can be a serious issue, because spaces tend to have strategic significance, rather than solely being flags to capture.
27/06/2009 at 08:55 Sartoris says:
I think it’s about time you guys did a piece/podcast dedicated solely to lengthy descriptions of Leigh Alexander’s prettiness. Oh and we should start a fan club on the forum.
27/06/2009 at 08:57 Kadayi says:
@the affront
Initial exploration followed by the opening up of jump locations tied to your game account (rather than your character) is a sensible suggestion for the themepark MMO indeed.
27/06/2009 at 09:00 MrBejeebus says:
The point you make is very much the reason I never bother with MMO’s, I prefer games were I feel no obligation to play, and games where I can go where I want, where I’m not like a donkey following a carrot on a string with the ground knocking pieces off as it goes along, till when I reach the end, the IS no reward.
Any way the whole teleportation thing is a mixture of keeping you in the game for more extended periods of time, it takes you 5 hours to do something that should probably only take and hour, and technical issues with broadband and the fact most WoW (not only WoW ofc) players dont have best PC’s around.
27/06/2009 at 09:03 MrBejeebus says:
sorry its early.. I meant internet not broadband and there are a few spelling mistakes…
27/06/2009 at 09:10 johan says:
Occasional reactionary that I am, I will now mention the fast travel in the original Fallouts. It’s pretty damn fast, offers an enormous sense of space, let’s you go everywhere at any time and will result in someones smg tearing large chunks of flesh out of your torso half the time.
Anyway, I stay well clear of any species of MMO, but is it not nicer to actually have to put in some work to go places than to be insta-traveled there? You might as well ask why your character has to start at level one or why you have to pay for new equipment.
27/06/2009 at 09:33 Lobotomist says:
You are not MMO player. If anything you are more of console player. Its what in MMO slang we call instant gratification. A thing that ruined and destroyed MMOs up to now.
You see MMOs are all about living in virtual world.
About enjoying the road. Not just (instant) action action action…
But no time now to elaborate further….
27/06/2009 at 09:39 Conlaen says:
I for one don’t like teleporters being added in a game. I like the feeling of a vast world, and it’s not something I want to see disappear when I’ve sen every inch of it.
I remember in Everquest, how traveling always really was an adventure. Something you had to really set out on. And then the Planes of Power came, adding the Plane of Knowledge with it’s teleportation stones to all major cities in the game. And quickly the game just started to feel…. smaller.
So yeh, I’ll skip on the teleportation.
27/06/2009 at 09:56 pepper says:
Chris, if people would teleport at the same time to the same location probably nothing crazy would happend. It would just update positions the same as people would travel, the engine doesnt care about distances.
Some more update information would be send, since people would be in the range of eachother, and some poly limit would probably be hit. those could crash a engine. But other then that, nothing to crazy.
27/06/2009 at 10:06 D says:
@pepper: you know, distributed computing is never “nothing crazy will happen.” I don’t really care for the tech argument, as I’m sure an mmo with teleporting can get properly designed, but I’m also pretty sure it isn’t an optimal normal case of people migration for say, WoW, since it wasen’t designed for constant mass-people zoning.
@above three guys:
Thats all fine and well, but it turns into quite a different situation when you have 20 people waiting for you somewhere.
How is it that allowing teleportation somehow removes the validity of running everywhere? It’s because you’d feel like you’d be wasting time..
27/06/2009 at 10:20 Butler` says:
I’m pretty sure one of Blizzard’s guys could give you a pretty solid justification for not letting players instantly port around.
For me it’s pretty obvious, it just trivialises the world and sense of scale — both of which are core to any serious MMO imo.
It’s the same reason they retained flight paths, even going as far as keeping some of them much longer than they needed to be.
27/06/2009 at 10:26 Larington says:
Also, Free Realms allows you to teleport about with relative ease, even straight to other friends.
27/06/2009 at 10:47 Myros says:
Exactly as Butler says above … “it just trivialises the world and sense of scale”.
There are times when I just want to log into some game and have a half hour of fun, in that case having to trek across 5 miles of terrain would be a waste.
But on the other hand sometimes I want to escape to a ‘real’ world, where distance matters and the scale is epic, where as the old cliche says ‘it’s the journey that counts not the destination’.
Instant porting around mostly just drags me out of the game and reminds me that I’m just wasting my time playing games instead of doing something more constructive ;)
27/06/2009 at 10:56 Kieron Gillen says:
(As a random point, the reason why you dismiss Guild Wars for being unable to jump is the same reason why others dismiss teleportation. The more teleportation, the more you break the world/immersion/sense-of-place/verisimilitude/whatever. Guild Wars was always happy breaking the world if it allowed them to focus tighter on what they considered the game.)
KG
27/06/2009 at 10:59 faelnor says:
A bit ironic considering your surname John.
27/06/2009 at 11:04 theleif says:
@Joseph “Leaving in the travel ensures players compare the action to something totally pointless and crap.”
This. Which is the reason there is fishing in WoW. After an hour of that, even mindless grinding seems like fun. Basic human behaviour. We are so easily fooled, we humans.
27/06/2009 at 11:05 the affront says:
I don’t understand you “traveling as a tool for immersion” guys, especially considering that Butler` talks about WoW where it’s a completely meaningless timesink without any danger whatsoever, so I (and probably everyone I know and used to play with) just alt-tabbed out while autorunning in a straight line through non-aggro grays to surf or do whatever. Or just went AFK entirely while on the flightpath. What does that say about immersion?
So.. I really don’t get it.
If that traveling included getting to hard-to-reach (really hard, or at least involving the danger of losing something, even if only an even bigger load of time) destinations offering great rewards (not necessarily loot), then you’d have a point, but WoW.. c’mon. Riding around in that game is so trivial it’s not even funny.
Thinking about this, I recognize a general lack of really awesome, hard to reach, out of the way locations in MMOs.
27/06/2009 at 11:08 Alec Meer says:
Including anywhere-anywhen teleportation would surely only lessen developers’ inclination to make large and fascinating game worlds packed with treats for explorers. That’s the last direction I want MMOs going in.
Good day to you, John Walker. I SAID GOOD DAY.
27/06/2009 at 11:30 The Hammer says:
You tell him, Alec!
I can’t say I like the idea of teleportation in MMOs either – in fact, if it was up for me, game worlds would be bigger, and less easily traversable (having said that, they’d be less focused on quests, raids, and the traditional MMO fare. They’d all be about the adventure). Anything that makes the world feel smaller is a no-no to me.
(I wonder what a system like this would do to WOW’s Crossroads’ raids…)
27/06/2009 at 11:32 Butler` says:
@the affront
You’re not wrong, and certainly the exploration element and travel essentially degrades with time. But put yourself in the shoes of a new player, remember the first time you played WoW…
If the ability to instantly teleport around at will was put in it would completely change the tone of the game and run contrary to the overall immersion of the world that Blizz worked so hard to achieve.
It would also superceed the main travel method in WoW, mounts (normal, epic and flying), a system which works well on numerous levels (by giving players something to work toward, speeding up the leveling curve and helping smooth over those large, area-wide journeys).
And most importantly it does it without sapping a player’s experience of being in Azeroth, of being an adventurer.
27/06/2009 at 11:44 the affront says:
Butler`: Yeah, I can see it not being ideal if teleport capability to anywhere would be given freely to anyone regardless of level.
But imagine in the specific case of WoW – if a teleport skill would unlock upon reaching max level and having visited every single flight point and dungeon, for the entire account. Hell, even add some (lore-centric, or whatever) points of interest you’d have to visit in addition to that if you feel like it, that would even _promote_ the whole exploration idea. Basically make it the “ultimate mount” (and allow teleporting while mounted so as to retain the posing associated with an expensive/rare mount).
I do think that would be an improvement.
(inb4 Blizzard pirating my idea)
27/06/2009 at 11:58 mrmelons says:
Considering my only real mmo experience has been wow, I can’t speak for a vast majority but i have to say Flight points are BS. Not allowing flying mounts in the old realms…complete BS. Mages get portals, locks get summoning I really don’t see any reason to not have hot spot teleport sites. These would include Instances and Towns. If you have to quest your still riding out of the town to the area that the quest falls within therefore your still seeing the scenery. But lets face it you can only fly to an instance so many times, pass the same grove of trees, skimmer across the same infernal body of water, before you are shaking your fist at the heavens that be saying “Ye God, in your great wisdom could you foresee to put my foot up your arse?”
MMO’s, that is at least wow, feel like a job. The only places of interest are the instances and everything else is just gray matter that stands between you and your epics. MMO’s seem like they are getting rid of the reason to explore an entire area to find that hidden little trinket or fun fact. They are all just focusing on instances instances instances screw the world we want you to skip all that and stay in one small zone for 5hrs with 24 other poor saps killing the same crap a bajillion times. Well we get the hint cut the crap and allow me to get where you want me to be instantly at the damn zone intrance. Thank you and good night.
27/06/2009 at 12:00 Butler` says:
I think these kind of discussions are proof of the influence of the wider gaming space on MMOs. This fashion for ‘casual friendly’ and ‘accessibility’ — but at the expense of what?
27/06/2009 at 12:01 Butler` says:
I think Leigh Alexander articulates this phenomenon more eloquently than I:
http://sexyvideogameland.blogspot.com/2009/05/great-big-bites.html
27/06/2009 at 12:05 Tei says:
MMO games are more than a game, are a hobby. A virtual place where to meet people, chat, and live adventures togueter.
Maybe the dragon is not real, but the adventure is.
So.. the fun is on the voyage, crossing a dangerous area.
Imagine Lord of the rings with Gandalf teleporting the ring to the mount of doom or using eagles.
LOTR movies sould have been much shorter, maybe only 40 minutes long, from the ring is discovered, to trown to the mount of dooom.
27/06/2009 at 12:14 Andy says:
I loved flying around in WoW, it really gives u a proper sense of scale to the world, when you think “Oh I have to go to the other continent, that’ll take 5 minutes” it just seems more epic than clicking “Travel to kalimdor” or whatever. There’s plenty of shortcuts, eg play a Mage and you can teleport to cities.
27/06/2009 at 12:19 MrBejeebus says:
The Lobotomist, just because someone is not an MMOer doesnt mean they are suddenly a console gamer…
MMO’s are a small portion of PC gaming as a whole, I don’t like them BECAUSE of the whole aspect of a virtual world where its not your story, but thousands of other peoples at the same time.
27/06/2009 at 12:56 KilgoreTrout XL says:
I see your point, and the travel does get to me sometimes.
But in defense of WoW, during travel between flightpoints, you now get a free, Warcraft-themed peggle application to play. It’s pretty cool. And there are kind of a lot of teleporters anyways. There are a dozen in high-level dalaran, and a summon stone near every dungeon in the game.
27/06/2009 at 13:05 jalf says:
@KilgoreTrout XL: And this makes travel meaningful how? If they seriously think Peggle is a better use of the player’s time than WoW, why don’t they shut down the WoW servers?
That is not a defense of WoW. It does not justify the travel time.
27/06/2009 at 13:28 yutt says:
Unfortunately, I can understand points on both sides. I’ve been a WoW subscriber since release and have experience both the immersion of being forced to trek on ridiculously long journeys, and the irritation and nonsense of travel time.
Some of the foot travel journeys, especially when you first start playing, become your most memorable experiences. This is when things you didn’t plan have lots of opportunity to occur, and you can either persevere or perish.
But, to be honest, that isn’t due to a genius of game design, but more a coincidence of what happens when low level players wander into areas they aren’t familiar with and might not be prepared for. It would happen regardless of fast travel, but primarily to people who wanted that sort of experience.
Adding fast transportation methods does not mean you are required to use them.
Certainly in a social game you should, at the very least, be able to instantly teleport to your friends. This causes so much wasted time in MMOs I’ve seen guilds break apart in part due to it. Instead of creating positive situations, as a game should, it creates extremely hostile situations.
27/06/2009 at 13:46 Gorgeras says:
I don’t mind travel times and I think teleporting defeats the purpose of having a large world. THAT is my gripe: design elements that defeat the purpose of a large, persistent world.
I hate the level system. I don’t know why developers keep using it in what are supposed to be open-world games and inevitably they cause all the previous areas of lower level to be made redundant, few will ever visit them again unless they have to. It’s a shame. Why is 95% of World of Warcraft now reduced to being nothing more than pretty wallpaper you will only see when you fly over it? How the hell does 1-60, then 1-70 and 1-80 count as progress? It isn’t progress; it’s a straight-jacket.
Why have our armies suddenly decided to put up a few tents and play sports on the Lich King’s doorstep? Why couldn’t they put stuff like this in under-used areas rather than Icecrown? I certainly couldn’t spot any mention of the same thing happening in Mordor.
World of Warcraft as a game has always started at level-cap, with the levelling being just a semi-polished over-long tutorial. The sooner the curse of levelling is purged from all open-world games, the better.
27/06/2009 at 13:48 Man Raised By Puffins says:
@ Rich_P:
Er, the whole point of teleporters in TF2 is to enable the attacking team to effectively spawn closer to the enemy lines. They reduce travel time for players, but only for the purpose of piling the pressure on the opposing team.
I’ve not really got anything to add to the topic at hand as I’m not an MMO player (or at least not yet anyway). I will say though that while I prefer speedier travel to be an in-world solution, where it’s not possible (e.g. in Fallout 3) then instant teleports to places I’ve been are fine by me. I mean I can spend an entire evening just plodding around in the corner of a map exploring all of the nooks, but there are times when I’m happy to break the immersion a little if it means I don’t have to waste hours trudging from one side of the map to other and back for a trifling fetch quest.
27/06/2009 at 13:57 Dante says:
Very true Jim. I’ve been playing the Champions Beta lately (which incidentally gives you ‘travel powers’ far sooner than CoH, basically right after the tutorial) and it’s made me wonder, why don’t all games do this?
It’s not even instantaneous teleporting, it’s a whole suite of ways to make travelling faster and more fun, and not just more fun because it’s less monotonous, but more fun because the methods themselves are great. Flying through the air, jumping miles at a time or running faster than your enemies can see, this is amazing fun.
Why aren’t more people stealing it? Why are they, instead, promising me a horse which goes marginally faster once I’ve spent 30 hours getting to level 40 and becoming richer than God? I’m not falling for it.
Sadly way to many people do.
27/06/2009 at 14:13 Lady Bobz says:
Daftest post on RPS for a good while.
27/06/2009 at 14:18 AlabasterSlim says:
LOTRO has anytime Teleportation for Hunters. And you can even bring along your team. I’ve got maybe a dozen locations I can port too, and to get to a more specific part of that map you can usually pay for a fast-travel horse (essentially another teleport)
27/06/2009 at 14:29 EyeMessiah says:
The answer is surely just to make travel more fun.
Give everyone pimped out rally cars and just let them tear it up.
Problem solved.
27/06/2009 at 14:48 Katnip says:
I just want to point out that while Matrix Online had heaps of other problems, teleportation wasn’t one of them. As you explored the map you found telephone booths spread throughout the city and once you’ve used one you can always come back to it. It eventually gets to the point where you can get to just about any location you like in less than three minutes, and the whole thing continues to all work fine and feel coherent as a game. There was also a hyper-run skill which let you run faster, and of course hyper-jump which lets you literally jump over buildings. With all the generous movement and exploration coded into the game, it’s just a shame there wasn’t more to see in the world.
27/06/2009 at 14:55 Tei says:
Travels powers could be fun. Traveling is fun (the first time). And everyone want to play with friends. So I think could make sense to make all citys in a game connected by teleporters (like Anarchy Online), but only citys. So people has to gather in a city to start a exploration/attack/pay visit to dungeon.
But thats me.
27/06/2009 at 15:42 Sonic Goo says:
I’m guessing this post was prompted by the current Midsummer Fire Festival in World of Warcraft?
For those not familiar, during this event there are bonfires all over Azeroth and Outland. Players can travel around to honor their faction’s fires and stamp out those of the other factions for nice rewards. You can also sneak/barge into the other faction’s capitol cities and steal their flames.
Getting all the flames can be quite a daunting task, especially on lower level characters. You have to go into hostile areas and can run into problems like having to raise reputation with the Timbermaw (or running the gauntlet through their tunnels) in order to get into Winterspring.
Getting all of this done is quite an achievement (in more ways than one) and not that many people will be able get it all done. Imagine if people could just do it by teleporting everywhere. They’d be done in 20 minutes, everyone would have the achievement and they’d be whining on the forums about lack of content in no time. At least this way they get to experience the joy of sneaking aboard alliance ships in Darkshore…
PS When on a flight path I just tab out and browse the internet…
27/06/2009 at 15:47 spinks says:
Never mind in games, why can’t I teleport in real life??
Anyhow, I think it’s a good idea to let people get quickly to wherever their friends are or the action is. Just there are some games where distance and time to travel plays a bigger part, like EVE or most PvP type games (ie. how long it takes people to get back to the fight after they die).
27/06/2009 at 16:15 unique_identifier says:
my initial reaction was similar to Ed Stern’s. gameplay reasons aside completely, slow movement throughout the world lets you balance the load on the servers better. less lag. i’ll bet there are many examples of this kind of thing in EVE, where they’re actually doing the `massively’ multiplayer thing.
27/06/2009 at 16:18 JKjoker says:
@Gorgeras: the level up system is crucial to make the mmos addictive and conditioning the player, they will never go away and any game attempting to remove them is DOOMED!
27/06/2009 at 16:23 armlesscorps says:
The reason you can’t really teleport anywhere in MMO’S is because it breaks the sense of it being a real place and it also would make the world seem much smaller. Probably the greatest thing about MMO’s are these two things so its kind of in antithesis to what they want to create. I’m surprised it took John Walker a conversation with a games journalist to realise this himself.
If you could teleport anywhere in real life it would instantly make life far less interesting, part of the fun of travel is it takes you a long time to go and see the wonders of the world so its great when you get there. If you could instantly teleport about the universe it would be far less interesting. Seen as teleportation has already been achieved with elementary particles (kind of) this might be a possibility in the future. I just hope that if they build it they dont let a green goblin be in control of it.
27/06/2009 at 16:36 Kadayi says:
@JKjoker
There is no Skinner Box levelling to Second Life, yet plenty of people participate in it.
27/06/2009 at 16:40 Vinraith says:
@John Walker
I’m curious if, after reading this thread, you still dismiss explanation #1. Look at how many people will fiercely defend having as much of their time wasted as humanly possible. How can a fee-based MMO developer possibly pass up a ready-made base of millions that will pay $15 a month to spend 80% of their time walking slowly?
27/06/2009 at 16:48 JKjoker says:
@Kadayi: ive never played it but according to the things i read about it, i thought it was a huge failure, also i dont think Second Life has the same objective as other mmos, it doesnt want to be a game itself, it was to be some kind of platform for micropayments, multiplayer minigames and chatting
27/06/2009 at 16:52 DMJ says:
Very true, travel tends not to involve much actual interaction for the servers apart from “update Player X’s position slightly”.
But I do think that being able to walk from one end of the world to the other is good for a sense of scale. Watching the loading screen provides a mental disconnect that jarred me in WAR after being used to WoW’s “only between continents” loading screen.
27/06/2009 at 17:14 jalf says:
@DMJ: but what does the sense of scale actually add the game? How does the scale actually matter?
A select few MMO’s have actually made use of this sense of scale, made it an integral part of the gameplay. But the cookie-cutter EQ clones such as WoW do not. There is no gameplay reason why the sense of scale is at all important in those games. These games are more like amusement parks, with a fixed number of “rides”, where all the actual gameplay takes place, and the rest of the world simply isn’t important. There is no reason why players have to spend time travelling between these rides.
Of course, it does help balance the server load, but really, considering the primitive setup most MMO’s use, I find it hard to take that argument seriously. They’re not even trying at the moment. When they actually start writing sensible, scalable backends that don’t require sharding to handle more than 4000 players online, I’ll start taking complaints about technological limitations seriously. Until they get to that point though, they simply need to hire some decent server programmers.
27/06/2009 at 17:24 cliffski says:
Normally I’d suggest that what people think they want in games, and what they actually want to make the game fun are different things. However, before COD 4, I always thought that limited player health in an FPS was essential, but it turns out that allowing you to recharge to full health after a few seconds of cover works fine, and makes for a less frustrating game.
I think you could easily implement teleporting in a lot of games without serious game problems, as long as you had a few limitations to prevent people using it to grief people.
However, that’s the main problem with ALL online games : other people. No matter how you design your game, some bunch of immature assholes will find a way to make the game less fun for everyone else :(
27/06/2009 at 17:28 Marty Dodge says:
Shadowbane had it but it was abused by griefers (naturally). It made it a lot more fun to play a character that could summon because you were valuable.
27/06/2009 at 18:21 Malibu Stacey says:
3 out of 4 of the MMO’s I’ve played had instant teleporting.
Earth & Beyond – Jenquai Explorer Wormhole. Predefined spots you could teleport to using the skill. Higher level of the skill unlocked more places IIRC (been a long time since I played EnB). If used when grouped, your group come with you.
Ragnarok Online – Priest Teleport skill. You have a max of 4 (IIRC, never played a Priest myself) teleport spots you can remember. These can be anywhere in the normal world (as in not in “dungeons”). You open a portal to one of these & it stays open until you walk into it so you can teleport literally hundreds of people almost anywhere.
Ryzom – Teleport points. There are “altars” in each region & city at which you can buy a single use item to teleport back to that altar. So basically anywhere you’ve been, you can get back to instantly by using the item & then when you arrive there you can buy another to replace the used one (they cost a neglidgable amount). Simple & it’s a “theme-park” MMO so if Ryzom can do it, any one can, they just don’t want to.
The other MMO I played is EVE-Online & even that has Jump Bridges which players can build in null sec at sovreignty towers to allow two-way instantaneous teleportation to another sovreignty tower in another system many jumps away. Also Capital ships travel using “teleportation” to Cynosaural Fields which are generated by either another players ship using a special device or to a sovreignty tower equipped with a field generator (also been a while since I was in EVE so this stuff may have been changed or there may be newer or better options added).
27/06/2009 at 18:24 Derek K. says:
Star Wars Galaxies has a pretty good set up.
You have a fair number of options. At a city, you have shuttle ports and star ports. Shuttle ports let you go to other big cities. Star ports let you move planets.
You can get Instant Travel Vehicles, which let you go from wherever you are to a shuttle/star port. So you have to find the nearest shuttle port, go there, then run 1-3km, which is alleviated by vehicles. You get there, do what you need to do, then call your ITV to get to the nearest shuttle to your next point. You run some, but it doesn’t suck like it did in the early days, with no mounts of vehicles.
You can also get camps with shuttle ports which allow anyone joining the group to take an instant shuttle to your new group.
I know people dog on SWG, but it has some very nice ideas hidden underneath.
27/06/2009 at 18:27 JKjoker says:
i don’t see why everyone always gets so upset about griefers, mmos are practically made for them
as long as 2 ppl that dont know each other get together under the veil of anonymity, one will tale a Schadenfreude approach, if you want to avoid it you shouldnt be playing mmos, you should be playing multiplay games with known friends that you can punch in the face
27/06/2009 at 18:42 candide says:
Tabula Rasa had a system where you could use one-way (e.g. to get home after finishing a mission) and two-way teleporters (e.g to resupply), and I felt it cut a lot of annoying travel without hurting the immersion.
27/06/2009 at 18:44 D says:
@Derek K.
Also it was quite a good idea to have that 10 minute spaceport waiting time as it forced people to stand around socializing..
@JKjoker
Also, Schadenfreude is not an approach or a method, its just a specific feeling of glee. It’s like saying “a gleeful approach”, nonsense.. And I don’t agree at all with your statement, most people are quite nice in mmo’s, it’s just the griefers that make the most noise.
Also RPS please post another topic so we can all move on!
27/06/2009 at 19:02 Kieron Gillen says:
(As others have noted in the thread, making travel more interesting is a great example of a way to keep immersion in a world while removing tedium. Frankly, this is the foundation stone which Grand Theft Auto’s success has been built upon)
KG
27/06/2009 at 19:07 Hunam says:
Isn’t that what the peggle plugin is for in WoW? A means to make travel interesting!
27/06/2009 at 19:07 Wooly says:
One of the many reasons I play Guild Wars! :3
Although yes, it does irk me that one cannot jump… (aside from the /jump command of course, but that doesn’t count)
27/06/2009 at 19:09 Gorgeras says:
A game is doomed when people get bored. World of Warcraft on the box said content would be constantly updated but it never happened even though it would have been quite possible. For the first four months, there was a patch every fortnight either adding content or fixing stuff. Then it became three weeks, then once a month, once every two months and now we have to wait five months for the most simple bug fixes and balance tweaks, tacked on to a major content patch where the ‘content’ simply seems to continue the anti-open-world philosophy of one instance after another. Much of the new open-world content appears to be pointless holidays.
Levelling as it is, seems to be nothing more than an artificial barrier and every MMO I have quit I have done so because of the levelling and I think I’m far from alone. WoW only got away with it because for most of it’s players it was their first MMO.
Don’t flash Operant Conditioning at me; having been had behavioural methods used on me in the 90s, I happen to know something about it and I’m one of the many ignored examples of a human study subject throwing a curve ball. The OC chamber relies on the subject having absolutely no control over their environment, they can choose X and get Y or not and get nothing of gain. But humans use Operant Conditioning back; the players have been able to cause changes to be made to WoW. The limits of the conditioning WoW are made clear given how much easier levelling has been made.
Sometimes, smart children have refused to do a task with a sweetie as a reward simply because they are aware of their lack of control, the lack of any reciprocity in the process and a sense of unfairness. It’s strong enough that they can resist a M&M in order to frustrate behavioural analysts by non-compliance.
It’s why the least played class continues to suck balls and the highest played classes just can’t be buffed enough.
27/06/2009 at 19:28 JKjoker says:
@D: oh, im sure there are nice ppl, if everyone was a griefer they wouldnt have as much fun, they leave for fresher grounds when the % of griefers grows beyond some point
and by approach i meant the “get enjoyment out of the mmo by screwing other ppl’s game” approach, which i though i could resume in one word, and it worked since you obviously got the message :p
27/06/2009 at 19:30 Larington says:
I think it’s because of tradition. And a hangover of old design principles of constraining players because we ‘should’. Like two vast and terrifying empires that fight a war hundreds of years into the future, but have forgotten why the war even started. Also, MMOs are a risky development prospect in themselves so it’s likely also a choice made to minimise potentially unforseeable consequences.
27/06/2009 at 19:49 Larington says:
Also, if you have a feature list several pages long, it’s likely that “make combat more fun”, “add end-game content” or “add more quests” will be at a far higher priority than “make teleporting/travel easier/faster/more-straightforward”.
27/06/2009 at 20:10 malkav11 says:
Guild Wars doesn’t really let you teleport anywhere you want (once you’ve been there, of course). They let you teleport between quest hub cities and mission entry zones. This is a little more extensive than many other MMOs, is free, and is basically instantaneous, but it’s not -that- different.
And, frankly, I wouldn’t want to be able to teleport everywhere in an MMO, or for that matter a singleplayer game. I think games like WoW are getting it basically right – you earn various options to speed up getting around, you have ways to bring the group together, and certain classes have utility powers that make life easier still. As the world expands, they add new shortcuts so that the immensity of the world is still perceptible and there are still long term goals for better mobility, but getting around isn’t rendered unmanageable.
Fast travel is convenient occasionally in Fallout 3 and Oblivion, but I think it hurts the immersion and the scope of the world a great deal. Oblivion is supposedly larger than Morrowind, and I guess it might be, but it feels about 50 times smaller because instead of Morrowind’s elaborate networks of conveyance and limited function travel spells, you can just pop back to anywhere you’ve ever been, poof.
27/06/2009 at 20:14 LionsPhil says:
“If Star Trek Online does not have teleporting of some form, I will be most displeased.”
Surely that’s the away-party loading screen. I’m sure you can still crawl across the Alpha quadrant at warp 9 for half an hour, trying to reach the Neutral Zone before the Romulan incusion ends.
27/06/2009 at 20:20 Jambe says:
@the affront: oh, you’re right. EVE is a pretty big exception, and that’s why I like it… The value of minerals, POSs and pirate spawns increases as the security level of a solar system decreases. Given this, CCP could at most only allow people to teleport around within solar systems, lest they break the “riskier space = bigger rewards” dynamic.
Even then, as has already been said here, allowing teleportation to and from non-combat zones in a given solar system would have a definite effect on the economy. If I could jump instantly between celestial objects, the travel time in my “how much ISK can I make over a given time” equation would be dramatically reduced. Travel time between resources and stations is vital to determining how much ISK people can make and how much goods and resources sell for. Introduce teleportation and you’ve changed the foundation for the valuation of EVE’s items.
Obviously, though, EVE already has a teleportation mechanic in the aforementioned clone jumping. It’s a restrictive teleportation, though, in that you can’t teleport ships, modules or implants with you and you can only do it once every 24 hours. I think this works fine as-is, and I think introducing a “teleport ships and modules around” mechanic would hurt the game, even if it were timered or distance-limited. Using your ship to travel around inside the current warp/jump paradigm is a core part of the EVE experience.
If that makes it so that folk like John Walker will never play EVE, so be it. There are plenty of people who will.
27/06/2009 at 20:49 Lollerskater says:
Final Fantasy XI seems to be more open about it, though this might just as well be a remnant from the design of previous single player Final Fantasy titles. FFXI allows the player to teleport to various points in the world once they have met certain conditions. Either a person has learned a “warp” spell being a Black Mage, has the necessary scrolls or makes use of one of the many NPCs which transport a player around the world.
As warp spells are restricted to higher level Black Mages it still keeps players who are starting out “confined” to certain lower level areas of the world. Though warping to one’s homepoint is always available, if the player has purchased the appropriate scroll.
But in the end politely asking for a warp in public will mostly yield the desired result, if one is unable to warp themselves. Even Square-Enix seems to get that warping is desirable as they’ve recently included occassionally appearing NPCs which will freely warp a player to a variety of locations.
27/06/2009 at 20:51 Moorkh says:
Too many comments already to really get into discussion on this, but I can’t help it.
If you think of an MMO as a sport or ‘game’ in the most elementary, pre-videogame sense, teleportation would make perfect sense, offering more comfort and control to the players.
If, however, you see them as virtual worlds, more in the sense of playing ‘pretend’, if you will, teleporting will only further the experience if it makes sense within the confines of the game world.
Magic/technology allows you to teleport just like that? That may well be, but then you better mae sure you have thought through the consequences this would have on this world, a world where space and distance are of no consequence.
Just imagine what would happen to our own world if tomorrow, everybody could suddenly teleport at will…
27/06/2009 at 20:52 tmp says:
If you try to take the OP complaint to its logical conclusion — you end up with question why bother with having a “world” in MMO [i]at all[/i]? If the player’s goal is to “hit the Giant Elves of Elvington” today and the Puny Gnomes of Gnomecity tomorrow then they don’t need the Countryland at all — just zone selection screen or staging area would do perfectly… no?
But then i think it’s just another split between players’ preference towards either “virtual worlds” or “amusement parks”. The former will prefer the travel to be real endeavour, because to them it lends to immersion in virtual environment. The latter instead prefer to have their ride du jour nao.
And since the MMOs started mostly as ‘virtual worlds’ you have this travel time as leftover from earlier era — as they shift further towards the park model you’ll probably see more and more of them do away with it. For better or for worse, depending where one’s preferences lay.
27/06/2009 at 21:16 Steve Williams says:
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.
27/06/2009 at 21:46 Trite says:
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?
27/06/2009 at 21:58 schwiz says:
it worked great in ultima online, I don’t know why other mmos didn’t follow suit
27/06/2009 at 21:59 DigitalSignalX says:
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.
27/06/2009 at 22:45 Dan says:
“I’m coming! Don’t start yet! I’m (pant pant) coming!”.
Heh.
27/06/2009 at 22:57 Tuuvan says:
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.
27/06/2009 at 23:07 Psychopomp says:
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
27/06/2009 at 23:17 FhnuZoag says:
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.
27/06/2009 at 23:44 Nakki says:
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 ;)
28/06/2009 at 00:04 Schadenfreude says:
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.
28/06/2009 at 00:17 Lu-Tze says:
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.
28/06/2009 at 00:34 Kadayi says:
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.
28/06/2009 at 05:02 Peanut says:
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.
28/06/2009 at 06:25 video games says:
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. >_<
28/06/2009 at 10:40 mihor_fego says:
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…
28/06/2009 at 12:10 nikomo says:
If Blizzard would do something like Portal to Dalaran in Stormwind and Orgrimmar, travel times would be cut by 90%.
28/06/2009 at 12:17 ts says:
Now imagine that someone shouts “RAID at Ogrimar” and the whole Realm teleports there….
28/06/2009 at 12:57 Trollmann says:
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.
28/06/2009 at 13:46 Ninja Dodo says:
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.
28/06/2009 at 13:49 Raphaël says:
You just got slashdotted : http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/06/28/0459209/Why-Dont-MMOs-Allow-Easier-Transportation
28/06/2009 at 15:47 John says:
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.
28/06/2009 at 16:06 Ninja Dodo says:
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.
28/06/2009 at 17:44 pelotin says:
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.
28/06/2009 at 19:55 Bonkers says:
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?
28/06/2009 at 20:59 Anonymous Coward says:
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.
28/06/2009 at 21:14 Jason McCarrell says:
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.
29/06/2009 at 00:03 kafka7 says:
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.
29/06/2009 at 01:06 Haechu says:
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.29/06/2009 at 05:53 Arganus says:
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.
29/06/2009 at 06:00 Arganus says:
“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.
29/06/2009 at 06:05 RT says:
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.
29/06/2009 at 07:17 Arganus says:
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)…
29/06/2009 at 07:41 Denis says:
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…
29/06/2009 at 18:39 Genei.09 says:
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”).
29/06/2009 at 19:16 Magnut says:
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.
29/06/2009 at 19:30 justin says:
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
29/06/2009 at 20:05 Shadus says:
@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.
29/06/2009 at 21:12 mujadaddy says:
(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!
30/06/2009 at 01:01 Skippy says:
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.
30/06/2009 at 17:27 DÀCHÉNG says:
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.
30/06/2009 at 19:31 skinfaxi says:
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.
01/07/2009 at 05:17 David B says:
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.
01/07/2009 at 09:03 Ian says:
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/
01/07/2009 at 22:57 PHeMoX says:
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.
02/07/2009 at 18:08 Neo says:
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.
03/07/2009 at 00:59 Ush says:
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?
03/07/2009 at 20:44 Malibu Stacey says:
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.
04/07/2009 at 11:12 Irthen says:
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?
05/07/2009 at 17:21 chimpynipples says:
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.