RPS wants to know why you can’t just teleport in all MMOs. After all, some do. Many others incorporate some form of instant travel from hither to yonder. It’s a reasonable question as to why we’re paying good money to just watch a character jog and jog and jog to get to the content we desire. And judging by the hundreds of comments on the post, it’s a subject of interest to players.
I touched on this subject a bit on a recent post about World of Warcraft’s “improvements”, but I’d like to offer a rebuttal to instant-teleporting MMOs and explain why they’re a bad idea. Now, I’m not saying that all MMOs should have nothing but hours of running and 1:1 scale maps of planet Earth to explore, but travel serves a purpose. Purposes, actually.
1. Instant Travel Lessens The Size Of The World
A comment I wrote on my previous post:
Something I didn’t touch on but I wanted to was how mount speed, specifically, cheapens the world. In WoW’s first year, one of the devs was handling a question about why flight paths took so long — why they didn’t have, for instance, instant portals everywhere to transit folks between zones. The answer stuck with me, because it makes sense: they wanted players to see the world and retain a sense of its scope. Yeah, that 7-minute flight was nothing more than glorified eye candy that gets old the umpteenth time you do it, but in having it, you never lost the perspective that the continents were quite expansive and that you were a small person traveling in a big world.
Ironically, this is now what they’re racing away from. In having mounts earlier, faster mounts and more instant portals, the sense of world has become, indeed, “small”. They’ve exponentially increased players’ leveling and travel speed to where the pace of the game is so much faster and makes everything so much smaller and more trivial because of it. Running, as annoying as it may be, serves an important purpose in these games.
Don’t believe me? Look at more modern MMOs that have instant flight (WAR), loads of instant portals, and highly instanced zones. One of the biggest complaints coming from all of that is that players no longer feel as though they’re part of a world, but instead are traversing from isolated zone to isolated zone with no sense of connectiveness, expansion and wonder. It’s all a mass transit system designed to get folks to the thick of the action while cutting out RPG trivialities like travel and exploration — which, again, cheapen the game.
2. Travel Is A Reward
What RPS needs to consider is an extension of their question “Why can’t you just teleport?” Well, why can’t we be invincible? Why can’t we have instant access to all gear right away? Why can’t I switch on God Mode and do anything, be anywhere, have anything I want in these games?
Yes, that’s a slippery slope argument, but it all revolves around very logical game design. Devs could give players the ability to do anything, but they intentionally limit your abilities — and access to content — and challenge you to become better at the game to earn rewards to lessen these restrictions, and by doing so open up more content. It’s always good for them to have fun rewards to offer players, and travel is no different. Mounts, portals, exploring to a flight path, even mounted combat — these are tangible rewards that can be doled out, and in the games that have them, players get pretty worked up over them. Why strip those away? It’s not necessarily better to make games that have more accessible content when it comes at the cost of earning that content.
In other words, they SHOULD be making parts of the game more difficult/tedious/whatever — as long as it’s balanced in proper proportion to the “fun” stuff — or else you ned up with a game that’s 100% reward and 0% challenge. I don’t want a game to be throwing a cookie in my mouth before I even click past the EULA, I want to work for my reward and feel as though I’ve earned it. I’ll enjoy it more, that’s for sure.
3. Instant Travel Is Hard On Servers
I’m not anything close to an expert on how MMOs function on their servers, but most vets know at least one crucial fact: too many players doing too much in one place tends to overload the servers and cause crashes. Now, imagine a game where huge chunks of the population zip around to different parts of the server, and you’ll have to worry about designing a system to handle a potential overflow of population that could happen, not gradually over several minutes, but near-instantaneously.
What We Might Agree Upon
As I said, I understand the sentiment of the original post, and in part, I agree with it — particularly when travel times are TOO long in proportion to the fun that you’re seeking. I’m not against having some form of limited instant-teleportation, as long as it isn’t everywhere and all-pervasive. But I’ll point to The Burning Crusade as the tipping point in that balance for WoW, when quick and completely painless transport (player-controlled flying mounts that could eventually reach up to insane amounts of speed) began to strip away any sense of an expansive and dangerous world.
And you know what? Blizzard saw that problem as well, because they “grounded” players in Wrath of the Lich King for several levels so that they would be forced to travel more mundanely in order to really experience the content.
I think we could expand this discussion into other realms of current MMORPG design, as to how devs are trying to find a balance between challenge and fun. For instance, what about quest markers? They were unheard of back in the day — the game actually showing you where to go for quests — and now they’re everywhere, embraced by players as a painless way to progress. Yet as much as we might like them, you have to feel a bit uneasy that we’re having our hands held so much that we get the impression we’re seen as mindless lemmings, ready to plunge over a cliff unless we get help from big brother.
I had teleportation since day one in WoW. I played a mage, but I got a say I’m quite spoiled now in WoW, I can’t even do alts…unless it’s another mage.
I still think that UO had the best travel system. You could “mark” a rune anywhere you wanted and recall back to that spot anytime you wanted. It didn’t destroy the exploration part of the game because the end-game was a sandbox.
In my eyes, it made the game more immersive because I could be anywhere I wanted to be whenever I wanted rather than wasting my playtime arbitrarily traversing the same paths and routes I had gone over for four years.
There was still plenty of reason to explore because of the nature of the game, unlike WoW and similar RPGs where questing and such bread-crumb mechanics are the only reason that some areas of the map are even utilized.
Personally, I think that player-controlled flying mounts in WoW were a mistake. (Unfortunately, they can’t in good faith permanently take that ability back after having players grind out thousands of gold for access to flight.) I also don’t think that games should include instant point-to-point teleportation to anywhere in the game world. As a third and final caveat, a large portion of the problem with the old world of Azeroth is that quests will send you halfway around the world to spend five minutes at your destination before having to make the return trip. That’s a quest design issue, rather than a travel issue.
Those points aside, I do think that players should have access to instant teleportation to some location that is somewhere in the vicinity of their final destination. I don’t mean that you should appear right on top of the quest mob, or a minute away from the quest mob with a giant pointing arrow to make sure you don’t get lost. I do think that, when you’re traveling to a location that you have reached before on foot, you should be able to get somewhere close enough that you can arrive at your destination within five minutes or so of watching your character travel to the location where you will actually play the game.
Ironically, old world Azeroth is closer to this than you might think, thanks to the combination of Dalaran and the existing auto-bird travel system. I would add a few more locations (Theramore/Stonard, which are existing mage portal destinations, perhaps Booty Bay), and there are some flight paths that need to have their detours removed, but these options are sufficient to get you within a reasonable striking distance of all but the most remote locations. EQ2 offers similar travel perks these days, with teleportation into the zone that you’re heading to but no point-to-point shortcuts within most zones. LOTRO does the same with its swift travel.
Does the teleport hub approach shrink the world? Perhaps, to the extent that there are large portions of the world that players have no reason to go/return to. Then again, a large world is only impressive if there’s actually something in it.
Travel is a very interesting topic. If it’s took ‘easy’ then you get no sense of the world. I found this with WAR. The zones weren’t connected and you felt like you were playing in one with arcade game. Then I switched to WoW and immediately I felt like I was playing in a real, vibrant and full world.
Of course the flight times of the griffons in WoW does my head in. 10mins to fly from one place to another is far too excessive.
I’ll argue against travel being a reward any day. It isn’t. The destination is the reward. Travel is simply what prevents you from arriving there until a set period of time.
Mind you, I personally draw a not-so-fine line between “travel” and “exploration.” Travel is A to B. Exploration is aimless wandering, hoping to discover something new or at least some type of adventure, with no specific destination in mind. Exploration can be its own reward. Travel? Less so.
I’m all for the Vanguard (or bigger) worlds, but give us the option of instant travel when we need it. Give us the choice. I’ll gladly travel “manually” when I’m in the mood or feel like exploring, but when I get a group for something I don’t think I need to force the group to wait 30 minutes for me to arrive (yes, that happened in Vanguard) and conversely I sure as hell don’t want to stand around waiting 30 minutes on anyone else just to arrive to get the group started either.
@ Scott – And hit points are what prevents you from finishing off an enemy so that you can loot their remains. And money is what prevents you from buying anything you want from vendors and the auction house. And levels are what prevents you from going to any zone and doing any content.
What I meant isn’t that travel itself is a reward, but increasingly swifter, more visually aesthetic or wider varieties of transportation is a reward, just like loot, money and leveling up.
The main issue is getting to where the fun is. For example, if you and I start a game together and you play and human and I’m a dwarf, how easy is it to get together and play? Or, I’m forming a group to do an instance, how fast can you get to the instance to participate?
On one hand, I do like the sense of having a large world with difficult travel. On the other hand, I don’t want to have too wait to have fun. So, a balance has to be struck.
Idle musing, don’t mind me…
What if you could teleport, but only to other characters, or even only friends? That way, that dwarf and that human can find each other and have fun quickly. And you do not have to wait for others to do that instance, they just teleport to you.
Someone still has to go to the instance, but the first one to arrive becomes a beacon.
I’m pretty sure it would open up all sorts of abuse (eg, a stealthed rogue going all the way to the boss, and then the entire group teleporting to him), and so should be carefully thought before being implemented, but it would be a catering to groups, instead of only solo players.
Possibly it could become a goldsink by using teleport scroll ala Diablo. Even, do a progressive price: first one free (hello, Mr Dwarven friend, I’m an aspirant human adventurer like you, what say we hang out together), the second one cost so much, and so on, and so on…
Also, I remember a spell called lloyd’s Beacon in Might & Magic IV & V, which set a place where you could teleport. I had 2 characters learn it, so that one could teleport us away from dungeons to sell loot (and get better), and the other get us back inside.
But, once again, group catering :S (I’m sorry, it’s just that I play MMORPGs to play with others, and I rarely could in WoW…).
That way, people who wants to adventure idly and have fun, can. Those who wants to join friends and have fun, can…
There needs to be a healthy medium between the extremes. Instant Teleport is about as bad as is longish and boring travelling.
Flight for example destroys open world pvp even more than it already was in WoW. It is also a challenge to game design if people can fly over all obstacles/mobs.
The best and worst thing about flight in WoW is that you can go almost everywhere where flight is permitted very fast.
I am personally in favor of a 3-part-travelsystem. Without hearthstone and flight
1. Instant Teleport-Hub: In Cities, has portals to a few major cities and landmarks
2. Public Travel-Hub: Gives players access to ferries and zeppelins. This is public mass transport to quest hubs or nearby zones. This gives people time to meet and talk to other players on the journey
3. Personal Mount: Horses, Raptors, whatever – just like in WoW. No flying mounts.
Ultima Online had the “Mark” / “Recall” system that beej mentioned for travel, which was great but also had drawbacks: You could mark a rune everywhere and travel there in zero time.
So later areas like Ilshenar introduced a teleport hub system and did not allow mark/recall on the entire facet. Parts of the “Lost Lands” also did not allow players to mark a rune there.
I think transport needs to be planned in detail at the very beginning of the game.
I personally would have loved more and faster public transport in WoW. More Zeppelins instead of Griffons/Windriders.
Hearthstones have always been used to travel quickly, but the main intention was that people could teleport quickly to an Inn and log off there without having to log off in a monster infested zone.
Right now they almost have a Guild Wars style approach: No travel/mounts at all allowed in instances, and you fast travel to the nearest outpost to enter this instance/dungeon.
They devalue the whole “world” of Warcraft by making players focus on fast travel to key dungeons, basically the dungeons of the last expansion.
The Stormwind Harbor already managed to connect Stormwind and Darnassus and Ironforge perfectly, no need for even faster travel.