Rant on Travel

I understand your point and it's a good one - for people with the time and patience to do that. But why not *at least* have stables in major cities where you can hire a horse, coach or wagon to move you from say Aerie to Brittainy? Brittainy to Ardoris? I don't think we need a huge number of Mark & Recall runes, bind points or a stable in every single PRT, NPC or POT town. But for goodness sake, why not leverage the *major* cities as travel hubs? There is nothing immersion breaking that I can see with being able to hire out for faster travel since stables are already in the game and so are horses and wagons. The same could be said for boats, which already function to move you to places you can't get to by land. A combined land/water travel system that uses the main NPC cities as the hubs would likely go a long way toward alleviating some of the travel slog we now have.

But maybe Portalarium is already planning on doing this...for episode 2.

 

@Duchess Fionwyn,

They'd need to at least have a cost in gold, for starters -- and not just be free. There are a lot of other good gameplay aspects to travel -- I've argued in this thread -- including meeting other players with traveling, and for that to happen, you actually have to have people travelling and not just teleporting everywhere. You don't want to incentivize fast travel over actual travel so much that nobody actually travels. Ferries eventually should also cost gold too, IMO.

Along that lines, they'd also need to have a chance of random encounters over long distances, and more at night, if they run at night at all. You also need to take into consideration PvP scenarios where some players might be hunting bounties on others.

I'd also argue from a game perspective that, if they did that, it would actually be better if it would take you to a wagon that you see moving across the map. And then the trip could be interrupted by things like holdups. Time should also matter in the game, and day and night should matter -- fast travel methods shouldn't erase time from the game.

So, maybe, yes. But I don't think free teleport wagons are good for the game; that's at least IMO.

 

I disagree. I like the travel, I think it adds to the realism. I love the way these types of games that make it feel arduous to get around and to survive in the beginning, but when you persist, it eventually become easier and faster.

I could not find my way from Soltown to Solania in the early releases...now I feel like the world is too small - btw I never /stuck (unless actually rare cases I actually get stuck in geometry) and I have barely used /zone. I can get around the world really fast - at least the areas I know well. I still tend to get lost up in the NE a bit.

I'm not discounting your feelings, I'm sure many agree - however, I want to voice that others may be looking for exactly this in the gameplay. I still don't get bored running around the overworld map.

 

I really have to second this! Almost all of my frustration went away once I started using sotamap. I don't find the travel to be overly time consuming but I did find it confusing. Part of the confusion is how fast I got from point A to point B. In my mind the world is a lot bigger than the overworld feels. Which greatly speeds up travel..

I still don't like the choke points where my level 0 guy got thrown several beatings because I needed to pass thru. Not sure anything can be done about it because it's part of the game's approach.

 

A banking network should be a normal part of the game and not something we have to pay to use. I don't think that is abnormal thinking. The current banking system stinks and needs to be upgraded so we can access our goods at any city, town big enough to have a banker.

When I log in during my morning hours before I leave the house I don't want to spend more time getting to the destination than I have to actually be there. My time is limited and I need to do what I want during that short time. And why are we limiting the travel talk to spells? We should be given a choice on how we want to be travelling. I don't think roving encounters, sea encounters or being pulled into an instance off the trail are things I should be forced to do if I am in a hurry to be at my destination.

If R.G. is so against recalls why did he implement it in UO?

 

I think recall should be like the hearth stone was in world of Warcraft. You can just go to where you choose as home. I wouldn't argue about some sort of player summoning spell.

 

I don't think I should be forced to get stuck in a traffic jam or a transit delay when I'm in a hurry to get to my destination in real life, but it gives me a story to tell (or rant about) when my journey is done, and sometimes it provides unexpected experiences with people I wouldn't normally meet. Now I don't want a game to be as realistic as a sim of being stuck in an airport terminal delay, however I do think these unexpected roaming encounters can add to my game experience. It's OK to be surprised - even frustrated- in my journeys from time to time if implemented well

PS UO frustrated me quite often. I would scream expletives out loud at my death by an unexpected Ettin while trying to get from A to B, followed by a stress-laden race in my ghostly form back to the nearest town to don my not-so-great armour set and run back to my corpse in order to pick valuables off it while dodging the same Ettin. I hated that game in that moment. I loved it at the same time. It never stopped me playing, and no game since has ever provided me that sense of value to my character. The risk made it so rewarding. (and that was even without taking part in pvp)

 

Travel is getting worse not better.

 

How so?

 

I understand your point but I would like to get FAR away from traffic jams and transit delays even if occasionally the gods reach down once in a blue moon and make them an interesting experience. I'm not gaming to replicate a once-a-year occasion when travel delays are actually a good thing. I game to escape the drudgery of traffic and bureaucracy and the mundaneness and waiting associated with RL. Because my play time is limited, probably well under an hour a day on average, I really don't want to spend those precious minutes farting around with this backwardass travel system when I could instead be fighting, flirting, guilding, crafting, building, exploring, dancing, summoning, spellcasting, foraging.

This is important. If I had 2-3 hours a day to play, I might feel differently about travel speed. But I don't, and I think the majority of players won't. So please don't stand in the way of actual play.

 

Why does everyone want everything easy? Why do we have to dumb everything down because someone gets "bored"
So let's say they dumb it down for you, what will they do when you post a few months later griping about how easy the game is?
People do not think when they call for changes like this. All you do is dumb the game down for those of us not to lazy to walk a few extra minutes or take a bit more time on this or that.
In the end it is a game, and if it is to tough for you. maybe it is time to find something more appealing to you?

 

I'm with Budner on this. I really want to see plenty of options to travel quickly around the place. For those who want to take the slow boat to china.. let that be a thing, RP the hell out of it if you want. It just doesn't interest me. I want to be able to get online, join friends/guildmates quickly or get to somewhere with the least amount of loading screens possible.

 

He isn't talking about making the game easy. He is talking about travel. I only have a finite amount of time to play. I hate wasting time running and zoning just to get a shorter space of time to play. Running and zoning isn't fun. PERIOD.

 

It should be fun as well...like I said your looking at the problem wrong.

It should be just as fun getting to the entrance of a dungeon as getting to throne room.

 

Are you not asking them to dumb down the game? Because you will be "bored" having to actually travel? I think I Was pretty spot on with what I said. So with what you are griping about, I guess they should just make a small map? So YOU can walk across it in what 2 minutes? Would that make you feel warm and fuzzy then? We do not even know the full potential of what the new travel system will be.
I do not think we should be able to travel across the map in a couple minutes. But I can see that if people disagree with you, you get all immature about it.

 

By dumbing down travel you indeed do dumb down the game. IF you can get to anywhere in the click of a button, then you have made the game easier. If you are a casual gamer as Budner is portraying himself as, why should those of us who may play a few more hours have to suffer, by having our game made easy for a casual player? They know the time they can invest in game and should prepare accordingly. It is that simple.

 

I'm on the camp of letting the game have regional communities where travel distance makes a difference. Can't be bothered to trek to an event? Don't go. Do something else. This isn't a "Casual vs Hardcore" thing. I'm waiting for the over-world encounters to really kick into gear before I pass judgement on whenever or not traveling is an issue. As for the (current) traveling happening in the game, I'm more bothered by the people who expect others to know exactly where and how to go to reach an event (kinda like how the game's quests are currently implemented... OH SNAP!). "Just /zone" is not a good answer to "where is X and how do I reach it?"

Then again, I'm a journey guy, not a destination guy. There's no answer to this.

 

I'm not convinced that incorporating better modes of transportation is *dumbing down* the game. I am not convinced that the changes proposed by the devs in the R26 postmortem are improvements to travel. I am also not convinced that people who would like a better transport system are *too lazy to walk a few extra minutes*.

But the game is still being developed and we all have our ideas about what constitutes *immersion* or *tedious repetition*. I look forward to seeing what the Devs come up with next, they certainly like to keep us on our toes

 

I'm a fan of open world exploration, but dislike time sinks just for the sake of time sinks. I'm also looking forward to how they balance it (especially towards giving PvP a fair shake for those involved)

 

Richard Garriot has said from the start and repeatedly that he wants regional economies to flourish. The Devs deserve the opportunity to try to create them. Anyone who thinks that ubiquitous insta-travel and regional economies can co-exist has not given the topic much thought.