The discovery of new Lunar Rifts!?

Well without really reading the other responses yet.. I have several initial reactions..

1: Do I detect a challenge?
2: Adding 5 more for the total of 8 to Novia (and note I do not say New Britannia because we still have EP2-5 to go) seems a little impatient.
3: Does not adding the 5 now mean abandoning the rule of 8? I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Novia in of itself, is really not that big. Ok I admit I scarcely remember the moo.. err lunar rifts are there. Even so, I do not feel compelled to use them to get somewhere just to save myself 2 minutes of travel. I'm having flashbacks to UO where I once saw a guy in Vesper begging for a gate to Minoc for 20 minutes.. when he could've ran there in 5. I suppose the point here being that relying on rifts in Novia isn't going to save you a lot of time. Adding the 5 more isn't going to make them that much more convenient as time savers.. I can run from Ardoris to Caer Dracwych in something like 5 minutes, control point included. That's pretty much the length of Novia.

and..

4: What about control points? Isn't it going to be that much harder to 'fix' them with one more way to bypass them? If part of the solution here is that rifts can't be controlled and don't change very frequently then I don't see how rifts themselves are going to be any more significant than they are now. People impatient enough to keep asking for more fast travel.. multiple bind points etc aren't going to wait around for a rift to change if they don't cycle quickly. or can't be controlled.

I suppose I'd rather stick to what I understood to be the original plan with 1 rift added to each new land in future EPs for the total of 8. Unless there is some more significant reason not to apart from what seems to be a personal preference. The limited number and greater distance between them makes them actually useful. Unless rifts are going to have some kind of special hook to make them all interesting and unique (ie the Shrine of Spirituality). Then I'd rather not have more rifts for the sake of more rifts.

 

Exactly this. Make them useful. I'd rather wait and fill them in with Episode 2-5 than "fix" them to work only in Novia.

Perhaps while the lunar rift portals are damaged (i.e., until they are all discovered), the gates might be mis-behaving during the five hours where they are currently non-functional, similar to the moongates during Ultima VII. The rifts might always be open but sputtering, can sometimes cause damage or stunning when you enter, and might output you at any of the active gates (so it randomly deposits you into one of the three current scenes, perhaps even the one you just left). As new lunar rifts are discovered, this effect goes away; this can even be a per-character thing, so personal exploration rewards you with travel options.

That sounds much better than just getting gates to five random places we can already run to.

 

I presume that you have to do the start up quests to view the lunar rifts...many have not done these quests or are waiting to do them for completion so therefore never see the rifts.

The trade route concept was dead on arrival...so anything that makes travel easier is a good thing.

V/R Brickbat

 

I strongly approve. I know that if I do not count the loading times of the various encounters and passes, it takes me about 10 minutes to go across the map. This will help that tedium, thanks.

 

Sad we couldn't call them good 'ol Moongates. But I guess there are legal mumbo jumbos around that...

 

But if you can run there in 8 minutes then is it really worth waiting at all?

 

Yea, this is what led me to my reply earlier in this thread.

We don't know exactly how all this is planned to work yet. Yet,
-- If rifts are too easy to use, then it makes control points unimportant. It's more than just about trade routes, its about making pointless key aspects of gameplay. On the other hand,
-- If rifts are too hard to use, then they won't be used, because travel in the game is already pretty easy. Fast movement, teleport scrolls, lax encumbrance limits.

So, to some extent I'm waiting on further comment because I don't know what the plan is, and how easy the rifts will be to use. But if they are introduced, it does warrant looking at other aspects of gameplay to balance it out.

Travel is already easy and will become much more pain-free when loading screen times are reduced. More rifts can't really help make something easy even easier. Maybe they'll make it easier to move around if you're carrying 2x or more your weight, but if it takes between an hour and two of heavy farming to get that encumbered in the game (my experience) you're basically just talking about enabling more hours of grinding... and not making the game more fun.

And if the point is not to make travel easier, but to help new players orient themselves, then there's another way to solve this, IMO. First, with all respect to all the hard work behind SotAMap, I don't think it really works well as an in-game map tool. It's slow, not that easy to read in game. I'd still prefer a dev-created map system. Signposts on the OW map would also help. NPCs in the starter quests introducing players to travelling would help.

I'm not opposed to lunar rifts... I'm just a bit skeptical about what the goals are.

 

To me it feels both rushed and a dumbing down. I understand wanting rifts to be more meaningful in EP1, I really do. But I don't think this is the way to do it. I think adding the 5 now risks having the opposite effect later on. I would rather implement a way to control destinations on demand, such as with spells and scrolls and stay with just the 3. That I would find useful since it eliminates the wait and you don't have to worry about missing the destination and having to wait. It's lore friendly to boot.

 

@Bowen Bloodgood,

And to be honest, I don't think most players even realize the current rifts exist Which may partly explain why they're not used...

 

Thats a better reason to add them to the tutorials, and guide players to them. They should be used fairly extensively at the beginning of the game, so players can get involved with all three beginning areas, and explore all three storylines. Once they can survive the control points, they can move beyond these.

I see no reason for more lunar rifts on Novia. You can run to all four corners in the 70 minutes that the moon cycle takes (which is insanely fast, by the way; what happened to the 9-day cycle of Trammel?).

 

I'm going to be that guy and call this whole system terrible. This is a complete waste of time. Nobody will use these gates, because the convenience factor is NOT there. And under this crock system of lunar nonsense, it never will be.

Why can't these lunar gates function EXACTLY like gates in UO? I can, y'know, GO WHERE THE **** I WANT WHEN I WANT!? Why is that such a terrible thing? This lunar crap adds nothing to the game except completely trivializing and making a feature useless and unused. I can run anywhere in the world faster than the average time it would take me to get the rift to go where I want. Useless *feature* and you should make it so a menu pops up and I can damn well choose WHERE I want to go, WHEN I want to go there.

 

Because this is no UO, where travel is meaningless and location has no purpose at all. I'm glad you can't instantly warp to the ends of the earth, and have a runebook with every vendor marked. It made for a horrible game.

 

It's an interesting idea... certainly my initial kneejerk reaction is to have more rifts!

However, I'm not clear about the risk/reward balance here, and so that leaves me wanting more information..

For example... I'm assuming that players can travel through rifts while encumbered? That's a huge advantage, IMO. What would be the tradeoff?

Does the rift occasionally drop me in an unexpected location? Can I just go back through the rift if I don't like it, or am I stuck there for a period of time? Perhaps there is a small chance that an object I am carrying get's lost in the rift.

Just thinking out loud here, but I would generally suggest that the rifts remain- to some degree- not fully predictable or formulaic.

In addition, I would suggest paying close attention to how the rift schedule interfaces with that of the cabalists.

 

When UO first came out in oct 97, very few could cast 'mark', which was a 6th circle spell. Because of this, most people met each other on the roads in passing. Within 3 months, the roads were virtually barren. Never liked runes or rune books.

 

Living in Drachwald I welcome the prospect of having a rift in Brookside in the near future. Yes, I can teleport to "friends" or travel through Blood Bay or Vauban Pass (at AL62 still risky) but it's too tedious. A rift access to the area will allow me to visit home more easily without thinking about how to get back to central Novia.
I understand why travelling on the map is encouraged and I generally enjoy doing it myself. Except that CP seem to be more penalizing to low-level avatars. Perhaps once the game is launched CP make more sense to allow for strong regional content. However, at the current player base and with many cloned zones I find the CP more a hindrance than anything else.

To improve "quick" travel without making travelling completely magic you could re-introduce Orbs of the Moon that allow travelling to certain places. E.g. shrines or sacred locations that need to be unlocked (similar to U6). This could be tied to "lore" + "search and discover" quests that not necessarily require strong fighting skills. Another way to control this type of travel making it expensive with orbs using up energy and need to be recharged / repaired / replaced regularly.

 

I for one am waiting to see how much load times have improved in R43, which will be a preview of things to come.

 

So, how do these gates change that? They just force you wait in place for no good reason to do the same thing. And that is by far and wide YOUR opinion. I do NOT enjoy having to scour the world for items because people think *location* warrants rip off pricing. Everything you described is an absolute joke to me.

 

It may surprise you that he's not the only one with that opinion. Watching people recall across the street to get to the next vendor 3 seconds faster or someone begging for 20 minutes for a gate to somewhere they can get to in 5 cause they can't be bothered to walk or learn their way around is not what I consider the product of good game design.

 

Recalling and gates are entirely two different things. This discussion is about static gates. I never mentioned recalls until responding to the attack on my opinion that brought the entire conversation off-topic.

Do any of you think for half a second that keeping this same crappy system with more locations will somehow make them desirable to use? On average you can get anywhere in the game in about 5 minutes starting from the center, Brittany. These gates are just a novelty without being able to choose where you want to go, when you want to go there. This is a strict comparison to the static portals around UO, not the gate spell.

 

Sounds great. Hopefully one is located in the Drachvald.

As next step, implement the trade routes you mentioned.