I think you can really see the problem with a lot of the posts in this thread.
There are some people talking about how they really like the dungeon finders and standing around in cities largely because they do not have to rely on other players so much. That's not what an MMO is. That's thematically the same as a Diablo game with a different presentation. Most of the MMOs these days are not MMOs. They're cooperative games with set inside a larger virtual world that largely goes unused.
WoW vanilla feels different because it wasn't like that- neither were the games that came before. I do believe that WoW started the trend away. However, in the old days of games, you needed lots of people to do a lot of the content. Travelling around the world was a significant part of the immersion experience. It also creates more time investment in the game. Many of us gripe about the travel times, but we also churn up and get bored with the instant gratification response by developers. In the quest to appeal to the lowest common denominator, the developers have made games that have very limited appeal over the long term.
Well I was commenting on you mentioning timesinks from older games.
As far as travel...I see no reason a Skyrim type thing can't be added. Meaning you must discover it to use fast travel to the area, or as near as you can to it. Or have portals near all the major hubs, still requiring travel, but at a minimal need. Even though I am an explorer at heart in MMORPG's, that doesn't mean that Iike taking the same beaten path over and over either. Depends on my mood or time restraints for what goals I have for a given day of playtime. So I can agree that quick travel is needed to a degree. Just not overused to the point of making the game world trivial.
But tell me how any MMORPG teaches you something these days too. Don't bother, because I already know the answer...none do, as they are all the same game with different titles. And yes, sadly those that want active fast fun in MMORPG's is the larger audience atm, so we get these MMORPG's with shallow content people speed through to get to the next one.
Eventually it will swing back the other way. May take awhile, but it will.
Well Skyrim is straight-up Guild Wars 1 style teleportation. It requires the player travel somewhere once and afterwards any excessive travel isn't necessary because you can teleport there. The player always has the option to manually travel places, but the game doesn't mandate excessive travel because it knows it's boring.
The discussion was never a critique of acceptable travel times, like the brief interludes spent traveling small distances, or the travel which makes combat tactical. It's only excessive travel (which also has no gameplay) which is completely uninteresting to players.
Almost every game teaches you something. From interactions with others, to optimizing economies, to resource management, to prioritized decision-making, there are a lot of little skills involved in a game. Not all of them apply to real life, but many do. Our minds are wired to derive enjoyment from this learning, and that's the fundamental reason why we play games (same deal with many animals.) If you think someone can play the auctions in WOW or EVE for any length of time and not passively be gaining business sense through their successes and failures, then you're simply being obstinate.
Honestly I assume most people are being intentionally contrary purely for the sake of argument when they pretend not to see the different in gameplay content between a travel sequence (where the extent of gameplay is "avoid the mobs") and a boss fight (where gameplay involves many factors from personal rotation to resource management to threat avoidance and more.) Fast-paced or not, it's pretty clear that one activity requires and rewards substantially more brain power.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I think you can really see the problem with a lot of the posts in this thread.
There are some people talking about how they really like the dungeon finders and standing around in cities largely because they do not have to rely on other players so much. That's not what an MMO is. That's thematically the same as a Diablo game with a different presentation. Most of the MMOs these days are not MMOs. They're cooperative games with set inside a larger virtual world that largely goes unused.
WoW vanilla feels different because it wasn't like that- neither were the games that came before. I do believe that WoW started the trend away. However, in the old days of games, you needed lots of people to do a lot of the content. Travelling around the world was a significant part of the immersion experience. It also creates more time investment in the game. Many of us gripe about the travel times, but we also churn up and get bored with the instant gratification response by developers. In the quest to appeal to the lowest common denominator, the developers have made games that have very limited appeal over the long term.
That is incorrect. In WoW vanilla you did dungeon groups by standing around in cities and spamming city chat with LFG. Once you the group formed, you took the flight out to the dungeon zone and traveled on mount to the dungeon. Once you done the travel a few times, it was mostly autopilot. The basic interaction with other players was just as minimal as it is today. Frankly I spent most of that time watching TV.
Unnecessary travel time is a lowest common denominator feature.
More so it's something of a global insult. Art has many forms and many aspects, all of which are elements that contribute to the depth and detail of a game.
A cleaner example would be Journey.
This is a game that was developed very much based on traveling. The interest from the game comes from a lot of relatively passive elements.
You can say it's not that deep a game. Which in a sense it isn't, but a lot of thought went into the setting, the set pieces, and the ambient atmosphere.
This is an element that's in play in many other kinds of games as well. It's not often given the same level of concern, but for a game built with exploration or open worlds in mind, the construction of detailed and beautiful landscapes is effectively the entire job of a few people.
Entire art forms are built around this kind of stuff too, in painting and photography both. And it is very much entertainment for some people to look at, admire, and talk about such things.
Replying to this again, as I skipped some bits the first time...
You can't say every element adds to the depth of a game. In fact some elements detract from the overall depth of a game. A wrong feature can entirely sabotage the existing depth of a game.
Journey is a great example because it's state of the art in terms of travel visuals. And how many times did you play through it? Once? Twice? Maybe since it's the pinnacle of travel games you played through 3 full times. Impressive.
...but did you play through a fourth time? Did you play through 10 times? Did you endlessly replay it? Because that's the sort of travel we're talking about in MMORPGs, and MMORPGs don't even have the caliber of travel scenery found in Journey.
Nobody has a problem traveling somewhere once (like GW1 or Skyrim.) Traveling somewhere once is fine, as long as travel isn't excesisvely long and uneventful (and yes, Journey's consistent barrage of new, distinct, emotive landscapes qualify as "eventful".) What's being argued against is repetitive travel. Excessive travel.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Congratulations, you missed everything and decided to continue the same non-argument, going so far as to quote me on some things and then effectively say the same thing with different words.
Not to be rude, but as I've already said, your argument is meaningless as there is no one that disagrees with your claim. It's everything else about how you present the claim that is the problem. Notably the fact you complain about travel and travel time as if it was the problem, and not acknowledging that it's a problem due to how the gameplay elements are built.
I've explained this a couple times at least for you to shrug it off and say the same thing again.
We get it, you don't like not doing something, and when you're going along in a game and can't do something in a timely fashion you don't like the game.
But like I have noted before, there's likely a reason the game is like that, and I am a person more apt to examine the game as a whole instead of just saying 'travel is boring, get rid of travel'.
I wanna know why travel is considered boring, why the game is setup to sabotage some of it's own gameplay elements, and how it can be built better to make those elements actually part of the meaningful ones.
That means changing the way questing works, changing the way exploration works, changing the way the experience of the game works.
EDIT: To summarize, you are doing with words exactly what you complain about with travel. Going a long way to say nothing.
Not only that, but you do so with much of it being hyperbole. Consequently you're isolating particular concepts and creating conditions that don't match up with anything that anyone but you would even be considering.
It's pointless, and has so far contributed no ideas or points to even address what the OP or anyone but you have elected to address. As far as what it does say, it's basically just noting you don't like worlds and would prefer a lobby game, if we were to try and divine a meaningful answer from it all.
Which, again, is a long way to walk for such a short answer.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Travel in any MMO is usually not the issue. It's upgraded travel.
SWG when it started had very slow land speeders and mounts. They were faster than running but not fast. In time more mounts were added and they became so fast rubber banding became an issue because the engine was rendering slower than the speed you were crossing it.
EVE. When it came out you had gates. That's what you used. Then came wormholes, Jump bridges, cyno's and before long you could logi a whole fleet of super caps from one end to the other in 15 minutes.
Devs use speed travel as an upgrade factor, carrots for the player and the game doesn't handle those upgrades. Rather than give players a method of ignoring the things between Point A and Point B how about giving players something more to appreciate between Point A and point B? You go for a walk in a park. Why would you do that? You could take a cab and get to the other side of the park in no time. Save wasting time looking at stupid trees. An Open world should be like a walk in a park.
Congratulations, you missed everything and decided to continue the same non-argument, going so far as to quote me on some things and then effectively say the same thing with different words.
Not to be rude, but as I've already said, your argument is meaningless as there is no one that disagrees with your claim. It's everything else about how you present the claim that is the problem. Notably the fact you complain about travel and travel time as if it was the problem, and not acknowledging that it's a problem due to how the gameplay elements are built.
I've explained this a couple times at least for you to shrug it off and say the same thing again.
We get it, you don't like not doing something, and when you're going along in a game and can't do something in a timely fashion you don't like the game.
But like I have noted before, there's likely a reason the game is like that, and I am a person more apt to examine the game as a whole instead of just saying 'travel is boring, get rid of travel'.
I wanna know why travel is considered boring, why the game is setup to sabotage some of it's own gameplay elements, and how it can be built better to make those elements actually part of the meaningful ones.
That means changing the way questing works, changing the way exploration works, changing the way the experience of the game works.
EDIT: To summarize, you are doing with words exactly what you complain about with travel. Going a long way to say nothing.
Not only that, but you do so with much of it being hyperbole. Consequently you're isolating particular concepts and creating conditions that don't match up with anything that anyone but you would even be considering.
It's pointless, and has so far contributed no ideas or points to even address what the OP or anyone but you have elected to address. As far as what it does say, it's basically just noting you don't like worlds and would prefer a lobby game, if we were to try and divine a meaningful answer from it all.
Which, again, is a long way to walk for such a short answer.
Excessive travel clearly was a problem. At least, until modern MMORPGs wisely realized that wasting the players' time was making them less money than the games which kept players engaged with interesting gameplay.
I'm guessing you're intentionally playing dumb, to claim not to know why a virtually-decisionless portion of gameplay (travel) would be considered more boring than decision-intensive portions of gameplay (questing, trading, combat, etc.)
One is nearly mindless, one actively engages the mind. Guess which players find boring.
If I sound repetitive it's because simple things like this have to be repeatedly explained, instead of us moving past obvious concepts into true discussion.
Along the same lines, all my posts have addressed the OP's point: travel isn't common anymore because it's not a focus of MMORPGs, and therefore tedious, except in the rare games that make it a focus (like Puzzle Pirates, as one example.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I think you can really see the problem with a lot of the posts in this thread.
There are some people talking about how they really like the dungeon finders and standing around in cities largely because they do not have to rely on other players so much. That's not what an MMO is. That's thematically the same as a Diablo game with a different presentation. Most of the MMOs these days are not MMOs. They're cooperative games with set inside a larger virtual world that largely goes unused.
WoW vanilla feels different because it wasn't like that- neither were the games that came before. I do believe that WoW started the trend away. However, in the old days of games, you needed lots of people to do a lot of the content. Travelling around the world was a significant part of the immersion experience. It also creates more time investment in the game. Many of us gripe about the travel times, but we also churn up and get bored with the instant gratification response by developers. In the quest to appeal to the lowest common denominator, the developers have made games that have very limited appeal over the long term.
That is incorrect. In WoW vanilla you did dungeon groups by standing around in cities and spamming city chat with LFG. Once you the group formed, you took the flight out to the dungeon zone and traveled on mount to the dungeon. Once you done the travel a few times, it was mostly autopilot. The basic interaction with other players was just as minimal as it is today. Frankly I spent most of that time watching TV.
Unnecessary travel time is a lowest common denominator feature.
You have just demonstrated the problem. I rarely, and I seriously doubt most people, just sat around spamming chat LFG. Instead, what most people did was create a network of friends and work with guildies to do instances. The set up and travel time provides a time for a social experience. People used to talk a lot more in groups. After instance finder was introduced, going through an instance without a single word said was the norm.
As I said, these posts demonstrate the problem. You do not want an MMO. You want a Diablo style cooperative game.
I'm a 20 warrior in Wow. The world seems exciting, it's beauriful and has nice lore. So, why do I don't explore it? Simple, for what sake? I will don't find any open dungeon with dangerous monsters and the boss from which I can loot very rare item to become rich. All the challenge is in the instances, so even if I loot something worth it will be nothing after 3 lvls. So I stay in city and queque for instances.
I'm a 20 warrior in open world mmo. Now I have only a wolf to ride on. I see a big hole in the middle of mountain. I go there, enter, but the monsters are too strong, I can't cope with them. 2 more people have arrived, because there were rumours that here is a monster which drops a very unique mount (1% chance). We clear the cave. Fight with the boss, but there isn't anything worth to loot. So, we come to the nearest village. People are talking about a raid on their village. In few minutes a dragon attacks the city. Only few people have killed him, but now I have a unique mount, and can explore the world, seeking for the adventure.
What is better, standing in city queueing for instances and loot mounts which are useless, cuz you stay in city the whole time while not raiding/ doing instances/bg/ arenas, or the second option. I'm waiting for your opinion .
Why is because you are playing the wrong MMO, play Vanguard it has no instances in the game at all.
I actually think travel time and downtime is a good thing as long as it's in moderation. It provides some contrast to the combat gameplay. You can't have highs without lows. It's used very expertly in many games and other media such as books and movies. Take the Lord of the Rings movies for example. There's a lot of calm moments where they're traveling or talking in-between the action scenes, and none of the action scenes are allowed to go on for too long.
I think MMOs tend to forget about this and that many players are in fact looking for more of a virtual world aspect from the genre than lobby-based multiplayer. I think this is one of the major reasons pretty much all MMOs coming out lose most of their playerbase so quickly.
I think there is room for some kinds of fast travel, but I dislike the inexplicable teleportation from LFG systems. I think teleportation and summoning spells are cooler because they're part of the world simulation rather than an arbitrary UI.
What's better, logging in to waste 50% of your gaming time traveling, or spending 100% of your time doing the interesting meaningful things?
A game's job is to entertain: to be fun.
When a book wants to entertain it doesn't explain literally every dull day of Frodo's journey to Mordor, it skips between the interesting parts.
When a movie wants to entertain, it doesn't waste time filming literally every single minute of the protagonist's 2-hour-long car trip to New York. It skips to the interesting part.
Immersion is fun, but doesn't justify wasting the player's time with non-gameplay. If a game deliberately wastes players' times, players move on to other games that don't waste their time.
Right on right on.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
All teleportations skills are best friends and worst enemys for the open world MMOs
i stay there, i prefer mounts than any kind of easy teleports... i am fan of GW2 and i hate all this with waypoints, i prefer mounts and also i prefer staying local or building fame around a place by holding a fort or guarding a place, anyway just a view of my ideal mmoRPG ...
Well I was commenting on you mentioning timesinks from older games.
As far as travel...I see no reason a Skyrim type thing can't be added. Meaning you must discover it to use fast travel to the area, or as near as you can to it. Or have portals near all the major hubs, still requiring travel, but at a minimal need. Even though I am an explorer at heart in MMORPG's, that doesn't mean that Iike taking the same beaten path over and over either. Depends on my mood or time restraints for what goals I have for a given day of playtime. So I can agree that quick travel is needed to a degree. Just not overused to the point of making the game world trivial.
But tell me how any MMORPG teaches you something these days too. Don't bother, because I already know the answer...none do, as they are all the same game with different titles. And yes, sadly those that want active fast fun in MMORPG's is the larger audience atm, so we get these MMORPG's with shallow content people speed through to get to the next one.
Eventually it will swing back the other way. May take awhile, but it will.
Well Skyrim is straight-up Guild Wars 1 style teleportation. It requires the player travel somewhere once and afterwards any excessive travel isn't necessary because you can teleport there. The player always has the option to manually travel places, but the game doesn't mandate excessive travel because it knows it's boring.
The discussion was never a critique of acceptable travel times, like the brief interludes spent traveling small distances, or the travel which makes combat tactical. It's only excessive travel (which also has no gameplay) which is completely uninteresting to players.
Almost every game teaches you something. From interactions with others, to optimizing economies, to resource management, to prioritized decision-making, there are a lot of little skills involved in a game. Not all of them apply to real life, but many do. Our minds are wired to derive enjoyment from this learning, and that's the fundamental reason why we play games (same deal with many animals.) If you think someone can play the auctions in WOW or EVE for any length of time and not passively be gaining business sense through their successes and failures, then you're simply being obstinate.
Honestly I assume most people are being intentionally contrary purely for the sake of argument when they pretend not to see the different in gameplay content between a travel sequence (where the extent of gameplay is "avoid the mobs") and a boss fight (where gameplay involves many factors from personal rotation to resource management to threat avoidance and more.) Fast-paced or not, it's pretty clear that one activity requires and rewards substantially more brain power.
Raid content, dungeons, and boss fights may take some decision making and brain power the first few times until a group (Guild) gets the sequence down, after that it is auto-pilot.
But just because you seem to enjoy instant travel to the next raid/dungeon does not mean everyone does. With travel...depending on how the game world is laid out...you have options for travel routes that may make it faster, may be safer, may take you past another objective on your way to another objective, etc. There were MANY such options in EQ.
That's not to say travel cannot be made more interesting either...
- Unique landscape additions players can use for directional purposes. Random spawn rare mobs that wander the landscape and offer great challenge and reward. (Just as EQ had mobs that were well above the level range of the zone you could find).
- Random AI bandit attacks along roadways...possibly have multiple spawn locations and spawn times.
- Why not have longer day and night cycles (Possibly 6 to 8 real hours) where either different creatures at maybe even a different level range come out between cycles. Also making zones visited at lower levels while er.....leveling viable to higher levels for revisits if night cycle mobs were near cap.
Could go on and on with ideas. It is possible, for the sake of those who enjoy exploration, to make it more inviting. And even more inviting for those such as yourself who shy away from travel.
Originally posted by marsh9799I think you can really see the problem with a lot of the posts in this thread.There are some people talking about how they really like the dungeon finders and standing around in cities largely because they do not have to rely on other players so much. That's not what an MMO is. That's thematically the same as a Diablo game with a different presentation. Most of the MMOs these days are not MMOs. They're cooperative games with set inside a larger virtual world that largely goes unused.WoW vanilla feels different because it wasn't like that- neither were the games that came before. I do believe that WoW started the trend away. However, in the old days of games, you needed lots of people to do a lot of the content. Travelling around the world was a significant part of the immersion experience. It also creates more time investment in the game. Many of us gripe about the travel times, but we also churn up and get bored with the instant gratification response by developers. In the quest to appeal to the lowest common denominator, the developers have made games that have very limited appeal over the long term.
That is incorrect. In WoW vanilla you did dungeon groups by standing around in cities and spamming city chat with LFG. Once you the group formed, you took the flight out to the dungeon zone and traveled on mount to the dungeon. Once you done the travel a few times, it was mostly autopilot. The basic interaction with other players was just as minimal as it is today. Frankly I spent most of that time watching TV. Unnecessary travel time is a lowest common denominator feature.
You have just demonstrated the problem. I rarely, and I seriously doubt most people, just sat around spamming chat LFG. Instead, what most people did was create a network of friends and work with guildies to do instances. The set up and travel time provides a time for a social experience. People used to talk a lot more in groups. After instance finder was introduced, going through an instance without a single word said was the norm.
As I said, these posts demonstrate the problem. You do not want an MMO. You want a Diablo style cooperative game.
The problem was that getting into a guild was the only way to see the content. Guilds were exclusive clubs and it kept more people from seeing content that it got people into the content.
Oh sure, people would socialize in their guilds, but they'd also make sure they didn't socialize with the people who weren't in a guild, or who were in the the 'wrong' guild. It was like an especially large high school, drama and all. Only the people who were in the 'good' guilds would look back on that fondly. Anyone who did not get to see the end game content and the people in the overly dramatic guilds might have a very different opinion of 'the good old days'.
** ** **
I don't see what this has to do with immersion in the open world. Even with guilds people would teleport to the summoning stones or get summoned by the warlocks. As far as socialization, there's always been a lot of socializing in global chat.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Raid content, dungeons, and boss fights may take some decision making and brain power the first few times until a group (Guild) gets the sequence down, after that it is auto-pilot.
But just because you seem to enjoy instant travel to the next raid/dungeon does not mean everyone does. With travel...depending on how the game world is laid out...you have options for travel routes that may make it faster, may be safer, may take you past another objective on your way to another objective, etc. There were MANY such options in EQ.
That's not to say travel cannot be made more interesting either...
- Unique landscape additions players can use for directional purposes. Random spawn rare mobs that wander the landscape and offer great challenge and reward. (Just as EQ had mobs that were well above the level range of the zone you could find).
- Random AI bandit attacks along roadways...possibly have multiple spawn locations and spawn times.
- Why not have longer day and night cycles (Possibly 6 to 8 real hours) where either different creatures at maybe even a different level range come out between cycles. Also making zones visited at lower levels while er.....leveling viable to higher levels for revisits if night cycle mobs were near cap.
Could go on and on with ideas. It is possible, for the sake of those who enjoy exploration, to make it more inviting. And even more inviting for those such as yourself who shy away from travel.
The decision-making involved in learning the fight is the very essence of fun in games. Animals and humans use play specifically to derive pleasure from learning -- from transitioning knowledge from something you have to actively think about, to the point where it's "auto-pilot". (Koster, 2004)
After it's auto-pilot, of course it isn't fun! There's no learning left.
What makes a game fun is the magnitude of that learning. In a combat system your character is a system (ability rotation) and the mobs have a system (threat-based AI), and your teammates have systems (their ability sets), and the environment can have systems (pain fields, physics-based gameplay, etc), you have to not only worry about optimizing each of those systems individually, but figuring out how they interact with each other.
In travel you just have mob avoidance. A solitary system which isn't interacting with other systems.
It's no surprise then which set of systems bores players faster.
And yes, if we stop talking about how travel has traditionally been ultra-boring, and start talking about adding new facets to travel, that begins to make it far more acceptable. But we can't say "games need more travel" until after we add gameplay to travel. Otherwise we're saying "games should be boring", which most players will disagree with.
You really aren't telling me anything I don't know. I understand how humans work as I am one after all.
Seems your just trying to make it sound more in depth than it is as far as gaming goes to make your point because really....ALL these games are the same thing over and over and over...just with different characters, maybe a different setting, and a different title (As far as MMORPG's are concerned). They are all lack luster...no innovation, no creativity, no staying power.
These damn companies need to start looking beyond trying to be or beat WoW and make something that stands out from the crowd. I'd bet then...they'd be far more likely to succeed and reach beyond the short life spans of these post-WoW era MMORPG's and make surprisingly more profit.
Or I could use the travel systems in the game and actually scoot my butt along, something that video didn't show.
One thing that video shows, and this video shows even better, is how I wasn't "lying" about AC1's mob density being much lighter and travel consequently being even more mindless than modern MMORPGs.
Before you accuse someone of not knowing reality and "lying", you should probably make sure you're not the one lying, because youtube videos do make it rather easy to call someone out on that, friend.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
-Its actually sad. I understand trolling sometimes (and it can be fun) and I understand debate/discussion/disagreement - Its healthy and intellectually stimulating.
All I see online these days are people arguing for arguments sake- And its getting worse by the Month.
Once again, Why do people play mmorpgs when people want small encounters, instant action and 'Levels'....
QFT
So sad that MMO gamers nowadays only want the "instant hop in and hop out fun" RPGs are suppose to take a long time because it is about progression. How can you feel immersed or attached to your character if you hop in for the occasional dungeon/instance (like in GW2) and then call it quits at the end? There is no feel of achievement or adventure at all. There was a certain adventurous feeling when you had to find a group and hold it together. On your way to the boss or dungeon in the open world you might encounter enemies and you have to stick together (or fail!) but in the end you felt like you were part of something. Today's games (sorry for taking GW2 as an example again) you rarely befriend or socialise much with the players you "fast run" the dungeon with. If you do befriend them it's mostly for the fact that they know how to do the "fast run" as much as you do, so you can grind some more tokens. There is no feeling of achievement or epicness at all!
Well enough ranting about GW2. There are plenty of other games that call themselves MMORPGs but have very little to do with it, IMHO. Like I said, MMORPGs are about progression and immersion and not the quick injection of fun which you can find in various minigames and action-oriented games (MMOFPSs, etc.). We shouldn't forget where the RPGs come from...
Comments
I think you can really see the problem with a lot of the posts in this thread.
There are some people talking about how they really like the dungeon finders and standing around in cities largely because they do not have to rely on other players so much. That's not what an MMO is. That's thematically the same as a Diablo game with a different presentation. Most of the MMOs these days are not MMOs. They're cooperative games with set inside a larger virtual world that largely goes unused.
WoW vanilla feels different because it wasn't like that- neither were the games that came before. I do believe that WoW started the trend away. However, in the old days of games, you needed lots of people to do a lot of the content. Travelling around the world was a significant part of the immersion experience. It also creates more time investment in the game. Many of us gripe about the travel times, but we also churn up and get bored with the instant gratification response by developers. In the quest to appeal to the lowest common denominator, the developers have made games that have very limited appeal over the long term.
Well Skyrim is straight-up Guild Wars 1 style teleportation. It requires the player travel somewhere once and afterwards any excessive travel isn't necessary because you can teleport there. The player always has the option to manually travel places, but the game doesn't mandate excessive travel because it knows it's boring.
The discussion was never a critique of acceptable travel times, like the brief interludes spent traveling small distances, or the travel which makes combat tactical. It's only excessive travel (which also has no gameplay) which is completely uninteresting to players.
Almost every game teaches you something. From interactions with others, to optimizing economies, to resource management, to prioritized decision-making, there are a lot of little skills involved in a game. Not all of them apply to real life, but many do. Our minds are wired to derive enjoyment from this learning, and that's the fundamental reason why we play games (same deal with many animals.) If you think someone can play the auctions in WOW or EVE for any length of time and not passively be gaining business sense through their successes and failures, then you're simply being obstinate.
Honestly I assume most people are being intentionally contrary purely for the sake of argument when they pretend not to see the different in gameplay content between a travel sequence (where the extent of gameplay is "avoid the mobs") and a boss fight (where gameplay involves many factors from personal rotation to resource management to threat avoidance and more.) Fast-paced or not, it's pretty clear that one activity requires and rewards substantially more brain power.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
That is incorrect. In WoW vanilla you did dungeon groups by standing around in cities and spamming city chat with LFG. Once you the group formed, you took the flight out to the dungeon zone and traveled on mount to the dungeon. Once you done the travel a few times, it was mostly autopilot. The basic interaction with other players was just as minimal as it is today. Frankly I spent most of that time watching TV.
Unnecessary travel time is a lowest common denominator feature.
immersion is just feeling
grafics and how you control your avatar
Replying to this again, as I skipped some bits the first time...
You can't say every element adds to the depth of a game. In fact some elements detract from the overall depth of a game. A wrong feature can entirely sabotage the existing depth of a game.
Journey is a great example because it's state of the art in terms of travel visuals. And how many times did you play through it? Once? Twice? Maybe since it's the pinnacle of travel games you played through 3 full times. Impressive.
...but did you play through a fourth time? Did you play through 10 times? Did you endlessly replay it? Because that's the sort of travel we're talking about in MMORPGs, and MMORPGs don't even have the caliber of travel scenery found in Journey.
Nobody has a problem traveling somewhere once (like GW1 or Skyrim.) Traveling somewhere once is fine, as long as travel isn't excesisvely long and uneventful (and yes, Journey's consistent barrage of new, distinct, emotive landscapes qualify as "eventful".) What's being argued against is repetitive travel. Excessive travel.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Congratulations, you missed everything and decided to continue the same non-argument, going so far as to quote me on some things and then effectively say the same thing with different words.
Not to be rude, but as I've already said, your argument is meaningless as there is no one that disagrees with your claim. It's everything else about how you present the claim that is the problem. Notably the fact you complain about travel and travel time as if it was the problem, and not acknowledging that it's a problem due to how the gameplay elements are built.
I've explained this a couple times at least for you to shrug it off and say the same thing again.
We get it, you don't like not doing something, and when you're going along in a game and can't do something in a timely fashion you don't like the game.
But like I have noted before, there's likely a reason the game is like that, and I am a person more apt to examine the game as a whole instead of just saying 'travel is boring, get rid of travel'.
I wanna know why travel is considered boring, why the game is setup to sabotage some of it's own gameplay elements, and how it can be built better to make those elements actually part of the meaningful ones.
That means changing the way questing works, changing the way exploration works, changing the way the experience of the game works.
EDIT: To summarize, you are doing with words exactly what you complain about with travel. Going a long way to say nothing.
Not only that, but you do so with much of it being hyperbole. Consequently you're isolating particular concepts and creating conditions that don't match up with anything that anyone but you would even be considering.
It's pointless, and has so far contributed no ideas or points to even address what the OP or anyone but you have elected to address. As far as what it does say, it's basically just noting you don't like worlds and would prefer a lobby game, if we were to try and divine a meaningful answer from it all.
Which, again, is a long way to walk for such a short answer.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Travel in any MMO is usually not the issue. It's upgraded travel.
SWG when it started had very slow land speeders and mounts. They were faster than running but not fast. In time more mounts were added and they became so fast rubber banding became an issue because the engine was rendering slower than the speed you were crossing it.
EVE. When it came out you had gates. That's what you used. Then came wormholes, Jump bridges, cyno's and before long you could logi a whole fleet of super caps from one end to the other in 15 minutes.
Devs use speed travel as an upgrade factor, carrots for the player and the game doesn't handle those upgrades. Rather than give players a method of ignoring the things between Point A and Point B how about giving players something more to appreciate between Point A and point B? You go for a walk in a park. Why would you do that? You could take a cab and get to the other side of the park in no time. Save wasting time looking at stupid trees. An Open world should be like a walk in a park.
Excessive travel clearly was a problem. At least, until modern MMORPGs wisely realized that wasting the players' time was making them less money than the games which kept players engaged with interesting gameplay.
I'm guessing you're intentionally playing dumb, to claim not to know why a virtually-decisionless portion of gameplay (travel) would be considered more boring than decision-intensive portions of gameplay (questing, trading, combat, etc.)
One is nearly mindless, one actively engages the mind. Guess which players find boring.
If I sound repetitive it's because simple things like this have to be repeatedly explained, instead of us moving past obvious concepts into true discussion.
Along the same lines, all my posts have addressed the OP's point: travel isn't common anymore because it's not a focus of MMORPGs, and therefore tedious, except in the rare games that make it a focus (like Puzzle Pirates, as one example.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I'd be curious to see how many players would end up playing on and sticking with a "classic" WoW server for example.
No LFD/LFR system, no instant travel to dungeons - back to hoofing it and warlock summons and meeting stones.
No flying mounts.
etc.
Hell, no ports to Battlegrounds or Arena's either.
Hoof it to the portals in the world.
I'd predict the server would have maybe a few hundred players on each faction after a couple of weeks.
I really miss that about the genre...The need to interact and rely on other people to get tasks done..
It gives players a sense of belonging.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
You have just demonstrated the problem. I rarely, and I seriously doubt most people, just sat around spamming chat LFG. Instead, what most people did was create a network of friends and work with guildies to do instances. The set up and travel time provides a time for a social experience. People used to talk a lot more in groups. After instance finder was introduced, going through an instance without a single word said was the norm.
As I said, these posts demonstrate the problem. You do not want an MMO. You want a Diablo style cooperative game.
Why is because you are playing the wrong MMO, play Vanguard it has no instances in the game at all.
I actually think travel time and downtime is a good thing as long as it's in moderation. It provides some contrast to the combat gameplay. You can't have highs without lows. It's used very expertly in many games and other media such as books and movies. Take the Lord of the Rings movies for example. There's a lot of calm moments where they're traveling or talking in-between the action scenes, and none of the action scenes are allowed to go on for too long.
I think MMOs tend to forget about this and that many players are in fact looking for more of a virtual world aspect from the genre than lobby-based multiplayer. I think this is one of the major reasons pretty much all MMOs coming out lose most of their playerbase so quickly.
I think there is room for some kinds of fast travel, but I dislike the inexplicable teleportation from LFG systems. I think teleportation and summoning spells are cooler because they're part of the world simulation rather than an arbitrary UI.
It's sad that people are actually using vanilla WoW for the standard of an "open world" MMO.....hahaha.
Classic Everquest is your best, and in many cases, only example of a true open world MMO.
Right on right on.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
i stay there, i prefer mounts than any kind of easy teleports... i am fan of GW2 and i hate all this with waypoints, i prefer mounts and also i prefer staying local or building fame around a place by holding a fort or guarding a place, anyway just a view of my ideal mmoRPG ...
Raid content, dungeons, and boss fights may take some decision making and brain power the first few times until a group (Guild) gets the sequence down, after that it is auto-pilot.
But just because you seem to enjoy instant travel to the next raid/dungeon does not mean everyone does. With travel...depending on how the game world is laid out...you have options for travel routes that may make it faster, may be safer, may take you past another objective on your way to another objective, etc. There were MANY such options in EQ.
That's not to say travel cannot be made more interesting either...
- Unique landscape additions players can use for directional purposes. Random spawn rare mobs that wander the landscape and offer great challenge and reward. (Just as EQ had mobs that were well above the level range of the zone you could find).
- Random AI bandit attacks along roadways...possibly have multiple spawn locations and spawn times.
- Why not have longer day and night cycles (Possibly 6 to 8 real hours) where either different creatures at maybe even a different level range come out between cycles. Also making zones visited at lower levels while er.....leveling viable to higher levels for revisits if night cycle mobs were near cap.
Could go on and on with ideas. It is possible, for the sake of those who enjoy exploration, to make it more inviting. And even more inviting for those such as yourself who shy away from travel.
The problem was that getting into a guild was the only way to see the content. Guilds were exclusive clubs and it kept more people from seeing content that it got people into the content.
Oh sure, people would socialize in their guilds, but they'd also make sure they didn't socialize with the people who weren't in a guild, or who were in the the 'wrong' guild. It was like an especially large high school, drama and all. Only the people who were in the 'good' guilds would look back on that fondly. Anyone who did not get to see the end game content and the people in the overly dramatic guilds might have a very different opinion of 'the good old days'.
** ** **
I don't see what this has to do with immersion in the open world. Even with guilds people would teleport to the summoning stones or get summoned by the warlocks. As far as socialization, there's always been a lot of socializing in global chat.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Nowhere did I suggest there's one way to do games.
I merely pointed out that in the context of traditional MMORPGs, travel sucks and should therefore be minimized. Simple and logical.
I've even called out a specific actual example of a game doing it another way.
So I guess that means you agree with everything I've said. So stop getting bent out of shape, have a beer (it's friday!), and relax. :P
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
You really aren't telling me anything I don't know. I understand how humans work as I am one after all.
Seems your just trying to make it sound more in depth than it is as far as gaming goes to make your point because really....ALL these games are the same thing over and over and over...just with different characters, maybe a different setting, and a different title (As far as MMORPG's are concerned). They are all lack luster...no innovation, no creativity, no staying power.
These damn companies need to start looking beyond trying to be or beat WoW and make something that stands out from the crowd. I'd bet then...they'd be far more likely to succeed and reach beyond the short life spans of these post-WoW era MMORPG's and make surprisingly more profit.
One thing that video shows, and this video shows even better, is how I wasn't "lying" about AC1's mob density being much lighter and travel consequently being even more mindless than modern MMORPGs.
Before you accuse someone of not knowing reality and "lying", you should probably make sure you're not the one lying, because youtube videos do make it rather easy to call someone out on that, friend.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
All I see is people wanting to argue.
Back and forth.
-Its actually sad. I understand trolling sometimes (and it can be fun) and I understand debate/discussion/disagreement - Its healthy and intellectually stimulating.
All I see online these days are people arguing for arguments sake- And its getting worse by the Month.
QFT
So sad that MMO gamers nowadays only want the "instant hop in and hop out fun" RPGs are suppose to take a long time because it is about progression. How can you feel immersed or attached to your character if you hop in for the occasional dungeon/instance (like in GW2) and then call it quits at the end? There is no feel of achievement or adventure at all. There was a certain adventurous feeling when you had to find a group and hold it together. On your way to the boss or dungeon in the open world you might encounter enemies and you have to stick together (or fail!) but in the end you felt like you were part of something. Today's games (sorry for taking GW2 as an example again) you rarely befriend or socialise much with the players you "fast run" the dungeon with. If you do befriend them it's mostly for the fact that they know how to do the "fast run" as much as you do, so you can grind some more tokens. There is no feeling of achievement or epicness at all!
Well enough ranting about GW2. There are plenty of other games that call themselves MMORPGs but have very little to do with it, IMHO. Like I said, MMORPGs are about progression and immersion and not the quick injection of fun which you can find in various minigames and action-oriented games (MMOFPSs, etc.). We shouldn't forget where the RPGs come from...