Really? you didn't see those who argue that down-time "foster social interactions" and want those 20 min boat rides back?
Basically, you have to agree with me, and call me names just because that is the only way not to lose face?
Because for them that constitutes interesting gameplay, not rocket science there.
Whether or not a opinion such as that is majority opinion is another matter and not my concern, it's not the argument I was making with Axe or otherwise. For you to push an inane argument onto me of such ill consequence is annoying.
Basically, I have to point out you have no argument because you refuse to even address the one I've been making, and are instead pushing to argue something that , as again said, no one has even disagreed with. This is as stupid as arguing that lemons are citrus fruits. Everyone knows that, but some people prefer limes.
If anyone is saving face in this scenario it's you and axe for falling back to arguments so simple as to not even have a reason for being made, just so that you can claim you're still "right" even though your arguments are so very wrong.
"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
We say: "Slow travel is boring and we want to change that and make it more interesting."
You say: "Slow travel is boring, that doesn't mean it has to be, but we're just removing it."
We say: "But we want it, and we want it to be interesting game play."
You say: "Tough shit. We're removing it and that's all you're going to get. And we're here on forums to make sure these conversations don't go anywhere."
You industry people suck melons.
I'd like to say he does not represent us.
It's been brought up in the past, he's predominantly done Q/A and supposedly now mobile games. He doesn't even talk on experiences with things in the mobile gaming market accurately any ways as that genre is rather huge on enforcing downtime in their titles. as a way to create pay incentives, and some of the largest earning games on the mobile market utilizes things like march time on soldiers for RTS titles and cooldown/timers galore on crafting, abilities, and research. Many of the games end up having waiting as a very intentional and often drawn out component as a two-fold intent of offering incentive to pay to make it shorter, and otherwise to pace the game out long enough to make it more casual-friendly.
So the games that he's supposedly representative of, he's not representing rather well.
And he seems to vehemently disagree with me to the point that he actually blocked me, even though between the two of us I'm the one that's worked on several MMOs and done the administrative duties and due diligence for multiple companies in the field.
However, he's also the only one that regularly brings up the "I'm a developer!" commentary, and it's ultimately at this point an obvious vie to claim authority on something where he has little more than his opinion. Sadly that can't be helped.
The only decent recourse is to simply state things as intelligently and rationally as possible and correct the claims made as often as possible so that the intelligent readers may form their own conclusions on what's right.
On the plus side, I can say you're at least not as alone as Axe would like to make you. Unlike his diatribe would suggest, travel in eastern MMOs has been regaining relevance as it has been tethered as a somewhat important component of many player activities now. As I said prior, not everyone may be enthused about Black Desert, but part of it's design philosophy exactly was pushing the relevancy of travel and incorporating features that are directly dependent on it's existence.
Axe might claim that you can cut travel and not lose the "important" parts, but reality is that if you don't have the physical travel itself then you are left with one of three things.
A bar that replaces the travel, which then has the events tossed in as a random chance while you wait for the meter to fill.
A montage of events that's more akin to playing a fighter game.
Or the culling of all the interim events entirely to slap a loading screen in there.
For it's part, the only loading screen you experience in BDO is the one when you log into your character. They wanted the user experience once you are logged in to be seamless and did quite a lot to make that happen. As it relates to the time and travel issue, it means that travel has focused itself around traditional means that do not break the game's "no load screens" philosophy and stuck with running around and mount travel. As a consequence, there are a lot of activities that are directly hooked to that travel mechanic as well so that "point a to point b" travel isn't simply an AFK endeavor, and often has meaningful reasons for you to do it.
Like said quite a while ago, there are plenty of mechanics that directly hinge on travel and time to even work. In some types of games it may not be necessary, but as a game where you only have one character that you can ever directly control, there is the immediate offset that whatever you do, it is through that character.
Caravans and resource trades, NPC and player raids/banditry, territory and resource control, hostile activity like guild and faction conflicts, inter-town economics, etc. You might be able to replace some of this stuff in certain types of games with timers and % chance calculations, but in an MMO they are closely tethered to what you as a character and player can achieve.
As a non-MMO example, one can also point to the likes of Mount & Blade. That game utilized a large overland map for it's travel and operated by having yo navigate your character across that map. As a component of that travel you had many roaming unit types and some environmental obstacles for challenge to navigation, along with resource management as food would be consumed by you and your army (along with certain kinds of foods spoiling over time), and fatigue that would accumulate and negatively impact your units which made your need to time your trips and not get caught up in perpetual conflict important. This is all capped off with the value of inter-city commerce as each place the cost of goods would shift and the means to making money would often be found in running long trade routes to buy and sell goods. It became largely a management game while traveling, with you plotting routes, tracking local activity and reacting to attack or avoid, hitting up villages along the way to do a few things, and reaching your destination for profit.
That's the type of gameplay you can presently see slowly progressing into eastern MMOs like Archeage and BDO, and at present may see more of in future titles if the direction of development doesn't change too quick.
Western MMOs are a different story, but largely because they are kinda going sideways and shrinking. If you look at the genre there are less of "MMORPGs" being done now and a swathe of other types cropping up in snippets. Star Citizen may have a lot of controversy, but it is an example again of an MMO that is aiming at much more of a virtual world (or universe) than a quick action game.
Much of the western market isn't even focused on MMOs any more and has retrained on the mobile and quick-action gameplay market for a while now. It's why you have all the MOBA games and the likes of axe espousing virtues that only really work/apply to small/quick titles (and not even universally applying to the popular titles in mobile gaming).
The idea of travel and time is still important in those games, but without a world and instead a focus on more lobby-style content they turn to many other mechanics that approximate things or can be done without a world to flesh out what they can. Also worth pointing out that many of these types of games actually still do have a "world" that they build with space and time built inherent to it with the use of overland maps and tiles/grids to overcome the problem of otherwise lacking the complexity it brings or trying to find a replacement.
The reality is that not even devs agree on this kind of thing, and that's evidenced by the wide range of game types and genres. The objectivity that's been tried to be claimed in many cases has generally been quite relative to the game and genre in question so far, save for the fundamental value of time and travel to opening up the option of gameplay at all.
"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
We say: "Slow travel is boring and we want to change that and make it more interesting."
You say: "Slow travel is boring, that doesn't mean it has to be, but we're just removing it."
We say: "But we want it, and we want it to be interesting game play."
and the dev said ...
a) we can add the interesting gameplay without the boring slow travel part, and b) slow travel is still there, don't teleport and walk, you choice!
Explain how you'd do that again, please? Because you're still leaving travel as it has been when actually traveling. And turning "slow travel" into random room encounters is one of the crappiest idea's I've ever heard of for a game with a world.
Simple ..
have a single player open world. Click on fast travel to a point .. roll a random number, and drop the player into the world with an encounter. No rooms.
And if you want .. you can also walk. So everyone is happy. In fact, that is how most successful open world single player games are done (minus the random part .. that is not even needed).
Of course not. You are only want to argue for what you like, and push them on everyone else.
True, I like the truth.
EDIT: Though as an exercise, I would love to know what you think I "liked" in my diatribe and where I espoused one game design as better than another versus me stating that there was actual value in various types of game designs.
Is me liking variety in games something so damning to you? Is me liking the development of more than one type of game such a bad thing? Is me pointing out that time and travel are intrinsic values somehow stopping you from enjoying that MOBA or ARPG?
No? Then how about you stop railing that the only way people can make a game is in a way that you specifically will enjoy, concede the fact that opinions and entertainment values vary for different types of games and mechanics, and move on to trolling somewhere else.
"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
Of course not. You are only want to argue for what you like, and push them on everyone else.
True, I like the truth.
wait .. you like the truth, and ignore what others, and the market prefers, which is part of the truth?
You don't even acknowledge that slow travel is not popular .. just because that is not what you feel?
Where did I not acknowledge that slow travel is not popular? Where did I ignore what other's said? Where did I ignore what the market has said?
What I did write is points on how games and game mechanics work. Your opinion on what you or someone else likes best is an entirely unrelated subject to that matter.
Lying about the things I've said is not a valid argument.
"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
I'm quoting my original post here to highlight a few points in this conversation. To begin with, the purpose of referring to narrative in books and movies has been to establish an idea, not suggest that all of these media are the same. As noted by essentially everyone at some point or another in this thread, games are interactive and require active, not passive, participation. This leads to what "active" participation is, which seems to be a key point of contention.
Again, it is clear to everyone that "active" is relative to different games and people. Twitch combat is "active", but so is a thought provoking puzzle. Many games balance (or try to balance) multiple elements into a cohesive experience, and each element will have its own natural pace of "activity". Often it is how these different elements are used in conjunction with each other that makes a game fun, even if an element on its own is simply an obstacle.
By gating unit abilities and upgrades behind research timers, and limiting those by resource costs and resource gathering times, RTS games foster a depth of strategy that makes them enjoyable. These games are still much faster than turn-based strategy games, but not necessarily more fun (it's subjective, after all).
My point is, any element taken on its own, out of its context in a broader game design, becomes simply meaningless. The question is how these elements can be used in the context of other elements to create a compelling sense of world in MMORPGs?
For example, @Axehilt, say that terrain becomes a factor in travel, so that some characters (those not weighed down by heavy armor, or with special skills and/or equipment) can climb a cliff wall while others cannot. Say there is a castle (fort, whatever) surrounded by a cliff with only one side facing a plateau. For your sake, Axe, the game designers put fast travel nodes in game. By putting one node close to the castle, but at the bottom of the cliff, while placing another node on the plateau but substantially farther off, the game designers can create a compelling decision. Do we, the players rushing to sack or save the castle, forgo our heavy defenses to scale the cliff wall and sneak in quickly, or do we traverse a greater distance across the plateau but come with our full force and armor? Say there's some time element involved, or even that the longer we take to arrive the more the castle shores up its defenses.
Is being forced to travel a greater distance if you can't climb an inconvenience? Sure. Is that part, the part where you have to trek from the node all the way to the castle, on its own, compelling gameplay? Are you doing anything along the way other than travel? No. But without it, without a significant distance that makes this decision to climb or trek a meaningful and strategic one, the actual fun of this particular game element is lost. Why have skills or tools that let you climb when you can just as easily run? I bring this up, particularly, because it does not preclude the use of fast travel nodes. It's just that no matter how you travel, the basis of any decision making is a cost-benefit analysis, and eliminating costs because they are not as fun as benefits eliminates the need for decision making.
The discussion so far has included the broader context of these timesinks. In the majority of cases, they fail to justify themselves.
In isolated cases like PVP respawn times (or distances,) these timesinks can be appropriate in order to properly reward PVP victories.
In the majority of PVE, timesinks do not justify themselves.
In Battlefield the Conquest game mode involves capturing control points across the map. If my team attacks a point and kills all the defenders, the game mode actually requires that the enemy team has a respawn time penalty (or at least is prevented from respawning at any nearby point.) In this case the game rules justify some form of timesink.
Conversely in a MMORPG there is very little justification for why it should take a long time to reach any particular piece of PVE content. There is no "opposing team" to be concerned about, and modern MMORPGs have game rules which make travel time mostly irrelevant (they prevent "graveyard zerging" by preventing you from getting back into a boss fight that's in-progress, for example.) So it would theoretically be fine to allow players to teleport into a dungeon at will from anywhere in the game (and that's pretty close to what we have in games currently.)
Your castle-attack example is an example where slow travel isn't required: even with fast travel taking you near the outside of the castle, you still have the interesting decision of the heavy frontal assault or the light wall-scaling sneak attack. (Remember the "slow travel" being compared here isn't traveling 500 foot approach to the castle, climb up the wall, and inside. Slow travel is the additional 5-minutes of travel that preceded the assault itself.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
To summarize axehilt. He is arguing that walking a long time doing nothing is boring.
We covered a while ago that this wasn't much of an argument and that most everyone else is arguing that there are plenty of mechanics that can and does make travel a meaningful component of games, and that it can and does have a place in MMOs.
His claim of what he remarks is in MMOs presently isn't even accurate to the most modern MMOs. BDO is an example as one of the newest titles, and even games that have teleporting for much of their territory like ESO and ArcheAge still have much ado about traditional travel and exploration methods. It's only in the older games (yes, WoW is old now) that what he says is even remotely true, as they are the ones missing a lot of the more varied world content, rendering the argument largely moot in that scenario.
So again, "doing nothing is boring" versus "there's a bunch of things we can do". Pick whichever side you want.
"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
Fun is relative to ... unfun. They play off one another. Without periods of unfun, the fun periods are not as fun.
Ex. Say you work all week (unfun), then go to an amusement park on Saturday (fun). The time spent at work makes the amusement park all the more enjoyable. The contrast is what makes it so.
Now, say you spend all week long at that amusement park. The fun factor sort of starts to wane by day 2 or 3. Might be miserable by the end of a week.
You really need both fun and unfun experiences to appreciate the other. In Everquest, I sure needed that long dangerous trek from Halas to Freeport in order to feel great elation and relief upon finally reaching the latter. But, when the Planes of Knowledge came out with their teleport stones, and I could slip off to Freeport simply by clicking something, it ceased to be the epic experience it once was. And sometimes, I never even bothered.
Pure Stockholm Syndrome.
EQ treated you badly (and once in a while treated you well.) That didn't mean EQ was a nice game with your well-being in mind.
Do amusement parks hire characters to walk around the park kicking people in the groin? Or maybe do amusement parks do everything in their power to create the most welcoming, fun experience possible? Even your own example is that of an entertainment product which tries to be completely fun.
Visitors' day to day lives already involve enough non-fun elements to act as a contrast. They don't need their entertainment to suck too!
Apart from a few early MMORPGs, the vast majority of entertainment products out there (including themeparks) try to be as fun as they can all the time. They simply don't need to try to deliberately suck. Enough sucking happens in players' normal lives, and the game is inevitably not going to be perfect.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Fun is relative to ... unfun. They play off one another. Without periods of unfun, the fun periods are not as fun.
Ex. Say you work all week (unfun), then go to an amusement park on Saturday (fun). The time spent at work makes the amusement park all the more enjoyable. The contrast is what makes it so.
Now, say you spend all week long at that amusement park. The fun factor sort of starts to wane by day 2 or 3. Might be miserable by the end of a week.
You really need both fun and unfun experiences to appreciate the other. In Everquest, I sure needed that long dangerous trek from Halas to Freeport in order to feel great elation and relief upon finally reaching the latter. But, when the Planes of Knowledge came out with their teleport stones, and I could slip off to Freeport simply by clicking something, it ceased to be the epic experience it once was. And sometimes, I never even bothered.
I generally agree.
I would also add that it's hard to say a forest is dark and foreboding if you can fast travel to it, from it, and around it like a walk in the park.
One other issue is that if people can fast travel they will all be going to the same points in the world in most cases as they are directed there. If people are forced into exploring they will happen on different various places.
I'd also again point out the immersion factor which ties in with making the world feel small via fast travel.
Fast travel will also expend your content a lot quicker.
I wouldn't be opposed to being able to travel quickly as long as it was a social mechanic. For instance only certain classes could teleport and cast speed enhancing spells in Everquest. This allowed for social interdependence where people would have to ask others for a speed enhancement buff or a teleport to an area or choose one of the classes that could do it.
Fun is relative to ... unfun. They play off one another. Without periods of unfun, the fun periods are not as fun.
Ex. Say you work all week (unfun), then go to an amusement park on Saturday (fun). The time spent at work makes the amusement park all the more enjoyable. The contrast is what makes it so.
Now, say you spend all week long at that amusement park. The fun factor sort of starts to wane by day 2 or 3. Might be miserable by the end of a week.
You really need both fun and unfun experiences to appreciate the other. In Everquest, I sure needed that long dangerous trek from Halas to Freeport in order to feel great elation and relief upon finally reaching the latter. But, when the Planes of Knowledge came out with their teleport stones, and I could slip off to Freeport simply by clicking something, it ceased to be the epic experience it once was. And sometimes, I never even bothered.
Pure Stockholm Syndrome.
EQ treated you badly (and once in a while treated you well.) That didn't mean EQ was a nice game with your well-being in mind.
Do amusement parks hire characters to walk around the park kicking people in the groin? Or maybe do amusement parks do everything in their power to create the most welcoming, fun experience possible? Even your own example is that of an entertainment product which tries to be completely fun.
Visitors' day to day lives already involve enough non-fun elements to act as a contrast. They don't need their entertainment to suck too!
Apart from a few early MMORPGs, the vast majority of entertainment products out there (including themeparks) try to be as fun as they can all the time. They simply don't need to try to deliberately suck. Enough sucking happens in players' normal lives, and the game is inevitably not going to be perfect.
You're mistaking your opinion for fact. Many people did and still do enjoy EQ how it was. I wasn't the biggest EQ fan because of the grind more than anything. The travel didn't bother at all. I thought it was kind of cool to have dangerous travel as a newbie. The pointless level grinds annoy me then as it does now.
I did enjoy the world and atmosphere. I did enjoy the classes and community powers. I did enjoy the factions. I did NPCs were different in feel.
You're mistaking your opinion for fact. Many people did and still do enjoy EQ how it was. I wasn't the biggest EQ fan because of the grind more than anything. The travel didn't bother at all. I thought it was kind of cool to have dangerous travel as a newbie. The pointless level grinds annoy me then as it does now.
I did enjoy the world and atmosphere. I did enjoy the classes and community powers. I did enjoy the factions. I did NPCs were different in feel.
Do you understand that "a non-zero quantity of people enjoyed something therefore it must be good game design" is a fallacy?
Do you understand that if you enjoy your job but the commute is terrible, that the commute being terrible isn't actually why you enjoy your job? Do you understand that it would be fine, and your job would simply be that much better, if your commute was cut in half or eliminated?
What I'm describing is rooted in how players enjoy games. It's not my opinion that people prefer not to have their time wasted. It's a fact which describes the general opinions of others.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
You're mistaking your opinion for fact. Many people did and still do enjoy EQ how it was. I wasn't the biggest EQ fan because of the grind more than anything. The travel didn't bother at all. I thought it was kind of cool to have dangerous travel as a newbie. The pointless level grinds annoy me then as it does now.
I did enjoy the world and atmosphere. I did enjoy the classes and community powers. I did enjoy the factions. I did NPCs were different in feel.
I'm sure many did enjoy EQ how it was, but that's not enough. That's the point. Even if Axehilt is only presenting his own opinion only, it is much closer to the majority opinion than yours is. In general, players don't want to waste their time on stuff that can't be made fun, is a huge inconvenience and only exists for a small minority to appreciate.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
The vast majority of gamers aren't simulator fans who would accept hours upon hours of uneventful nothingness. The majority of gamers want gameplay.
Movies/shows DO skip to the interesting bits.
Name a single successful narrative-based movie that portrays 10+ minutes of uneventful travel. You can't. Any movie stupid enough to do that wouldn't be successful. Anything you tried to name would involve some flavor of action, plot development, or character development which would be the actual purpose for the scene.
So essentially you've bought into Beatnik's false assumption. Try discussing the actual points being made instead of the false straw man argument he invents.
I can name a ton of MMOs who include some flavor of action. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that MMOs are so action heavy, the action itself becomes boring and mundane after a few weeks.
The more difficult challenge is to name a single, contemporary MMO which includes some flavor of plot development or character development...not the scripted stuff that is new exactly once, with very little ownership or replay value, but something that is ongoing and novel.
You won't find it easily. That's because such opportunities have been deliberately removed in order to funnel players into PvP and PvE combat more quickly...which seems to me to be the only content that really 'counts' as important in your mind.
Fair enough. Your perspective isn't unique. But then I have to ask what, after its all said and done, does this genre do that can't as easily be done with online shooters and button mashers? Because those genres deliver the action in a much more fluid, intuitive sense.
And I have to ask what these MMOs today offer, in a narrative sense of good 'literature', that the action/adventure game can't do even better? Because at least the action/adventure game has the advantage of the 'cutscene' to create downtime, a sense of normalcy, develop characters and advance plot.
If the entire point of an MMO is to cut out everything extraneous to the action, then the action will--by default--become something boring and routine. It is only by oscillating between times of high action and low activity that the high activity actually feels as it ought.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
You really need both fun and unfun experiences to appreciate the other.
I prefer to use the terms "exciting" and "routine"...because something that's routine doesn't necessarily preclude it from becoming exciting at a moment's notice. That trip to Freeport might become routine, until you encounter an unexpected something along the way that makes the trip unique.
But if the entire experience is engineered with the thought that nothing should ever be thought of as "routine", skipping over all of that in favor of fast jumping from "exciting" to "exciting", the exciting parts won't feel very exciting...they'll just feel "routine" (hence, why every MMO player these days complains about "grind").
Today's combat-centric MMO game has really painted itself into a corner. Combat is, or should be, a high-tension, exciting affair. You can't get anything more exiting than a life or death struggle. But by taking out everything but the combat, the MMO publishers have inadvertently made the most high-tension, dramatic activity into something that's boring, predictable and "routine" with nowhere else they can go to bring back the excitement.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
The more difficult challenge is to name a single, contemporary MMO which includes some flavor of plot development or character development...not the scripted stuff that is new exactly once, with very little ownership or replay value, but something that is ongoing and novel.
There aren't any. None. Never has, and likely never will be. It's all scripted or its imaginary - all in your head.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
The more difficult challenge is to name a single, contemporary MMO which includes some flavor of plot development or character development...not the scripted stuff that is new exactly once, with very little ownership or replay value, but something that is ongoing and novel.
There aren't any. None. Never has, and likely never will be. It's all scripted or its imaginary - all in your head.
What are you talking about? I am the hero that saved the world at each level. They told me so. And you can't change that with your alternate reality!
The more difficult challenge is to name a single, contemporary MMO which includes some flavor of plot development or character development...not the scripted stuff that is new exactly once, with very little ownership or replay value, but something that is ongoing and novel.
There aren't any. None. Never has, and likely never will be. It's all scripted or its imaginary - all in your head.
There's a commemorative statue in Asheron's Call that begs to differ. It's not contemporary, but it points out it was a feature of some MMOs when there was more involvement between dev and player for events and activities that affected the games.
"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
I can name a ton of MMOs who include some flavor of action. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that MMOs are so action heavy, the action itself becomes boring and mundane after a few weeks.
The more difficult challenge is to name a single, contemporary MMO which includes some flavor of plot development or character development...not the scripted stuff that is new exactly once, with very little ownership or replay value, but something that is ongoing and novel.
You won't find it easily. That's because such opportunities have been deliberately removed in order to funnel players into PvP and PvE combat more quickly...which seems to me to be the only content that really 'counts' as important in your mind.
Fair enough. Your perspective isn't unique. But then I have to ask what, after its all said and done, does this genre do that can't as easily be done with online shooters and button mashers? Because those genres deliver the action in a much more fluid, intuitive sense.
And I have to ask what these MMOs today offer, in a narrative sense of good 'literature', that the action/adventure game can't do even better? Because at least the action/adventure game has the advantage of the 'cutscene' to create downtime, a sense of normalcy, develop characters and advance plot.
If the entire point of an MMO is to cut out everything extraneous to the action, then the action will--by default--become something boring and routine. It is only by oscillating between times of high action and low activity that the high activity actually feels as it ought.
Gameplay is decisions. Not just action. All decisions.
Good gameplay is deep gameplay. Meaning it doesn't merely involve decisions, but involves enough difficult decisions that it's hard to master.
Travel in games has traditionally been very bad gameplay. It involves very few decisions, and those decisions are completely trivial to master (know your destination, plot your course, adjust for local obstructions, and avoid mobs.) So it's unsurprising that the mistake of requiring excessive slow-travel in early MMORPGs has generally been corrected over time.
RPGs are about narrative, progression, and stats-based combat. The narrative in videogame RPGs has never been especially dynamic, due to optimizing more for quality story-telling. So your "non-scripted story" requirement comes off as very arbitrary. Historically RPGs haven't been about that.
Why would players seek out narrative in RPGs rather than action-adventure games? Because of those core pillars (narrative, progression, stats-based combat). Some players prefer that flavor of interesting decision over the interesting decisions offered by action games. Again, you seem stuck on the idea that gameplay is only combat or only action-based, and that's just a false assumption.
Action games also don't have an advantage in cutscenes, as RPGs also have plenty of cutscenes. And at this point it's worth noting that in addition to gameplay, cutscenes are the other major way games are entertaining. Being a game doesn't prevent you from entertaining people via tradition non-interactive methods, like those used in film/TV. It's also not limited just to cutscenes: beautiful scenic overlooks and the 20 second fiery crash animation of that alien mothership are both examples of what we might call 'non-interactive visual exhibition' (but a much better term probably exists for this.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
If we are going to have fast travel then why not just has a nice focused and linear experience? One devoid of needing to click on NPCs, accept quests, and walk around. One where a story just unfolds naturally as you play the game.
I will vote for that too. There are plenty of no-world games with good levels, like Dishonored.
But you have to admit open world single player games with fast travel is selling very well. I suppose if that open world is turned into linear levels (or random levels for side quest), no harm done.
But at the same time, there is no reason building a big giant level, with fast travel, would not work.
I would also add that it's hard to say a forest is dark and foreboding if you can fast travel to it, from it, and around it like a walk in the park.
One other issue is that if people can fast travel they will all be going to the same points in the world in most cases as they are directed there. If people are forced into exploring they will happen on different various places.
Of course you can. Put a forest level together, drop the player into ... dark & foreboding instantly. No slow travel needed.
If you don't like seeing too many players at the same point, just instanced the world, and drop a small number into each.
Better yet, each player has their own, dynamic world, and they can invite (or happen randomly) others to join them.
Slow travel and fast travel are used in games for specific reasons.
If the game design uses things like territorial control, resource control, exploration, economics of trade or many other things that fast travel invalidates then having fast travel is not a good thing to have.
Fast travel is used when travelling between locations offers no additional game play, where economics require nothing more then a glorified central hub, where exploration is meaningless, where players have no influence over a 'world' and usually because a game is on rails and a long progression of whacking moles for shiny rewards. And of course for convenience to avoid parts of the game that are boring or just to get to the juicy parts of the game.
Some games need slow travel to work.
Some games need fast travel to work.
Some people play games that require fast travel to work.
Some players play games that require slow travel to work.
At the end of the day though, having either fast travel in ALL games or slow travel in ALL games is poor design if you do not consider how either method of travel will affect the greater game design.
I would also add that it's hard to say a forest is dark and foreboding if you can fast travel to it, from it, and around it like a walk in the park.
One other issue is that if people can fast travel they will all be going to the same points in the world in most cases as they are directed there. If people are forced into exploring they will happen on different various places.
Of course you can. Put a forest level together, drop the player into ... dark & foreboding instantly. No slow travel needed.
If you don't like seeing too many players at the same point, just instanced the world, and drop a small number into each.
Better yet, each player has their own, dynamic world, and they can invite (or happen randomly) others to join them.
I think that's exactly how to trivialize a dark and foreboding forest.
As I said if you can avoid an area or quickly travel out of it by clicking on a faster travel point then it's no longer a dangerous place to worry about on your journey through the world. It's and optional place to go that you can avoid. When I played EQ I had to choose to go through Beholder's Maze and Runneye or Highpass Hold on my way to Freeport. Both were maze like areas with nasty monsters. It made the journey perilous until high level.
Slow travel and fast travel are used in games for specific reasons.
If the game design uses things like territorial control, resource control, exploration, economics of trade or many other things that fast travel invalidates then having fast travel is not a good thing to have.
Fast travel is used when travelling between locations offers no additional game play, where economics require nothing more then a glorified central hub, where exploration is meaningless, where players have no influence over a 'world' and usually because a game is on rails and a long progression of whacking moles for shiny rewards. And of course for convenience to avoid parts of the game that are boring or just to get to the juicy parts of the game.
Some games need slow travel to work.
Some games need fast travel to work.
Some people play games that require fast travel to work.
Some players play games that require slow travel to work.
At the end of the day though, having either fast travel in ALL games or slow travel in ALL games is poor design if you do not consider how either method of travel will affect the greater game design.
Agreed.
Also, you can mix it up a bit. In P&P roleplaying the DM tend to skip the boring parts of traveling and focus on the interesting and dangerous stuff. A MMO could easily allow fast traveling in the safer areas but not in the unexplored wilderness. Or it could allow you to fast travel to an area you already been to in the last day or week.
The whole thing is that traveling can be very fun or incredible boring. Skip the boring parts and add more content to the fun.
Comments
Whether or not a opinion such as that is majority opinion is another matter and not my concern, it's not the argument I was making with Axe or otherwise. For you to push an inane argument onto me of such ill consequence is annoying.
Basically, I have to point out you have no argument because you refuse to even address the one I've been making, and are instead pushing to argue something that , as again said, no one has even disagreed with. This is as stupid as arguing that lemons are citrus fruits. Everyone knows that, but some people prefer limes.
If anyone is saving face in this scenario it's you and axe for falling back to arguments so simple as to not even have a reason for being made, just so that you can claim you're still "right" even though your arguments are so very wrong.
"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
It's been brought up in the past, he's predominantly done Q/A and supposedly now mobile games. He doesn't even talk on experiences with things in the mobile gaming market accurately any ways as that genre is rather huge on enforcing downtime in their titles. as a way to create pay incentives, and some of the largest earning games on the mobile market utilizes things like march time on soldiers for RTS titles and cooldown/timers galore on crafting, abilities, and research. Many of the games end up having waiting as a very intentional and often drawn out component as a two-fold intent of offering incentive to pay to make it shorter, and otherwise to pace the game out long enough to make it more casual-friendly.
So the games that he's supposedly representative of, he's not representing rather well.
And he seems to vehemently disagree with me to the point that he actually blocked me, even though between the two of us I'm the one that's worked on several MMOs and done the administrative duties and due diligence for multiple companies in the field.
However, he's also the only one that regularly brings up the "I'm a developer!" commentary, and it's ultimately at this point an obvious vie to claim authority on something where he has little more than his opinion. Sadly that can't be helped.
The only decent recourse is to simply state things as intelligently and rationally as possible and correct the claims made as often as possible so that the intelligent readers may form their own conclusions on what's right.
On the plus side, I can say you're at least not as alone as Axe would like to make you. Unlike his diatribe would suggest, travel in eastern MMOs has been regaining relevance as it has been tethered as a somewhat important component of many player activities now. As I said prior, not everyone may be enthused about Black Desert, but part of it's design philosophy exactly was pushing the relevancy of travel and incorporating features that are directly dependent on it's existence.
Axe might claim that you can cut travel and not lose the "important" parts, but reality is that if you don't have the physical travel itself then you are left with one of three things.
A bar that replaces the travel, which then has the events tossed in as a random chance while you wait for the meter to fill.
A montage of events that's more akin to playing a fighter game.
Or the culling of all the interim events entirely to slap a loading screen in there.
For it's part, the only loading screen you experience in BDO is the one when you log into your character. They wanted the user experience once you are logged in to be seamless and did quite a lot to make that happen. As it relates to the time and travel issue, it means that travel has focused itself around traditional means that do not break the game's "no load screens" philosophy and stuck with running around and mount travel. As a consequence, there are a lot of activities that are directly hooked to that travel mechanic as well so that "point a to point b" travel isn't simply an AFK endeavor, and often has meaningful reasons for you to do it.
Like said quite a while ago, there are plenty of mechanics that directly hinge on travel and time to even work. In some types of games it may not be necessary, but as a game where you only have one character that you can ever directly control, there is the immediate offset that whatever you do, it is through that character.
Caravans and resource trades, NPC and player raids/banditry, territory and resource control, hostile activity like guild and faction conflicts, inter-town economics, etc. You might be able to replace some of this stuff in certain types of games with timers and % chance calculations, but in an MMO they are closely tethered to what you as a character and player can achieve.
As a non-MMO example, one can also point to the likes of Mount & Blade. That game utilized a large overland map for it's travel and operated by having yo navigate your character across that map. As a component of that travel you had many roaming unit types and some environmental obstacles for challenge to navigation, along with resource management as food would be consumed by you and your army (along with certain kinds of foods spoiling over time), and fatigue that would accumulate and negatively impact your units which made your need to time your trips and not get caught up in perpetual conflict important. This is all capped off with the value of inter-city commerce as each place the cost of goods would shift and the means to making money would often be found in running long trade routes to buy and sell goods. It became largely a management game while traveling, with you plotting routes, tracking local activity and reacting to attack or avoid, hitting up villages along the way to do a few things, and reaching your destination for profit.
That's the type of gameplay you can presently see slowly progressing into eastern MMOs like Archeage and BDO, and at present may see more of in future titles if the direction of development doesn't change too quick.
Western MMOs are a different story, but largely because they are kinda going sideways and shrinking. If you look at the genre there are less of "MMORPGs" being done now and a swathe of other types cropping up in snippets. Star Citizen may have a lot of controversy, but it is an example again of an MMO that is aiming at much more of a virtual world (or universe) than a quick action game.
Much of the western market isn't even focused on MMOs any more and has retrained on the mobile and quick-action gameplay market for a while now. It's why you have all the MOBA games and the likes of axe espousing virtues that only really work/apply to small/quick titles (and not even universally applying to the popular titles in mobile gaming).
The idea of travel and time is still important in those games, but without a world and instead a focus on more lobby-style content they turn to many other mechanics that approximate things or can be done without a world to flesh out what they can. Also worth pointing out that many of these types of games actually still do have a "world" that they build with space and time built inherent to it with the use of overland maps and tiles/grids to overcome the problem of otherwise lacking the complexity it brings or trying to find a replacement.
The reality is that not even devs agree on this kind of thing, and that's evidenced by the wide range of game types and genres. The objectivity that's been tried to be claimed in many cases has generally been quite relative to the game and genre in question so far, save for the fundamental value of time and travel to opening up the option of gameplay at all.
"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
have a single player open world. Click on fast travel to a point .. roll a random number, and drop the player into the world with an encounter. No rooms.
And if you want .. you can also walk. So everyone is happy. In fact, that is how most successful open world single player games are done (minus the random part .. that is not even needed).
Of course not. You are only want to argue for what you like, and push them on everyone else.
EDIT: Though as an exercise, I would love to know what you think I "liked" in my diatribe and where I espoused one game design as better than another versus me stating that there was actual value in various types of game designs.
Is me liking variety in games something so damning to you? Is me liking the development of more than one type of game such a bad thing? Is me pointing out that time and travel are intrinsic values somehow stopping you from enjoying that MOBA or ARPG?
No? Then how about you stop railing that the only way people can make a game is in a way that you specifically will enjoy, concede the fact that opinions and entertainment values vary for different types of games and mechanics, and move on to trolling somewhere else.
"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
You don't even acknowledge that slow travel is not popular .. just because that is not what you feel?
What I did write is points on how games and game mechanics work. Your opinion on what you or someone else likes best is an entirely unrelated subject to that matter.
Lying about the things I've said is not a valid argument.
"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
In isolated cases like PVP respawn times (or distances,) these timesinks can be appropriate in order to properly reward PVP victories.
In the majority of PVE, timesinks do not justify themselves.
In Battlefield the Conquest game mode involves capturing control points across the map. If my team attacks a point and kills all the defenders, the game mode actually requires that the enemy team has a respawn time penalty (or at least is prevented from respawning at any nearby point.) In this case the game rules justify some form of timesink.
Conversely in a MMORPG there is very little justification for why it should take a long time to reach any particular piece of PVE content. There is no "opposing team" to be concerned about, and modern MMORPGs have game rules which make travel time mostly irrelevant (they prevent "graveyard zerging" by preventing you from getting back into a boss fight that's in-progress, for example.) So it would theoretically be fine to allow players to teleport into a dungeon at will from anywhere in the game (and that's pretty close to what we have in games currently.)
Your castle-attack example is an example where slow travel isn't required: even with fast travel taking you near the outside of the castle, you still have the interesting decision of the heavy frontal assault or the light wall-scaling sneak attack. (Remember the "slow travel" being compared here isn't traveling 500 foot approach to the castle, climb up the wall, and inside. Slow travel is the additional 5-minutes of travel that preceded the assault itself.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
We covered a while ago that this wasn't much of an argument and that most everyone else is arguing that there are plenty of mechanics that can and does make travel a meaningful component of games, and that it can and does have a place in MMOs.
His claim of what he remarks is in MMOs presently isn't even accurate to the most modern MMOs. BDO is an example as one of the newest titles, and even games that have teleporting for much of their territory like ESO and ArcheAge still have much ado about traditional travel and exploration methods. It's only in the older games (yes, WoW is old now) that what he says is even remotely true, as they are the ones missing a lot of the more varied world content, rendering the argument largely moot in that scenario.
So again, "doing nothing is boring" versus "there's a bunch of things we can do". Pick whichever side you want.
"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
EQ treated you badly (and once in a while treated you well.) That didn't mean EQ was a nice game with your well-being in mind.
Do amusement parks hire characters to walk around the park kicking people in the groin? Or maybe do amusement parks do everything in their power to create the most welcoming, fun experience possible? Even your own example is that of an entertainment product which tries to be completely fun.
Visitors' day to day lives already involve enough non-fun elements to act as a contrast. They don't need their entertainment to suck too!
Apart from a few early MMORPGs, the vast majority of entertainment products out there (including themeparks) try to be as fun as they can all the time. They simply don't need to try to deliberately suck. Enough sucking happens in players' normal lives, and the game is inevitably not going to be perfect.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I would also add that it's hard to say a forest is dark and foreboding if you can fast travel to it, from it, and around it like a walk in the park.
One other issue is that if people can fast travel they will all be going to the same points in the world in most cases as they are directed there. If people are forced into exploring they will happen on different various places.
I'd also again point out the immersion factor which ties in with making the world feel small via fast travel.
Fast travel will also expend your content a lot quicker.
I wouldn't be opposed to being able to travel quickly as long as it was a social mechanic. For instance only certain classes could teleport and cast speed enhancing spells in Everquest. This allowed for social interdependence where people would have to ask others for a speed enhancement buff or a teleport to an area or choose one of the classes that could do it.
You're mistaking your opinion for fact. Many people did and still do enjoy EQ how it was. I wasn't the biggest EQ fan because of the grind more than anything. The travel didn't bother at all. I thought it was kind of cool to have dangerous travel as a newbie. The pointless level grinds annoy me then as it does now.
I did enjoy the world and atmosphere. I did enjoy the classes and community powers. I did enjoy the factions. I did NPCs were different in feel.
Do you understand that if you enjoy your job but the commute is terrible, that the commute being terrible isn't actually why you enjoy your job? Do you understand that it would be fine, and your job would simply be that much better, if your commute was cut in half or eliminated?
What I'm describing is rooted in how players enjoy games. It's not my opinion that people prefer not to have their time wasted. It's a fact which describes the general opinions of others.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
The more difficult challenge is to name a single, contemporary MMO which includes some flavor of plot development or character development...not the scripted stuff that is new exactly once, with very little ownership or replay value, but something that is ongoing and novel.
You won't find it easily. That's because such opportunities have been deliberately removed in order to funnel players into PvP and PvE combat more quickly...which seems to me to be the only content that really 'counts' as important in your mind.
Fair enough. Your perspective isn't unique. But then I have to ask what, after its all said and done, does this genre do that can't as easily be done with online shooters and button mashers? Because those genres deliver the action in a much more fluid, intuitive sense.
And I have to ask what these MMOs today offer, in a narrative sense of good 'literature', that the action/adventure game can't do even better? Because at least the action/adventure game has the advantage of the 'cutscene' to create downtime, a sense of normalcy, develop characters and advance plot.
If the entire point of an MMO is to cut out everything extraneous to the action, then the action will--by default--become something boring and routine. It is only by oscillating between times of high action and low activity that the high activity actually feels as it ought.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
But if the entire experience is engineered with the thought that nothing should ever be thought of as "routine", skipping over all of that in favor of fast jumping from "exciting" to "exciting", the exciting parts won't feel very exciting...they'll just feel "routine" (hence, why every MMO player these days complains about "grind").
Today's combat-centric MMO game has really painted itself into a corner. Combat is, or should be, a high-tension, exciting affair. You can't get anything more exiting than a life or death struggle. But by taking out everything but the combat, the MMO publishers have inadvertently made the most high-tension, dramatic activity into something that's boring, predictable and "routine" with nowhere else they can go to bring back the excitement.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
I am the hero that saved the world at each level.
They told me so. And you can't change that with your alternate reality!
Once upon a time....
"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
Good gameplay is deep gameplay. Meaning it doesn't merely involve decisions, but involves enough difficult decisions that it's hard to master.
Travel in games has traditionally been very bad gameplay. It involves very few decisions, and those decisions are completely trivial to master (know your destination, plot your course, adjust for local obstructions, and avoid mobs.) So it's unsurprising that the mistake of requiring excessive slow-travel in early MMORPGs has generally been corrected over time.
RPGs are about narrative, progression, and stats-based combat. The narrative in videogame RPGs has never been especially dynamic, due to optimizing more for quality story-telling. So your "non-scripted story" requirement comes off as very arbitrary. Historically RPGs haven't been about that.
Why would players seek out narrative in RPGs rather than action-adventure games? Because of those core pillars (narrative, progression, stats-based combat). Some players prefer that flavor of interesting decision over the interesting decisions offered by action games. Again, you seem stuck on the idea that gameplay is only combat or only action-based, and that's just a false assumption.
Action games also don't have an advantage in cutscenes, as RPGs also have plenty of cutscenes. And at this point it's worth noting that in addition to gameplay, cutscenes are the other major way games are entertaining. Being a game doesn't prevent you from entertaining people via tradition non-interactive methods, like those used in film/TV. It's also not limited just to cutscenes: beautiful scenic overlooks and the 20 second fiery crash animation of that alien mothership are both examples of what we might call 'non-interactive visual exhibition' (but a much better term probably exists for this.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
But you have to admit open world single player games with fast travel is selling very well. I suppose if that open world is turned into linear levels (or random levels for side quest), no harm done.
But at the same time, there is no reason building a big giant level, with fast travel, would not work.
Of course you can. Put a forest level together, drop the player into ... dark & foreboding instantly. No slow travel needed.
If you don't like seeing too many players at the same point, just instanced the world, and drop a small number into each.
Better yet, each player has their own, dynamic world, and they can invite (or happen randomly) others to join them.
If the game design uses things like territorial control, resource control, exploration, economics of trade or many other things that fast travel invalidates then having fast travel is not a good thing to have.
Fast travel is used when travelling between locations offers no additional game play, where economics require nothing more then a glorified central hub, where exploration is meaningless, where players have no influence over a 'world' and usually because a game is on rails and a long progression of whacking moles for shiny rewards. And of course for convenience to avoid parts of the game that are boring or just to get to the juicy parts of the game.
Some games need slow travel to work.
Some games need fast travel to work.
Some people play games that require fast travel to work.
Some players play games that require slow travel to work.
At the end of the day though, having either fast travel in ALL games or slow travel in ALL games is poor design if you do not consider how either method of travel will affect the greater game design.
As I said if you can avoid an area or quickly travel out of it by clicking on a faster travel point then it's no longer a dangerous place to worry about on your journey through the world. It's and optional place to go that you can avoid. When I played EQ I had to choose to go through Beholder's Maze and Runneye or Highpass Hold on my way to Freeport. Both were maze like areas with nasty monsters. It made the journey perilous until high level.
Also, you can mix it up a bit. In P&P roleplaying the DM tend to skip the boring parts of traveling and focus on the interesting and dangerous stuff. A MMO could easily allow fast traveling in the safer areas but not in the unexplored wilderness. Or it could allow you to fast travel to an area you already been to in the last day or week.
The whole thing is that traveling can be very fun or incredible boring. Skip the boring parts and add more content to the fun.