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I need advice on fast travel and zone based overland
KenFisher
Member UncommonPosts: 5,035
As the topic, I need advice on fast travel and a zone based overland. This is for the game I'm working on.
9 zone world. Not seamless. 27 public dungeons, not instances.
Zones have entrances to 3 major dungeons each, a crypt, a cave and a stronghold. There's a few landmarks with specialty population, and scattered random population for grind. Zones are 2km wide, there are no mounts, so travel on foot is rather slow (as intended).
Travel can be achieved on foot:
Zone to zone is done through mountain tunnels with load screens. Dungeon entrances are doors with load screens.
Travel can be achieved via teleporter:
DarkElf Strongholds have a teleporter on the top of the building that will teleport a character to a Stronghold in another zone. Convenient if you're near a stronghold and need to travel.
Villages don't offer any form of transportation (for now).
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The replacement for a 'main city' is an enclosed underground area known (for now) as Stromhold City or The Lobby.
It functions similarly to Shattrath in TBC WoW. There is a Potion of Recall which teleports from anywhere back to the lobby. It is also the fixed location for respawn after death.
Travel from the Lobby:
Teleport to any village
Teleport directly to any dungeon
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My options that I see at this point:
1. Make The Lobby a Town - Put the lobby in a new overland zone as a city with buildings rather than the current underground complex model. But the zone would not have mob population since I have to reserve resources for having a bunch of players in the lobby and the server won't do both (realistic capacity about 600 per zone).
2. Pull Dungeon Teleport - Remove fast travel directly to dungeons, so that reaching a dungeon requires teleport to a village and walk. The off-side to this is it means two load screens.
3. Both 1 and 2.
4. Leave it as-is - Because it's convenient.
NOTE: This won't affect overland PVP at all. There isn't any. At least not yet. I'm looking at doing a red / blue FFA PVP server setup later. Even so, I don't see that as a huge issue because public dungeons will be PVP areas.
I have strong, but mixed feelings on this. Dungeon teleports are very convenient, but I feel they contradict the intended old-school design. Underground Lobby is very efficiently modeled so it runs fast, but it feels like it's not part of the world.
Thoughts, suggestions?
Ken Fisher - Semi retired old fart Network Administrator, now working in Network Security. I don't Forum PVP. If you feel I've attacked you, it was probably by accident. When I don't understand, I ask. Such is not intended as criticism.
Comments
If you're going to have group content that is intended for players to participate in, you have to make it practical for a group of players to get to the content quickly. If grouping means spending more time trying to find a group and then get your group to the dungeon than actually participating in the content, most people won't do it.
I generally favor making fast travel easy unless there's some gameplay reason not to. "Because I hate fast travel" is not a gameplay reason. "The same goods are supposed to be more valuable in some places than others" is the only common reason I've seen not to have fast travel, apart from trying to make the game obnoxious to play.
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It's not just the number of loading screens. It's also how long those loading screens take. A one second loading screen every five minutes is no big deal. A one minute loading screen every five minutes is a problem.
Waypoint nodes is the ideal design for most games. You must explore a waypoint to be able to use it, but once you've discovered it you can fast travel easily. I prefer GW2's ultra-convenient "teleport to any discovered node anytime you're not in combat" because it gets me to the important parts of the game, skipping the boredom (like good books, movies, and games do.)
ESO has a slightly less convenient variation on that:
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Outstanding ! I had unlockable travel in my head, but got busy and it slipped my mind.
Teleport to a party member could be modified to "teleport to party leader" and added to the Party Menu as a button. That could be used to join dungeon runs in progress.
Hrm, now I have to rethink this.
Thank-you thank-you.
edit: kant spel
I agree completely on the hassle of grouping. I'm not a huge fan of pick-up-groups, but mechanics shouldn't intentionally make them difficult to form.
I have problems with load screen times, and the bottleneck is communications rather than CPU / disk / memory. I'm pushing zone complexity to engine limits and the server is authoritative on everything, so all that data gets transferred on each zone change. I have throttling code on the server that constrains spikes by dropping updates, but the zone change data can't be dropped so it buffers.
I have to revisit that code once I hit beta. I'd be happy at 10 seconds, but for now I bet it's around 30.
Fast Travel makes the world seem small if you have it right from the start so unlockable is best imo.