Fast Travel

[kilagan800]

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5 easy to find locations, 6 convenient destinations.
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5 easy to find locations, 7 convenient default destinations, 8 more upgradable destinations.
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Easy favor benchmark, survives TR, reduces all that awful time you actually need to run someplace public.

All of these.

[Vanquishedfo]

I thought about doing a bunch of specific quote answers but relized the OP is not worthy of them as he is clearly not a D&D player and thus has actually said nothing at all.

So dont worry my friends who love D&D as we know Nothing is going to change something that is very much a part of D&D and one of those small things that brings that spirit to DDO.

However in the case of something Non DDO related I will respond to the OP.

The Elder Scrolls series, especially ESIV: Oblivion is a personal fave among sandbox RPG that hasnt been matched since the days of Arcanum: A tale of steamwork and magica obscura. In fact from forums Id say Fast travel added to oblivion was one of the thing many older ES purist universally agree to dislike and mock oblivion for over say number 3 which to many is the best of the old school sandbox( personally I do favor 4 but that has to do more with mods) games and had much more immersion based travel.

Infact for Oblivion on TESnexus one of the most popular mods is the no fast travel mod because it disables it so fully you have to doa full delete/reinstall to get it back. Combined with no borders of cyrodil and people of cyrodil mods you end up with a huge active world to explore once you start adding in mods for elswyr desert etc.

Fast travel is never a good thing just for the sake of having it, but that doesnt mean teleport shouldnt exist, and infact teleport spells added to ESIV through mods as well as quick exit from dungeon spells all become good reasons from an immersive roleplay perspective to want to be a magic user. Wanting the power of fast travel is as viable a reason to want to pick magic over might as wanting to command legions of undead or hurl fire balls.

[Templarion]

/signed



Did you ever play Guild Wars?

1) Push m
2) Double-click

Nine times out of ten, this puts you either at your quest starting point, your quest endpoint (if it's a person in a town), in a town adjacent to your quest objective, or in your mission start point. Some dungeons require travel over an explorable area, but they are intended to be in remote areas anyway.

Arguing for my /signed: It's not the literal amount of time that it takes to get from point A to point B. We likely all agree that we have personally observed the cognitive phenomena of time compression and time dilation: time is compressed when you are engaged or interested, and time is dilated when you are unengaged or bored. Example: you are in the Shroud raid with a group of very interesting people and your run takes an hour after all of the joke-telling and levity, but it feels like 15 minutes because you're engaged. Perception of time is compressed. Another: you are stuck in an LFM for 20 minutes but it feels like an hour because you're bored. Perception of time is dilated.

Good game design must take the player's perception of time dilation into account, and prevent this whenever possible. All game designers, including the folks at Turbine, should make an effort to compress time where it is both appropriate to do so, and perceived by many as dilated. By appropriate, I mean that it cannot shortcut a quest objective. Travel from one enclave to the next within Stormreach lends to the perception of time dilation for many players. It is not germane to engaging in a quest, and is boring.

To make things worse:

1) The game rewards deeply-thought builds. Those builds will not necessarily include the stats necessary to commit points to UMD.
2) The game allows you to bypass the boring travel by paying money. That can brook resentment.

These easy-button-slippery-slope arguments are... well... if you're going to do that, I will pry open that can of worms and argue that pay-to-play itself is the slippery slope, and that we area already on it. If not, we shall respectfully disagree and leave it at that.

Therefore, any standard enclave in Stormreach available via teleport should be available via map travel for everyone.

[edit: deeply-though? deeply-thought. My bad!]

Extremely well written post. And exactly what I think but only in better words.

I, specially, like the part where you talk how the time is relative:
When you are doing the quest itself, the time flies because you have fun. But running the same streets without anykind of amusement is boring and feels like it takes a much longer time than it actually does.