Starting Cities

Amathe

In original Everquest you chose your starting city, and you might then be far, far away from your real life buddies (who chose other races and cities). By the time you hooked up with them, you might be level 15-20. 

I know Pantheon plans to avoid fast travel (except maybe player ports?).

So is this how it will be in Pantheon? With players needing to find a way to get to their friends, who could be on another continent? 

Albatroes

I do believe player porting was going to established but I could be wrong, but if it is I'm sure that would alleviate the issue.

Anthur

https://pantheonmmo.com/game/faqs/

Question 19.0.

"Pantheon will have meaningful travel -- players will need to travel to new areas and face the dangers that come with such a journey. That said, there will be spells like 'Call of the Hero', which summons an ally to your side if they are grouped with you. There will also be a caravan-like system, where a player can log out whilst in a group and then log back in and still be with the group, even if that group has moved. There will also be additional ways to help groups come together and stay together. But it's also important to note that this doesn't mean people will be able to travel as they please, to anywhere in the world, at a whim; especially if they haven't travelled there by foot or horse at least once (e.g. players will need to unlock certain regions by travelling there first). More details to come as we get closer to beta and launch"

Still leaves room for speculations. E.g. does Call of Hero work for someone who hasn't travelled to the destination by himself yet ? Anyway, that's all info I am aware of for this topic.
Personally I like it when decisions have consequences. Never had an issue with traveling in original EQ either so yeah, I think Pantheons system will be not too harsh for me.

Mackaveli44

Pantheon will have travel similar to EQ, i.e. Druid portals to different locations, Wizard portals to different locations.  That's the extent of what they have said. At least to my knowledge that is.

Albatroes

Anthur said:

https://pantheonmmo.com/game/faqs/

Question 19.0.

"Pantheon will have meaningful travel -- players will need to travel to new areas and face the dangers that come with such a journey. That said, there will be spells like 'Call of the Hero', which summons an ally to your side if they are grouped with you. There will also be a caravan-like system, where a player can log out whilst in a group and then log back in and still be with the group, even if that group has moved. There will also be additional ways to help groups come together and stay together. But it's also important to note that this doesn't mean people will be able to travel as they please, to anywhere in the world, at a whim; especially if they haven't travelled there by foot or horse at least once (e.g. players will need to unlock certain regions by travelling there first). More details to come as we get closer to beta and launch"

Still leaves room for speculations. E.g. does Call of Hero work for someone who hasn't travelled to the destination by himself yet ? Anyway, that's all info I am aware of for this topic.
Personally I like it when decisions have consequences. Never had an issue with traveling in original EQ either so yeah, I think Pantheons system will be not too harsh for me.

I think it was mentioned that people would be able to summon who hadn't visited an area before but I'm guessing it'll have a long cool down to avoid abusing it.

TwoTubes

How are you all not familiar with CotH??  Standard CotH was only zone wide.  There wasn't a long cool down.  Only a small component cost.  It brings people together...but not from anywhere in the world.  It's not a reverse port.  It sounds like ports are going to be limited, at least on release (likely not until at least mid levels).  Don't expect CotH to work around that. 

In short Amathe...yes you will have to travel to group with your friends if they are on another continent.

Scumm

I suspect that Pantheon will have some way for starting players to quickly join their friends.  However, I actually hope it doesn't. 

I enjoyed the relative silos of starting areas that were created by the difficult travel in EQ.  It made for smaller tight-knit communities. If you can easily jump between starting cities, nowhere will really feel like home. You won't see the same people around consistently because we'll all be travelling around so much.

I would actually prefer to see more options for starting areas per race than quick teleport systems in-game. Allow halflings and elves to start in each others towns, or allow all races to start in the human area, but don't provide instant teleports between all those cities that all players can take advantage of.  

If you're going to provide a quick way in-game for new players to meet each other immediately upon starting, just unlock all the starting areas at creation instead.  

I do plan to play Pantheon with some RL friends and family. But if we want to group together from day 1, I fully expect to either roll characters in the same starting area or overcome some serious obstacles to join them.  

svann

LegotheHutt said:

How are you all not familiar with CotH??  Standard CotH was only zone wide.  There wasn't a long cool down.  Only a small component cost.  It brings people together...but not from anywhere in the world.  It's not a reverse port.  It sounds like ports are going to be limited, at least on release (likely not until at least mid levels).  Don't expect CotH to work around that. 

In short Amathe...yes you will have to travel to group with your friends if they are on another continent.

Vanguard had a similar spell that did work across zone lines iirc.  However it is unlikely that players get it at L1.

Zindaihas

Scumm said:

I suspect that Pantheon will have some way for starting players to quickly join their friends.  However, I actually hope it doesn't. 

I enjoyed the relative silos of starting areas that were created by the difficult travel in EQ.  It made for smaller tight-knit communities. If you can easily jump between starting cities, nowhere will really feel like home. You won't see the same people around consistently because we'll all be travelling around so much.

I would actually prefer to see more options for starting areas per race than quick teleport systems in-game. Allow halflings and elves to start in each others towns, or allow all races to start in the human area, but don't provide instant teleports between all those cities that all players can take advantage of.  

If you're going to provide a quick way in-game for new players to meet each other immediately upon starting, just unlock all the starting areas at creation instead.  

I do plan to play Pantheon with some RL friends and family. But if we want to group together from day 1, I fully expect to either roll characters in the same starting area or overcome some serious obstacles to join them.  

I agree.  I touched on this subject in my incredibly long-winded thread about why EQ is better than virtually all other MMOs.  I think it would be a huge mistake for Pantheon to allow instant travel (or nearly instant) between cities right from the start.  It would put a serious dent in the feeling of immersion.  If you want players to get a sense of how immense Terminus is, make them have to travel across it on foot in the early stages.  Not only that, but having to travel from one city to another in the traditional manner gives you a feeling of the cultures of the various races as they are dispersed in different corners of the world.

Going back to EQ, I made a wood-elf ranger and my brother played a big ugly hairy troll (I think he had bad breath too).  Which meant I started in Kelethin on Faydwer and his home city was Grobb on Antonica.  I'll never forget my first time traveling to southern Antonica (on foot) to visit Grobb and the ogre city of Oggok.  It was a real adventure, and actually, there was also a sense of culture shock as I walked through to streets of Grobb and saw troll butchers carving dwarven corpses on tables and hanging their entrails on hooks for consumption by uncouth barbarous trolls.

Dullahan

I hope even portal travel is limited. If it was up to me, portals would require reagents that would be expensive enough to make you consider running, riding or taking a boat. If it does not, other forms of transportation will inevitably become irrelevant and the size of the world will shrink.

vito11

Amathe said:

In original Everquest you chose your starting city, and you might then be far, far away from your real life buddies (who chose other races and cities). By the time you hooked up with them, you might be level 15-20. 

I know Pantheon plans to avoid fast travel (except maybe player ports?).

So is this how it will be in Pantheon? With players needing to find a way to get to their friends, who could be on another continent? 

Best to atock up on some Law Runes!

svann

Rhoklaw said:

The only people who are against immersive forms of travel are the so called "I don't have time to sit around for 5 minutes on a boat, because my time is precious" crowd.

Whenever you start out "The only people who...." you are almost certainly wrong and in this case you certainly are. 

Many people in many threads have brought up the point that when you have a group and one has to leave the group generally does not have patience to wait 20 minutes for a replacement to find his way.  Its not always about my time, its often about the group's time.  Im not sure how you could not get that unless you are one of those people that just solo and never group?

Albatroes

Scumm said:

I suspect that Pantheon will have some way for starting players to quickly join their friends.  However, I actually hope it doesn't. 

I enjoyed the relative silos of starting areas that were created by the difficult travel in EQ.  It made for smaller tight-knit communities. If you can easily jump between starting cities, nowhere will really feel like home. You won't see the same people around consistently because we'll all be travelling around so much.

I would actually prefer to see more options for starting areas per race than quick teleport systems in-game. Allow halflings and elves to start in each others towns, or allow all races to start in the human area, but don't provide instant teleports between all those cities that all players can take advantage of.  

If you're going to provide a quick way in-game for new players to meet each other immediately upon starting, just unlock all the starting areas at creation instead.  

I do plan to play Pantheon with some RL friends and family. But if we want to group together from day 1, I fully expect to either roll characters in the same starting area or overcome some serious obstacles to join them.  

I honestly do agree with your point and Svann's slightly. I'd much more prefer if the race and choice were different options and that you started out neutral with all factions (similar to FFXI). To me, that would broaden the idea of the world, so you can see npcs of other races in those cities as well trading and kind of adding a living element to the game instead of orcs are here and elves are here etc. Maybe your character would have a back story of being a human that was abandoned in a forest and raced by orcs or something. I'd say if there's going to be some kind of travel like that, it should be at later levels since to me that would make more sense in the fact that you should be grouping to make leveling go faster at higher levels since it requires more experience etc. As for low levels (maybe 30 and below?) I feel like people should still be finding their sea legs so to speak and embracing the exploration instead of getting enthralled with the idea of rushing to the end. That being said. I think the travel should be an account wide thing so it helps with the alt leveling since most people can only handle the "exploration" idea so many times when leveling up other classes.

Zindaihas

Dullahan said:

I hope even portal travel is limited. If it was up to me, portals would require reagents that would be expensive enough to make you consider running, riding or taking a boat. If it does not, other forms of transportation will inevitably become irrelevant and the size of the world will shrink.

Well...even I am in favor of speeding up travel eventually.  After traversing the same landscape a couple dozen times, you should become sufficiently familiar with it that you can bypass it at higher levels.  In addition, giving upper level wizards the ability to gate from one point in the world to another creates the perception that they are powerful casters who can bend space with their spells.

Now if you're talking about making porting expensive for lower levels characters but for affordable for higher ones who tend to be wealthier, that's an idea.

wanderica

I actually think Vanilla WoW struck a good balance here.  Travel was fast enough that it was rarely an inconvenience to the group when it mattered, but not so fast to be meaningless.  If you were a Night Elf, for example, getting to Ironforge (the only alliance AH back then) was a serious task.  You were almost certain to be doing a bit of corpse running on your way to Deadmines at level 15. 

These days, of course, travel is a joke on all fronts, so the same game can be used to reinforce Dullahan's point.  The sheer number of ways to travel . . . whistles, ground mounts, fast ground mounts, flying mounts, hearthstone, the other hearthstone, garrison hearthstone, summons, LFG, etc, etc, pretty much means that community built around regions within the game world doesn't exist. 

All that said, I'm really looking forward to a game that can give me that "Oh Sh*t" feeling that I had in FFXI trying to get to a new area.  The world was dangerous, unforgiving, and all kinds of fun as a result.

Dullahan

Zindaihas said:

Dullahan said:

I hope even portal travel is limited. If it was up to me, portals would require reagents that would be expensive enough to make you consider running, riding or taking a boat. If it does not, other forms of transportation will inevitably become irrelevant and the size of the world will shrink.

Well...even I am in favor of speeding up travel eventually.  After traversing the same landscape a couple dozen times, you should become sufficiently familiar with it that you can bypass it at higher levels.  In addition, giving upper level wizards the ability to gate from one point in the world to another creates the perception that they are powerful casters who can bend space with their spells.

Now if you're talking about making porting expensive for lower levels characters but for affordable for higher ones who tend to be wealthier, that's an idea.

That is the idea. If you have to buy reagents, and they're bound, it means you can't just run around passing them out like candy and porting people. If people really want to give players money to go to town and buy tokens, nothing is preventing that, but it's less convenient. I think it should still be something that should tax players though, even at max level.

The way you can do it is simple. Portals to areas that are higher level or expansion content would require tokens that are more expensive than the general continental portals.

lahnmir

Rhoklaw said:

svann said:

Rhoklaw said:

The only people who are against immersive forms of travel are the so called "I don't have time to sit around for 5 minutes on a boat, because my time is precious" crowd.

Whenever you start out "The only people who...." you are almost certainly wrong and in this case you certainly are. 

Many people in many threads have brought up the point that when you have a group and one has to leave the group generally does not have patience to wait 20 minutes for a replacement to find his way.  Its not always about my time, its often about the group's time.  Im not sure how you could not get that unless you are one of those people that just solo and never group?

What I said has nothing to do with grouping. My point was that WoW pretty much gave birth to the mentality that the MMO genre should cater to the instant gratification crowd at the loss of immersion. From my experience, people with little to no patience are more often than not, less mature than people with more patience, but I could be wrong, lol.

Patience and time are most certainly not the same thing. And the mature people, also called grown ups, have the least time of all with families, busy jobs etc. Its the young and immature people that have all the time needed for such artificial pacing. I am all for immersion but waiting on a boat for 10 minutes means I have wasted precious time, it says nothing about patience. Also, lol at the 'lets blame WoW' attitude, WoW catered to a generation that was already there, it didn't create it.

/Cheers,
Lahnmir

deniter

lahnmir said:

Rhoklaw said:

svann said:

Rhoklaw said:

The only people who are against immersive forms of travel are the so called "I don't have time to sit around for 5 minutes on a boat, because my time is precious" crowd.

Whenever you start out "The only people who...." you are almost certainly wrong and in this case you certainly are. 

Many people in many threads have brought up the point that when you have a group and one has to leave the group generally does not have patience to wait 20 minutes for a replacement to find his way.  Its not always about my time, its often about the group's time.  Im not sure how you could not get that unless you are one of those people that just solo and never group?

What I said has nothing to do with grouping. My point was that WoW pretty much gave birth to the mentality that the MMO genre should cater to the instant gratification crowd at the loss of immersion. From my experience, people with little to no patience are more often than not, less mature than people with more patience, but I could be wrong, lol.

Patience and time are most certainly not the same thing. And the mature people, also called grown ups, have the least time of all with families, busy jobs etc. Its the young and immature people that have all the time needed for such artificial pacing. I am all for immersion but waiting on a boat for 10 minutes means I have wasted precious time, it says nothing about patience. Also, lol at the 'lets blame WoW' attitude, WoW catered to a generation that was already there, it didn't create it.

/Cheers,
Lahnmir

On the other hand, your gaming experinece is more relaxed because of unavoidable down time. You have time to do minor tasks at home like make some food, go to toilet, answer a phone call, etc. compared to f.ex. a fast paced MOBA game where your focus has to be 100% at all times, granted they last shorter time.

I believe it's not the total gaming time that matters but the length of time you have to focus and avoid interruption, i.e. the time it takes to run a dungeon or battleground.

These games are not about efficiency either. You don't have a schedule to tell what specific tasks you have to accomplish in certain time limit. In that sense your time is not precious at all. If it was you wouldn't waste it to games in the first place, would you.

Amathe

I'm not sure what WoW has to do with my original post, other than for one guy just to insult people (while ironically calling them immature). 

The issue is how, if at all, to accommodate players in different starting cities who know one another to be able to group together early on (in a game oriented to grouping). Doesn't have to be at level 1. But when might one reasonably expect to be able to make the journey to hook up with one's friends?

Keep in mind that leveling is projected to be slow. Travel is expected to be slow. Naked corpse runs are a possibility. And there won't be a map (beyond whatever that very basic overview of the world thing is).  So it could be quite a while before a player could succeed at such a meet up. If that's the goal, looks like mission accomplished. But it is kind of sad, to me at least, not to be able to share the  new experience of a game with the people you want to play it with (unless you limit your race choices and play something or someone that isn't necessarily appealing to you). 

As I'm typing, however, I do seem to recall players paying other players (with in game currency or goods) to serve as their guides and bodyguards while traveling. So that's one possibility. Except that when a game first starts out players tend to be poor and lack much to pay with. 

svann

I agree that at beginning travel should be hard.  There has to be some incentive for players to stay at their starting areas or else everyone will just port to what is said to be the best starting area and the other areas will be empty. 

If friends want to group up at level 1 they could just start at the same city.  Or if you really need to be a different race then go the extra mile and make that journey.  Or have your friends do.   Its not impossible.

Kyleran

They could just let people choose where they wish to start in at character creation.

Worry about which area is best would appeal mostly to the min max crowd, but if people believe that to be true Devs can put caps on them when necessary.

dcutbi001

I like the idea of keeping the starting races siloed without fast travel, aside from the possibility of a couple starting cities having boats to other areas. However, I hope they have cities that are in close proximity to one another that will add some variety to your race/class combo without forcing people to either not play together, or to make very restricted concessions on what race and/or class they want to play as their only two options.  In a world build in that way, people will be able to make a short journey from one starting area to another, with some possible threats in between, and still allow for them to meet up with their friends. I think of Grobb/Ogguk and Qeynos/Surefall Glades as two examples from EQ.

The other possibility would be that good and neutral class/race combos will have one or two main cities, like Freeport and Qeynos, that allow for a handful of different race/class combo's to choose as their home city in the character creator. Maybe toss in one evil city that has a handful of options as well. That would not allow for all combinations of races and classes to find one another in the early game, but it would allow for more options for the people that were willing to make slight concessions on their race or class to play with a friend, but not have it be so punishing as to restrict them to a single race and a class within that framework.    

Zindaihas

ReallyNow10 said:

I hope not everyone (outside of mages, maybe druids) should port.  Land travel makes for memorable adventures, and opportunities to see and help out folks who are in trouble.  My most memorable EQ (heck, MMO) adventure was the long, perilous journey from Halas to Freeport.  It was a scary, heart-pounding, fantastic adventure.

If there is too much porting, then the geography becomes trivial, folks become bored, and you see people aimlessly riding horses in circles around town, like they do in WOW's Dalaran.  Even early WOW had some memorable travel, before all the porting.

Porting kills worlds.

Definitely.  I almost put that in my first post on this thread, but I figured it was understood.  Only powerful magic-users (and not even all of them) should have the ability to port across the world.  Give it to everybody and it cheapens the spell.  Of course, they should be able to port their entire party so they can all arrive at their destination at once.

Once again, I like the way they did it in EQ.  Only wizards and druids could port.  However, mages had a cool spell too whereby they could call members of their party to them within the same zone.  It allowed replacement members to quickly reach the group in the event they were deep within a dungeon.  That's what I hope they're working toward (and it sounds like they are) in Pantheon where each class has their own special talents that contributes to the team and sets them apart from other classes.

Dullahan

Amathe said:

I'm not sure what WoW has to do with my original post, other than for one guy just to insult people (while ironically calling them immature). 

The issue is how, if at all, to accommodate players in different starting cities who know one another to be able to group together early on (in a game oriented to grouping). Doesn't have to be at level 1. But when might one reasonably expect to be able to make the journey to hook up with one's friends?

Keep in mind that leveling is projected to be slow. Travel is expected to be slow. Naked corpse runs are a possibility. And there won't be a map (beyond whatever that very basic overview of the world thing is).  So it could be quite a while before a player could succeed at such a meet up. If that's the goal, looks like mission accomplished. But it is kind of sad, to me at least, not to be able to share the  new experience of a game with the people you want to play it with (unless you limit your race choices and play something or someone that isn't necessarily appealing to you). 

As I'm typing, however, I do seem to recall players paying other players (with in game currency or goods) to serve as their guides and bodyguards while traveling. So that's one possibility. Except that when a game first starts out players tend to be poor and lack much to pay with. 

One of the greatest memories for many people in EQ, was being able to get from one city to another, particular in the early levels. It was that very danger and inconvenience that made it seem more like a world than a game.

Zindaihas

Amathe said:

I'm not sure what WoW has to do with my original post, other than for one guy just to insult people (while ironically calling them immature). 

The issue is how, if at all, to accommodate players in different starting cities who know one another to be able to group together early on (in a game oriented to grouping). Doesn't have to be at level 1. But when might one reasonably expect to be able to make the journey to hook up with one's friends?

Keep in mind that leveling is projected to be slow. Travel is expected to be slow. Naked corpse runs are a possibility. And there won't be a map (beyond whatever that very basic overview of the world thing is).  So it could be quite a while before a player could succeed at such a meet up. If that's the goal, looks like mission accomplished. But it is kind of sad, to me at least, not to be able to share the  new experience of a game with the people you want to play it with (unless you limit your race choices and play something or someone that isn't necessarily appealing to you). 

As I'm typing, however, I do seem to recall players paying other players (with in game currency or goods) to serve as their guides and bodyguards while traveling. So that's one possibility. Except that when a game first starts out players tend to be poor and lack much to pay with. 

These are the kinds of things you have to take into consideration when making a character.  The devs cannot and should not sacrifice immersion in any way in favor of convenience (in my humble opinion).  So you have to weigh that against what you hope to accomplish early in the game.  If your goal is to hook up with friends you already know right from the start, then that could well mean making characters in the same starting city.  Or possibly finding two cities that are relatively close to each other so that you can make characters of different races and get together relatively early.

One thing I would definitely do if I were the devs (and they may be, I don't know) is build roads between cities on the same continent which offer safer travel than wandering through the wilderness (but not completely safe).  That way if you want to make a character in a city different from a friend, then one of you will have to make the trek to the other's starting city and that way you'll be together from that point on.

I assume there will be bind points in the game that you can change depending on where you go.

Amathe

Somehow the issue I raised has been given its least charitable interpteration. I am confident I never advocated for instant travel for everyone. What I did do is suggest a discussion of how to accomodate friends wanting to play together early in the game, that of course should be done in a way not to ruin the game's many challenges. But that is not nearly as fun I guess as accusing people of wanting WoW like casualism with the attendant primate chest thumping. So let me 
join in then! Dadgum casuals hate em want something for nuthin - instant easy my little pony mmo. Friends should never even see each other for the first year. F'n A.