Do you realize that academic discussion doesn't mean blindly accepting evidence which doesn't fill the criteria?
And you realize that you're either blindly accepting your beliefs, backtracking, upping the requirements, side stepping to continue you arguing what you turn around say you're not arguing?
Do you realize fun/good/best aren't cornerstones of my argument and that comparing them with meaningful (which is still a very subjective word) is irrelevant?
Do you realize that you were and you can be quoted on this?
Do you realize "decisions" is the cornerstone of my argument? Do you realize "whether a game mechanic has more decisions" is objective? Do you realize "whether decisions have depth" is only slightly less so? (Two players might master chess at different rates, but even the guy who masters it in a day is unlikely to consider it a shallow game, because game depth is measured relative to the other games out there.)
Not really because depth is decisions is imply quality of decisions. How many decisions you can make are tangible. Answer to 1 is either a, b or c. Or you could have near unlimited choices. You can generally judge that. Saying WoW's combat is deep is very subjective and I certainly don't find it so. Combat is generally a routine outside of a few encounters you can learn on YouTube.
Do you realize calling things "reactions" doesn't change anything? Every decision (even those typically considered "actions" not reactions) can inevitably be considered a reaction, but that just doesn't matter. Decisions are the heart of the most common way games are enjoyed by players.
No what you described as meaningful was a reaction. No, a pure reaction means something happens because something causes it. A decision means you have a choice. A reaction can have decisions involved but not all do.
If you punch me before I know it and I am knocked out that is my reaction. If you come up to me and say let's fight I now have decisions.
If you give me a quest to kill 10 mobs I do not have a decision outside of not completing it or not. If I am dropped in a world like SWG and given free run I could go where I wanted just sight seeing, searching for resources, hunting, go to themepark, go to a player town search for buffers, look for creatures to tame, look for faction PVP and so on.
Do you realize that combat gameplay hasexamples of objectively offering deep decision-making? Do you realize that travel gameplay has no such examples? (You will never find a "travel guide" of similar complexity which details the many decisions one must master to travel well. You'll never find one because travel offers infrequent and shallow decisions.)
That's purely opinion. And games like GTA and Red Dead had MMO like single player with tons of travel over the same place which had tons of replay value
Do you realize the decision of "where to go" (travel) is analogous to "what to do" (non-travel)? (And refer back to the example above which details how "what to do" is a very involved decision even if you just consider the combat component (which is only a small part of the full set of decisions you make during the gameplay you call "linear")
Combat is generally very shallow. In WoW you do not have a variety of playing combat in 90% of all situations. Many of those 10% are cartographed situations.
Do you realize that calling something "the ultimate decision" doesn't make it so? Do you realize that in the fact of evidence objectively showing the decision-making depth of combat gameplay, and the fact that you'll be unable to provide evidence showing the depth of travel gameplay, means that you're flat-out objectively wrong to call those travel decisions "the ultimate decision"?
Take a max level character and count you're combat decisions. Then look at all the places you can travel and see which has greater choices and decisions.
And you realize that you're either blindly accepting your beliefs, backtracking, upping the requirements, side stepping to continue you arguing what you turn around say you're not arguing?
Do you realize that you were and you can be quoted on this?
Not really because depth is decisions is imply quality of decisions. How many decisions you can make are tangible. Answer to 1 is either a, b or c. Or you could have near unlimited choices. You can generally judge that. Saying WoW's combat is deep is very subjective and I certainly don't find it so. Combat is generally a routine outside of a few encounters you can learn on YouTube.
No what you described as meaningful was a reaction. No, a pure reaction means something happens because something causes it. A decision means you have a choice. A reaction can have decisions involved but not all do.
That's purely opinion. And games like GTA and Red Dead had MMO like single player with tons of travel over the same place which had tons of replay value
Combat is generally very shallow. In WoW you do not have a variety of playing combat in 90% of all situations. Many of those 10% are cartographed situations.
Take a max level character and count you're combat decisions. Then look at all the places you can travel and see which has greater choices and decisions.
My argument has remained completely unchanged since the start. If you're struggling to understand, feel free to ask about specifically where you failed to understand the consistency.
Also it's really weird to claim I'm "blindly accepting my beliefs". What do you even mean by that? My beliefs are created through observation, logic, and evidence. There isn't any "blind acceptance" really. It's straightforward, consistent, and logical. Again, feel free to ask about specifically where you failed to understand this.
You cannot quote me as citing fun/good/best are the cornerstones of my argument. My argument from the start has been about the most common ways games are entertaining ("Instant travel generally works (because it focuses on games' biggest strength: interaction and decision-making)," was my first post here.)
You might want to retry that 3rd paragraph. But before retrying it you might want to step back and realize players play games for fun, and fun isn't produced by long periods of non-gameplay, and travel in MMORPGs has been extremely close to non-gameplay (it's shallow and infrequent decision-making.)
You seem confused in the 4th paragraph. Whether the thing I described as having meaning was a reaction just isn't relevant. Whether all reactions are decisions isn't relevant. What mattered is that we were discussing travel and I was trying to teach you that the value of game mechanics comes from their gameplay (which is decisions) and you went off on a tangent about whether the travel had meaning (which isn't relevant.)
Do you understand we're discussing game design? We're discussing how games are fun. Games are fun through gameplay. Gameplay is decisions. Meaning may provide a broader decision-consequence loop, but gameplay is experienced moment-to-moment, and if too many moments pass without significant gameplay, that's a boring game players will leave. So any argument that crappy travel is justified by its long-term meaning simply doesn't hold weight. It's a justification, but an extremely weak justification. We're not interested in the weakest game designs possible, we're interested in discussing strong game designs where players are actually having a lot of fun, and are highly engaged.
Again, you're calling things opinions which are not opinions. You can objectively look at the number of mechanics, their interrelatedness, and the underlying math, of both travel in MMORPGs and combat in MMORPGs. There is absolutely no question in any reasonable person's mind that travel is extremely shallow, whereas combat ranges from somewhat shallow to very deep.
There are many MMORPGs where you can honestly say "Wow, that player is really skilled at [class]!" but there are no MMORPGs where you can honestly say "Wow, that player is really skilled at travel!" The reason why this is true is rooted in the shallow reality of MMORPG travel.
"MMO like" games having travel doesn't mean they have deep travel. GTA has somewhat deep travel, but RDR's travel wasn't particularly deep as I recall. And again, the reason lies in the decision-making involved: in GTA there are enough nuances to the decisions you're making while driving (turn 10 degrees/sec vs. turning 11 degrees/sec to perfectly slip through traffic) where some depth emerges.
But again, I'm talking about the reality of current MMORPGs. Not theoretics. Not "MMO like" games. Whenever I say travel is shallow, I say it in the most literal sense that travel is shallow, which doesn't conflict at all with the statement "travel could be deep." I do this because the majority of players asking for more slow-travel tend not to have some elaborate deep-travel-system in mind; they're simply asking for the shallow gameplay they've seen in existing games.
Why are you even bringing up all of the coordinates you could travel do? Those decisions don't matter. Why would you want to go down that road against a combat system anyway? If you insist that traveling to coordinate 95,96 is different from traveling to coordinate 95,100 then I can just describe all of the combat choice variety which can be employed against the monsters at either coordinate (and it would be equally irrelevant; this entire tangent is irrelevant; choosing where to travel isn't a relevant decision because there is no mastery involved!)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The vision of EQN seemed to be a answer to make the worlds and traveling through them decisionful again. A generated world with mobs useful objects, or resources that you could interact with and would react to you would have been nice.
My argument has remained completely unchanged since the start.
Actually if people care to look at page one and page two they can see that you uniformly decried travel doesn't work in all games. You since have backpedaled into saying it doesn't work specifically in MMORPGs, but even that is a very by-case argument that was pointed out as both a flawed claim and actively changing as eastern market gaming is evolving to address that very issue in virtual world game design (not to mention it's not entirely accurate to even classic MMORPG titles as they all had varying degrees of features).
Where it's primarily valid is in the MMORPGs that focus not on virtual world building, but set-piece user experiences. Which, of course it's valid there because most all systems that aren't tied directly to the combat are shallow in such 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
Now let me just throw out a couple of propositions:
Prop. A: If getting around is slow and tedious, doesn't this create an incentive to build or acquire something that will make travel less slow and less tedious?
If it does, then can't the building of machines be part of the game?
Prop. B: If getting around is quick and efficient through portals or fast travel, doesn't this destroy any incentive to build or acquire something that will make travel without portals less slow and tedious?
If it does, then isn't it just better not to waste time on building machines?
Now I'm sympathetic with Devios here, but I think it is important to point out to him that Axehilt is, in a sense, right when he says that long distance travel and time consuming travel serves no purpose in MMOs. There's nothing in the vast spaces that is of any use to players of these games, so there's really no point in making them traverse the expanse. Arguing against his ironclad logic here is rather futile.
Devios, Axehilt's logic isn't wrong. If you are going to argue something with him, you have to argue his assumptions.
And the assumption that is never quite stated, but can be implied, is that Axehilt has a very particular definition of what these games are about that excludes a lot of things that the games could be about, but aren't.
__________________________ "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
A. Yes, yes. In some mmos and mmo-like survival games it does solve this at the expense of making the world "smaller", less grand adventurous, and sometimes harder to spot the materials you used to make your fast travel vehicle.
B. No? Buying a horse doesn't remove the incentive to buy a horse. Players will seek the fastest means of travel even if it results in what I said earlier.
Devios, Axehilt's logic isn't wrong. If you are going to argue something with him, you have to argue his assumptions.
And the assumption that is never quite stated, but can be implied, is that Axehilt has a very particular definition of what these games are about that excludes a lot of things that the games could be about, but aren't.
This actually falls under the point I already addressed that the type of MMO axehilt seems to be focusing on is the set-piece hopping style of user experience.
In a vitrual world scenario, that game world has quite a bit of value and there is a reason that the eastern titles have shifted towards the implementation of travel progression with the likes of mounts, mount breeding, boat/glider and wagon crafting, etc.
It's not that they "could" be about them, there actually is a pre-existing and growing market already forming. Axehilt has just chosen to ignore those titles and that market in favor of saying it doesn't exist.
That's where his logic is indeed wrong. Not every MMORPG is built like WoW, EQ, and TOR as a finite user experience focused on a scripted experience fitted around combat. There is in fact virtual world MMORPG titles, and they are continuing to evolve these mechanics.
"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
My argument has remained completely unchanged since the start. If you're struggling to understand, feel free to ask about specifically where you failed to understand the consistency.
Also it's really weird to claim I'm "blindly accepting my beliefs". What do you even mean by that? My beliefs are created through observation, logic, and evidence. There isn't any "blind acceptance" really. It's straightforward, consistent, and logical. Again, feel free to ask about specifically where you failed to understand this.
You cannot quote me as citing fun/good/best are the cornerstones of my argument. My argument from the start has been about the most common ways games are entertaining ("Instant travel generally works (because it focuses on games' biggest strength: interaction and decision-making)," was my first post here.)
You might want to retry that 3rd paragraph. But before retrying it you might want to step back and realize players play games for fun, and fun isn't produced by long periods of non-gameplay, and travel in MMORPGs has been extremely close to non-gameplay (it's shallow and infrequent decision-making.)
You seem confused in the 4th paragraph. Whether the thing I described as having meaning was a reaction just isn't relevant. Whether all reactions are decisions isn't relevant. What mattered is that we were discussing travel and I was trying to teach you that the value of game mechanics comes from their gameplay (which is decisions) and you went off on a tangent about whether the travel had meaning (which isn't relevant.)
Do you understand we're discussing game design? We're discussing how games are fun. Games are fun through gameplay. Gameplay is decisions. Meaning may provide a broader decision-consequence loop, but gameplay is experienced moment-to-moment, and if too many moments pass without significant gameplay, that's a boring game players will leave. So any argument that crappy travel is justified by its long-term meaning simply doesn't hold weight. It's a justification, but an extremely weak justification. We're not interested in the weakest game designs possible, we're interested in discussing strong game designs where players are actually having a lot of fun, and are highly engaged.
Again, you're calling things opinions which are not opinions. You can objectively look at the number of mechanics, their interrelatedness, and the underlying math, of both travel in MMORPGs and combat in MMORPGs. There is absolutely no question in any reasonable person's mind that travel is extremely shallow, whereas combat ranges from somewhat shallow to very deep.
There are many MMORPGs where you can honestly say "Wow, that player is really skilled at [class]!" but there are no MMORPGs where you can honestly say "Wow, that player is really skilled at travel!" The reason why this is true is rooted in the shallow reality of MMORPG travel.
"MMO like" games having travel doesn't mean they have deep travel. GTA has somewhat deep travel, but RDR's travel wasn't particularly deep as I recall. And again, the reason lies in the decision-making involved: in GTA there are enough nuances to the decisions you're making while driving (turn 10 degrees/sec vs. turning 11 degrees/sec to perfectly slip through traffic) where some depth emerges.
But again, I'm talking about the reality of current MMORPGs. Not theoretics. Not "MMO like" games. Whenever I say travel is shallow, I say it in the most literal sense that travel is shallow, which doesn't conflict at all with the statement "travel could be deep." I do this because the majority of players asking for more slow-travel tend not to have some elaborate deep-travel-system in mind; they're simply asking for the shallow gameplay they've seen in existing games.
Why are you even bringing up all of the coordinates you could travel do? Those decisions don't matter. Why would you want to go down that road against a combat system anyway? If you insist that traveling to coordinate 95,96 is different from traveling to coordinate 95,100 then I can just describe all of the combat choice variety which can be employed against the monsters at either coordinate (and it would be equally irrelevant; this entire tangent is irrelevant; choosing where to travel isn't a relevant decision because there is no mastery involved!)
The point in bring up places to travel was not just coordinates. You're making a big deal about decisions. I was showing that even if you just count zones a max level character can go to in WOW you will have more decisions than in combat.
Decisions, "depth," and all the other stuff you talk about are subjective and irrelevant to gaming. An 18 foot pool is deep to me but a deep sea diver its nothing. Decisions mean nothing if they're not fun or bad ones. There are simple games that are just a blast to play and some games that are so deep and complex they bore most people to tears. ITS opinion and subjective. For me I don't consider any MMORPG I've played have deep combat. Street Fighter or Tekken to me have deep fighting. MMORPG combat is routines you learn fighting the the same opponent remodeled or reskinned 90% of the time. They are on the low end of combat scale even WOW which many think is archaic with tab targeting. Its again opinion no matter what useless you metrics you claim make it better.
I used GTA and Red Dead because they do use a quest/mission system like MMORPG. You walk up to a guy or area and get sent on a mission. Its something that can translate into MMORPG. The reason why traveling is generally fun is because you have random events and encounters. Not only do you have the mission opponents but traffic, police and environment challenges. You may find a car, an animal to hunt, a random rare encounter all driving down the same roads. You could replay the mission 8 times in a row and it could be vastly different each time depending on what you used to travel and what path and what randomly happened.
This can be done in themepark MMORPG with instances and phasing. This can be done with being more imaginative with mounted combat and questing choices. This could be done in a sandbox for economic, crafting, resource, exploring, finding random events or encounters, achievements, rare NPCs and multitude of reason that keep the player entertained like SWG or even single player games with similar MMO mission setups.
A. Yes, yes. In some mmos and mmo-like survival games it does solve this at the expense of making the world "smaller", less grand adventurous, and sometimes harder to spot the materials you used to make your fast travel vehicle.
B. No? Buying a horse doesn't remove the incentive to buy a horse. Players will seek the fastest means of travel even if it results in what I said earlier.
Now I don't know anything about your playing habits, @mmoguy43, but do you find yourself purchasing fluff from the cash store? There's no shame in saying you do. I do too.
But the way you answer Proposition B reminds me the "cash store logic" behind how games are designed these days:
"If you want a horse, we'll sell you a horse."
But there's a catch...
Of course the horse, like everything in the cash store, doesn't really do anything....Not when you can get to the dungeons quicker via portal or fast travel. Its presence doesn't integrate itself in any major gameplay system. You could just as easily forget about the horse and suffer no loss of function. You can consume content at just the same rate with the horse as without the horse.
But the horse is cool to have, just like any fluff item. Its very uselessness is the reason why it can be sold in the cash store for real money.
See, if we had to rely on horse breeders to find the horses in the wild, break in the horses, ensure they have some good pasture land to feed themselves, and protect them from orcs, dragons, tigers and bears, the MMO publisher couldn't sell them out of the cash store. Because there would be no reason to go through all that work and waste all that time, as a horse breeder, if every player could simply whip out a credit card and get a horse from the publisher.
But then, what would justify all that extra coding, resource management and effort to create an entire player market in horse breeding, if fast travel gets you everywhere faster than a horse ever could? Which means we are in Proposition A: time and distance creates a need for horse breeding.
__________________________ "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
Now let me just throw out a couple of propositions:
Prop. A: If getting around is slow and tedious, doesn't this create an incentive to build or acquire something that will make travel less slow and less tedious?
If it does, then can't the building of machines be part of the game?
Prop. B: If getting around is quick and efficient through portals or fast travel, doesn't this destroy any incentive to build or acquire something that will make travel without portals less slow and tedious?
If it does, then isn't it just better not to waste time on building machines?
Now I'm sympathetic with Devios here, but I think it is important to point out to him that Axehilt is, in a sense, right when he says that long distance travel and time consuming travel serves no purpose in MMOs. There's nothing in the vast spaces that is of any use to players of these games, so there's really no point in making them traverse the expanse. Arguing against his ironclad logic here is rather futile.
Devios, Axehilt's logic isn't wrong. If you are going to argue something with him, you have to argue his assumptions.
And the assumption that is never quite stated, but can be implied, is that Axehilt has a very particular definition of what these games are about that excludes a lot of things that the games could be about, but aren't.
Typically it's bad to have our game's incentives be based around "fixing shitty gameplay". Yes, it will be an incentive to fix shitty gameplay, but wouldn't it be better to have the default gameplay be enjoyable, and allow players to do things to make it even moreenjoyable?
For example GTA provides relatively deep travel gameplay, and in GTA you can upgrade your car with nitrous, which both deepens the skill mastery (your car will be harder to control while using nitrous) but also the reward (you're going to move much faster.) It didn't require shallow travel to motivate players to want to purchase upgrades; players will always want to purchase upgrades.
Also to be clear, I haven't meant to imply travel, "serves no purpose."
Even a rusty non-functioning automobile serves some purpose. But it's not worth the cost if you intend to try to use it as transportation.
So travel actually serves several purposes. Just not enough to be worth the costs. (And at least one of the purposes travel serves is a developer-only benefit: travel as a timesink to sell longer subscriptions.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The point in bring up places to travel was not just coordinates. You're making a big deal about decisions. I was showing that even if you just count zones a max level character can go to in WOW you will have more decisions than in combat.
Decisions, "depth," and all the other stuff you talk about are subjective and irrelevant to gaming. An 18 foot pool is deep to me but a deep sea diver its nothing. Decisions mean nothing if they're not fun or bad ones. There are simple games that are just a blast to play and some games that are so deep and complex they bore most people to tears. ITS opinion and subjective. For me I don't consider any MMORPG I've played have deep combat. Street Fighter or Tekken to me have deep fighting. MMORPG combat is routines you learn fighting the the same opponent remodeled or reskinned 90% of the time. They are on the low end of combat scale even WOW which many think is archaic with tab targeting. Its again opinion no matter what useless you metrics you claim make it better.
I used GTA and Red Dead because they do use a quest/mission system like MMORPG. You walk up to a guy or area and get sent on a mission. Its something that can translate into MMORPG. The reason why traveling is generally fun is because you have random events and encounters. Not only do you have the mission opponents but traffic, police and environment challenges. You may find a car, an animal to hunt, a random rare encounter all driving down the same roads. You could replay the mission 8 times in a row and it could be vastly different each time depending on what you used to travel and what path and what randomly happened.
This can be done in themepark MMORPG with instances and phasing. This can be done with being more imaginative with mounted combat and questing choices. This could be done in a sandbox for economic, crafting, resource, exploring, finding random events or encounters, achievements, rare NPCs and multitude of reason that keep the player entertained like SWG or even single player games with similar MMO mission setups.
You can't make an irrelevant point and then ignore an equally irrelevant response. The right move is to realize your point was irrelevant and let it drop. Your alternative move is to continue pretending your irrelevant point mattered, and also accept my equally irrelevant response (and by extension realize that combat still has dramatically more decision-making than travel because your decisions are just "where to go" while mine are "who to fight" combined with "how to fight them" which is a much denser decision matrix with far more decisions.) But again, the correct choice here is to drop this irrelevant tangent.
Are you seriously arguing that game depth isn't important? Mastery of game systems is literally the most common way games are enjoyed and certainly the most common way they remain interesting in the long-term. In fact I watched a GDC2015 talk today by Tom 'Zileas' Cadwell of Riot/LoL fame where he basically said the exact same thing that A Theory of Fun's Raph Koster said about game design, except in different words. (Talk is here[Requires paid GDC Vault account] ) Both of these established designers say the same thing I'm saying to you, that the games players find most compelling are the ones which offer interesting decisions to master. Sid Meier (Sim City) has called games "a series of interesting decisions."
If you want to live a fantasy where you pretend you know more about game design than Cadwell, Koster, Meier, and myself, nobody can stop you. But if you have any interest in reality or truth, you'd be better off dropping that nonsense and learning from those who've put more thought into this than you have.
As for the rest of your post, random encounters aren't travel. They're encounters. When you're traveling and get attacked by a bandit in RDR, you stop traveling. You begin combat (a separate, deeper system.) While this can make shallow travel more palatable by interrupting it, the travel itself is still shallow in RDR. So it's preferable to have a system more like GTA, where the travel itself is deeper (and you also still might have random encounters on top of that.)
So even though it might be interesting to created a mounted combat system in a MMORPG, it wouldn't help travel to be less shallow. To do that you'd need to inject a lot of gameplay into the travel itself.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
If travel is going to be an important part of the game experience in some way why would you allow people to skip over it?
Because you only get to skip after the FIRST TIME THROUGH?
Is there something wrong with content that supposed to be consumed only once?
Is it hard to understand a game design may have you travel the same place more than once for a reason?
Try playing Rockstar games like GTA or Red Dead Redeption to see games where travel over the same places is relevant to the gameplay.
Sure .. the question is whether it is fun enough for the player. So what if there is a reason? A reason does not make things fun. If I give you a reason to click on a rock for 100000 times, will that make click on a rock fun?
And having stuff happening at the same location again (like Fallout 4, you went back to the vault for a sequence) does not mean that you have to travel there. You can just teleport back too.
Again, try the eastern gaming market. The use of virtual world MMORPG titles instead of set-piece hopping themepark MMORPG titles makes a world of difference to this situation.
Like the whole GTA example. The whole reason it works for the most part is because it's a virtual world. They have directly integrated the use of travel into the manner in which you deal with shop locales, robbing, driving and escape routes, cops, etc. This only works because these are all elements tethered to a large world in which you navigate these features and understand how they affect you.
The vehicle upgrading example takes a parallel to things like horse breeding, but the depth does not need to be as simple as upgrading something. Like, BDO for example does have upgrade tiers to their mounts, but there are ability lists that you can never completely obtain on a horse, you have to pick which ones are most important to you and focus on obtaining them. It's a to-task feature that needs that pushes the use of tailoring types of horses rather than simply making "the best one".
It's also the case of scope. Different travel actually offers a differing scope for what actions and activities are both available and pertinent in virtual worlds. It's a feature than can and does get used both as an intentional means to gate content, as well as provide a varying range to commit different activities relative to the distance traveled. IE, short travel range activities (fighting mobs, farming/mining resources, crafting, etc) versus long travel range activities (caravan, trade runs, banditry, exploration, etc).
Something mentioned in that GDC session you linked was that the majority of interesting decisions in Civ for example takes place in the city building, and Cadwell even states that it's the long-form processes "wonder strategy, military strategy, etc) that ends up being the deepest components. Those are aspects of the game that are affect moment to moment decisions, but are quite broader and time intensive decisions. He explicitly states "A lot of the best decisions in Civ are decisions that are aligning short term and long term objectives."
It's certainly good to have populous moment to moment gameplay. But overarching goals and elements that drive actions through long-form play (according to Cadwell in that link you shared) are quite important to have. He actually says "I think they could do a better job of forcing players to make do with tools." The very point in their commentary is that there is value itself in controlling player options and focusing on finite windows of choices that makes players plot ahead. Using sacrifice to propel gain.
He has a whole section on the logic he calls "Competing Objectives & Strategic Commitment." which defines this logic where the intent is to push trade-offs and sacrifices to push players to a greater anticipated reward. It pushes it further with the offer of features that emphasized the sacrifice as the other feature becomes more desirable. This in fact applies to travel just as much since it is an element of picking destinations to judge the rewards given, plus the risk features of the environment and players as well as what travel means you have to complete your goal.
His dialogue on "Diverse Tools & Making Do" He states "Generally in Roguelikes players have diverse challenges and diverse tools, and often those diverse tools are imperfect tools." His diatribe states that these imperfect tools "By designing for this, you really encourage player activity and reward." Using tools and features that confine players in an intentionally designed fashion to create a challenge scenario. "By incensing players to learn these tools, by putting them in situations where they have to use these tools, you actually get these players to sample in a way they actually excited about a larger percent of your content."
A more concrete statement of his on the matter. "Tools need to be limited in some way, it could be that they are inconsistently available. It could be that you have options A, B, and C and all of them have different uses or importance. It could be that there's a lot of cool-downs. It could be that they're just not provided to you when you need them by some mechanic. I think that's really really important, it can force players (if it's done in a way that doesn't feel arbitrary and lame, it feel's natural to the game) players naturally get into this "making do" and creativity mode."
So thanks for the link, it helps prove the point well that depth in game travel is quite valuable.
"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
There are two reasons why at least the option of slow travel is important.
1) Because it makes it seem you are in a real world. If it only takes five minutes to walk from one side of a continent to another, you cannot "suspend your disbelief".
2) It ought to be enjoyable if the landscape is richly created.
Decisions? Yes there are. You can be wandering along and think, "I wonder what's down that little track there?" Do you take it, or carry on down the road?
It all depends whether you want to play an action game where the only thing is to get from one bit of hack and slay to the next, or a role-playing game in a believable world.
There are two reasons why at least the option of slow travel is important.
1) Because it makes it seem you are in a real world. If it only takes five minutes to walk from one side of a continent to another, you cannot "suspend your disbelief".
2) It ought to be enjoyable if the landscape is richly created.
Decisions? Yes there are. You can be wandering along and think, "I wonder what's down that little track there?" Do you take it, or carry on down the road?
It all depends whether you want to play an action game where the only thing is to get from one bit of hack and slay to the next, or a role-playing game in a believable world.
In other words: Do you want to play a game or do you want to role play? If you want to play a game, no travel is better than boring travel.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Very interesting thread and my mind is just bubbling with scenarios. I had a thought about weather and perhaps even sickness. What if the weather inside an mmorpg could kill you and even make you sick. Lets say you're cruising a long maybe searching for mats and all of a sudden it starts to snow. Your character actually gets cold and your hp drops. Unless you find shelter or make a fire you will die, and there is till a 50% chance you get the flu for instance. So let's say you survive the snow storm and a few days latter; yes actually 2 days latter your toon starts to feel sick and must see a npc Doctor. I guess the Doctor could even be a profession. Imagine the possibilities and situations you could invent.
There are two reasons why at least the option of slow travel is important.
1) Because it makes it seem you are in a real world. If it only takes five minutes to walk from one side of a continent to another, you cannot "suspend your disbelief".
2) It ought to be enjoyable if the landscape is richly created.
Decisions? Yes there are. You can be wandering along and think, "I wonder what's down that little track there?" Do you take it, or carry on down the road?
It all depends whether you want to play an action game where the only thing is to get from one bit of hack and slay to the next, or a role-playing game in a believable world.
I don't mind if there is an option of fast travel. It does not concern me if others want to walk around and around in their games.
1) We are playing games ... i can easily suspend my disbelief if the screen pop a screen up and said "you just walk 2 days and now arrive at ...." and magically i appear at my destination. There is a reason why in movies, when people travel, they don't show a two hour drive .... and i don't see a suspension of belief to be a problem in movies.
2) Only the first time, or may be a second. If i have to walk the same path again and again, it is a commute, and never enjoyable. In fact, most games with fast travel requires you to walk there ONCE first.
There are two reasons why at least the option of slow travel is important.
1) Because it makes it seem you are in a real world. If it only takes five minutes to walk from one side of a continent to another, you cannot "suspend your disbelief".
2) It ought to be enjoyable if the landscape is richly created.
Decisions? Yes there are. You can be wandering along and think, "I wonder what's down that little track there?" Do you take it, or carry on down the road?
It all depends whether you want to play an action game where the only thing is to get from one bit of hack and slay to the next, or a role-playing game in a believable world.
In other words: Do you want to play a game or do you want to role play? If you want to play a game, no travel is better than boring travel.
While the comment Aba laid out is somewhat flawed, your comment just now was rather facetious. Point of example being the post made just above quoting Cadwell's commentary from that GDC link.
"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
Very interesting thread and my mind is just bubbling with scenarios. I had a thought about weather and perhaps even sickness. What if the weather inside an mmorpg could kill you and even make you sick. Lets say you're cruising a long maybe searching for mats and all of a sudden it starts to snow. Your character actually gets cold and your hp drops. Unless you find shelter or make a fire you will die, and there is till a 50% chance you get the flu for instance. So let's say you survive the snow storm and a few days latter; yes actually 2 days latter your toon starts to feel sick and must see a npc Doctor. I guess the Doctor could even be a profession. Imagine the possibilities and situations you could invent.
If finding a shelter or making a fire doesn't involve fun gameplay, all you're doing is creating more hassle, more chores and annoy players. Just like a character's need to sleep, drink, eat and/or take a dump every once in a while is basically a game of whack-a-mole in the style of Sims. And all that takes the attention away from all the interesting and fun stuff you might want to do in the game. You know, actual content.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Very interesting thread and my mind is just bubbling with scenarios. I had a thought about weather and perhaps even sickness. What if the weather inside an mmorpg could kill you and even make you sick. Lets say you're cruising a long maybe searching for mats and all of a sudden it starts to snow. Your character actually gets cold and your hp drops. Unless you find shelter or make a fire you will die, and there is till a 50% chance you get the flu for instance. So let's say you survive the snow storm and a few days latter; yes actually 2 days latter your toon starts to feel sick and must see a npc Doctor. I guess the Doctor could even be a profession. Imagine the possibilities and situations you could invent.
If finding a shelter or making a fire doesn't involve fun gameplay, all you're doing is creating more hassle, more chores and annoy players. Just like a character's need to sleep, drink, eat and/or take a dump every once in a while is basically a game of whack-a-mole in the style of Sims. And all that takes the attention away from all the interesting and fun stuff you might want to do in the game. You know, actual content.
What is fun game play and interesting content then? Is constant moving and killing the only way to be entertained? A lot of those things add to having to think a bit more if setup properly. I found things like foraging and tracking as a Ranger in EQ added a lot to the immersion of the game. Going to the bathroom is another story. I'm not sure how that would add any additional strategy other than making sure you go before your next fight. It could be interesting for a funny role playing mechanic though. As he is about to finish swinging his sword to fell the demon a sudden case of diarrhea hits him and his strength fails (plop).
Very interesting thread and my mind is just bubbling with scenarios. I had a thought about weather and perhaps even sickness. What if the weather inside an mmorpg could kill you and even make you sick. Lets say you're cruising a long maybe searching for mats and all of a sudden it starts to snow. Your character actually gets cold and your hp drops. Unless you find shelter or make a fire you will die, and there is till a 50% chance you get the flu for instance. So let's say you survive the snow storm and a few days latter; yes actually 2 days latter your toon starts to feel sick and must see a npc Doctor. I guess the Doctor could even be a profession. Imagine the possibilities and situations you could invent.
If finding a shelter or making a fire doesn't involve fun gameplay, all you're doing is creating more hassle, more chores and annoy players. Just like a character's need to sleep, drink, eat and/or take a dump every once in a while is basically a game of whack-a-mole in the style of Sims. And all that takes the attention away from all the interesting and fun stuff you might want to do in the game. You know, actual content.
Could be true I was just inspired to write about it I think the jist of this thread is imagining reality inside a game. The title is space and time and when I first read it I immediately thought Einstein. Thanks for the comment ...
What is fun game play and interesting content then?
You know... Are several tactics and strategies involved, will you be forced to improvise, is there competition, is the activity actually fun etc.
It sounds mostly like combat, but strategies and improvisation can come from having to do certain non combat things like build a camp at a certain time in order to survive or having to make sure you have or can get enough food and drink. Those and more can be incorporated into a game in a meaningful way.
What is fun game play and interesting content then?
You know... Are several tactics and strategies involved, will you be forced to improvise, is there competition, is the activity actually fun etc.
It sounds mostly like combat, but strategies and improvisation can come from having to do certain non combat things like build a camp at a certain time in order to survive or having to make sure you have or can get enough food and drink. Those and more can be incorporated into a game in a meaningful way.
Meaningful how? Because you have to do it otherwise you'd lose the game?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Comments
Do you realize that you were and you can be quoted on this?
Not really because depth is decisions is imply quality of decisions. How many decisions you can make are tangible. Answer to 1 is either a, b or c. Or you could have near unlimited choices. You can generally judge that. Saying WoW's combat is deep is very subjective and I certainly don't find it so. Combat is generally a routine outside of a few encounters you can learn on YouTube.
No what you described as meaningful was a reaction. No, a pure reaction means something happens because something causes it. A decision means you have a choice. A reaction can have decisions involved but not all do.
If you punch me before I know it and I am knocked out that is my reaction. If you come up to me and say let's fight I now have decisions.
If you give me a quest to kill 10 mobs I do not have a decision outside of not completing it or not. If I am dropped in a world like SWG and given free run I could go where I wanted just sight seeing, searching for resources, hunting, go to themepark, go to a player town search for buffers, look for creatures to tame, look for faction PVP and so on.
That's purely opinion. And games like GTA and Red Dead had MMO like single player with tons of travel over the same place which had tons of replay value
Combat is generally very shallow. In WoW you do not have a variety of playing combat in 90% of all situations. Many of those 10% are cartographed situations.
Take a max level character and count you're combat decisions. Then look at all the places you can travel and see which has greater choices and decisions.
Also it's really weird to claim I'm "blindly accepting my beliefs". What do you even mean by that? My beliefs are created through observation, logic, and evidence. There isn't any "blind acceptance" really. It's straightforward, consistent, and logical. Again, feel free to ask about specifically where you failed to understand this.
You cannot quote me as citing fun/good/best are the cornerstones of my argument. My argument from the start has been about the most common ways games are entertaining ("Instant travel generally works (because it focuses on games' biggest strength: interaction and decision-making)," was my first post here.)
You might want to retry that 3rd paragraph. But before retrying it you might want to step back and realize players play games for fun, and fun isn't produced by long periods of non-gameplay, and travel in MMORPGs has been extremely close to non-gameplay (it's shallow and infrequent decision-making.)
You seem confused in the 4th paragraph. Whether the thing I described as having meaning was a reaction just isn't relevant. Whether all reactions are decisions isn't relevant. What mattered is that we were discussing travel and I was trying to teach you that the value of game mechanics comes from their gameplay (which is decisions) and you went off on a tangent about whether the travel had meaning (which isn't relevant.)
Do you understand we're discussing game design? We're discussing how games are fun. Games are fun through gameplay. Gameplay is decisions. Meaning may provide a broader decision-consequence loop, but gameplay is experienced moment-to-moment, and if too many moments pass without significant gameplay, that's a boring game players will leave. So any argument that crappy travel is justified by its long-term meaning simply doesn't hold weight. It's a justification, but an extremely weak justification. We're not interested in the weakest game designs possible, we're interested in discussing strong game designs where players are actually having a lot of fun, and are highly engaged.
Again, you're calling things opinions which are not opinions. You can objectively look at the number of mechanics, their interrelatedness, and the underlying math, of both travel in MMORPGs and combat in MMORPGs. There is absolutely no question in any reasonable person's mind that travel is extremely shallow, whereas combat ranges from somewhat shallow to very deep.
There are many MMORPGs where you can honestly say "Wow, that player is really skilled at [class]!" but there are no MMORPGs where you can honestly say "Wow, that player is really skilled at travel!" The reason why this is true is rooted in the shallow reality of MMORPG travel.
"MMO like" games having travel doesn't mean they have deep travel. GTA has somewhat deep travel, but RDR's travel wasn't particularly deep as I recall. And again, the reason lies in the decision-making involved: in GTA there are enough nuances to the decisions you're making while driving (turn 10 degrees/sec vs. turning 11 degrees/sec to perfectly slip through traffic) where some depth emerges.
But again, I'm talking about the reality of current MMORPGs. Not theoretics. Not "MMO like" games. Whenever I say travel is shallow, I say it in the most literal sense that travel is shallow, which doesn't conflict at all with the statement "travel could be deep." I do this because the majority of players asking for more slow-travel tend not to have some elaborate deep-travel-system in mind; they're simply asking for the shallow gameplay they've seen in existing games.
Why are you even bringing up all of the coordinates you could travel do? Those decisions don't matter. Why would you want to go down that road against a combat system anyway? If you insist that traveling to coordinate 95,96 is different from traveling to coordinate 95,100 then I can just describe all of the combat choice variety which can be employed against the monsters at either coordinate (and it would be equally irrelevant; this entire tangent is irrelevant; choosing where to travel isn't a relevant decision because there is no mastery involved!)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Where it's primarily valid is in the MMORPGs that focus not on virtual world building, but set-piece user experiences. Which, of course it's valid there because most all systems that aren't tied directly to the combat are shallow in such 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
Prop. A:
If getting around is slow and tedious, doesn't this create an incentive to build or acquire something that will make travel less slow and less tedious?
If it does, then can't the building of machines be part of the game?
Prop. B:
If getting around is quick and efficient through portals or fast travel, doesn't this destroy any incentive to build or acquire something that will make travel without portals less slow and tedious?
If it does, then isn't it just better not to waste time on building machines?
Now I'm sympathetic with Devios here, but I think it is important to point out to him that Axehilt is, in a sense, right when he says that long distance travel and time consuming travel serves no purpose in MMOs. There's nothing in the vast spaces that is of any use to players of these games, so there's really no point in making them traverse the expanse. Arguing against his ironclad logic here is rather futile.
Devios, Axehilt's logic isn't wrong. If you are going to argue something with him, you have to argue his assumptions.
And the assumption that is never quite stated, but can be implied, is that Axehilt has a very particular definition of what these games are about that excludes a lot of things that the games could be about, but aren't.
__________________________
"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
In some mmos and mmo-like survival games it does solve this at the expense of making the world "smaller", less grand adventurous, and sometimes harder to spot the materials you used to make your fast travel vehicle.
B. No? Buying a horse doesn't remove the incentive to buy a horse. Players will seek the fastest means of travel even if it results in what I said earlier.
In a vitrual world scenario, that game world has quite a bit of value and there is a reason that the eastern titles have shifted towards the implementation of travel progression with the likes of mounts, mount breeding, boat/glider and wagon crafting, etc.
It's not that they "could" be about them, there actually is a pre-existing and growing market already forming. Axehilt has just chosen to ignore those titles and that market in favor of saying it doesn't exist.
That's where his logic is indeed wrong. Not every MMORPG is built like WoW, EQ, and TOR as a finite user experience focused on a scripted experience fitted around combat. There is in fact virtual world MMORPG titles, and they are continuing to evolve these mechanics.
"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
Decisions, "depth," and all the other stuff you talk about are subjective and irrelevant to gaming. An 18 foot pool is deep to me but a deep sea diver its nothing. Decisions mean nothing if they're not fun or bad ones. There are simple games that are just a blast to play and some games that are so deep and complex they bore most people to tears. ITS opinion and subjective. For me I don't consider any MMORPG I've played have deep combat. Street Fighter or Tekken to me have deep fighting. MMORPG combat is routines you learn fighting the the same opponent remodeled or reskinned 90% of the time. They are on the low end of combat scale even WOW which many think is archaic with tab targeting. Its again opinion no matter what useless you metrics you claim make it better.
I used GTA and Red Dead because they do use a quest/mission system like MMORPG. You walk up to a guy or area and get sent on a mission. Its something that can translate into MMORPG. The reason why traveling is generally fun is because you have random events and encounters. Not only do you have the mission opponents but traffic, police and environment challenges. You may find a car, an animal to hunt, a random rare encounter all driving down the same roads. You could replay the mission 8 times in a row and it could be vastly different each time depending on what you used to travel and what path and what randomly happened.
This can be done in themepark MMORPG with instances and phasing. This can be done with being more imaginative with mounted combat and questing choices. This could be done in a sandbox for economic, crafting, resource, exploring, finding random events or encounters, achievements, rare NPCs and multitude of reason that keep the player entertained like SWG or even single player games with similar MMO mission setups.
But the way you answer Proposition B reminds me the "cash store logic" behind how games are designed these days:
"If you want a horse, we'll sell you a horse."
But there's a catch...
Of course the horse, like everything in the cash store, doesn't really do anything....Not when you can get to the dungeons quicker via portal or fast travel. Its presence doesn't integrate itself in any major gameplay system. You could just as easily forget about the horse and suffer no loss of function. You can consume content at just the same rate with the horse as without the horse.
But the horse is cool to have, just like any fluff item. Its very uselessness is the reason why it can be sold in the cash store for real money.
See, if we had to rely on horse breeders to find the horses in the wild, break in the horses, ensure they have some good pasture land to feed themselves, and protect them from orcs, dragons, tigers and bears, the MMO publisher couldn't sell them out of the cash store. Because there would be no reason to go through all that work and waste all that time, as a horse breeder, if every player could simply whip out a credit card and get a horse from the publisher.
But then, what would justify all that extra coding, resource management and effort to create an entire player market in horse breeding, if fast travel gets you everywhere faster than a horse ever could? Which means we are in Proposition A: time and distance creates a need for horse breeding.
__________________________
"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
For example GTA provides relatively deep travel gameplay, and in GTA you can upgrade your car with nitrous, which both deepens the skill mastery (your car will be harder to control while using nitrous) but also the reward (you're going to move much faster.) It didn't require shallow travel to motivate players to want to purchase upgrades; players will always want to purchase upgrades.
Also to be clear, I haven't meant to imply travel, "serves no purpose."
Even a rusty non-functioning automobile serves some purpose. But it's not worth the cost if you intend to try to use it as transportation.
So travel actually serves several purposes. Just not enough to be worth the costs. (And at least one of the purposes travel serves is a developer-only benefit: travel as a timesink to sell longer subscriptions.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
You can't make an irrelevant point and then ignore an equally irrelevant response. The right move is to realize your point was irrelevant and let it drop. Your alternative move is to continue pretending your irrelevant point mattered, and also accept my equally irrelevant response (and by extension realize that combat still has dramatically more decision-making than travel because your decisions are just "where to go" while mine are "who to fight" combined with "how to fight them" which is a much denser decision matrix with far more decisions.) But again, the correct choice here is to drop this irrelevant tangent.
Are you seriously arguing that game depth isn't important? Mastery of game systems is literally the most common way games are enjoyed and certainly the most common way they remain interesting in the long-term. In fact I watched a GDC2015 talk today by Tom 'Zileas' Cadwell of Riot/LoL fame where he basically said the exact same thing that A Theory of Fun's Raph Koster said about game design, except in different words. (Talk is here [Requires paid GDC Vault account] ) Both of these established designers say the same thing I'm saying to you, that the games players find most compelling are the ones which offer interesting decisions to master. Sid Meier (Sim City) has called games "a series of interesting decisions."
If you want to live a fantasy where you pretend you know more about game design than Cadwell, Koster, Meier, and myself, nobody can stop you. But if you have any interest in reality or truth, you'd be better off dropping that nonsense and learning from those who've put more thought into this than you have.
As for the rest of your post, random encounters aren't travel. They're encounters. When you're traveling and get attacked by a bandit in RDR, you stop traveling. You begin combat (a separate, deeper system.) While this can make shallow travel more palatable by interrupting it, the travel itself is still shallow in RDR. So it's preferable to have a system more like GTA, where the travel itself is deeper (and you also still might have random encounters on top of that.)
So even though it might be interesting to created a mounted combat system in a MMORPG, it wouldn't help travel to be less shallow. To do that you'd need to inject a lot of gameplay into the travel itself.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
And having stuff happening at the same location again (like Fallout 4, you went back to the vault for a sequence) does not mean that you have to travel there. You can just teleport back too.
Like the whole GTA example. The whole reason it works for the most part is because it's a virtual world. They have directly integrated the use of travel into the manner in which you deal with shop locales, robbing, driving and escape routes, cops, etc. This only works because these are all elements tethered to a large world in which you navigate these features and understand how they affect you.
The vehicle upgrading example takes a parallel to things like horse breeding, but the depth does not need to be as simple as upgrading something. Like, BDO for example does have upgrade tiers to their mounts, but there are ability lists that you can never completely obtain on a horse, you have to pick which ones are most important to you and focus on obtaining them. It's a to-task feature that needs that pushes the use of tailoring types of horses rather than simply making "the best one".
It's also the case of scope. Different travel actually offers a differing scope for what actions and activities are both available and pertinent in virtual worlds. It's a feature than can and does get used both as an intentional means to gate content, as well as provide a varying range to commit different activities relative to the distance traveled. IE, short travel range activities (fighting mobs, farming/mining resources, crafting, etc) versus long travel range activities (caravan, trade runs, banditry, exploration, etc).
Something mentioned in that GDC session you linked was that the majority of interesting decisions in Civ for example takes place in the city building, and Cadwell even states that it's the long-form processes "wonder strategy, military strategy, etc) that ends up being the deepest components. Those are aspects of the game that are affect moment to moment decisions, but are quite broader and time intensive decisions. He explicitly states "A lot of the best decisions in Civ are decisions that are aligning short term and long term objectives."
It's certainly good to have populous moment to moment gameplay. But overarching goals and elements that drive actions through long-form play (according to Cadwell in that link you shared) are quite important to have. He actually says "I think they could do a better job of forcing players to make do with tools." The very point in their commentary is that there is value itself in controlling player options and focusing on finite windows of choices that makes players plot ahead. Using sacrifice to propel gain.
He has a whole section on the logic he calls "Competing Objectives & Strategic Commitment." which defines this logic where the intent is to push trade-offs and sacrifices to push players to a greater anticipated reward. It pushes it further with the offer of features that emphasized the sacrifice as the other feature becomes more desirable. This in fact applies to travel just as much since it is an element of picking destinations to judge the rewards given, plus the risk features of the environment and players as well as what travel means you have to complete your goal.
His dialogue on "Diverse Tools & Making Do" He states "Generally in Roguelikes players have diverse challenges and diverse tools, and often those diverse tools are imperfect tools." His diatribe states that these imperfect tools "By designing for this, you really encourage player activity and reward." Using tools and features that confine players in an intentionally designed fashion to create a challenge scenario. "By incensing players to learn these tools, by putting them in situations where they have to use these tools, you actually get these players to sample in a way they actually excited about a larger percent of your content."
A more concrete statement of his on the matter. "Tools need to be limited in some way, it could be that they are inconsistently available. It could be that you have options A, B, and C and all of them have different uses or importance. It could be that there's a lot of cool-downs. It could be that they're just not provided to you when you need them by some mechanic. I think that's really really important, it can force players (if it's done in a way that doesn't feel arbitrary and lame, it feel's natural to the game) players naturally get into this "making do" and creativity mode."
So thanks for the link, it helps prove the point well that depth in game travel is quite valuable.
"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
1) Because it makes it seem you are in a real world. If it only takes five minutes to walk from one side of a continent to another, you cannot "suspend your disbelief".
2) It ought to be enjoyable if the landscape is richly created.
Decisions? Yes there are. You can be wandering along and think, "I wonder what's down that little track there?" Do you take it, or carry on down the road?
It all depends whether you want to play an action game where the only thing is to get from one bit of hack and slay to the next, or a role-playing game in a believable world.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
1) We are playing games ... i can easily suspend my disbelief if the screen pop a screen up and said "you just walk 2 days and now arrive at ...." and magically i appear at my destination. There is a reason why in movies, when people travel, they don't show a two hour drive .... and i don't see a suspension of belief to be a problem in movies.
2) Only the first time, or may be a second. If i have to walk the same path again and again, it is a commute, and never enjoyable. In fact, most games with fast travel requires you to walk there ONCE first.
I want to play fun games. Just don't bore me.
"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 skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
The gameplay provided by these task-oriented game elements and maintenance is not gameplay?
You just said that entire genres of games are not games (or are at least games devoid of content).
"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 skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky