(04-15-2014, 11:41 AM)Ildur Wrote: Yet your way of making travel difficult seems to be for you to take fourteen hours to reach your target, plus whatever time buying and gathering the correct supplies and crafting takes. And that's not considering that the player might die during the trip and have to redo one or more chunks of it, recrafting, gathering or buying supplies once again. A journey lasting fourteen hours to reach a goal is no different, conceptually, than fourteen hours of grinding to make gold, or upgrade your Relic weapon or some other goal.Maybe a bit incorrectly, but not that incorrectly. Â I just decided to pick up a quick way to do it. Â In fact, I'm somewhat disappointed by MMORPGs consistently making the worlds small and/or empty, but I'm more disappointed by the way MMORPGs handle travel. Â It might be an element of modern design, getting people as quickly as possible to the next vignette, but the core element of great fantasy isn't the goal, it's the journey. Â That's why Lord of the Rings was so great, getting to Mordor was a great adventure, it in and of itself was a place of no return, and the ring falling into the Crack of Doom was the culmination of the journey.
Or...that's if I'm reading things correctly after waking up. I bet I totally am.
What is true is that difficulty shouldn't be necessarily linked with time (even though learning complex, 'hard' things takes longer), but with the effort/time ratio.
That's why grinding mobs is not difficult: you are applying little effort, but the ammount of time units required to overcome it is large.
I guess that's why many people, including developers, keep thinking that a hard thing is anything that takes a long time. Then we are stuck with simple mobs with eight times the HP they should have and sillyness like that.
Though we should note that 'difficulty' is incredibly relative since, once you learn to overcome it, it becomes easier. Then all you have left is how much time it takes to complete the task.
It just seems to me that towns are too numerous, the world's not dangerous, and all we're doing is traveling from cell to cell of quest objectives. Â Travel is just a time sink in between quest and quest, not an interesting diversion where sometimes you run right through something random you didn't know would be there. Â Do you run through, say, the raging battle happening along the road you were traveling or do you know a pass through the caves nearby, which might have its own issues.
We can handle this with modern technology. Â The harder part would be handling the NPCs in a more organic way, where animals might cover wide regions or bandits might move from place to place. Â However, I'd rather have server resources allocated to making a world unpredictable and dangerous and my drive space used to cover a massive, organic world.
I've got ideas on how things like this might work, and I'd say most gamers do as well. Â But basically, it's too easy to get from A to B. Â It kind of ruins the idea of having an open, living, breathing, persistent world when it actually plays like pages in a book. Â Traveling shouldn't be an inconvenience or a time sink to be shortened, it should be, at the very least, a major part of the point.
