I'm pretty sure this is me just being old and crotchety but I've been finding the amount of excessive walking around in Star Wars: The Old Republic to be a little annoying. To explain what I mean, here's what my current planet has been like...
You arrive by starship at the spaceport on the edge of the planet. In order to get to the main town on the planet (where my Sith master and main quest giver lives) I have to walk through the jungle. There's a quest or two to pick up along the way and monsters to kill as you go so it's really not very bad at all. (If walking around killing monsters for quests isn't your cup of tea then you should probably avoid playing a modern MMO.) When you get to the main town there's a speeder taxi you can talk to who will fly you back to the starport and from now on you can essentially teleport between the two spots. (It does take some time to fly but you're not in control or in any danger.) Ok, great!
Head into the town and discover it's huge! There are some vendors spread out, a cantina with profession trainers, and an auction house. There are also a couple quests you can pick up. Finally get to the back of the town and find another speeder taxi which will take you to your maser's estate. Get there, do some cutscenes, get a quest, head out. Get to the speeder taxi and discover it doesn't link up to the first two you found. Instead you need to taxi to the back of the town and then walk out of the huge town.
Repeat over and over as your Sith master sends you on quests to every corner of the planet. Finish quest. Speeder. Walk. Speeder. Cash quest. Get next quest. Speeder. Walk. Lots of walking. It really makes me pine for a flying mount...
But even if I had one, would it matter? I think back to playing World of Warcraft and with a flying mount that went anywhere I certainly got between places faster but there was still a lot of time spent flying around between places while doing _nothing_.
Is it really any different than flying around in an airship in Final Fantasy IV though? Final Fantasy X-2 abstracted away the airship and you just chose your destination and it took you there instead of needing to find it on the map. (The idea being you told the pilot where to go. Yuna had better things to do than learn how to fly an airship!) What about the run button?
Walking around in a big city is immersive. People certainly complain about the dungeon finder in WoW because it instantly teleports to a dungeon no matter where you are in the world. Having to actually travel to a dungeon before you can go in and beat up the monsters makes sense in terms of living in a virtual world. In terms of having fun playing a game? It sucked to wait 15 minutes or more while the slowest person in your group meandered their way to the dungeon. (I can remember leveling my warrior in Maraudon back in vanilla WoW... It was quite the trek from Ironforge!) Waiting around for the slacker in your group before you can start playing is a fact of real life. If an online world is going to simulate that properly it should have that aspect too. It is immersive. But it is also boring. I want to pretend to be an awesome Sith lord with a snarky blue companion. I don't want to jog around a big boring city. I just don't see why the two speeder taxi systems on the planet don't connect! It seems to be set up just to waste my time. Maybe they're trying to delay finishing the story so I keep paying monthly fees...?
2 comments:
When I was younger, I would have argued for the more realistic "make you walk" world. Now I have more of a game designer view of things and making you do things that aren't fun is bad design.
Oblivion has a lot of walking too (and Skyrim, I suspect), and sometimes it's a pain in the butt, but other times it leads you to weird sites or ruins and you end up taking 3 days to do a 4 hour walk. That's good times.
Walking through a place the first time to explore can make sense and lets you find (or not find) all kinds of secret things. That seems like a fine thing to have in a game, especially an open world game. (I seem to recall in Oblivion you could teleport around to places you'd already been?)
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