Lets face it, everyone at one point or another has intentionally killed themselves in-game to avoid having to walk back to town. I myself have never played a MMO where I didn’t regularly kill myself as a means of travel. However each time I do, I feel like I’m some how killing a part of the game for myself. I mean the whole point to video games is NOT to die, however because of the extremely lame traveling rules nearly every MMO has, we gamers are almost forced to partake in the rediculas act of suicide in order to save ourselves time.
Let us examine the three traveling means that are most common in MMOs today.
Mount – The trusted mount which will about double your run speed (depending on the game) and be your primary form of transportation. While the mount is useful in many situations, it cannot beat suicide travel. If I’m out completing a quest about need to go back to town to collect my reward, unless I’m very close, I’m going to be looking for a really high cliff to jump off of or a group of mobs so they can pumble me to death. The mount is good for short distances or traveling to quest locations.
Waypoints – Nearly all MMO’s will give the player the ability to make any town their home location. Then whenever they want they can just use that skill/item to instanly travel back there. The problem with this is that most games have a extremly long cool down, 1 hr usually and you can only travel to 1 location. While it seems very useful, I barely use this form of traveling, maybe once every time I play. What I would like to see are multiple locations and a shorter cool down, which would make this acutally useful.
Town to Town Travel – Most games have some sort of instant travel from town to town, however there are almost always some sort of restriction. Restrictions might be something like, from Town A you can only travel to Town B, D and F. Then from Town F you can get to A, C and R. Then from R, you can get to E and H. So if you wanted to get to H to begin with you’ll have to travel multiple times. Lame. Other restrictions can be that each map only has one travel spot, so if you want to get to another town on the same map you’ll still need to run/ride across the map to get there. There are a handful of restrictions depending what game you’re playing and all are just as lame.
I’m sure there are MMO’s out there that have a great traveling system, however I have yet to play one. For me suicide is the 4th form of traveling and is actually the best in my opionion since most games have little to no death penalty and it’s instant.
My suggestion to developers is let it go, traveling around the map is boring as hell. I should be able to travel from any town to any town(as long as I already visited once) in the game. I should also be able to set more than 1 town using my waypoint item/skill. I’m tired of killing myself, help me stop.
I know guild wars is not a ‘true mmo’ But they have traveling down perfect. But it only works becasue of the kind of game it is.
I was expecting you to name the primary reason people do this now, and not in the old MMO’s. Because death is such a joke. Nothing happens when you die, except teleporting you to a graveyard, or town. Which is what you want! I’m not advocating the horrible death panalties of old, but something should be changed.
It all fits in line with how casual MMO’s have become. Very simple and easy to play so they can appeal to more people. Which makes more money, so I see why they do it. But it does make me look forward to Darkfall. Yay for European realease date, hopefully the US it not far behind.
Well I only know one game that rewards not dieing – LoTRO. Maybe give some reward for staying alive for consecutive levels or hours and well see people making the effort to make that run back to town. A buff to damage or a cool title or extra run speed would work.
how about You use your mount and Run back instead of Dieing? Taking the lazy way out of the game dulls it down because theres no telling what you can run into or get to drop for yourself on the way back to your desired Location. I pride myself on not dieing and you could do the same if you tok the time out to enjoy the game for what it was made for.
This suicide travel is easily thwarted by a death penalty that involves leaving a corpse / items behind. Let’s see just how quick you are to throw yourself off a cliff and return to town when you’ll just end up running back to pick up your things later.
Asheron’s Call (and Everquest especially) are two prime examples of games where suicide travel was almost non-existant.
And at least with AC, I feel the adventures I found along the way to / from my destinations are what fleshed out my adventures. It made them enjoyable romps instead of goal-oriented tasks that felt like a job.
Lineage had it right. They had Scrolls of Teleportation that would return you to the nearest town. However, you could bookmark any place, anywhere and use a Blessed Scroll of Teleportation and choose from one of your bookmarks. By far the easiest way to get around that I have ever seen.