Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyro
Meaningful travel... that's a term I've been trying to figure out since I first started following Vanguard three years ago. The best I can figure is that it means that getting from point A to point B has sufficient amounts of challenging monsters and interesting visual points of interest to prevent boredom on the trip. The game artists have or are working on the visual aspect, and there are plenty of monsters. Of course, not all monsters are equal. Thus, as monsters become challenging, the players are given faster mounts to enable a reduction in the time spent in areas with no challenging combat content. So far so good.

At least on land appearently. On the ocean there isn't much you can do as far as visual interest cutting out half of the proposed solution. Then, there is only so much you can do with challenging combat content; only so many pirate ships and Loch Ness Monsters you can meet in one trip before belief is suspended.

Enter the ocean teleports.

But are there other solutions? Certainly concepts proposed at this late date will not make the game before release, but they could be part of expansions or later games.

One of the biggest challenges in real world ocean travel is meeting a storm at sea. In a good implementation, one can imagine storms adding both visual interest and the equivalent of combat excitment.

A bit rarer in the real world, but whirlpools could spice the trip up. It is a fantasy world, but lets try not to overdo these.

Combine these two concepts with the sea monsters and pirates and it might be enough. But...

On to other ideas: Why not enter a different sort of game play when ocean traveling. It works for diplomacy cards and rts cities... I'm thinking of the old racing games, your speeding along and you have to dodge the oil slick, jump the glass on the road, and plow through the old lady. I'm sure some form of this could be implented for ocean travel.

And yet another thought: Okay so the ocean surface is boring, what about under the water, especially the ocean floor? Certainly plenty of potential for visual interest here. Some of the most alien, fantastic, and frankly frightening creatures in the real world come from the ocean depths. We are no longer stuck with just the Loch Ness Monster. Sailing has only recently become a real world activity practiced beyond the sight of land. Restrict it in game the same way. Require all travel between continents to take place along the ocean floor. Go go gnomish Aquasuit! Or maybe it's: "Oh please great magic elf wizzard, allow me to breath the ocean depths and travel to another land."

Tyro
MMORPG Mechanics

We will have underwater content, but look at that map -- there's no way we could create enough underwater content by launch to fill that area. We'll be adding more underwater content -- in fact, a whole expansion that was underwater would be cool -- but even that would fall far short of making all of that area interesting. Also, it doesn't make sense that every ocean floor is full of ruins and underwater civilizations -- those things you'll need to look for, like a good dungeon -- it will be part of the exploration.

I do appreciate the 'thinking outside the box' though.


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