MMO Travel – Is Instant Gratification a Good Thing?

The general consensus among MMO developers these days seems to center around instant gratification for the player base.  One of the biggest forms of instant gratification is near instantaneous travel across long distances in the game world.  Given the size of the game worlds growing at an ever increasing rate in most AAA MMO’s, it isn’t hard to understand why.  But what effect does that have on our perception of the world and more importantly the immersion factor?

In some of the larger titles, traveling from one corner of the world to the other could take hours on foot.  Most games offer some sort of faster travel mount to help ease the pain, but almost all offer a way to teleport from area to area quickly.  On one hand, this is handy if you just need to make a quick trip across the world to complete a quest or meet up with friends.  On the other hand, this seems like a massive waste of good game world and pulls players back out to reality.  What’s the purpose of an enormous map if you don’t ever have to cross it?

There has to be some kind of happy medium that will allow faster forms of travel than mounting up your favorite stead and galloping toward the horizon yet slower than speaking to some NPC vendor and instantly appearing at your destination.  Blizzard being the mac daddy of MMO’s with their World of Warcraft came close to meeting in the middle with their flying mounts, the only down side being that you had to visit the flight master at your destination first before you could use it.  Then they went and ruined the whole idea of making travel a part of the game by introducing hearth stones, ships and zeppelins.  Not to mention mages who could just cast a spell and open up a magic portal.

Traveling in the world just makes the world feel bigger.  It makes the world feel more real and gives players opportunities to make discoveries they otherwise would have just ported past.  Ships and zeppelins start out with the feeling of making a journey by moving across the game world with good speed but they don’t make the entire journey, they just get to an end point and you get a loading screen.  What do you think about traveling fast in your particular game world?  Be honest, do you find it useful yet find it leaves you feeling unfulfilled?  Would you be happy if traveling was a feature built in as part of the adventure of playing the game?

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