KCD: You had One Job!

[Part of the Kingdom Come: Deliverance journal.]

You are Henry the peasant and Henry sucks at pretty much everything so you'll need to pay attention to the fantastic (and somewhat lengthy) intro that gives you the bare basics of the game, such as when faced with a strong enemy force, RUN THE HECK AWAY.

Now would be a good time to do that.

Since the map is huge, you might be tempted to use the fast travel system that unlocks as you find villages, towns, and random encounters. Good news, it will save you the player some time! Bad news, Henry also sucks at fast travel and will take the slowest route possible. You also can't stop midway to go exploring.

In a game where you have timed quests and missions where you must be at location x at a particular time, this isn't really ideal. Going cross country with stamina management is faster in game (handy to remember during races), but makes it more walking simulator for you. Especially if you are overloaded with gear, because if you are - you can't fast travel anyway!

Sunset Six: That's Just Lovely

[Part of my Sunset Six story.]

Before jumping into the last discipline I thought I'd talk about a few other things first. For example: Offline chores. Once you've manually done something enough times you can start doing it while you are offline too, which I thought is pretty cool.

Travel time is used to power chariot fast travel.

I also like the idea that players can build working ferries (which move faster than swimming) and trade posts which are the only way to actually "trade" between two players. Otherwise you either drop stuff on the floor that anyone can pick up or directly give someone something. They don't even get to say yes or no, they just get the item. I also like the notion of player built "Welcome Banners".

When creating a new character you can warp 20 times in the first four hours to any of the ones already built. Another cool thing is being able to randomly run into the Pharaoh (lead developer) himself!

Much thinner than I previously thought!

Of course there are also things I dislike, such as quarries needing two to four people to run, and balancing the temperature of a glazier's bench to form sheets of glass only to have it crack and disintegrate until your glass fabrication level increases a bit. How does it increase? Through practice and many broken sheets of glass! The last thing for this post I dislike is not really something that's difficult, just something that's yucky: making saltpeter which is used in quite a few things. Behold the secrets of its acquisition!

I'm sure it smells lovely.

Dead Island Riptide: E-E-Elec-Electrical Scraps!

[Part of the Dead Island Diary]

It's side quest time on the island and thank the developer gods that they decided to include a fast travel system in this game, otherwise this would be literally hours of walking through horrible disconnect zones. The walking itself isn't that bad. Getting d/c-ed is BS. Other than doing a few of the instanced locations for nice loot and saving random trapped people, we accomplished a few things this session, the first being that we discover Jacqueline is an idiot. She didn't come with the rest of our team and instead opted to stay again in her theatre. This is only slightly better than the handful of women that opted to remain in Halai Village, just waiting for the plague to blow over. Even telling them the fate of their missing friends did nothing to change their minds.

We also helped out the Zombienator, a local "superhero" retrieve his cape, shoes and fish to help him fight zombies. There was another guy in an apartment who kept asking for stuff too, but by the third iteration of him going "oh... I don't remember what these are for, but could you get x now?" we decided to let him rot. Our most important sidequest this round though was a simple delivery trip to Dr. Kessler back at his Dome lab, where he wants the rather commonly found electrical scraps item for his non-descript inventions. Given the late stage of the game and the number of these items we had on us, we went to town unloading on the good doctor.

"Electri... E... Ele... Electrical Scraps, bring them to me," he would say - or try to because giving him the next one forced a line repeat leading us to believe that the good doctor is actually a robot. This must have been the single most rewarding quest though. Each scrap gave 30+ thousand XP (same as canned food and painkillers but those items are more rare). In comparison killing one of those "dangerous" screamers gives 6k.

Congratulations, you have just won at life!

This is a perfect example of why levels should be done away with, as it meant handing the doctor something in my pocket increased my skills far faster than fighting any zombie present on the island. ELECTRICAL SCRAPS - It's the stuff of heroes!

MMOs: Fast Travel

[Part of my MMO Design Folder]
 
 "The journey is more important than the destination."

Apparently not if you need to meet up with your party at the entrance of the evil lair or attend an event in a distant zone "now". Fast travel is one of those conveniences that I'm on the fence about. If I only have x amount of time a session, do I really want to spend it running from point A to point B while dodging blood thirsty monkey-snakes? If I "skip" to the nearest portal or waypoint what would I miss by going on foot? Well, unless the game has dynamic spawns or better yet random encounters placed by a game master, then probably nothing you haven't seen already if you've run there before.

While I wouldn't want to remove it entirely I'd probably be ok if it required a bit more forward thinking to achieve, like maybe having to purchase warp crystals or rations that occupy inventory space (they don't stack) and the further you travel the more of those are required. In addition maybe using (consuming) rations outside fast travel gives you and your party a full heal while the warp crystals grant full mana or something. Most importantly though, these would only be available in friendly cities and villages. It would be up to the player to carry enough for a return trip, sacrificing loot space, to fast travel back.

Alternatively maybe "fast travel" involves going through a horrible maze with unkillable foes chasing you down to involve some risk in doing so. The Ways and Machin Shin in the Wheel of Time books are a good example of this, and the PC game really had it as a terrifying force you could only run from. Maybe that would get at least some people to use the slower form of travel to experience (or re-experience) the content of the game.

Seems like it exists in card form too.

What do you think about skipping content? Is fast travel the only way to bypass the "been there, done that" mentality? Is warping from point A to point B very different from starting with a level 90 character as all the WoW people are talking about lately? And is that a feature you'd like to see in other games, like paying extra to start at the final zone of Mario or the last quest in Skyrim with a fully powered up dovahkin?