[Editor's Note: Tim McDonald of IncGamers is back with a friendly guest editorial about his love of walking in MMOs. Take it away, Tim!]
Level one personal mount use? Yes, please.
MMOs are a relatively young genre, so I don’t like to rant at them too much. Most genres I rant at these days have had years to fix ingrained problems (which usually leads to new problems, and yes, heavily-scripted first-person shooters, I am looking directly at you) but the humble MMO is a stripling in comparison.
It depends on how you count it, I admit. Some people consider Wolfenstein 3D to be one of the earliest first-person shooters, but it’s not. It popularised the genre – although not as much as Doom a little later – but what about Catacomb Abyss, or MIDI Maze, or… well, hell, what about Battlezone? No, Wolfenstein 3D just shifted the genre heavily in a certain direction and pretty much defined the public expectations of that genre for the next however many years. I admit that’s one hell of a “just,” though.
I suppose that’s sort of like a certain MMO we could mention, in fact. Not one of the originals – in fact, similar in many ways to a number of its predecessors – but it was so massively popular, so streamlined, and so well put together that it spawned a legion of copycats and changed the way MMOs have been viewed ever since.
The 600-pound gorilla I’m talking about is World of Warcraft, obviously. It broke sales figures; it broke subscription figures; it broke the machine that Blizzard use to count their money. Apparently it also broke my head enough that I’m physically incapable of writing an article about MMOs without mentioning it. At least it’s relevant this time.
Anyway. MMOs have their problems and it’s maybe not fair to scream too much because, hey, the modern MMO is a young thing, but the hell with it. I hate walking in MMOs.
It’s a personal little bugbear that annoys me more and more as time goes on, because no-one’s fixed it. It’s not hard to see why, mind – MMOs are complicated, and it’s hard to get them right. You need to balance your finances between creating stuff for the players who want to explore, with the players who want to quest, with the players who want to kill other players, with the players who want to shout that it’s just a crappy WoW clone while still playing for the next seven years and complaining the entire time, with network infrastructure and area design and varied (but balanced) classes… and all of a sudden you’ve spent millions, and you’ve got a single room with no graphics that six people can connect to before it falls over and crashes, and your investors are getting annoyed because your new internal release date is sometime after the earth is a desolate wasteland lit by a dying sun, and you’re in tears and everyone hates you, and you wonder why you didn’t just make Sporting Franchise 2013: This Time We’ve Got Physics That Still Don’t Work Properly. I get it, y’know? With all of that in mind, no-one’s going to blame you for stealing WoW’s mount system.
But for crying out loud, stop stealing WoW’s mount system. Just don’t do it. It’s awful.
Out for a brisk walk...
Here’s how it works: you start out as a new character, at level Rat Poker, in the blissful town of Who Cares, and someone asks you to kill some rats in their basement. You run at 100% movement speed, which has to be pretty good because 100% is by definition the maximum. It means 100 out of 100.*
Then you hit level I’ve Been Playing For Fifteen Hours and all of a sudden you can get a mount – if you can afford it, because they’re always disproportionately expensive. Seriously, who the hell can afford to learn how to ride a horse, let alone buy one, if they cost this much? Stop killing rats for farmers in return for a paltry handful of copper coins. Farmers have multiple horses for general fieldwork and pretending to be cowboys on their days off**, and considering the prices these farmers must be the in-game equivalent of Donald Trump and Bill Gates. They’re multi-millionaires. Listen, Farmer Trump, if I’m clearing your fields for you so that you can carry on making money hand over fist then you can give me a horse, you cheapskate bastard.
I digress! You get your horse, and suddenly you’re moving at 150%, which is by definition impossible* except that it’s 150% of base movement speed so I guess it actually kinda works. Suddenly, you’re one of the horse-riding elite. You pity those plebs who have to walk places. Then some sod charges past you on a horse in armour.
You hit level I Haven’t Seen My Girlfriend In A Week and suddenly, if you can afford the even more extortionate price, you can move at, ooh, let’s say 200% base movement speed. Then someone flies past you on a horse with wings, and you laugh at them because they actually paid real money for it, and then you feel kinda sad because you’ve been paying real money just to play this game all along. So you either pony up some real money or you grind away until you hit level Divorce Papers, at which point you too have a flying mount.
And then someone swoops by on a faster flying mount. Then an expansion comes out with an even faster one. And another, and another, until eventually you’re capable of teleporting anywhere in the game instantly. It’s the logical conclusion – the MMO going full-circle, from graphics and walking between places, back to just picking things off a menu.
It’s all well and good, and there are a number of perfectly reasonable ideas behind it. Low-level players can marvel at the pretty scenery and they have the opportunity to find the autorun key without immediately barrelling into a nest of giant acid-breathing Obsidian Cockroaches because they haven’t yet worked out how to control their character. You can enjoy a nice stroll through picturesque terrain. And let’s not forget that when you actually get a mount, you feel good. You can almost feel your hair blowing in the wind as you whoosh past those losers still using their feet. It gives you prestige, and it lets you get on with your important stuff much faster.
The problem is that this only works once. I’m going to assume you’re all MMO players (which makes the past six paragraphs utterly redundant, but shut up, they amused me) and you’ve probably tried levelling at least two characters. Do you remember how awful it felt going from a level I Defecate Into A Bucket character back to a level Rat Poker character? How you had to walk oh-so-slowly from place to place rather than materialising there instantly through sheer effort of will? How all the early quests are really dull because you have to play for a few hours before you get any interesting abilities? How you’ve seen the areas before? Yeah, that’s my problem. Being slow again is rubbish. The slightly bigger problem that no-one seems to have cottoned onto is that it doesn’t even work once per game: it works once per genre.
I'd like one of these as well. Don't bother to wrap it - I'll be driving it straight away.
The tipping point that made me finally write this article was, fittingly, in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Wonderful game for the most part, but it borrowed WoW’s mount system and that’s easily enough for me to scrawl a few thousand words of unmitigated bile.
I was playing with the Jedi Knight, and in one early area, I had to walk from one place to another to get more quests. There weren’t any quests to do on the way. In fact, there wasn’t anything to do on the way. There were no monsters. There were no lore objects. There was a pretty view, but I’d been playing for awhile at this point and I was kinda eager to get back to levelling up. The walk took about two minutes.
This perhaps doesn’t sound like much, but think of any other genre where you have literally nothing to do for two minutes except turn your character (it wasn’t even a straight line, so I couldn’t just tap auto-run and wander off for a cuppa). It boggles the mind that something like this is in a game. Downtime is one thing, but two minutes in one go, for no reason other than to make me waste time?
It’s possible that every time I’ve been there, I’ve arrived just as someone else has killed everything. Maybe there were exciting quests lurking just out of detection range. Maybe I missed a shortcut (I certainly wasn’t trying to speed-run it, after all; I’m sure it’s possible to do it much faster if you hug the corners or something). Or maybe it’s just stupid, and wouldn’t have been such a problem if I didn’t have to be on the sodding Jedi Council before I’d proven myself worthy of braving the dangers riding a bloody bike.
Impotent rage aside, there are advantages to this system and – as with all things in MMOs – it’s a careful balancing act. If basic movement’s too fast, exploration is pointless… unless the world is much bigger, in which case the advantages of sped-up movement are entirely mitigated. There’s also the flipside, in that some areas have to be big; if Tatooine had less of a Dune Sea and more of a… well, a dune, then I’d happily whinge about how it doesn’t feel like Tatooine and I hate everyone involved in designing the planet. If there’s nothing new and cool to grab when you hit level I Can’t Be Bothered Describing Levels In This Manner Anymore, then you won’t feel like it was worthwhile. It’s a careful drip-feeding of things to keep each type of player interested and happy, and to make each player feel like they’re making progress. Balance is key.
I will also concede that holding off on flying mounts for awhile is perfectly acceptable because they open up new avenues of gameplay, as opposed to withholding a flat speed increase out of sheer pettiness. (Okay, now I’m done with the impotent rage.)
This doesn’t change the fact that, for any MMO veteran, walking slowly at the start is an agonising experience as soon as you get over the ooh-that’s-new-and-pretty thoughts. Once that’s out of the way and you’re focusing on the game proper, the lower numbers of mechanics and abilities mean that the start’s usually the most boring bit. Isn’t that when you’d want to move faster?
* – And before anyone gets snippy with me in the comments, I’ll point out that I’m crap at maths. Shush.
** – Which I suppose counts as science-fiction in most of these universes.
TORWars Podcast #77: The Big Subscribers Discussion
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Jedi Knight Weekly: Slaying the Dragon
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Riiiiiight. Alrighty then.
That was awesome. Agree with you. At least by lvl 7 you have decent armor/clothes and not waiting until lvl 20 for a decent cloak
Tim McDonald is awesome. Props!
A related MMO pet peeve of mine: turning missions in. I hate that after I’ve completed a handful of missions and killed a mini boss, I need to run 10 minutes back in the opposite direction just so I can receive credit. If I can’t turn a mission in at the next logical rest point on the map then just have the mission finish automatically and mail me the reward. Who likes being forced to run back? I always pray that the mobs haven’t respawned so I can just get it over with.
Running a long way to turn quests in bothers me more in Star Wars than in most games because of the holocommunicator. Half the time my class-quest guys will call me up and let me turn in quests that way, and half the time I have to run all the way back to Kaas City. I feel like every quest giver should also give me his cell number so I can call him to tell him I finished the quest.
I personally don’t mind walking for a bit and waiting to get a mount. I find walking in mmo’s fine and i just enjoy the hard work that was put to make the game. If it was a small world i would be complaining.Out of all the problems in an mmo, walking doesn’t bother me.
First MMO aren’t a young genre since they’ve been around for 15+ years. Mounts started out as a luxuy item way back in the day to show noobs how rich you were, until the 600 pound gorilla came along.
Bioware has done a good job at character progress in this game. The starter worlds are small so you don’t notice the walk much, then you get sprint @ 14 right when the world gets alittle bigger. Once you unlock your first mount the worlds are alot bigger than where you started from. Also the price isn’t outrageous. Right when I hit the hallmake level I had enough money to buy a mount and the riding skill. BW has hit the Goldilocks zone here.
Not having ‘running’ or ‘walking’ instantly removes the enriching experience of the game. It’s meant to be immersive, if you’re hopping a lightning jet to every single place suddenly you’re playing the mechanics, not the game. Which i assure you is very dull and a waste of spending all that money on making, and buying, a game.
I wouldn’t mind the ability to ‘holocall’ in to NPC for quest rewards, but only if it’s for Bonus series and one-offs. Because you want to keep towns and outposts populated.
Um….have you played Rift? Mounts at early levels.
Funny article, and I’m not trying to be an arse here, and I know most people will disagree, but the reality behind this is at the core of the turmoil that surrounds MMOs. Basically, the idea behind MMOs stems from types of entertainment like PnP RPGs, games which focus on creativity and exercising one’s mind. The format of these games…large explorable worlds etc., stem from that culture, and for an imaginative person, walking through a large online world and exploring it fully is just as exciting as performing what most gamers consider “accomplishments” eg downing a raid boss etc.
The real problem is not that some people feel inconvenienced by having to walk in MMOs, but that a genre that was created by and supported by people with a certain outlook on gaming has been overrun by people whose gaming focus is much more oriented towards genres like FPS and RTS etc…and that now the parts of MMOs that separated them from the mainstream of gaming are being forcibly removed by overpopularization, and also by people who don’t care at all for the culture and ideas that made MMOs great, but just want another version of an FPS or RTS game packaged like an MMO.
WoW’a mount System???? There were mount systems way before WOW came out. Dark Age of Camelot had a system similar to the Taxi’s and I think UO came out with mounts before WOW.. it was UO or AC I dont remember which. WOW did not have many “new” ideas. most were just copied from other games that were already out there. What Blizzard did was soak a ton of money into the game and advertise more than any other ever thought of doing. Then they got rid of everything that was hard and made a game that a baby can hit the keyboard and get epic levels. That is it.
Why do people think MMOs started with WoW?
Everquest didn’t have mounts or any type of real quick travel until way later. I spent hours walking, taking boats, etc. in EQ.
you played EQ mwhahaha
WoW was boring and the story was bland. At least EQ didn’t have pandas… And I still think the website from SOE for character profiles is great. Wait, are you even old enough to know the early EQ? Don’t knock what started the evolution.
Funny article but the author does lose a bit of credibility talking about “WOW’s mount system”. Makes him sound like any other noob that declares any MMO specific idea was invented by Blizzard. Hey, you know quests and UIs weren’t invented by Blizzard either. Just fyi
Tons of MMOs have used the same system–you walk, you get a slow mount, you get a faster mount…blah blah.
SWTOR does a pretty good job with the timing of their mounts. I would prefer you get them at around 15-20 but 25 isn’t bad.
If I remember correctly, didn’t WOW originally give you a mount at 40?
I hate walking too. It’s mundane and boring. My wife, who walks by my den from time to time stopped once as I was playing SWTOR and said, “That’s all you do is run around! That’s all I hear is your feet slapping the pavement. That that all this game is? A lot of running around?” And then I got my ship and called her in to look at it: “You can’t be serious.” Shs said, “This is what you called me in here for? I can’t believe you.” and walked out. But yeah, the walking for 25 levels really freakin sucks.
My wife says the same thing. She calls SWTOR, “that running game you play.” I tell her that Bejeweled would be so much more fun if they forced her to run 2 minutes just to play the game. She disagrees.
There are some points there that might be true. But I was disappointed when WoW reduced the mount availability from Lvl 40 to Lvl 20. Why do you need a world at all if all you want to do is to hop to your enemy, kill him and get the reward immediately? This is not what the ‘R’ in MMORPG is about!
I like it the way it is!
Taygeta
The walking is part of the game. This is an mmorpg and the world(s)is supposed to be huge. If you just want to transport to the next location why play an mmorpg?
If there’s anything to complain about in SWToR about mounts it’s the way they’re +90% / +100% / +110%. I’m probably not alone in only planning on getting the +110% on main, or possibly each character I care about Gathering on. For just questing and maybe a little PvP I don’t see the point in going from +90% to +110%.
Something like +70% / +100% / +130% might have been better.
I am aware there are technical limitations to how fast you can allow players to go. Already at +90% I’m occasionally quite close to mobs before they start rendering for me. WoW had this *very* bad with the fastest flying mounts, not even seeing mining/herb nodes until past them!
Yeah I really wish they went with a cooler system for the speeds, its speeders not slow 4 legged creatures. 90% is an okay start but the only way I would buy the next speed is if it was at least 200%.
UO had mounts at release in 1997.
My biggest complaint was the change in mounts that occurred in that 600-pound gorilla game. I started WoW prior to BC being released and busted my a** to get to lvl 40, then lvl 60, then to earn enough gold to buy that over-priced flying turd of a beginning flying mount that was released in BC. Then they revamped the mounts… I felt cheated. I pray that BioWare keeps things the way they are in the future. Lvl 25 is a nice stepping stone to earn the ability to ride all over the planet if you want. Don’t belittle the original players who worked for it because the “extreme casuals” want what “the big kids” have. Youcan lvl to 25 easy enough and gain 40,000 credits easily, as long as you don’t buy every gizmo and armor piece that catches your eye.
LOL@ WoW’s mount system. That is all.
Oh you do know about quick travel right?
Collector’s Edition . . . I bought it for the for all the cool shit that came with it, including the mount. For some dumbass reason I assumes I’d be zooming around at level 1 on my special mount. Well, I was wrong, just … wrong
This is amazingly well written, but I have to chime in and say I don’t mind how Bioware has done it for SWTOR. I didn’t need a mount until about the level I got it, but I probably could have used the faster run speed at level 10. I get a freaking SPACESHIP before I get a mount. I don’t have to run to a world in order to fast travel back to it. The fast travel (by bike or transport or Alderaanian whale) doesn’t take FOREVER. It is a huge improvement over WoW. Sure, it’s weird to go back to a low level alt and not be so fast, but I find it’s more the reverse – when I go back to my main I forget I have a hoverbike.
Walking isn’t that much of a drag when you play your first character, but if you hit level cap on your main and then create an alt, that is definitely when you feel the pain of walking.
Still, while it would be nice to zoom around more quickly especially at planetary bases (seriously there’s a lot of “wasted space” between your ship and the exit of the spaceports) but I actually enjoy the expansive feeling of this game. You could easily smash vendors and locations a lot closer on planets but it would feel too compact. They seem to have done a good job with providing taxis near quest hubs for each zone and the quick travel works pretty well.
What I want more of, is customization of mounts at least in terms of color schemes.
How did you get into jornalism? cause you shouldn’t of, also you should just watch a movie, then you would have to do nothing and sit in your armchair!
Highly entertaining article!
One thing Aion did that worked well was to give you a variety of ways to speed up your run speed (this being a game with no mounts at all until the next expansion) with scrolls, boots with extra speed, titles with extra speed and wings with extra flight speed. Even at low level you could go a lot faster with some 30% scrolls and the lower level areas tend to be a bit smaller anyway, which made you feel like rerolling didn’t mean moving at a snails pace – you could zoom past other beginner players and leave them confused in your wake. However Aion is a game in which part of the fun of running from one area to another is gliding along the landscape on large, feathery wings, leaving you with a sense of loss in every other MMO when you hit the space bar twice while going downhill and nothing happens. Sadface.
One thing I noticed in Rift was that the mounts really do go FAST. Now, I have a tendancy to get lost, run in the wrong direction, fall off things and generally go in every direction but the one I’m meant to be travelling in (if I’m even vaguely aware of what that direction is, which is rare). I only ever made enough money (due to apathy) to buy the level 40 mount and along with some increased speed riding chaps (steady boys) I found I was going at ‘wheeeeeee!’ speed. The upshot was that I was still running in the wrong direction but now I was getting there faster, and having further to run back.
I remember when I first started playing WoW my other half had a super fast rhino like creature of some sort which I used to enjoy running around various high level areas that I was months from getting to when he was out of the room. He would generally come back to find his toon either dead from falling off somehting I hadn’t spotted in time, stuck in a deep cave or mineshaft of some sort that I had accidentally ‘discovered’ or wedged somewhere inacessable, usually when return was on cooldown.
DCUO gives you your “mount” at level 1. Maybe I missed where he mentions this (who can ever read a whole Tim McDonald article?), but he seemed to be implying that no MMO gives you your “mount” early enough and DCUO is a great example of one that does.
Why not when you first roll a character you have to trudge along and when you get your first mount, all of your alts have access to that mount too? There may be some flaws in this thinking but I think its a good idea.
So seriously…you think travel is bad in early lvl MMOs now…you should have played early FFXI…OMG! it was the first MMO i played, so i didnt realize how painstaking it was to get ANYWHERE…but looking back…i spent probably 20% of the 5 years playing that game, just getting to the places to play the game. rediculous.
I swear…the great untapped market that no major game developer will tap bc they are incapable of allowing creative minds to dominate the development process rather than gimps wielding calculators and capitalist mass market propaganda rhetoric is the MMO that appeals to classic MMO players.
There are a TON of us out there. And we don’t require seduction via graphix and other things that appeal to people easily swayed by shinys…we just want an MMO that is designed to support social interaction, RP, and exploration.
I can guarantee that a game advertised in the right way that is truly designed by old school MMO players for old school MMO players can make a profit nice enough to suit anyone who actually wants to spend their time advancing intelligent gaming instead of grabbing a concept, pretending you are a true gamer and then selling out the minute xcorp waves a buyout offer in your face.