Table ronde n°12 : Voyage rapide : vous aimez ou vous détestez ?

La Table ronde n°12 est consacrée aux Voyages rapides dans EverQuest Next.

Sondage

Le sondage est visible sur le site officiel : Fast travel in EverQuest Next: love it or leave it?

Résultats le 8 décembre 2013 :

Voyage rapide dans EverQuest Next : vous aimez ou vous détestez ?
I want to be able to get to my group within 5 minutes, wherever they are in the world.	9%
I want a huge world, even it means 30 minutes getting to my group each night.	24%
Fast travel with limitations, such as only via player abilities or requiring you to visit "the long way" first.	44%
I would like a fast travel network between major cities/hubs only, not outside.	22%
I don't have a preference.	1%

Transcription

Cette transcription de la vidéo provient du site EQ Hammer.

Omeed Dariani: Hi. My name’s Omeed Dariani. I’m the Senior Brand Manager for the EverQuest franchise. Welcome to the Round Table. With me today is Lead Game Designer, Darrin McPherson. And we’re talking about fast travel, love it or leave it. And people had a lot of opinions on this. I think there were over 200 pages of forum comments ranging from ‘I want fast travel everywhere, all the time’ to ‘Why do we even want to have mounts?’

Darrin McPherson: Right. They didn’t even want feet. They wanted to be able to crawl around. Really, really slow travel.

Omeed Dariani: Let’s not have a run button. So, but I think in the poll, we saw that a lot of people wanted to have a system of fast travel with limitations, right? Exploration first. And why is it that MMOs ask us to explore first?

Darrin McPherson: Well, the world needs to feel like a tangible place. In a world like ours that is going to be very large, you want that size and scale. You want to be impressed when you know a friend is halfway across the world...that he’s traveled far. He’s far away from you, right? Those are places you have yet to discover, and the world seems massive. That’s a very powerful thing. I remember once when I was playing EverQuest my first character was a dwarf, and I wanted to play with a friend in Halas, who was a barbarian, and that was an epic journey. By the time I ended up getting to Freeport, after taking the wrong boat, and ending up over there being killed and basically restarting, not having any of my loot again, the world felt massive. By the time I got to Rivervale and Kithicor, and got killed by undead because it happened to be nighttime...the world was a huge place. And I think that the developers want that. We certainly want that for our players.

Omeed Dariani: But at the same time, we don’t ever want the world to be so massive that I can’t ever get to where people are, right? My friends are on the other side of the world, we want to group up...

Darrin McPherson: This is a multiplayer game. Players want to be playing together. We want to incentivize players playing together. And therefore, they need to be in proximity with one another. They need to be able to group together. And so we need to, I think...fast travel is introduced as a way to do that.

Omeed Dariani: Absolutely. So, for EverQuest Next, what does the system look like? What are we thinking?

Darrin McPherson: So, the plan...the thing that we’re talking about now is there’s a travel network that first must be discovered. All the points along that network must be discovered. But once you’ve discovered them, you can access those and travel with relative speed. It isn’t instantaneous travel that we’re talking about--instantaneous travel is something that we’re going to be limiting. But when you’ve arrived at your end point there’s still, because of the way we’ve spaced these out, there’s still plenty of movement. We have heroic movement in the game. We have mounts. Movement through the world should be fun. So, when your players are on the outermost borders working on procedural content that just appeared yesterday, they’re doing all this really cool stuff, you need to be able to join them. So, you use this network. Assuming you’ve discovered the points along it.

Omeed Dariani: So, this system sounds great. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. And so that’s what we’re thinking for EverQuest Next. That’s where we’re headed. Thank you guys very much for your wide range of opinions on this topic. It was a lot of fun to read. We’ll see you next time on the Round Table.