Fast Travel

One of the design problems I am trying to overcome is how to require exploration and the inability to bypass encounters, but still have a world that is large enough that walking everywhere is prohibitive and maintain a sense of realism. I don't want players to just hop on a horse and ride past enemies or to ride past areas that they haven't explored. I also don't want the player to get to their destination and just shrink their horse into their backpack. This is a medieval game with light magic.

I'm floating between two ideas. The first is that the player would have to basically clear a zone, then be able to build a stable at the other end of the zone.. so in effect they could fast travel to the end of a zone they cleared and then enter the newer area on foot. But I'm kinda 'meh' on the idea of a stable being out in the middle of nowhere with a horse inside. This does fit in well with the theme of the game where building the stable and acquiring horse would be consistent with other activities in the game.

The other idea is that there are either portals or tunnels at the far end of a zone, that once the player can ' activate' them, they can then use to fast travel to that point. Overall I am leaning towards the tunnel idea because it really fits in well with the lore of the game. So like there would be tunnels in the main city, but they aren't accessible until they are cleared at the far end.

Have you played a game that had realistic, yet fun way to handle fast travel to bypass already cleared content?

 

I like the tunnel idea, especially if it fits the lore. It seems like a nice reward for clearing the area, plus it's different from a typical fast-travel terminal.

If you did want to do a fast-travel terminal, what about hiring a coach or joining a caravan that's heading to the player's destination. Then the game could just fade to black and fade back in at the new location, or do the classic world map with animated line.

 

it seems like the idea that you can only fast travel after clearing the area should solve the problems of disincentivizing player from exploring.

I can think of a few prominent games that use this method. And logically, it makes sense to the player as well. Elden Ring is probably the most recent and popular example.

 

I also like the tunnel / portal idea, but I'm not clear on how it solves this:

I'd also consider that, assuming you're making a game which is meant to engage people, you perhaps want to encourage people to choose something rather than mechanically forcing it upon them. Potential ways to do this:

• Put interesting stuff in your explorable areas which players want to find. Side quests, loot, lore, unique battles, etc.
• Attach meaningful choices to combat. E.g. maybe you can ride past enemies, but leaving them there increases the danger rating of the area, which makes fast travel more dangerous, increases the cost of goods in nearby settlements, etc.
• Put bounties on named enemies but don't tell players exactly where they are. To get the reward the player has to explore an area and kill at least one enemy, most likely their whole mob, and potentially more than that.
• Boost motivation for those (and other things) by tying them into story elements. It's not just a random named enemy, they kidnapped the shopkeeper's daughter and it's closed until the situation is resolved.
• Tie it into secondary reward loops, such as getting currencies that tie only into cosmetics. This avoids messing with the balance of the rest of your game while giving players an orthogonal set of goals and being highly satisfying to certain groups of players. (But not everyone, so make sure it's a fit with your audience before committing!)

Basically, if something is interesting I'll do it without your game forcing my hand. If it's not interesting then forcing me to do it will potentially stop me from playing at all. And if you solve that by making it interesting... you don't need to force me any more.

 

Also fast travel only at "midway point", ie not at the dungeon or the city, but a bit on remote point, potentially chokepoint hub organized in a network, so you still has to traverse area to get to the fast travel and the many gameplay terminal services (like city, dungeon, shop, etc..), that is fast travel are terminal services in themselves. Another way to see it, is instead of fast traveling to cities, you fast travel to crossroads that lead to city.

 

This is all good. In reality a lot of what I am trying to do is prevent players from making a mistake, rather than not allowing them to 'cheat'. If the player runs past combat it will hurt them both in short and long term. The game at it's core is a village building game where the PC explores new areas, discovers resources, then sends villagers to harvest those resources. The part that is different from most games is that the villagers are greatly hampered by creatures in the area, so after exploring regions, discovering resources, sending villagers, the next step is for the PC to go back and eliminate some of the creatures to make the villagers more efficient. Just discovering resources and sending villagers is not enough to build up the village.

The other side of it is an attrition component. There is not much healing outside of the village, so in order to be able to successfully explore an outer ring zone, the player needs to be able to travel through the inner ring zone without taking too much damage. And that is where the fast travel is a problem. If a player can fast travel past zones that haven't been mostly cleared, they can always just get to new zones at full health and it greatly shrinks the game.

The fine-tuning I guess is just at what point do I want them to be able to speed past a zone and the mechanism to do it. My leading contender is to have a tunnel that appears at the far end of the inner ring zones, have that tunnel blocked and villagers are needed to restore it. That way if the zone has not been cleared, the villagers will be very ineffective at fixing the tunnel because they will be harassed by all the creatures still alive in the inner ring.

 

Yes exactly. I haven't played Elden Ring, what is the mechanism they use for fast travel and how do they prevent players from using it too early. For instance, in early WOW, you could only open up a flight path by reaching it. But that didn't work well because you could just death run there.

Also I would rather have it fit fiction or at least seem reasonable rather than some just random rule. For instance the flight path rule in WOW was very arbitrary. I mean the flight path where I am launching from knows the far away flight path exists even if I have never tagged it and the first flight path would have no idea if I tagged the second flight path. For gameplay it made sense and was reasonable, but for RP it was stupid.

 

That all sounds reasonable.

I'd strongly consider applying consistent rules to both villagers and fast travel. For instance, each villager has health, and they run back to village when their health gets low. In an uncleared area there's lots of stuff which hurts them so they will run back before gathering much, in a cleared area there is little or nothing so they'll get a full load most of the time.

Then, apply that exact same thing to the player. When fast travelling they take damage exactly the same way villagers do. So you can fast travel through an uncleared area if you want, but you'll start at the other side with less health. Also, both the player and villagers can take advantage of tunnels once established.

 

@Carve_Online

in Elden ring it's like you described originally. Once you've been to a place then you can fast travel there anytime from anywhere.

There is no justification, and I doubt anybody has ever thought into it. It's a game, and first and foremost it is designed to be fun.

Unless you are making a hardcore simulation, I'd only focus on making fun mechanics, and then if you can justify them somehow with lore that's fine but, 99.9999% of players are never going to think that far into anything. And those that do aren't going to stop playing because something in a game doesn't make perfect sense.

If you try to make things make sense, it becomes an endless rabbit hole very quickly and it is hard to know where to draw the line. if you focus on fun you get much more concrete barriers to work within.

 

With the villager part... I think you spied on my design notes. There are two parts to it. 1. is that sometimes they get chased back to the village which requires the other villagers to stop what they are doing and defend the village, it also means the player must preemptively do defensive upgrades to the village to prevent the villagers from being damaged during those raids. So from a gameplay perspective, sending villagers into uncleared areas means you need to be sure to build defenses (at the expense of other things). And 2, even if villagers are not being chased back to town, they are less efficient at gathering because they have to spend time hiding, sneaking or just not walking the optimal pathway. Each resource node tracks which creatures impact it, and then subtracts efficiency from villagers based on how many of those creatures are still alive. The penalty decreases as the player clears the creatures attached to the resource nodes.
The villager part is all simulated, the resource gather rate is based on math, not the actual villager in the gameworld. So the villager gathers an amount based on its skill, equipment distance and the creature penalty and then occasionally there is a check to see if one of the creatures decides to raid the village.

The player part is actual gameplay, and you described what I want to do.. If an area is not cleared, the player will be forced to fight creatures and will reach the second area at less than full health. WAI. The part I am juggling is how to keep that part of the design, but then also allow the player to fast travel at some point. The WOW or Elden Ring are the desired effect, but just seem cheap or lazy way to do it. My original post was just looking for a fun or clever way to accomplish it without just saying ' ok, you reached here once, now you can just always bypass the earlier zone even if it is still full of creatures'.

I've been fleshing out the tunnel idea and solved a bunch of problems. First was that I want there to be a blockage that the villagers need to clear before the Player can use the tunnel. Well then the question was ' well why wouldn't the villagers just clear it from the town side of the blockage' So the villagers must clear the blockage from the outside, then there is a switch/key and brings down a shield that was blocking the village side of the tunnel. And then there are a bunch of scene-load issues because the tunnel has 3 forks (inner zone, outer zone, village).. and it was tricky to figure out where the onload and unloads should be.

 

If you've already got simulated villager travel happening then can't you apply the exact same thing to the player?

 

I don't want it to be ultra-hardcore, but if there is an opportunity to add lore/sense to it, and also gameplay to it, then it is better. For instance, if the villagers need to clear a tunnel, that means they are doing that and not something else (opportunity cost). There is now a cost of getting fast-travel which creates a decision for the player, and double that because the player can lower that opportunity cost by killing creatures, which makes the villagers faster at clearing the tunnel. I don't play a ton of games, but I've never seen anything interesting in this regard, it is always just ' tag a flightpath and be able to use it anytime'. I was just asking for ideas if anyone has seen it done better.

 

Wouldn't that feel kinda cheap though? Ok, here is the flightpath, you were instantly transported to it but you lost 12% of your health based on the creatures you bypassed. The villager stuff is different because it is in the background and the player doesn't see it (although they can occasionally bump into a villager out doing their job). On a higher level, the player has no idea that the gathering rates are purely simulated, for all they know, the numbers they are seeing are based on what the villager really did collect in the last hour etc. The game is a combination of a village building game with a lot of math going on with regards to gathering and build/craft times, but at the same time the player plays a typical first person RPG.. so instead of having a god-view of the village building game, you are the one combat unit in first person view.

 

I think it's less cheap than magicking me past a dangerous area and just pretending it didn't happen. Personally, I find that kind of thing in certain games to be a significant immersion breaker. In other games which already didn't take themselves seriously it's a non-issue.

 

I agree. Unless the magicking makes a lot of sense or is a puzzle itself. I love to explore but I also want the ability to get somewhere fast if I need to do so. Again though the jump from portal to portal, and your players miss everything in between. Immersion is important to me and I often take the long road.