Travel woes
Quite a few games have the protagonist travel around on a map of some kind. More often than not, this results in some boring moments later on in the game. At first, the travelling is fresh and interesting, because every place is new, but when the player has discovered a significant amount of the territory, walking back and forth between places isn’t much fun any more.
My attention was (again) brought to this problem when I mentioned to a friend that I was replaying the classic game Lands Of Lore: Throne Of Chaos. His reaction was one of disgust. He told me that he had tried the game, but that he couldn’t stand the maze-like structures of the maps. There’s more than a little truth to his claim: Lands of Lore is very maze-like and the game involves a lot of backtracking.
The maze-like structure in Lands of Lore is largely due to the technology used for the game, but even in modern games without this limitation the problems of navigating maps, and especially of backtracking still exists. There are a couple of solutions to these problems, though.
Don’t look back
The most straightforward solution to the problem is to make sure that the player never has to go back. Once she’s been somewhere and has done what she came there to do, she doesn’t have to go back. Quite a few RPGs and adventure games use this solution. The downsides are that it results in very linear gameplay, which might not be the experience you are trying to create, and it can result in the necessity to create a lot of content, because every place has to be new. It’s also more unlikely that your game will have high replayability.
Auto-mapping
Lands Of Lore tries to overcome the problem of its mazes, by providing the player with an automap. Every place the player has visited is added to the automap and all places and items of importance are marked on the map. Some games also allow the player to add her own notes to the map. For players who are fairly competent in navigating in 3D, the automap is all they need.
Games that employ an isometric or topdown view of the world, usually combine the world the player is walking around in with the automap. Places you haven’t visited yet are dark, but once you walk over to them, they become and stay visible. These games usually still need a seperate map that shows a larger area, because there is only so much of the world you can show to the player at once. These maps don’t have to be very detailed, as long as the player can make out the general direction she needs to travel in.
Minimap
If your not that comfortable navigating 3D worlds, switching back and forth between the map and the game after each step, quickly becomes very tedious. My friend said that he wasn’t interested in a game unless it had a minimap and that’s indeed an excellent solution to the problem. Place the part of the map that the player is currently travelling on the screen while the player is travelling. This way just about anyone can walk around without frustration.
Designing a good minimap is an interesting challenge. What’s the appropriate zoom level? Can the player adjust the zoom level? Do we show enemies on the minimap? Do we use coloured arrows to indicate the locations of important landmarks that are outside of the minimap? It might not be easy, but providing the player with a good minimap can make a world of difference.
(Near) instant travelling
A completely different solution - one that is heavily underused, in my opinion - is making travelling between familiar locations instantaneous. It works like this. The first time you visit a place, you have to navigate it as usual, all the while filling your automap. Because everything you see is new, that won’t be much of a problem. Once a location is marked on your automap, you can travel there by simply clicking that location on the automap. The player still has the option to backtrack manually to see if she missed something the first time around, but she doesn’t have to.
Often, backtracking also means that the player has to fight off a couple of monsters. Teleporting the player to a location would forego this and make travelling easier than you might want as the game’s designer. The way to solve this is to have the computer simulate the protagonist walking around the map. You could show a line that (quickly) traces the route the protagonist is taking. When the protagonist encounters an enemy along the route, the player is given control of the protagonist again to fight off this monster. Once she has won the fight, she can continue on her way.
Conclusion
Walking to and fro all the time in a game is not the experience most players are after. Even the beautiful vistas in a game like Oblivion get old after a time. Proper mapping makes it easy for the player to find the quickest route to her destination. Giving her the option to instantaneously travel to locations she has already visited will keep her from the tedium of travelling altogether.
(9 votes, average: 4.56 out of 5)
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William Willing said,
Comment • March 1, 2007 @ 7:41
I’m afraid I’m not much of a console gamer, so I haven’t played the games you mention. I’ll have to see if I can remedy that.
I agree with you on the point of 3D level design. Utilising the third dimension well might do a lot to cut down on travel times. On the other hand, it would be much harder to provide the player with a map that makes any kind of sense (the maps in Descent were quite hard to decipher); maybe that’s why level designers tend to stick to levels that are mostly 2D in design.
Dargo said,
Comment • March 2, 2007 @ 6:59
I’m on the fence when it comes to issues like travel time in games, especially MMORPGs. Although I do feel that instant travel and things of that sort are convenient, I also feel that it takes away immersion.
Everquest, up until the Shadows of Luclin expansion and beyond, has been my favorite MMORPG of all time. It was a horrible leveling treadmill and nothing but hack-and-slash gameplay for the most part but there was something about that MMORPG that sucked me into a hardcore addiction phase for nearly 4 years. The only thing I could attribute that to is game immersion. Yes, sitting around at the docks for 15 minutes waiting on the boat was a pain. Yes, running across 4 zones to get back to the city for training was a pain. Yes, moving from town to town to find that one vendor with a certain gemstone was a pain. But for some reason that I cannot grasp, that’s what kept me in the game.
The Shadows of Luclin expansion introduced the Nexus, which had instant teleportation to various hotspots around the world. Two expansions later, the Plane of Knowledge had instant teleports between the cities. Incidentally, the expansions that introduced these began to kill the game’s immersion and made it easier for players like me to break away from the game.
Then again, this is just my experience. Others may feel the same, others may not.
Petri Purho said,
Comment • March 17, 2007 @ 19:39
First off all, I also love Lands of Lore. I think it’s one of the best computer RPGs ever created.
Anyway, reading your article I remembered (and came up with) few other solutions to this problem.
I think you’ll find this most interesting solution, at least I did. You can actually do a RPG without the spatial navigation. As an experiment Daniel Benmergui did a game called Hunter RPG, which doesn’t use any kind of map or graphics to represent the space. I recommend you check it out, it’s actually quite fun game.
http://www.ludomancy.com/blog/2007/01/12/an-rpg-without-space-hunter-rpg/
He also wrote some desing notes about the game, which aren’t available from his blog, but I recommend reading them too, since there’s a lot of good information in them also.
http://www.experimental-gameplay.org/2006/Hunter%20RPG%20Concept.doc
Other quite often used solution (at least in 2D games) is to use an arrow or an indicator to show where the player is supposed to go. This was also used in some 3D games (some driving games), but I cannot think of any right now.
While I was at the GDC this year, I attended the Peter Molyneux’s talk about Innovations in Fable 2 (the innovation was a pet dog). But while talk seemed more a like sales pitch, he did mention off hand an interesting point. That they as a development team hated the minimap, because they put a lot of energy and time into creating this beautiful 3D world and the game could basically be played in the ugly minimap. So their solution to this in Fable 2 was to let your pet dog guide you as a player. So basically its the indicator solution in better disguise.
The solution that I came up with when I read the article, was one Bezman mentioned already. Which was to pack everything tight enough, so the player doesn’t have to wander around exploring things. I thought about the good old Lucasarts adventure games, where basically every screen had a purpose in the game. So there wasn’t any filler stuff in there to make the games last longer. I know that some of old adventure games used to include these mazes in the games to make them last longer (like the jungle in Kyrandia 3). I really hated that.
Btw. I’m really glad you started writing again on. It was an inspiring article.
William Willing said,
Comment • March 17, 2007 @ 21:58
@Dargo: I find it a bit strange that getting rid of a part you admittedly find boring would kill your interest in the game. Isn’t it possible that some other aspect of the game - possibly related to travelling and waiting around - was (partly) responsible for this? Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s just the complexity inherent in these design issues, but it just seems so counter-intuitive.
@Petri: I was, of course, talking about games where the decision to include travelling has already been made, but you are completely right: why include travelling in the first place? As a game’s designer, that’s something you need to ask yourself.
Thanks for pointing out Hunter RPG: it’s a very nice proof-of-concept. I think these kind of demos are very valuable, because they show that alternative types of gameplay can actually work. Also, when I play something like this, I always get ideas on how I can use it in other games. Really nice.
The other day I was playing the demo of Daemonica and it includes an arrow exactly like you describe. You open up the map, click where you want to go and back in the 3D view you get an arrow pointing you in the right direction. My only gripe with it was that it only shows the general direction, instead of the path you need to take. It sounds like Molyneux’ pet dog would solve that problem. (Ehm, that sounds a bit strange, but I think you know what I mean. 
)
Dargo said,
Comment • March 25, 2007 @ 14:05
My answer would have to be “cause and effect”.
Cause: long downtime, lots of waiting, traversing lots of ground using an auto-run key.
Effect: more time to chat with friends, sort through items, discuss issues with guild members. If you’re waiting or traveling with a group, even more to talk about!
MMORPGs are a social game, first and foremost. If you’re going to play an MMORPG solo, what’s the point? Go play something like Morrowind or Oblivion or NWN or something.
When MMORPGs become fast-action and no downtime when the game doesn’t require fast-action and no downtime to be a success (like an FPS would), it slowly turns into a solo game. When you are given time to talk with others, bond with players and develop a community, you are being social: the thing that MMORPGs do best. When you get from A to B instantly, B to C instantly, C to Boss instantly, then kill, you have no time to bond.
If you ask a lot of players, the reason they kept playing MMORPGs like EverQuest was because of the friends they had made, not because of how fun the game was. EQ was not a fun game. Playing with the players that played EQ was fun.
Games like DDO are designed to cater best to groups of friends. This kills the social aspect of the game. How well has DDO done?
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Bezman said,
Comment • March 1, 2007 @ 0:00
To (mis)quote Super Play, tLoZelda: Link to the Past has a map that can be traversed from one side to another in under a minute. And yet, there’s just as much to see as in Square-Enix’s offerings.
Similar to the ‘hub’ solution offered by most FF games, but a lot more elegantly implemented. The scales of the character and surroundings remain constant and thus we don’t notice it as much.
When entering the tardis-like houses and temples, we negotiate the maze-like structures only once. The only problem is that a fairly small number of buildings can be shown on the main map, but one could say that just like the Haiku format, this encourages economy and encouraged Miyamoto to select which elements to include even more carefully.
Unlike FF maps or the castle in Mario 64, the ‘portals’ in the aforementioned Zelda game often don’t look like portals when first walking by. As skills increase, the brilliantly disguised lock-and-key system lets us descend down stairs under rocks, blow open caves, swim under bridges… even a house (itself magnified when entered) can make for an entryway to a later Temple.
In a way, Zelda3’s system works so well because Miyamoto used the 3rd dimension better than in many games which are graphically 3D. When we could climb up vines, fly into the clouds, drop down through a hole as deep as hell… why do so many games seem intent on designing the levels on a flat 2D plane?
Doom was forced into this by technical limitations but many newer games retain this unecessary practise. If levels were imagined as less of a square and more of a sphere or a cube, then all locations could be fitted into a smaller expanse of space and returning to a previous location would necessitate a shorter line of travelling.