Does instant transportation effect game immersion?

[Azurymber]

People play games they enjoy.

If the majority of people enjoy "easy" games, why does that matter as long as the game also includes what you enjoy?

(Not to mention, if the majority of players enjoy "easy" games, who exactly is going to buy an exclusively "hard" game? - food for thought)

At this point in time, FFXIV does include what you enjoy - slow traveling.

Why does it matter to you if other players are playing the game and using the option they enjoy - traveling fast?

It doesn't seem to matter to them if you travel slow, so why are you upset if they travel fast?

because allowing people to travel fast ruins the feeling of the game world for everyone. It means when you run around the world will be dead because everyone will just warp.
It means when you take an airship you will be the only one on it
It means that there will be no incentive to improve the world since everyone will be insta warping everywhere

So its not as simple as choice.

[Crica]

because allowing people to travel fast ruins the feeling of the game world for everyone. It means when you run around the world will be dead because everyone will just warp.
It means when you take an airship you will be the only one on it
It means that there will be no incentive to improve the world since everyone will be insta warping everywhere

So its not as simple as choice.

Are you trying to say that if Square removes the option to travel fast, then you would have more players to travel slow with?

I disagree.

You would have the same amount of players to travel slow with as you do right now since the players who enjoy traveling fast would no longer want to play the game because the option they enjoyed was removed.

You can not force players to enjoy traveling slow in a game, sorry.

[Azurymber]

Are you trying to say that if Square removes the option to travel fast, then you would have more players to travel slow with?

I disagree.

You would have the same amount of players to travel slow with as you do right now since the players who enjoy traveling fast would no longer want to play the game because the option they enjoyed was removed.

You can not force players to enjoy traveling slow, sorry.

your argument can be summed up as "if they took out this one single small thing everyone would quit"

why do you think people will quit over something that trivial? They would have chocobos to make up for the loss of insta-port.

[Crica]

why do you think people will quit over something that trivial?

Would you quit (or try out the game) if they removed the option to travel slow?

[Azurymber]

Would you quit (or try out the game) if they removed the option to travel slow?

no, I just know the game would never succeed.

My argument is that insta travel ruins the one thing FF is strong in, immersion.
In ffxi there were ppl running places. In FFXIV most areas feel dead.

for FFXIV to succeed in a seriously competitive MMO market (SW TOR has 400k+ preorders, ffxiv boards have 20kish registered) they need to play to their strengths. FF is a story+immersion based series. Warcraft wasn't an rpg it was a tactical adventure game. So WoW's design played to their strengths (more focus on the fightin, killin, raiding, etc in a cool world). FFXIV is trying to be WoW, and failing miserably.

Taking out airship travel is essentially removing airships, a FF legacy item, from the game.
Traveling instantly takes the life out of a giant world that really needs life in it.

[Crica]

Traveling instantly takes the life out of a giant world that really needs life in it.

According to you, because you enjoy traveling slow.

According to players who enjoy traveling fast, the game would be boring if they were forced to travel slow.

Again, it is a matter of personal enjoyment.

And when a game caters to personal enjoyment, then people will play the game.

Take out the option to personally enjoy the game, and you take out the people playing the game.

[Quanta]

Even if it's mundanely monotonous, my perspective is they're only moments that provide a MMO it's "You are involved in my massive world" feeling.

I can feel involved in a massive world without the developers adding pointless timesinks that are totally unimportant to the game itself. I can imagine, for instance, that the events of FFVII took months to complete, and that I haven't seen every town or village in the world because they're completely unimportant to the plot. Adding those villages with nothing to them except bits of dialog from the 2-3 inhabitants that would be shown and maybe a potion in a chest would not enrich the game or make it more believeable because their existence has no bearing on what I'm trying to accomplish, unlike every other location in the game. In Mass Effect, watching my ship travel through the void of space wouldn't add anything to the experience, so it's omitted. That doesn't stop the developers from getting the point across that space is vast, or that the places I visit in my quest aren't enormous. The Citadel would seem a lot smaller than it really is supposed to be if you could visit every end of it, hence why you're confined to small sections of the areas you're allowed to visit.

In other words, game worlds feel massive when you're only shown bits and pieces, and your imagination is allowed to fill the empty space. Being able to experience the airship ride and seeing the same passengers on the boats over and over again would rapidly make the world feel smaller, because the patterns are easily recognizable; the absence of the ride allows you to fill in the blanks yourself, and helps to maintain the fiction that the world you're in is ginormous, and you're not, in fact, riding with the same "Worried Adventurers" over and over again.

Imagine fighting the last boss of a game, and killing it in 3 hits.
That is the same effect we are feeling here. Where is the challenge? How am I to be immersed in a boss battle when I just literally skipped the fight?

Some games do have final bosses that go down in 3 hits. Super Mario 64, for instance. That doesn't make the fight any less of an epic final encounter, though. The challenge lies in being able to land the hits in the first place, something that the boss and the arena you fight him in try to make as difficult as possible.

Yes, we ultimately enjoy the boss killing, but it's the journey we went through to achieve it that was fun and entertaining. Killing the boss is similar to arriving at a destination. The enthusiasm and mental/emotional immersion we experienced gave that achievement a feeling of worth-fulness.

True, the journey is important, but only the first time on a given character. Once my Warrior kills the Wizard King once, killing him again isn't a worthwhile pursuit unless there's additional mechanics at work in the 2nd fight. A 3rd fight is even more pointless unless, again, new mechanics are introduced. And that's never the case unless you're playing WoW, whose bosses follow patterns rather than adapting to circumstances. Once you know the pattern, the boss is easily beatable on all subsequent characters, so long as you're proficient with them.

Now instant teleportations (can we just say IT's?) doesn't necessarily kill immersion totally, it just affects it, moreso than anything because when a game has no real achievements and less in-game involvement, it's killing what little we could have atm.

What's to be gained from a mandatory ride other than a convenient spot to AFK for a few minutes? Unless you can fight, gather, or have access to unique crafting opportunities on the boat, there's zero purpose to it taking any longer than the departure and arrival cutscenes. The whole "doesn't make sense" argument doesn't fly with me, because anyone with even a tiny bit of imagination understands that instant-travel airships are abstracted for the sake of brevity. Remember, we're playing games where hundreds or even thousands of people somehow manage to live together in an area that only has two buildings and no signs of agriculture, where all wild animals seem to breed like rabbits, where the same patch of mountain has minerals that never run out. All of those things are far more worrisome to the believability of the world than instant-travel airships, yet we handwave them because adhereing strictly to reality in those instances would result in a game that's far more terrible and puts far more strain on our willing suspension of disbelief.

[Azurymber]

We have had instant travel for a year.
The game is not successful.
I don't think a single review has claimed the game is immersive.

If ffxi could pull off immersion why can't this game? No one is saying to cut out instant ports completely, they are saying to do what FFXI did -WHICH WORKED-. Its called balance.

[Quanta]

We have had instant travel for a year.
The game is not successful.
I don't think a single review has claimed the game is immersive.

If ffxi could pull off immersion why can't this game? No one is saying to cut out instant ports completely, they are saying to do what FFXI did -WHICH WORKED-. Its called balance.

How does a timed trip bring game balance?

And immersion was never FFXIV's problem. It's problem was that it was a terribly designed game. If anima teleports have ever been a problem, they've been the least of this game's worries, given the focus on battle elements and actual game content. Quit trying to convince people that timed travel is the salvation of FFXIV, because it isn't.

[Azurymber]

How does a timed trip bring game balance?

And immersion was never FFXIV's problem. It's problem was that it was a terribly designed game. If anima teleports have ever been a problem, they've been the least of this game's worries, given the focus on battle elements and actual game content. Quit trying to convince people that timed travel is the salvation of FFXIV, because it isn't.

immersion was at least 50% if not more of this games problem. FF's are role playing games. People expect a detailed world, good lore, a great story, etc. FFXI's success was in large part due to the immersive world, the detailed story heavy sidequests and the AMAZING missions (CoP is considered one of the best stories and one of the best endings in any MMO)

Immersion + story are SE's strong point. People can look past graphics and gameplay and even poor translation if a story is well done.

FFXIV never felt like a RPG. You insta ported everywhere, the battle and SP system was broken, and you just sit around crafting all day. The whole point of an MMO is immersion. If it wasn't then there is no point in having massive worlds, you could just creates instanced dungeons and have a picture-map that lets you travel from zone to zone (like ff tactics).

The fact they put so much effort into creating huge world which was originally near seamless without ffxi-like zones kind of shows that the world was of great importance to the original devs. And now you have this beautiful giant world, with amazing graphics, and rather than play to their strengths they make it easier to avoid experiencing that world. That isn't logical at all.