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Gerad
Eager Tradesman
Joined: 20 Jul 2002
Posts: 38
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| No Fast modes of Transport in RPGs |
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I was thinking about this lately it seems most CRPGs have an aversion
to giving us horses or other modes of transportion.
Now don`t get me wrong always seems to be teleportation but thats different.
Anyway I was thinking about computer games that gave you some form of transportation I`ve played quite a few CRPGs but not all them
The only games that offered fast transportation were: Daggerfall, and being very liberal in saying Fallout 2.
and no I don`t count morrowind slit strider is more like teleportation than fast transport.
Any ideas why?? 
In my opinon the makers are either too lazy or think it will unbalance the game or something, but I wish more rpgs had horse or SOMETHING oh well.
Can anyone add to list of games that have fast transport??? Oh yeah one the old ultima had a boats and those old hero's quest games one had a camel, thats all I can think of. |
Thu Oct 31, 2002 7:12 am |
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Remus
Overgrown Cat
Joined: 03 Jul 2002
Posts: 1657
Location: Fish bowl |
If remember correctly from some interviews a developer said it is because difficult to implement it, or no worth the time spent on it. However, with further new developments in making games i think sooner or later we will get that feature anyway...
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Thu Oct 31, 2002 7:51 am |
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Dhruin
Stranger In A Strange Land
Joined: 20 May 2002
Posts: 1825
Location: Sydney, Australia |
I certainly think horses (or similar) would be cool. I'm also sure the reason it hasn't been done is the extra development difficulty to do it. Apart fron the obvious graphical stuff they have to think about complexities like implementing horseback combat and others.
Of course, Jaz has her own solution to this by including centaurs as a playable race  |
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Thu Oct 31, 2002 8:04 am |
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mDrop
High Emperor
Joined: 06 May 2002
Posts: 479
Location: Under the desk |
And in many games, like Morrowind, the gameworld would shrink in size when players got horses. So to make the world appear bigger, it's better to force the player to walk. An interesting fact is the in DoomIII, the player can't even run, just sprint for small amounts of time. The developers said, although jokingly, that they wanted the player to really pay attention to their surroundings and when everyone defaults to autorun in most games, they never really see the gameworld.
In Morrowind this applies very well. The gameworld is beautiful and if everyone would just use horses to get quickly from place A to place B, they would never see the run rise on top of a mountain near ghostgate or watch the fog shift in the coastal swamps, sea glittering in the horizon.
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Thu Oct 31, 2002 1:54 pm |
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Joey Nipps
Orcan High Command
Joined: 03 Jan 2002
Posts: 849
Location: Outer Space |
Some of the very early Ultima series provided both horses and boats. In terms of MMORPHS, UO allows for horses.
The simple answer to your question is the laziness of the designers coupled with their desire to provide the least to the players they can get away with.
Most (if not all) game CRPG game worlds are actually quite small - Gothic, Morrowind - all I can remember. They may seem large due to a variety of tricks that are used (putting uncrossable mountains or waterways in your path forcing you to take longer routes around) - some terrain oriented and some just graphical. If the game world only takes your character a few game day cycles to cross, then regardless of how it appears or how many towns and dungeons they put in, it is small.
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When everything else in life seems to fail you - buy a vowel. |
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Thu Oct 31, 2002 2:38 pm |
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fleabitfox
Village Dweller
Joined: 01 Nov 2002
Posts: 4
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I don't think it is laziness at all, rather just inpractical. When there are horses, they certainly don't run as fast as horses would! I remember quite clearly thinking in Daggerfall.. "I have the slowest horse on the face of the planet". They implemented them ok in DAOC, with horses just taking you from one locale to another, and it looked pretty good.
I wish there WERE more horses. Especially magical steeds. Being able to say, fly into mountains on a pegasi sort of critter would really rock.
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Fri Nov 01, 2002 5:41 am |
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Urnakh
Eager Tradesman
Joined: 03 Jun 2002
Posts: 49
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Yes, it's a pity that so few rpgs provide mounts to the player. In fantasy worlds it has not even to be a horse. For example, although it's not quite a rpg, i liked these funny looking, tow legged critters you could ride in Outcast.  |
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Fri Nov 01, 2002 8:25 am |
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Gerad
Eager Tradesman
Joined: 20 Jul 2002
Posts: 38
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Ok it's not just me I was hoping there would be a longer list of games that provide as one person said mounts.
Funny they can make an entire game but when it comes to adding mounts too much trouble...
AH well so basically there are only about mabye 5 or 6 CRPGs that provide other forms of transport?
hope future games have more! |
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Fri Nov 01, 2002 12:49 pm |
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stanthony
One Smart Dog
Joined: 28 Oct 2002
Posts: 556
Location: Tallinn, Estonia |
Just re-installed good-old Daggerfall and loaded my ancient save to get a feeling of travelling on a horseback again. Nice The idea seems to be so simple... But then to think about it - to make a game even more realistic programmers have to make all sorts of adjustments to the game mechanics to allow battling from the horseback. They have to make a player on a horse stronger (or have a first strike or whatever) etc. etc. Now this could be hard thing to do. |
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Fri Nov 01, 2002 1:30 pm |
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Gig
Southern Spirit
Joined: 20 Feb 2002
Posts: 3226
Location: NFG Headquarters |
quote:
Originally posted by fleabitfox
IWhen there are horses, they certainly don't run as fast as horses would! I remember quite clearly thinking in Daggerfall.. "I have the slowest horse on the face of the planet".
Horses are slow. You can't run, canter or even trot a horse for long distances. Horses are very amazing creatures but they aren't the same as a mechanized form of transportation. Most horse travel is done at a walk... it has to be. Horses that are ridden hard need a significant period of rest afterwards or they can become lame. They also must be rubbed down and dried off to avoid rashing. The farther you force a horse to run the less distance it is capable of carrying you in a day. A horse is a very powerful animal and it's advantage lies there. A horse can easily carry you and all of your needs for most of a day at a steady walk, this is because horses don't tire as easily as people do. Most people would have difficulty walking the entire day without stopping. However, a horse's muscles convert ADP to ATP (did I get that backwards?  ) just the same as your's do, so if you tire a horse it needs to recover, just like you. A rider on horseback can cover a greater distance in a day because the horse can travel the whole day with fewer breaks, not because of speed. A horse doesn't walk significantly faster than a human being does, it just does it longer.
I used to take day trips with my riding club all through my early teens. We would leave at about 8:00am and get back around 7:00pm and rarely did we travel more than fifteen miles. This was over easy ground with well established trails. Of course we stopped more than you probably would if you were an adventurer and we would sometimes need to wait for slower riders to catch up. Still, we would canter the horses a little, so it wasn't a steady walk, still only about fifteen miles. Plus, the horses were pretty much worn out even over easy ground. If you add five extra miles to compensate for two chaperones and half a dozen teenage girls that's still only twenty miles in a day! That's about the same distance a human being can cover on foot in a day if so inclined. The bottom line is that a horse is a mammal and it's body must follow the same rules your body does. When you ask a horse to carry you and all your stuff for a whole day, something it does very well, you are still asking a great deal from an animal.
So, since you're talking about adding a horse as fast travel, you are choosing the wrong method. A horse can increase your daily travel distance but not really your travel speed. You might as well walk. A car is fast travel, I can drive that same twenty miles in twenty minutes on the turnpike and that's slow enough that I'd learn every compound swear word in the book from the other drivers! A fast method of travel would have to be something else.
That said, I think it would be so very cool to have horses in an RPG! I just think it would be fun.
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Fri Nov 01, 2002 1:56 pm |
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Joey Nipps
Orcan High Command
Joined: 03 Jan 2002
Posts: 849
Location: Outer Space |
@Gig, Well thanks for that! I suppose next you are going to inform us all there actually is NO Santa Claus!!! 
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When everything else in life seems to fail you - buy a vowel. |
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Fri Nov 01, 2002 2:18 pm |
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Michael C
Black Dragon
Joined: 09 Jul 2001
Posts: 1595
Location: Aarhus, Denmark |
Well I had a donkey in dungeon siege, draging around 1000 pounds of swords, armour and other equipment I found on my way. And it sometimes did got involved in combat and got a few scratches, and still I never heard it complain. So don't You tell us that horses or their kin can't be tough!
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Fri Nov 01, 2002 2:20 pm |
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Lintra
Elf Friend
Joined: 23 Apr 2002
Posts: 9448
Location: Bermuda, the triangle place with SANDY BEACHES |
M&M6->8 had the fly spell that allowed very fast transport, it was omitted in M&M9 so I have to think that the lack of fast transport is just designer laziness - moving quickly shrinks the world. But of course when that world is a large as MM6, you need it!
And, of course, it requires much play balancing. By the time a party in MM6 got fly, lloyds beacon, and town portal, getting places was a snap ... but it was also the stage of the game when the player is more interested in finishing a quest then exploring ... so it was well balanced .... and *that* requires a lot of time and effort in design. It was an impressive implementation to make sure the party gets the skills early enough to be useful and fun, but late enough to not spoil the game. Of course the second and third times through the party will get them a little earlier, but not a lot. In fact, MM7 did it the best. Lloyds' beacon and town portal w/ control are not available until after the party gets to Nighon - those tunnels are one of the best journeys in any CRPG and very challenging at early stages of development 
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Fri Nov 01, 2002 2:39 pm |
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stanthony
One Smart Dog
Joined: 28 Oct 2002
Posts: 556
Location: Tallinn, Estonia |
True, donkeys are tough But those donkeys in DS are good only for carrying things, not your party members.
Concerning horses, then. I remember that in one very old adventure game there were two screens that you had to travel between very often for some reason. Maybe 25 times or more, you had to carry smth back and forth. There was a merry-go-round in that location - one part of it on one screen, another part on another screen. Instead of walking back and forth and trying to avoid obstacles (many crates and bad guys) you could simply sit on a wooden horse and travel to another screen in 3 seconds, not in some 40. Which is more than 10 times faster!
So horses were used in adventure genre as a faster means of transportation, why couldn't they be used in RPGs?  |
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Fri Nov 01, 2002 2:47 pm |
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Joey Nipps
Orcan High Command
Joined: 03 Jan 2002
Posts: 849
Location: Outer Space |
quote:
Originally posted by stanthony
So horses were used in adventure genre as a faster means of transportation, why couldn't they be used in RPGs?
In general, RPGs are about (at least in principal) simulating reality.
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When everything else in life seems to fail you - buy a vowel. |
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Fri Nov 01, 2002 2:58 pm |
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