Better Immersion through crappy teleporters

| Friday, September 17, 2010
For too long we've been teleported to random instances with random people with no sense of a world. We could hand-wave it all away and say that a wizard did it. Well screw that wizard, I want something more concrete. Specifically I want more faulty engineering devices.

For once this isn't me asking for another awesome engineering device, though I did have one in mind: Unique and Beautiful Flower. That's for another day. Instead I want gnome and goblin engineers to devise a system of Person Subspace Somewhere Near There Transporter Devices and Day Spas. These would replace the current wizard-based teleportation for instances. Instead of being teleported directly into instances, we'd instead be teleported to somewhere very near the instance. No one knows quite where, but it would certainly be near. Could be 50 yards away or 50 yards above. Maybe you'll be in the middle of a whole lot of angry enemies. But don't worry! Most of the time you'll be in a temporary immunity bubble. Or frozen in place. Possibly also phased out of the world. Temporarily.

What's the point?

The point is to still reduce travel time so people aren't scared away from instances and to not totally disrupt questing either, since I know it can be hard to pry someone away from just needing one more drop and they'll be on their way in a minute. But at the same time, to bring back the sense that instances are somewhere.

To prevent this being used as a travel method, movement away from the instance would not be possible beyond 100 yards or so. This is due to the uh, residual magnetic defluxualization.

Who needs wizard hand-waving when we can have less reliable engineer hand-waving?

4 comments:

Syl said...

Why am I suddenly reminded of Mel Brooks with his head facing the wrong way in Spaceballs?? :P

I think it would be fair if the world in wow had some set teleport 'points' or hubs of a kind spread over the maps, from where any given place is more or less far away to get to. it's something frequently done to ease travel in other MMOs without taking the entire experience of it away.

Shintar said...

@Syl: But isn't that kind of what flight paths are there for already?

I wouldn't mind teleporters like that. To be honest I found it weird that Blizzard implemented the current dungeon finder teleport as it is, without as much as even an attempt to give an in-game justification for why we can suddenly be anywhere in the world in the blink of an eye. "The UI did it" is a pretty poor reason really.

Syl said...

I guess that's true, even tho getting from point A to point B with FPs can be very long and tedious if you're not a mage. the portal to tanaris in dalaran helped a little to get to southern kalimdor for example, i wouldn't mind more such quick ports.

Klepsacovic said...

I'm actually pretty happy with the state of transportation and portals outside of LFD right now, at least at max level. With the variety of portals scattered around players can avoid the worst of the flights. Essentially each continent is divided up into large sectors serviced by a portal.

Though without the Tanaris portal, Alliance are in pretty bad shape in southern Kalimdor. I suppose IF-Menethil-Theramore isn't too awful, but it does seem rather roundabout compared to the Horde equivalent of Org-STV. I suppose the Alliance has some difficulty with northern EK, since their cities are mostly middle-southern. I suppose Gilneas should help with that.

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