[MUD-Dev] I Want to Forge Swords. [Another letter to game designers]

[Auli]

Batir wrote:

> I've never played EQ.  I have played UO for three years now, and
> location means nothing there.  I can get anywhere in the game within
> 5 minutes or so.  Deepest dungeon, farthest corner of the world,
> might as well be next door.  I've also played GemStone III.  At the
> time I played, they had 2 towns.  Travel between the two wasn't
> something you did in a couple seconds.  Took at least 20 minutes if
> memory serves me right, and was a dangerous trip as well.  Some
> items could only be bought in one of the towns.  Often when I
> traveled from one to the other, I stayed at the local inn, and
> hunted, shopped, lived, and yes, socialized in that town for a
> while.  Sometimes friends came with me, sometimes I was travelling
> to meet a friend, and sometimes I went by myself and meet new
> friends.

Well UO sounds like probably too much instantaneous travel.  I didn't
play long as I was already used the the PK switch from The Realm and
gave it up in frustration rather quickly.  Gemstone III sounds rather
more like version 2.x of The Realm.  There were just two cities and
they were a similar distance apart.  I was describing version 3.x
which had 8 or so cities all connected by a teleport system.  It is
noteworthy however that travel to adventuring spots was never
instantaneous.  You could teleport to the nearest city, but getting to
a dungeon could still be quite time consuming from that point.  The
point is it was always easy to get back to 'civilization' if you
wanted to.  Because of that towns tended to be highly populated by PCs
and these 'social spaces' formed naturally.  PCs in EQ are nomads,
getting to any city can be so time consuming that they are simply way
points and supply stops.

Auli

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