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Let's look back to the late 1980s, for a spell. Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy were more than king, they were the only players on the field. They set the groundwork for how things have developed in ways both vast and far-reaching. Their philosophies, for the most part, are still represented today... but I'm curious over a set of designs that seem to be vanishing.
In Dragon Warrior, you had a return spell that could get you back to the first city, always. It was the first of it's kind, a representation of the belief that the player shouldn't have to struggle to return to somewhere he's already been. It evolved in future versions, allowing the player to leave dungeons when they need to and travel to any city they'd been to previously if they needed to go there. This was representative of a design philosophy:
The player should be spending his or her time interacting. The challenge provided by playing through to the area is undoubtedly part of the game, but once it's done, we shouldn't force the player to do it again. Who really wants to walk a huge way back? Who wants to fight puny enemies that provide no challenge to go see what's going on ten cities back? We don't think the player should have to waste their time on it when they want to go interact with a part of the world.
In Final Fantasy, they took a different route. They gave you ships. Not just ships that let you move a little faster, but ones that let you transverse the globe in moments. These things would ignore the barriers that had been put there to slow you down originally. They were for convenience. Yeah, they were also used to provide a way to reach areas that you couldn't get to any other way, but if that was their only purpose they wouldn't have had any reason to move faster.
Later variants used both speedy vehicles and warp spells. Heck, warp spells would bring your vehicles to you. After all, who wants to play 'remember where you parked your car'? These were a mainstay through most of the 1990s. The vast majority of games had something like this if they allowed going backwards at all. Sure, one might point out that having warp spells provides a bit of a reasoning problem, but it was one that was vastly ignored in favor of giving the player a more convenient way to travel backwards to see where they had been. Similar to life spells, they were not there because they were meant to be a big part of the realistic integrity of the worldset, but because they made the game more convenient to play. It was entertainment. Why make the player suffer getting assailed by weak beasts as they spend fifteen minutes walking back to a village with nothing even remotely threatening between the two points? That's not fun!
So...what happened to this? What happened to the vehicles that went 'whoosh' and traveled cross the map in an instant and the warp spells that would take you where you want to go? Look at Final Fantasy X. It had an airship that dropped you off sometimes a full level from the city. What were they thinking? Shockingly, that seems to be GOOD these days. Breath of Fire: Dragon's Quarter consisted of nothing but wandering around the dungeon, leaving no quick way to travel back to unload all the mess you'd pick up in each set of long dungeons or to travel back, if you felt like it, outside of walking the whole way. While I don't play it, I haven't passed an evening in the last four weeks without hearing someone grumble over the sheer nuisance it is in Final Fantasy XI to walk everywhere and spend sometimes fifteen to twenty minutes to just get over to where your friends are waiting for you. I'm playing Star Ocean 3 right now where you have to walk literally everywhere. I'm told even in the end, the best you get it some warp points. That's it? Sure, a few still have some vague semblance of it, but what is up with this trend? Developers, remember us! We are lazy. We are gamers. We come to game! We don't come to walk the route between Arlia and Aquinos twenty times in the hopes that something at least remotely challenging and fun will appear that wasn't there the other nineteen times! When we log onto an MMORPG, we want to hang out with our friends! Not spend thirty minutes walking to reach them! We like going zoom about the world map! We like a world map! We like saying "I want to go check on Taloon. I'll warp over to his place and say HI!" If we really enjoy a section of your map and feel like walking it over and over again, we'll do it on our own without having it mandated by having no other way to go between cities. So, in a line... Where have all the warp spells gone and when are they coming back?
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