Do you consider travel as part of your adventure?

[Donald Hellscream]

Not really, I mean I do like exploring but after months, I either put my flying mount on autorun and alt tab or hop on a flightpath and alt tab.

Even back in classic I didn't really pay attention to the world around me, I followed the super vague instructions from the quest text and only looked for whatever mob, item etc. was mentioned in the text. If I were to play classic now I'd tunnel-vision even more on the quest objective than I did back then so if anything I'd take even less of the world in.

[Thelxi]

Other than the first time seeing the place, absolutely not.

[hyphnos]

HELL FUCKING NO.

In Everquest, travel could be an adventure and genuinely challenging. In WoW, travel is a tedious time sink that mostly rewards skill in dodging mob aggro radius and not getting dismounted as you run through it. (that it, it is lacking in any challenge that would make it remotely interesting)

Travel as far as WoW goes is just a time sink to burn your time between activities and needs to be fucking gutted.

[Barkloud]

THIS! I absolutely loved leveling in Cata because you could fly. I also loved that you auto-learned flight paths as you hit the correct levels for the related content, instead of having to go back and painfully acquire them later. Then again, isn't that when we got Have Group Will Travel? I LOVED HGWT because it made it SO easy to get or give help. And they took it ALL away. NOW they want to take away waterwalking, and force you to buy THAT skill back on a per character basis.

I just pray there is a major Dev cleanout coming up. Surely SOME exec somewhere will remove their head out of their ass long enough to realize the Devs are alienating the player base with each and every quality of life nerf.

I forgot about have group will travel. That was truly awesome

[TigTone]

For me it depends on how I’m feeling at the moment.

Some days it nice to travel through the new zones, old zones, take new looks at forgotten places.

Other days I just want to go where I need to be as fast as possible.

[hulkgor]

"Do you consider travel as part of your adventure?"

Absolutely.

The world itself, and its dangers was a lot more prominent in the early stages of WoW, but 'travel' is still an important part of the adventure.

[Biomega]

Metaphorically, yes. Practically, no.

Running down the road for 15 minutes isn't fun gameplay to me. Even if there's exploration.

I'm fine with events interrupting quick-travel, though, as long as they're done well and don't repeat too much.

[endersblade]

If you hate travel, don't EVER play FFXI.

[Sylvaeres]

In older iterations of WoW? Sure.
In a world with flying, not really.

So basically Vanilla, which released like 15 years ago or something like that? Ok guy.

[analmoose]

I had a debate with a friend the other day regarding travel in lobby games, open world games and games like Neverwinter that fall in the middle. Both of us have been playing mmorpgs with the same people since UO launched and have played most of the mmorpg games out there over the years. Each of these games has had their own spin on travel. I was wondering how a community like mmo-champ looks at travel


Do you consider travel in WoW to be part of your adventure or does your adventure start when you arrive at your destination?

Do you find travel fun?

Not really, I enjoyed it with flying, but otherwise it is just a chore, rather get a summon, port or afk on a FP if i must

[Zandalariprelate]

Feels horrible without flying, the WQ system made the dialies system far worse because you have to travel a long distance to do x mission that you do at worse in 2 minutes

[darklogrus]

Depends on the game and the amount of time I have been in that games world. For BFA it was the case while leveling and a couple weeks at max game. But after that its more annoying then it really should.

[Charge me Doctor]

If flying works - no; If flying doesn't work - yes

- - - Updated - - -

travel is fun in open world games designed for exploration like skyrim were you may find that tower full of bandits or a dungeon or a dragon/monster suddenly attacking, wow world is too small and too static to be entertaining plus addons mostly spoil the fun and rewards aren't as nice as open world games.

...unless you already know about those towers full of bandits or dungeons, which is often the case with wow.

[Mestalis]

I enjoy traveling if there is still something happening. If environments have unique visuals and audio, the area is appropriately populated with things just to look at, and things to interact with, I really enjoy it. I also appreciate it when the game rewards me for progressing through an area enough times, by providing me with faster forms to travel, and instant travel options. I appreciate movement speed and type "gating" for new areas, because I want to experience them in the optimal way according to the people who designed them. I don't enjoy retreading the same travel path over and over again with no reward of faster and instant travel.

[Dastreus]

Yes. The first few times.

[Lothaeryn]

In older iterations of WoW? Sure.
In a world with flying, not really.

Yep, travel back when it was designed around ground based navigation in Vanilla made mapping very open and broad so as to make it easier to travel large locales; most locations didnt have a giant fucking cliff that forced you to run around half of the zone to get up, expecting you to eventually trump it by unlocking flying in some fashion.

Honestly it matters little in MMO's anymore, it can be quite obvious when an elevation change is deliberate to force the player to navigate a very specific corridor for content in a zone. I despise that kind of mapmaking: not allowing the user the freedom to navigate to their destination their own way circumvents the purpose of an open world design, and very rarely can be justified for certain scenario building, which most MMO's fail to do anyways.

[SirCowdog]

...unless you already know about those towers full of bandits or dungeons, which is often the case with wow.

To be fair, there's some amount of replay value, even if you already know about the tower and the bandits, as long as you're playing a completely different character build. How you approach the tower as an archer or spellcaster will be different enough from a melee to give you a new experience, even though you've already been there.

Unfortunately this isn't something that WoW does very well. Despite the number of different classes and specs, WoW's experience can be boiled down to RDPS and MDPS. There's very little in the way of replay value once you've gone through any particular piece of content as both.

[Alex86el]

It depends.
In certain games, yes.

For bad examples,
in Neverwinter, while it had amazing combat and the awesome "foundry", the maps were really boring.
It was like there were signs everywhere "go that way now".
In WoW it sucks that the combat is really boring and unchallenging. Blizzard seems to think "longer to kill" equals "harder".
Sorry Bliz, but how many times i repeat my rotation does not define the difficulty of a mob. When will you learn that? Go play some Heart of Thorns.
Worst of all was FFXIV. MY GOD WHAT A DRAG! There is literally zero exploration. But ironically the questing system is 99.99% traveling.
It's basically: Talk to mute NPC, pick up quest, travel for 5', talk to another mute NPC, teleport back, repeat 500 times. Every single quest, lol.
Not to mention that i literally went to max level without dying once. Didn't even feel like i was in danger at any point.

For good examples,
games such as ESO and GW2.
The first offered amazing exploration and immersion, you simply "escaped" for a while.
And the second is trully a fun game to do anything.
In the vanilla version there's tons of hidden paths to special little things, and jumping puzzles, even riddles.
(and i dont mean the toddler-level ones from WoD/Leg/BFA)
And on the second expansion it was a blast! You had to do a ton of exploration only to find the way to the place you wanted to go,
and even the smallest mob was trully a challenge. Yes, i definitely consider traveling in that game as part of the adventure.
Though they toned it down a lot in the third expansion, it's still fine. It even has a zone with constant lightning storm, where you have to run from cover to cover and pick your fights carefully, or you'll die. How fun is that?


So, to sum it up...
If the terrain is interesting and complex, and you can use your class's fun abilities to "cheat" a bit, like grappling hooks, leaps, blinks, glides, etc...
If there are subtle paths that lead to actually interesting things.
If there are terrain dangers, like needing to be really careful to cross certain points or fall to your death.
If the mobs are dangerous, challenging, and not just boring and time consuming.
Then traveling can be considered part of the adventure. Else, it's just a time sink.


If i had to rank the areas of WoW by "fun to travel through" factor...

1. WoD
2. Legion
3. Pandaria
4. BFA
5. Northrend

But eventually, flying ruins everything.
Might as well add teleports everywhere.

[Big Mama]

Yes! Traveling and exploring are one of the best parts of the game that they didn't ruin ... yet

[Benomatic]

With the inclusion of chests, increased rares, toys and pets etc in later expansions has certainly given me more incentive to wander from the beaten path and explore.