The list of MMORPGs I have played over the years since starting SWG in 2003 is a relatively substantial one. SWG through the CU (but not NGE), City of Heroes, Guild Wars, Lord of the Rings (Beta only), Saga of Ryzom, Vanguard, and most recently World of Warcraft. The game I’ve played the longest (with periodic interruptions of months to as much as a year) is City of Heroes (I just hit my 36 month vet reward on that game, which is roughly 52 months old). The most recent one I tried was WOW.

My time in WOW did not last very long. It was fun for the first 10 levels or so, and then turned into a very boring, slow, tedious grind. But it wasn’t the combat grind, or the auction house grind, or the crafting grind that finally did WOW in for me. No, what killed WOW for me was spending nearly an hour just traveling from one place to another to turn in a quest, and then back again. In short, what murdered WOW for me was TRAVEL TIME.

Now, Travel Time in WOW is really not beyond the pale compared to other MMORPGs. One strange element to the game is that there is no sprint or burst run, which I find exceedingly odd. Most charactes move at a rate that could be characterized as a “fast walk,” and even mounts only move you as fast as what COH would call a “sprint.”  It will take you many minutes, even mounted, to get from point A to point B… usually through an area full of grey cons that holds not one feature of current (i.e., your level) interest. The monotony and tediousness of WOW travel is, I would say, typical of MMORPGs rather than unusual, and they do provide “flying mount” points to allowyou to move from point A to B more rapidly… but it’s not instantaneous, and flying a long distance with bats = time to go use the powder room or have a snack (it takes many minutes, though of course is much faster than running).

The problem WOW had, at least from my end, was that at the same time as I was playing it, I was still playing COH… and I am a long-time vet of COH. Starting at 14th level in COH, your character can (and mine always do) get a “travel power.” These include Flight, which is slow but essentially risk-free; SuperJump which is much faster but entails risk (each time you “touch down” in a zone your level or higher there is a chance you might land next to some aggro spawns — though it’s not hard to avoid them); Superspeed, which is a very fast travel mode but has no vertical ability, annoying in the zones with high vertical relief, of which there are many; and Teleport, which is the fastest mode and just as safe as flying (if you teleport up in the air) but annoying in that it requires constant clicking. The slowest of these travel modes, flight, will move you roughly as fast as the fastest possible travel mode in WOW (flying transport mounts).

In general, I select SuperJump as my travel power… it has no annoying features (like being unable to scale vertical surfaces), it’s quite fast (equivalent to roughly 70 mph), and it’s a lot of fun to hop around from roof to roof. The speed and convenience of SuperJump has a huge impact on my gameplay. From the point where I receive a mission, it’s usually less than a minute to get to the mission door and start the mission. Contrast this with over an hour a few times in WOW. In short, once you get to 14th level, the amount of “travel time sink” you are faced with is minimal — nearly non-existent. By 30th level, when your SuperJump power has gotten faster, you can jump longer and higher between “touch downs”, and you have probably enhanced it with a Jump enhancer to make it even better, you are zooming around the COH zones and getting to missions really quickly. Add to that the “cell phone” feature once you do a few missions for a contact, and you can literally spend an hour in COH doing 3 20-minute missions, with only seconds of down-time between them, if you so choose.

And of course, when I am in the mood for missions rather than travel, I do indeed so choose.

Now, it is often objected by folks who either like travel itself, or at least like the “realism” that travel brings to a game, that not having long-term travel can hinder certain elements of the game. For example, rapid-fire travel makes the world feel smaller. I don’t find this to be the case in COH, but part of that is due to the fact that the world is limited to a huge city. Still, the city does not feel small… it’s clearly as large as all 5 buroughs of NYC put together. Some of the zones can be many miles across (Independence Port is 2.5 miles long and over a mile wide, for instance). And yet, travel between zones is instantaneous (on the metro), and travel within a zone is very quick (with Flight, Superspeed, etc). I think the reason the city in COH feels large is because (a) the zones are large, and you still have to travel through them… the sense that you are moving FAST, helps you feel like you are also moving a LONG DISTANCE, and (b) there are lots of zones (30 or so), which makes you realize how huge the city really is once you get a feel for it.  I think COH has hit on the right balance of travel options to give players a good feel for the city size, while still minimizing the amount of time wasted in mindless (and not-fun) travel.

A second issue with speedy travel powers is that players might tend not to explore. There are often “Easter eggs” hidden in the landscape, and if you can just fly over it in 2 minutes, will you ever find them? In my experience this is not an issue in COH. Indeed, COH has 122 “exploration badges” that can be located. Many of these are in places that have no obvious physical features — instead being something like a normal-looking rooftop that just so happens to be the sight of a battle years ago between Statesman and Lord Recluse. There may be no graphical feature to distinguish it, but if you land on the roof or touch it in the right spot, you get a badge. Not only have the players found all 122 of these badges collectively, but many players have earned them all. My main character, Comet Flare, has has SuperJump since level 14, and yet, so far, she has 89 exploration badges to date… and most of the remaining ones are in zones that she is not a high enough level to explore safely yet. And Comet is by no means one of the highest badge collectors on my SuperGroup (guild), let alone my server. Indeed whole websites have sprung up like “badge-hunter.com” to take care of this for players and help them keep track of what badges they have earned, and which ones are left to earn. The history badges (of which Comet has 15 out of 17, again missing ones she is not a high enough level for yet), also require you to find specific spots in the city, and this time to click on plaques that bring up a popup window telling you some little tidbit about the history of the COH world.

What I have found from this experience is that far from discouraging players, including myself, from finding the “Easter eggs” in the world, giving me a convenient means of travel has given me a reason to look for them. Because the REST of my time is not being wasted on travel, I have time to just hop around the city (or fly around it, or teleport around it) looking for interesting spots. And I would say I have found just about every cool spot in just about ever zone in COH (Fraktal, my main, has found more spots, as a level 50, but I wasn’t using badge hunter when I played her, and badges hadn’t been implemented yet when she found some of the spots).

In the end, one thing I have definitely concluded from my joint WOW-COH experience is that I can no longer stomach the slow, plodding forms of travel most MMORPGs force upon their players. COH has spoiled me, by showing me that not only can travel be fun and quick in a game, but the things that people generally claim travel would ruin, have not been ruined in COH, but been enhanced. The world does not seems mall. The Easter eggs are still found by many players (indeed, finding them is a hobby to most of us). And I have not missed out on one drop of content. On the contrary, I have experienced it ALL, because I can get right to it without having to waste any time.

I don’t think I’ll be able to play any future MMORPGs unless they are at least as good with travel as COH is. I am hoping Champions Online will be… but I’m not sure if any other game will.