The Daily Grind: Long treks and earned mounts, or easy fast travel?
Long overland quests are a fantasy staple which migrated into the MMO genre. This blogger remembers when World of Warcraft was first nicknamed World of Walking. It may not have been the first MMORPG to use the model, but it's the most famous: have a huge world that players begin by walking around in, eventually giving them the ability to use mounts to travel much faster. Age of Conan follows the trend, providing glorious landscapes and not allowing players to use horses until around level 40, a full half way through the leveling progression. Even sprinting in Age of Conan can only be done in short bursts.
City of Heroes took a radically different approach. (It could hardly not do so, what with comic book heroes superspeeding and flying all over the place.) The individual zones were much smaller, and characters could take 'travel powers' at level 14, which would get them from place to place in a fraction of the time it would take to run. Later issues introduced temporary travel powers given out as rewards for Mayhem and Safeguard missions, which allowed characters to fly as early as level 5. The flipside is that the game world feels a lot smaller, with no sense of the long trek into the unknown, far from home.
Should games still adhere to the familiar format of walking a long way, taking in the sights, then earning your mount and really appreciating it? Or should characters be able to skip trekking from an early level, and just get to go where they want to go, at risk of missing out on the scenery? Is walking a tiresome chore, or a valid way to ensure players see the world the designers created?
