Town Portals: Good or Bad for ARPGs?

I don't think the devs have said exactly how travel will be implemented in PoE yet and I was wondering what everyone else thinks on this subject.

D3 is getting rid of them completely, and I think it will be a better game because of it. I never really thought about it until I played Titan Quest. You'd be in some dark, eerie, menacing dungeon, and then you'd drop a town portal and go back to the bright, cheery, bustling town. It was just kind of a bizarre transition that made the atmosphere of the dungeon be lost. PoE of exile probably won't have any towns like Titan Quest, but still, when you're really deep down in some dark messed up dungeon, knowing you can drop a town portal at anytime and head back to town kinda takes the weight of the moment away.

as done simply saving and exiting the game. i keep going back to sometimes people need a break, they need to step away. i have 3 kids so being able to jump into town when i have to step away is nice the other options are to save and exit or sit there and probably die. if people want the added dangers of no being able to use a town portal then simply do not buy them. no one made you buy them in D2

town portals on there own aint a bad thing, there are many reasons to jump back into town for some time. (seeling dropped crap as an example)

The only thing that i dont like so much on them is the way u could save ur live with them in D2, running away from a fight should not be the reason to use a TP.
Simply make them not useable while in combat would seem fair to me.
I think thats the biggest reason why they got rid oof them in D3, atleast thats what i remember :)



Narf

it depends on how much running would be required to get back to town . teleports to/from towns are the only reason some games are even bearable .

if it sets up an actual portal it could be combat locked , as could teleport scrolls .

i like fast travel.

this was my main arguement about town portals in D3. they removed them when i said they could easily be fixed. if a player has entered combat be it by choice or if they were attacked the portal will be locked to them until they are out of combat. the devs could of course set the time it takes after killing a mob to be considered out of combat. this seems like easy thing to do but then again i dont make games.

doing the combat lock removes the cheese factor where you can run from mobs jump to town and pop back fully healed. this still leave players the option to quickly get back into the action if they died or if you really want to you can close all town portals when someone dies

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Apocalypse23x wrote:

this was my main arguement about town portals in D3. they removed them when i said they could easily be fixed. if a player has entered combat be it by choice or if they were attacked the portal will be locked to them until they are out of combat. the devs could of course set the time it takes after killing a mob to be considered out of combat. this seems like easy thing to do but then again i dont make games.

doing the combat lock removes the cheese factor where you can run from mobs jump to town and pop back fully healed. this still leave players the option to quickly get back into the action if they died or if you really want to you can close all town portals when someone dies

I like the combat lock, but I'm not sure how I feel about them shutting when you die. When I kick because some random shit went down, I don't want to crawl down five levels of dungeon just to die again. That gets really, REALLY old.

I'm highly in favor for them. Yeah, probably not for running away from combat. Of course I've done that many times in Diablo II. Just put a cast time on it, like 5 seconds.

I also like how you could put one down before a fight and then if you died, you could take the waypoint right to your portal. Titan Quest got annoying because you'd have to run back from the last fountain.

Let's face it, nobody wants to be running back and forth all the time. It's tedius and does nothing for the gameplay.

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pico_suarez wrote:

I like the combat lock, but I'm not sure how I feel about them shutting when you die. When I kick because some random shit went down, I don't want to crawl down five levels of dungeon just to die again. That gets really, REALLY old.

That's exactly how I see it too. If you have to backtrack all the time for trivial reasons (emptying your pack would be the most common) then the game becomes a drag. The idea of waypoints like those in D2 reduces this somewhat but even some of those involved a lot of leg work - consider the flayer jungle maps for example. Having town portals is part of the modern rpg experience imho and the cast delay would get around those who dive back to town at the slightest hint of danger :)

no instant TP or other retreat from battle skill/spell, for me it's kinda obvoius, it provides too much safety and make game too easy to play and too hard/impossible to balance for devs

At least 5 seconds cast time or even more on hardcore (if it's gonna be hc mode, sry I haven't read faq so far :F).

Of course cast time should depends on speed of the game and monsters, if they're gonna be fast 5 sec will be ok.

Any in/out of battle system will probably have some bugs and or downturns, better keep it simple and put global few seconds delay inho.

TP here stands not only for town portal but any long range form of transportaion.

a cast time wont really prevent abuse. you can slap a 30 second cast time on it and people will just cast it before combat and run back to it if needed. a combat lock is the best way to go if you want to avoid tp abuse.

also i dont like the idea of the tp's closing either i just threw it out there

one thing i also threw out there for D3 was removing tp's and giving everyone a self town teleport that had a 10 second cast timer. this could not be set up in advance and casting would get interupted if attacked. of course this has no way to return since it is a teleport so you would need to use the last waypoint or whatever and walk from there. not my favorite idea and probably works better for D3 which will have waypoints all over the joint


in the end my favorite idea is a combat lock on the portal