A minor (or major?) gripe about the Caravans outside my capital city.

Dahveed · April 23

I was just wandering around doing crafting writs outside Mournhold and left the city gates, and I see a bunch of carts and such. I mean I saw them but didn't really notice them. But I did notice a random donkey for some reason that I ran past... Then noticed it was interactable.

Who knows, maybe I can pet him? Or it'll be some silly Fallout-style instance of bizarre dialogue where I can actually open a dialogue window and something goofy happens. "Let's find out!"

So I interact, get a loading screen, and *poof!*, I'm in.... fricken' High Isle? What???

So I go back immediately (I'm nowhere near that DLC yet, I'm still in Elsweyr for crying out loud) so I go back, and then realize all those carts I was ignoring can actually transport me to different zones.

What a bland, unimmersive way of transporting me. I have my own qualms about the wayshrines plastered all over the place in every zone, but that's a completely different rant. But at least before we had navigators you could interact with for the alliances and such.

This just seems lazy and bizarre. Not a huge deal I guess (like I said I never even really noticed this stuff before), but if I were the lead dev I'd implement some sort of caravan outpost or stables or something with NPCs you can talk to and make the whole experience feel like you're actually travelling in Tamriel over great distances, and not just clicking on different pixels to "coc" to a different game cell in a video game.

/shrug

Nerouyn · April 24

Dahveed wrote: »

But at least before we had navigators you could interact with for the alliances and such.

They're still there. I used them recently on some newly created characters.

They're also I suspect highly underused. Possibly not a day goes by that I don't hear people begging in zone chat for a "ride" to somewhere which I know is reachable through the game's transit system.

I don't know the cart you're referring to specifically but I know that NPC attempted verbal interactions with players to trigger those distant land quests became a bit of a joke.

You can't do them all at once. Most players want to play everything in order.

You end up beset by a constant stream of NPCs begging your urgent aid, which you end up ignoring for like in my case, years.

Had dragons truly been in Elsweyr unattended by my good self for as long as they've been asking for my help, it'd be roasted kitty hides from horizon to horizon.

If they've introduced some quieter means to reach those places, it could be because of that rather than laziness.

Dahveed · April 27

Maybe a compromise then? At least give me some kind of a popup message with a "yes" or "no" option asking me if I want to, you know, instantaneously teleport 7,000 miles to the other side of the planet in 3 seconds.

This world is so massive yet seems so tiny. That would be a different post altogether, and it's far far FAR too late to make those kinds of changes even if they were so inclined. But I'm always struck at just how tiny Tamriel truly feels.

I'm probably showing how much of a boomer I am but I actually miss the old WoW classic system where you had to wait a few minutes for a boat or a zepplin if you wanted to change continents. It actually kind of felt like you were travelling somewhere and not just hop-skip-and-jumping to another game cell in a video game.

Along with many other compounding factors that would be too pedantic to list here, the travel system in this game is such that the "feel" of distance in this game is non-existent. Everything feels like I'm just hopping between different crammed-in hockey arenas, rather than traversing a continent (or, in some cases, between literal realms).

Oh well.

ESO_player123 · April 27

I few minutes of travel might feel immersive while you are new to the game or are in a new area. After several years of playing you want to get as fast as you can to wherever you are going in the old zones.

Carcamongus · April 27

I saw that donkey that could take me to High Isle. I had never seen a donkey that could swim long distances before.