Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-28076892-20190206162024

One that always kind of bothered me with the LOTR mod is how location in the game doesn't impact gameplay after a certain point of playtime. One could essentially travel from their personal base in the most southern tip of Harad to Mt. Gundabad in 10 seconds. There are different solutions (that vary in terms of difficulty or inconvenience) to this problem that I could think of, and while I think all of them would be amazing if they were to be implemented, they each bring their own issues with them.

Solution 1: remove fast travel entirely

This is probably the most hardcore of them all and would most likely work best on servers. Having to walk everywhere would give players the opportunity to peddle goods from one place to another, make regional goods more rare and give an interesting new perspective on politics and alliances. Someone who built a base in Forodwaith or the mountains of the Wind would live so far from the civil world that they would be forced to be isolationist. East and west would be more disconnected from each other, like they were in lore, as one has to travel a great distance to get to the other side. While I feel that this solution would deliver some interesting differences to trade and politics on servers, this solution would also drive away a lot of new players from the mod, as it would be a pain to walk or ride everywhere. It would also limit the organization of events and the like. It would definitely not work on some of the established servers, as many players travel across the world for all kinds of different things all the time.

Solution 2: Fast travel limit

My second solution would be to create a certain "fast travel limit". This would mean that fast travel is limited to a certain amount of neighbouring regions, using the areas that determine the unlocking of waypoint groups. For example: if one were to start in Belegost in the Blue Mountains with the fast travel limit being 1, they would only be able to travel to a waypoint in Lindon or Eriador, as those regions border the Blue Mountains. I think this would have the advantages of the first solution while keeping the overall time traveled still quite low. This would also mean that people who travel around a lot get lower cooldowns at the waypoints along the route, meaning they can travel across Middle-Earth faster. This would open up new concepts like marching time for armies, mapping out your route as to avoid enemy teritorry and having goods peddlers who take stuff from one end of the map to the other. This option could be disabled in the config, or edited to allow one to travel through multiple regions at once.

Possible addition to Solution 2

In order to make the fast travel system even more immersive, the option could be added to only allow fast travel inside a certain range of a waypoint. As to make up for the fact that travelling through the wilderness takes longer than when travelling by road. Alternatively, a mechanic could be added that instead of 1 region ahead, when on the road one is able to travel an extra region further.

I hope this gets implemented in some way or another. It's at least interesting to speculate about.

-Gondhir Celebrinolf, ai-menu duzhuk 