Portal or no portal?

I prefer #2. The third options sounds good, but you can achieve it by not using portals. It's all up to preference really.

 

Option #3 sounds great, but going on foot can be quite tedious. If there are other means of transportation, for example like horses or cars, that is the best medium. Makes it feel like an adventure, which I like!

 

Even with mounts that speed up the process, it's still tedious getting from zone to zone. A good compromise would be a hybrid system. Portals between zones and using mounts to travel between points in a specific zone.

 

You are certainly right.

 

You are certainly right because often times i feel the same way too.

 

While I do enjoy month long quests I usually prefer to be able to travel quite quickly between places, so I'd say option 1 for me. I just don't have that much time to be able to spend a lot of it playing online games.

 

I like the way Guild Wars 2 does Portals, You can use the free ones which will take you city to city or you can pay to use the waypoint system. Even when I could afford to use the waypoint system I found I would run from place to place more often than not, unless it was a really long run.

 

One of the problems with this is just developer resources. While it is great to have a huge world with all these minor, hidden events that can happen... it is just not good business to pay guys to design stuff that most players will never see.

I mean think about it, in WOW they tell you the reason there are not more class quests is because only a fraction of players will see it..

While your idea sounds great as a player, it just is not feasible. The reason there is fast travel and portals is so that the devs can count on a very high percentage of players actually seeing that content, thus justifying the cost to build it.

 

Portals for main cities and craftable scrolls for villages for me. Players will have to unlock it by getting to each area on foot plus warping need to be level restricted or else it can't be abused for power leveling lowbies. Having every area accessible by teleportation just makes everyone lazy plus we'll miss a lot of profitable areas specially when it comes to crafting.

 

If the map is large enough, than I think portals or some form of teleportation is almost necessary.

 

I like Bethesta's solution - fast travel. Once you explore an area, then it unlocks for fast travel. It requires you to still explore the zone, but once you've seen the content - you can quickly get to anywhere you want to go with the click of a mouse. Once I've seen the content, I'm no longer interested in a jogging or horseback simulator.

I remember trying to organize ANYTHING in vanilla WoW; the first 3 hours were a waste trying to get everyone in the same area at the same time. There was always at least one person who had to fly from one end of the world to the other.

 

I like being able to teleport to all of the major cities, and that's about it. I don't think it's necessary to have every game be like Skyrim where you can travel to ANYWHERE that you've ever been. At the same time, I feel for a game to be enjoyable, you should have access to the major cities at all times, because they often provide a lot of useful content.