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Getting around Free Realms was always easy. Once you reach a new area's teleportation stone and click on it, you can click on it on the map from anywhere in the game world and jump to it immediately, just as you can jump to anyone on your friends list. It gets easier, too. Take a quest and a green dotted line extends from your character's feet across the map to where you need to go. It was a simple matter to open the map, click the stone nearest your destination, and then hoof it from there.

After Friday's reassurance from SOE that Free Realms is headed to the PS3 in 2010 I decided to log back into my character on PC and play a bit. To my surprise they made navigation even easier with a new "take me there" sneaker-adorned button which you can see in the picture of the quest window or widget at left.

Push this "take me there" button and your character runs along the green dots to the target on autopilot. I immediately smiled, loving this feature, and also felt a twinge of distress at how lazy this really is. I'm not sure if this feature is always available for new quests or just if you've already reached an area before, but I still like it.

You can see that SOE's focus is on keeping people in the game and eliminating frustration for the younger gamers out there. I can imagine a kid looking at the long dotted line and scurrying off to look at something else shiny online. If this keeps them logged in so they can chat while their character saunters along, it works for them.

Given that every classical MMO out there ends up with a bot or script to try and walk you from place to place, I imagine this is a feature that MMO makers could probably charge for and get the hardcore gamers to buy. What do you think?