fallout 4 survival mode, it doenst have fast travel BUT has the vertibirds that are usless in other difficulties so you have to stay in good relations with brotherhood of steel or later into the game when you reach the institute you can teleport from anywhere back to the institute wich is near hanged mans alley wich in other difficulties is the worst settlement in the game but in survival its the best due to its proximity with diamond city and the institute
I agree with Lautaro Perez. I also think that Gothic did it very well with the teleportation runes that the player can obtain later in the game after exploring the compact map.
Far Cry 2 had my favoure bus stops, allowing you to get to a specific place only if you grab a bus passing by with a clear map on it, showing where it leads
Old School World of Warcraft sort of did it the best honestly. From purchasing trips on a gryphon/wyvern from a local flightmaster or a portal from a high level mage player, to learning a specific type of Goblin/Gnomish engineering to use their respective teleportation pads, or even just hopping onto a boat.. the sheer variety and uniqueness of the fast travel systems always sort of blended into the world, got you from one place to another without feeling too gimmicky.
Another good point of the Morrowind fast travel system: it's a money sink. In the early game it forces you to either be very careful about planning your routes, or take the cheaper option of traveling on foot. Both of these immerse you deeper into the game. Later in the game when you get so rich you no longer care about the costs it rewards you with that sense of privilege, the ability to just go anywhere on a whim. Hard-earned freedom. And it keeps money at least somewhat relevant for the whole game, even when you're kitted out in the best enchanted gear you can possibly own.
It's like the RPGs in the 90s. They weren't open world, but traveling around the map still required effort. I especially liked the games that ultimately gave the player some kind of airship. It still wasn't FAST travel, but it was the fastest, and still had a trade off if the player wen to the wrong place and had to double back.
"In the early game jt forces you to either be very careful about planning your routes, or take the cheaper option of traveling on foot" *laughs in limeware platter*
I like to slowly make friends with all the drivers over the course of the game to lower the cost! By the end I usually have them at 100% and it’s very satisfying to be saving money from something I worked on all game!
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When you know the game, money isn't an issue. I have over 10k gold within the first hour or so.
Morrowind's "fast travel" system could have been great, if not for the fact that the movement speed is *so* slow. I have to resort to cheats to be able to move at a remotely reasonable speed so I don't get bored out of my mind just running to the nearest Silt Strider.
9:11 It should be mentioned that the morrowind makes a real effort to teach you the travelling network through the quest the mage guild and the fighters guild offer to you. Many of them will send you to locations far away, but the questgiver will give you real directions on usind the network to get there. Through the mainquest the game will also push you towards these guilds. The task of learning the network really isn´t all that difficult and happens pretty organicaly through normal play.
On a side note, I love how Morrowind's main story encouraged you to do all this other stuff. In Oblivion and Skyrim the main quests basically tell you to forget about all that other stuff going on, because time is of the essence.
It’s a lot simpler, but I really enjoyed the fast travel in Hollow Knight. Not only is the travel well-explained in universe, the cutscene that plays gives it weight, and makes you feel like you’re actually covering ground. Plus, the stag stations are just sparse enough that it doesn’t completely negate the need for physical exploration.
Yep, even to get to the nearest station you gotta _platform_ there, probably need to get past a few hazards... It doesn't get rid or the platforming in the platforming game and that's why it's good, if you could pull out the map and go to any station it would be way less friendly to the game design
As a long-time Morrowind player, when I play Skyrim I only allow myself to fast travel using carriages and boats. Although I did install a mod that adds departing carriages to four cities that don't have them in the vanilla game.
The Wildlander modlist implements this well. There are *carriages in all major cities, but they can also drop you off (but not pick you up) from smaller towns. The carriages are also relatively expensive so it encourages lower level players to not use them.
I play only lightly modded oblivion quite a lot and I only allow fast travel from stable to stable to act like my character took a carriage, and even them I only "unlock" for it once I've walked to that city once
On the subject of Elder Scrolls fast travel, the Skyrim Special Edition has a survival mode built in that you can turn on after Helgen that requires you to deal with sleep, warmth, and food in addition to turning off that standard fast travel, so all you have access to is the cart network. Travelling via cart isn't very expensive, but it does take time, and therefore will result in your character needing food and sleep when you arrive, so you still have to have some idea of how far away a place is in terms of how much you'll need (particularly since making a large dent in hunger requires cooked food, and cooked food typically requires salt, which can be a pain to get hold of). Given the limited number of places you can get a cart to or from, you end up having to do a lot of walking, which has its benefits because there are a lot of cool things you can come across when doing things that way.
I only wish they had made the carts got to the smaller cities. I tried survival but turned it off when i started needing to go up and down the throat of the world every other quest from Riften
@@Shaweweweeewah There's a mod on Nexus called "Carriage and Ferry Travel Overhaul" that adds boats and carriages in some of the smaller settlements and makes the pricetag more reliant on how far in the middle of nowhere your destination is rather than just the distance.
@@ithidt I use apocalypse spells, and ordinator perks of Skyrim. With these you get spells and perks that let you run really fast while concentrating, and also teleport between 5 fixed points you can choose, finally you can also have an option to always return to a single point. You need master level alteration to use the teleports but it's worth it, so with all these I have teleports to cities that don't have carts and whiterun, and my return home is white run. Ends up with a similar set up to morrowind I guess but with just 2 different forms of fast travels
This is how I am playing sse now. I like it a lot more than straight fast travel…. Especially when I went to one of the further out strongholds and realized they didn’t have a cart back so I had to walk clear across the entire map at a low level… it was amazing. And that’s not sarcasm, it was an epic and intense journey back home at times.
Your grocery store analogy really makes me appreciate European urban planning. In Europe, life is far more similar to a modern fast travel system thanks to essential services being in walking distance and public transport being simple and reliable. While travelling in Europe is not quite as simple as pointing at a map, it's a close as you're going to get!
The GTA series has a great fast-travel system in that it can take you anywhere within moments, but the driving and flying mechanics are so much fun that you rarely use the fast-travel service. Some players may even be unaware of its very existence.
This is the real solution to fast travel woes. Most open world games that implement a fast travel system do so because traveling through their world is boring. The solution is to make traveling part of the game. GTA is a good example, also the Insomniac Spider-Man games, and Just Cause. World of Warcraft is also about to introduce a system with their new expansion pack called Dragon Riding that turns flight travel into a fun system to use, instead of something boring you have to do between quest content.
Yep. GTA San Andreas allows you to use airports and trains to travel to unlocked cities. However, I think the main issue is that you never really have a reason to move to a city other than the one the missions currently are at.
I didn't even know they have a fast travel system, and I've played through GTA 4 and 5 completely. Never bothered doing a second story playthrough for either, because I've never been able to get invested in any story more than once, except for with We Happy Few
Its a taxi ride. You can hail a taxi and you can select where it will take you. From mission point, shops to random map location you have placed your marker. And I love it, as it gives you options how you want to travel. You can just leave it to the driver to follow traffic laws and all. You can pay him extra to hurry up, that would make him break some laws. Or you can just teleport. It's a fun system, but at the same time, not as useful because driving yourself is just fun in GTA games.
The main issue I have with the fast travel system is you don't actually experience the journey like with skyrim if you walk down the road you might be forced to fight bandits or wolves or you might find a deserted camp that gives you a quest to find out what happened those things are some of the most fun and imersive things I've experienced in any game
This is why I like the WoW original fast travel system where you fly over the map on a fast mount on a fixed route. It shows off the world they built and you can see other players battling on the ground which really helps with immersion, and it's still quite fast.
There's a fallout mod that tries to get around this by adding a chance that every time you fast travel, you get stopped enroute by a random event that can occur any place on the map between where you are and where you're going.
I like to play Skyrim without fast travels and even without the map, to find myself I mostly use the environment, the direction boards and the compass, it's a really fun way to play
To my knowledge the best iteration on fast travel was done on *Kingdom Come: Deliverance* In KCD you could only fast travel to very specific points of settlements, or towns. But here's the catch. First, you had to be on a proper road, or near one. If you were in the middle of the woods, it would just be rejected until you at least reached a beaten path. Secondly, if you DID fast travel, you weren't just going to "teleport" from point A to point B. Your character was going to traverse a specific path and take the main roads to get there, and he would take time to get there, so if you were in a hurry, it could bite you in the ass. Finally (and this is the best part), when travelling you risk getting a random event, from weird encounters, to traders, to ambushes with either bandits or raiders. You had a lot skills and perks to better engage and spot or sense what was happening, but sometimes you could get a guy selling you a treasure map, or whom you could kill and rob for nice loot, or you would be the target of a robbery.
@@XzaroX Oh yeah, I didn't play either of the first Fallouts, but I recall that there was a similar method of fast travel. What were the main differences with KCD's fast travel, if you don't mind me asking? :)
@@KRIMZONMEKANISM The main difference is that in Fallout 1 and 2 the fast travel was "Mandatory". There was no continuous world, only many smaller levels. That being said, you still moved on the map and there was always a chance for a random encounter. Many of those encounters are quite memorable and whacky. Additionally, there was no need to eat food, so that part was irrelevant, but time still passed and was more significant. KCD does have some time-limited quest, but in Fallout 1, the main quest was limited to 150 days. There is a story reason for it, so it makes sense. In many games the story may say that something is urgent, but the gameplay does not reflect that. Well in Fallout 1 it does. You really are in a hurry. If you run out, the game is over. You do get some nice time-related game over cutscenes though. There is a way to extend that time a bit via some quests that also make sense story-wise. As a result you may want to plan your game a bit, as going back and forth willy-nilly will end up wasting that precious time.
@@XzaroX Ah, I see. I didn't know the fast travel was mandatory, but I do recall the game being on a timer, and I did know that there were some neat interactions with the story being that you want to retrieve a water ship for your own vault. :)
When I was playing Skyrim I naturally found myself avoiding the fast travel because I felt so immersed in the world. After having played the game for hundreds of hours I had never fast traveled once and I enjoyed every minute of my adventures on foot. And trying to get Lydia home safely to boot. :)
Same. Although, after a bit, I made use of the wagon occasionally. And installed some mods that made it possible to fast travel from Dragon's Reach down to the front gate of Whiterun and to the Whiterun stables just to skip Nazeem asking me if I get to the Cloud District.
On the consoles I have to fast travel because of silly invisible walls and the complete lack of paths on the map but on pc I have a mod to show the paths on the map and I can plan my route
But this is why Skyrim's system is fine, you don't HAVE to use the Fast Travel anywhere. In fact it's brilliant for players to implement all kinds of self imposed challenges.
@@mattandrews2594 Exactly. Just because you have a fast travel system doesn’t mean you have to use it. There have been times when I’ve had to go to a location I had unlocked and I just decided “you know what, I’m gonna walk.” The same thing is true in every open world game I’ve played with fast travel.
I recall a mod for skyrim that made fast travel better. Made time go by now realistically. Also had a chance to load you in somewhere randomly along the way attacked by bandits or something. As if you were just riding along in the wagon and got attacked.
Dragon’s Dogma had an interesting fast travel mechanics, you had to put a beacon to fast travel and it was really expensive. It really gave you a sense of “travelling” you had to plan ahead and be careful of the night. I think it was immersive
I loved that fast travel, there was only 4 or 5 fast travel stones built into the world and then you could spend a small fortune on a beacon that you can put down anywhere in the overworld. Ofcourse, then you have to buy fast travel stones just to teleport to said beacons and those stones are used up per teleport.
I appreciate you referencing Gothic visually if not by name. The reason it's version of fast travel works is not just the fact it's written into the magic system (aka more immersive than dealing with a separate menu) but first and foremost the perfect timing of when it's delivered in one's playthrough: right around the point when you've already explored most of the main roads on foot and would start to get bored with them. This way preserves all the joy of exploration but releases the player from tedious retracing later in the game
I think this is a very important point, I fully agree with. Fast travel should cut in, when travelling starts getting boring. I'd rather make a tripe two - three times with different, unexpected, encounters than zip through the game, but when travelling gets stale, I want some literal shortcuts.
I think another thing that people never talk about when discussing fast travel is how the actual game should be built around it and built around distance. I limited fast travel system is fine but if the game is constantly expecting for you to go pinging around the map doing short objectives then it feels very tedious. By the end of my time with Morrowind I was just using a spell that let me jump so far that I could clear mountains which made travelling a joke. I did this because I was enjoying the story of the game but was sick of one NPC in one town telling me to go speak breifly with an NCP in another town just to then be sent back, especially the story mission where you need to get all of the houses and ashlander tribes to accept you as the Nerevarine. That mission is just walking back and forth between places and talking to people. Games need to give a sense of scale by making each region of the game world slightly seperated from each other in terms of missions so that when you are sent to region A you get to stay there for a while doing quests in a more local area and it feels more significant when you are eventually need to move to region B even if region B isn't actually that far away. This would make major quests where you do need to travel back and forth around the work feel more meaningful because you are usually not required to go as far. A good example of why games need to be built around there systems is when a game shoehorns in a hunger system. Since most games have very short day and night cycles you character is constantly getting hungry and keeping up with the hunger system feels like a chore. If the game hasn't taken into account how long objectives or quests in the game are going to take and how often the character will need to eat then it begins to feel less realistic because nobody in real like is stopping mid activity to eat five wheels of cheese, in real life we built our schedules around our need to eat and therefore eat in a few set meals. Travel should be considered in the same way. A game in which travel is important should take travel into account when planning out quest lines and other mechanics so that travelling actually feels like a part of the gameplay and not just something you are forced to do to get from one story beat to another.
people really seem to forget about the time wasting aspect. One quest that comes to mind, is one of the first ones in New Vegas. Nipton, and telling that ranger station what the Legion have done. You're really expecting a player to walk back and forth between these two areas because they told me to? no fam, i'm teleporting. Same as when you need to get the Khans to work with Caesars legion. There's NO travel in Fallout outside of fast travel. Like fuck am I going to walk from one end of the map and back again after finding the Khans. As I write this the more I think Fallout is never intended as a travel game because SO many quests are "go to this place over HERE, miles and miles away and then come back and MAYBE you will have to return again"
The thing is by the game is designed so that by the time you make the hortator mission and have to dart around the map you have access to all the jumpy spell and speed potions that make travelling a breeze (and make you feel like a badass). But the first few times you venture into ashlands for the Urshilaku quest it makes it feel like an actual adventure, where you need to prepare for the long march outside of civilization
@@thewhitefalcon8539 If you think the hunger system in Minecraft is the best example of an annoying and useless system you have ADHD worse than I do. Either that or you just wish you could tank any enemy with a hotbar full of steaks again, which is about the only way you could make Minecraft combat MORE mindless and boring.
This so much. People always talk about the highs of planning out journeys to fulfill lots of quests at once, but ignore the lows of those times when you can't do that and you really do just have to journey halfway across the game world and back because you're tired of waiting to finish that one quest and nothing else is sending you over there. Plus in most of these games, not fast traveling isn't actually more interesting. Most games don't let you fast travel the first time you find something, it's just about skipping the part where you repeat the same steps you've already taken before where the content will never be different at all.
I loved Morrowind the moment I started playing. It was the first open world RPG I ever played. My favorite aspect of it was that it didn't hold your hand when telling you what your objectives were. If you had to go to a certain location, it gave you a general idea of where it was at and you had to go explore to find it. Most modern games automatically marking the location on your map. This drastically increased the exploration part of the game and added to the overall effect of "go anywhere and do anything."
I think Fallout 1 & 2 (and Arcanum, to some extent) had pretty good system. It gives you sense of distance, but isn't major pain in the a$$. It allows You to have some encounters between locations. And, unless You travel in area with high random encounter density, it was FAST, without being instant teleportation.
Are they even "fast travel" systems? Fast travel is basically skipping travel. Those games had an overworld you regular-travelled through with its own rules and hub locations where interesting things happen in, be it because they're a city or a bespoke dungeon. I think that basically makes this just travel in games which are not actually open world, which honestly might be what the real answer to this problem was all along.
The caravan system in Fallout 1 & 2 is kind of like fast travel, but with a sense of peril out there in the wasteland. And you still have to learn which places have caravans going where
I disagree, I can tune that out just fine. What bothers me is that there’s no opportunity cost, you can be everywhere and do everything at once, so you don’t feel any connection to the area you’re currently in AND you hit with dozens of things you can do in most open world games. Having an opportunity cost to go from place to place completely changes how your approach tasks in a game.
One thing that I feel makes it work is the fact that while the travel costs money, discouraging you from using it too much in the early game when you are still poor, it's cheap enough (and becomes even cheaper with good relations with operators) that using it isn't really an issue in a late game when you have accumulated lots of money. That wat game incetivises you to explore in the early stages, while letting you skip unnecessary legwork later when all the exploring is done.
Another game with a rather deep and complex mix of partial fast travel systems is Runescape. This game also highlights another advantage of more immersive fast travel systems: You can organically tie it into player progression by involving quests, rewards and recurring activities in the unlocking, accessing, using and paying for different fast travel networks or particular nodes within them. E.g. there's a questline where the player supports an inventor with creating and testing prototypes for hot air balloons, allowing them to explore different routes including obstacles and map them out during/after the quest. Later on, the inventor lets the player use these explored routes as part of an air balloon fast travel network. There's also dwarf underground train lines, boats, fairy rings, sentient spirit trees, magic portals between wizard guilds, teleport spells to certain locations using consumable runestones, gnome gliders, magic carpet rides, camel caravans, river canoes, various shortcuts like ropeswings or wallclimbs that need to be unlocked using materials or requiring certain stats and skills to use, and a set of ancient portal frames leading to randomized destinations within a certain area, as well as giant eagles travelling between mountain top nests once you befriended the eagles, discovered and explored those peaks. And various enchanted jewellery pieces that can teleport you to one or a few specific locations related to the specific piece of jewelry. And then there's the chaos tunnels, the definitely-less-chaotic shortcut tunnels between some dungeons or through certain mountain ranges that are difficult and/or dangerous to walk over/around normally... some other shortcuts even require temporarily transforming into apes or other creatures to use them using items and knowledge obtained from quests. And then there's some areas that are initially or permanently only reachable or directly connected via certain puzzle/parcours/obstacle navigation mechanisms ("slow travel") differing from normal walking in the opposite direction as opposed to fast travel, further expanding the spectrum of gameplay mechanics, tasks and travel speeds available in the game. E.g. one area is separated via a maze-like swamp full of dense vegetation, muddy water pools, dead ends and hostile ghosts that will cause food in your inventory to rot away if you don't bring special protective artifacts with you, and even airborne vampire creatures occasionally attacking you while being immune to most conventional weapons. Those anti-food-rotting artifacts as well as blessed anti-vampire weapons can be crafted and later upgraded after completing unique quests related to the overarching lore of the area, and later in the game's progression you can establish a fast travel route across the swamp, but also unlock a sort of minigame where you can escort npc adventurers through the swamp with various randomized encounters, rewards from the npcs and even persistent progression of those npcs who gain experience over time as well. Plus, the more pilgrims and travellers make it across the swamp, the better also for a small settlement at the other end of it, which also profits from player-orchestrated repairs and protective measures to fend off vampires. And that's just one small area within the extensive game world.
One thing I started doing in Skyrim as a compromise is to only allow fast travel back from dungeons to a major city or town. Otherwise I cart and hoof or foot travel to locations and use a camping mod to sleep the nights away
My favorite form of fast travel in Morrowind? Easy, it's Windform scrolls. (500 Levitation for 60 secs., + Invisible for 60 secs.) Expensive, but what's money in TES3. (Avoid Windwalker scrolls, exact same 2 effects, but 5 times the gold.) Flying over the landscape at high speed is cool af, and I can stop if I see something interesting. And I often do. 👍
Bethesda's fast travel has a point, though, it lets the player avoid wasting time trying to travel on foot only to crash for the 10th time halfway through without saving during the trek
Another thing I really liked about morrowind when playing it for the first time was that the game gives you specific, written directions on how to get to your destination. This adds even more to the immersion of navigating the game world because the game doesn't just point you directly to your objective. In Skyrim this is part of why players will often find themselves just walking up mountains, despite there being a perfectly good road to follow. The compass just tells you to go a certain direction so you tend to take it at face value if you aren't looking at the map.
It also is both proof and result of developers actually playing the game they made. There are anecdotes of them working in this basement and *taking walks* in-game instead of outside.
It also affects how the quest are done. When fast travel is easy and free you also get small local quest that send you all around the map rather then keeping it local.
I remember playing this game where you could only teleport back to your house. It was absolute torture going anywhere. It didn’t help that you couldn’t jump either.
Ultima has a long tradition of in-universe fast travel, most notably the moongates, which open and are directed according to the phases of the moons. Ultima VII and Ultima Online also have teleportation spells which require preparation using the Mark spell on a magic stone, followed by Recall (or Gate, in UO) to teleport to wherever the stone was marked.
In Skyrim I completely missed a major storybeat that happens on your way back to town from a short trip outside. The fast travel was right there and it felt like it beckoned me to use it, but then I got to town and everyone talked about how basically the heavens themselves talked to me and I had not noticed any of that. I went back and loaded an older save to see it and since then I made a point out of not fast traveling at all and have discovered a lot of fun random encounters along the roads as a result. Not to mention getting familiar with the land itself.
The game specifically removes the fast travel to Dragonsreach (the palace in Whiterun where you need to go) so that you don't miss this story moment. So you were either distracted, or your game bugged, or you're lying.
@@SpaceApe020 Did the game always do this? Or was that something that was fixed in a patch later? This was close to release day back in 2011 when this happened to me.
@@ToastbackWhale It probably is the event you are thinking of. This was way back in 2011 and it's been a long while since I played the game so my recollection of names is a bit fuzzy.
@@Nails077 I don't know if it was always like this. First time I played Skyrim was 2012-2013 and it was already this way I'm pretry sure. Would be interesting to track down patch notes to see though.
as a dev myself, there was an ugly period where players were too concerned with how big the map was.. and then a bunch of games were created with empty huge worlds that required fast travel to skip over all the empty space. ultima online felt huge as a player, but i think the entire world was like 2 miles x 2 miles. you could run the entire landmass in less than 30 minutes.
Gothic's 1 and 2 fast travel was great too.(having to earn or find teleportation runes but you still have to travel on foot and learn your surroundings) Public transit is nice too, GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption use it nicelly too
I agree in theory, but not necessarily in practice. As someone who doesn't have a lot of time to play open world games (and when I do, I play them stretched out over a long period of time, which makes learning systems like the ones in Morrowind more difficult), I quite appreciate having a Bethesta style fast travel. Also, personally, I like having the option to pop around on the map, doing a thing on one end and then another quest on the other side of the map, although I appreciate having another form of faster travel, like a mount.
I don't know if anyone has brought it up yet, but the original fallout had a unique fast travel system with a large map you can travel across southern California with specified locations like vault 13 or shady sands. You are freely allowed to travel anywhere on the map through a grid system or travel with caravans. Unlike modern games where the entire world is in one huge map, the original fallout had its locations separated into smaller maps with the world map to set the immersion of a much larger world, there is also dangers while using fast travel too, like getting ambushed by the wild life, raider, of super mutants or maybe the random encounters that can happen while your traveling that can grant you unique weapons or items that can't be found anywhere else in the game, alien blaster for example.
In Valheim, an open world survivial game, you can build portals wherever you want but can't travel through them with metal ores and ingots, which are necessary materials for upgrading both your equipment and crafting stations, requiring you to make the trek aaallll the way home on your ownsome knowing one unlucky ambush can have you respawn back at home with your cargo stuck halfway across the world
Fast travel on foot could also have resource cost. You'd need to gather rations, water and other necessities and depending how much you gather, that is how far you'll be able to travel before it kicks you back into normal movement mode.
Kingdom Come Deliverance has that style, with your journey shown on the map and risk of combat encounters depending on character skills (like classic Fallout). Resources are required to meet your needs, and you can stop if you want to. It's a shame the Bethesda Fallout games didn't use the classic Fallout overworld travel system as their fast travel option. It would have been a nice touch.
Y’all are forgetting that there are different degrees of immersion; it’s not just a choice between completely immersed or not at all. If you’re watching a movie in theatre and someone is talking at 100 decibels and their phone’s screen is super bright, it’s a lot more immersion-breaking than if someone is talking at 70 decibels without a bright phone. Sure, both are immersion breaking, but I’m sure you’d much prefer the latter if you were forced to choose.
Honestly I like just teleporting, preferably without even an animation for it. For a game I'm putting 100+ hours into, I'd like that time to be gameplay, not waiting to get to the gameplay. If I've already gone over the route before, I'd rather skip it.
@@Gary-o9t typically choice presents itself within the game, not as the game itself. you are disadvantaging yourself by not using one of the game's core features. using the word choice in this sense is reaching. we dont really have a choice because the developers prioritized a fast travel system over not using it. there isnt a lot of benefit to not using it, because they didnt design it that way.
Dude i love your videos and indepth analysis on given topic :) u made me try Morrowind for the first time, it seems like its one of those RPGs where you spend many hours learning about the world :)
I believe the problem goes deeper than the travel system itself and goes back to how the open worlds are made. Objectives are designed to make you hop around a lot, to justify the open nature of the map. But backtracking through familiar, safe areas all the time gets tedious. So, instant fast travel.
@@zoltanz288 that’s a lot easier said than done and entirely depends on how the games story plays out. A game like Skyrim would needs it’s entire story progression rewritten to stop the quests from jumping all over where as a game like fallout 4 wouldn’t need many changes, really just the minutemen quests. Everything else is fairly centralised.
Far Cry 2 has a map, which is an in game map, so it doesn't break immersion. You have cars, boats and stuff and bus stations. Buses travel around the map and to the mayor city. Simple and fits very well into the game's pace. World of Warcraft had a similar system to Morrowind: Mage teleports, underground metro, zeppelin, boats, wyvern and hippogriff. Later, it also gives you your own mounts. The major landmarks in that game were stunning.
Another game that had a cool fast travel system, was LA Noire. As you work a case, you build up a list of Locations of Interest in your notebook, peoples' houses, the crime scene, etc. You can drive everywhere yourself, and sometimes you run into optional little events when you do, or you can tell your partner to drive (your character whips out his notebook as the UI to choose such locations) and the game just advances time and cuts to you arriving there. That solves the UI problem, and the "how does it work in-universe?" problem, too!
hollow knight's fast travel is also really solid. you have to manually find and spend money to activate the stag station for that area (and not all systems have stations), and then every time you want to fast travel, you have to walk to a stag station from wherever you are. then you select from the dialogue and watch a small cutscene. what i like is that they aren't in the most convenient of spots, and often times you're using them just to get to an area a little quicker so you can walk to whatever objective you need to get to. it's a fun system and i like how it's done a lot.
Hollow Knight is kind of a different experience just because it's a metroidvania. Each zone is a level and fast travel exists to either give you access to the level or get you out of the level. Deepnest doesn't have its stag station till the very end as a way of making you feel alone and isolated, until you're done with the area. The Palace meanwhile has a stag station right next to it because you need to go to it and its area for a bunch of stuff. Furthermore Hollow Knight's backtracking is less about returning to town to pawn items (even though you do buy stuff from Sly) and more about backtracking to other areas that have now opened up thanks to the new progression item you've found (double jump, shade dash, etc). Generic open-world RPGs would have a tougher time with this system as the player is often backtracking through familiar locations for the purposes of quests and services, and very rarely backtracking to discover new content.
Mass Effect had a great fast travel system, which was itself a game mechanic and gelled well with the setting. To travel to someplace else, you used FTL travel. Slow FTL within systems, and almost instantaneous between major mass relays. And going from one place to the other you needed fuel, so it added immersion. This solved all the problems you have listed with fast travel system.
I personally enjoy focusing on single quest lines and getting objectives finished before starting new ones so I like instantaneous fast travel. I personally feel like it is good because if you don’t want to use it you don’t have to but if it’s the kind of experience you enjoy then all the power to you
My favorite fast travel system is vanilla WoW. From the zeppelins, gryphons and bats to the hearthstone with a massive cooldown that only ports you to your set inn as default... It has a ton of weight to it, like zeppelins not always being there, and planning your hearthstone focused inn.
The problem in most open world games where you just walk or ride horses is slow. Red Dead Redemption 1 didn't have a fast travel like Syrim iirc but it didn't matter because horses where really fast in that game and if you wanted to fast travel you had trains and coaches. Normal travel is really slow in recent Bethesda games and that's why people use it often.
There is also the component that with RDR you can engage dangers and events from horseback while in Skyrim you can barely fight anything while riding. And if you chose to dismount you are left vulnerable for several seconds while in RDR you just jump of the horse.
I only played Rdr2 but the system also checks all points, exept the one, that it takes away a sense of distance. But that's a good thing, since the invention of trains took away distance and made the world feel smaller, so its only good that it does that in game too
I loved how Kingdom Come: Deliverance would break up fast travel with random encounters/ambushes. Or, better yet, the hardcore mode just eliminated it entirely, but the ambushes still existed on roads. For larger maps, this is a problem, but a game like Cyberpunk 2077 already had several transit options built in, yet the company didn't utilize them and instead went with fast travel points. Thankfully, the mod community has opened up the train system for travel. Now, we just need an AV system with specific landing locales and maybe a bus system as well.
I always keep my mark spell location in balmora between the silt strider and the mages guild so I can always fast travel to those two easily and with the silt strider you can travel to vivec city and there’s a boat right there next to it’s strider, making all three fast travel options easy to access.
I go for Tel Vos. Divine Intervention takes you to Wolverine Hall for guild guides and ships, Almsivi Intervention to Ald-ruhn for silt striders and another guild guide. Tel Vos itself is halfway between two strongholds, so you're also a reasonably short amount of levitation time away from that network as well (once you pick up the index, obviously). Two of the main Ashlander camps are practically within sight, and a reasonably large section of the land in the north-west is closer to Tel Vos than any other travel location.
Haven’t watched the video yet, but upfront I think the best way of fast travel would be you have to discover the location first before unlocking fast travel, then when you want to travel somewhere you have to go to a location and a simple cutscene will play whilst loading montage style. So like fantasy game you head to a stable in a town to fast travel and you get a montage of riding on horseback when loading. A modern game you go to bus stop or station and get a cutscene of taking a journey on a train or bus. 🤷♂️
I agree, i agree and I also agree BUT this video was uploaded when Survival Mode was already in Skyrim, an official mod now implemented to the base Game in Anniversary Edition, which makes It as vanilla as Vampire Lord Form for example. This mod disables map fast travel and only leaves you with 3 kinds of fast travel: •Boats: Solitude-Morthal-Windhelm •General Carriages: capitals of the holds but cannot travel back from Morthal, Falkreath, Winterhold or Dawnstar •Personal carriages: can travel both capitals and villages but never travel back Also EVERY time you use these you Will have to inmediately go to the Closer inn as you Will be tired, hungry and in some cases cold from the journey. Still, i do think that the prices do not scale well, its always too cheap.
I honestly like God of War’s system. Teleport points aren’t so ubiquitous that you can use them to get everywhere, plus you don’t unlock them until much later. Then you have the nice conversations within the fast travel realm that make it actually enjoyable
Sometimes I wish they took Morrowind's FT a step further - you get on the carriage/strider/ship/whatever and get to watch the entire journey. From carriage you could look at landmarks, note them down on the map, discover areas as if you were on foot - and when tired of it, you just hit T and take a nap till you arrive at the destination.
Prince of Persia 2008 allowed you to fast travel to areas which you have "healed"'. I think that gave some immersion. The game was not large at all though, so even if it didn't have fast travel it wouldn't be a big difference. I think they just wanted to make Light Seed collectathon a little less cumbersome
You should play a small indie game called ADACA. It has a mode called Zone Patrol. It has a fast travel system I find just GENIUS! The map will have a few rifts in spacetime that will randomly spawn. The catch with it is, you cannot select your destination. You could end up closer to your intended target, or further way, in a place with a pleasant suprise, or end up somewhere much much worse. It makes you weigh in the chances and how prepared you are, and if they are better than wherever you currently are.
It's odd to me that people seem to want to actively discourage anything different in fast travel design. You must either click everywhere instantaneously or take forever to get anywhere. No in between!
@@numidium3 what I’m answering to is the idea that “people are too lazy”. Skyrim has fast travel everywhere and its design responds to that. The Witcher 3 doesn’t have fast travel everywhere, but it’s structured so that it makes good use of its specific fast travel mechanic: a large majority of quests are close to a fast travel marker and you can maraud through them. I fail to see anything that breaks immersion now than facing a game’s make-work mechanics that pad its length. If those are present, I want to be able to get them out of the way ASAP.
The fact you didn't have a waypoint system back then was so great. Made me write down or memorize names and actually had to track stuff down. I haven't felt as immersed by any other game since then.
to me, the best way to do it is, make it a reward. make it limited at first, and give more and more until you fully unlock FT. for example, at first, you can only FT by using teleport systems that are limited from and to the big cities, then you get the option for those tps to take you to and from smaller cities(make it an investment, maybe you are able to buy the tp company, and that allow you to invest and unlock those options). then you can get it to tp you from cities to dungeons(but not the reverse, yet) finally, you get access to the magic crystal that will allow full teleport from whatever place you are(on the outside). another option is to put it behind expensive or limited to buy 1- time uses. until you find the infinite use one. this is how DS 2 and 3 does it, and while ds 1 does not, by the time you get access to tp, its so cheap you could buy as many as you want with ease.
I like the way borderlands 2 did it because it starts you at the beginning of the map and you have to get to an actual fast travel station before you can use it
I have admittedly never played Morrowind but I really like how the witcher 3 does fast travel. It's still perfectly possible and quite convenient, but you can only travel from a roadsign, and the number and placing of roadsigns is really well balanced with more of them with a lot of them in places you'll go very often and less on the outskirts. Most places and quests aren't located directly on a roadsign, forcing you to go on foot quite a bit even after you mapped out the whole area, but just enough that it doesn't become poinlessly tedious after many hours of playing, because there's only so much I can admire the beautiful scenery
One of my favorite fast travel systems is Ocarina of Time. The only way to find the shortcuts is by exploring. There are only 6 fast travel locations which are unlocked one at a time a fair bit into the game, but they are placed in locations that allow you to get to wherever you want to go (except gerudo fortress 😢) within a minute or so. In one case, learning a warp song even unlocks a new area to explore
Anyone who says "fast traveling is stupid i walk everywhere for immersion" is a teenager or lives in mom's basement. I'm sorry, that's such a stupid thing to say. Adults who want to game don't want to walk 20 minutes there and back for a fetch quest, when they get maybe an hour tops to game a day. *Note I'm not bashing Morrowind system, i love that system, this is more directed at say, classic wow where we all had to make that perilous journey as kids, but i would never do that again as an adult*
I gotta say, World of Warcraft (in Classic at least, idk about retail) is a pretty good sort of fast travel. There is some instant fast travel, but it’s extremely limited in both frequency and function, with most options only having 1 specific place you can travel to. Beyond that, fast travel with flight masters is a phenomenal way of doing things. It offers “fast” travel, but not instant travel. It keeps the player immersed in the world, and it goes out of its way to display some key elements of regions as you pass through them. The scale of the world is never lost, and planning how you travel it is always a factor.
I played with a skyrim mod that caused fast travel to bug and freeze or something, so in order to keep playing smoothly, I just forwent fast travel, and never really went back. It became fully immersive and changed the game play style from point a to point b into the whole alphabet. Completely changed and enriched the experience of the game, which is just ironic after all these years. As the saying goes, it's not the destination it's the journey...
Dragons Dogma had the all around best fast travel system. For the vast majority of the game, you have to walk everywhere, and can only fast travel to the capital using ferry crystals, that you have to find, or buy, and they are expensive. You can only fast travel to other locations if you buy, or find Rift Stones, which the price of them are astronomically expensive, not to mention you can only have so many active at one time. Most people won't have more than 1 or 2 extra Rift Stones set until at least your second or third playthrough.
I don't care much for expansive game worlds myself. But your point about game immersion is well taken. Perhaps the best of both worlds is to make the fast-travel map more integrated. You want to fast-travel from one coast to the other? Deadly high-level lands in-between, fast-travel only eligible from a certain point. Put rules on the places you can fast-travel to. And make sure you can still encounter interesting things in-world, instead of just watching map-progress. But give your character a choice if they want to stop to investigate.
In skyrims defence, skyrim does have all the mentioned ways of fast travel, except the mage(i think) so, if you want to fast travel that way, you can still do it
Baldur's Gate 3 has a similar fast-travel system where you can only travel to specific warp points and camp; and if I remember correctly, you can only warp from one of those points as well. It's not as advanced, but the game isn't open in the same way either. I'd love this system to be built into more games. Elden Ring is a joy to ride around, but I use still use the fast-travel system to get around sometimes. It really depends. That game is also different in that you have to earn the fast-travel points. Forza Horizon 5 has a fast-travel system, but I've only used it once because it costs credits to use. Since you're in a car, you're encouraged to drive around. I think limiting you in this way is a good thing; although, it takes way too long to get around the world in a slower car meaning I'm less likely to use one :(.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is one of my favorite games. I've only ever played it on hardcore, so I've never used the fast travel system, other than the few quests which require it. Normally, you go everywhere on foot, or more likely, on horseback. You have a map, but there is no icon telling you where you are, and you don't have a compass. You have to use landmarks to navigate.
Good analysis. If I could give you a tip: I can hear some background noises from your mic and it's easy to tell voice tracks apart, it feels less like a narration and more like a scripted voice-over. I would recommend that you put some quiet music in the background so people can't tell when you mute and re-insert another audio track. Other than that, good content.
I love red dead redemptions fast travel system; you can either pay to use public transport, which only goes to main cities and towns, or you have to make a significant investment to unlock fast travel, and even then, you can only go to main cities and towns from your camp, you cannot go wherever you want at a moments notice.
Since I only played Skyrim of al Bethesda games, I can only talk about it. I like the options in Skyrim. As the player, I have the freedom to fasttravel anywhere, take a carriage or boat, or walk myself. We can teleport around if we want, or take a more immersive appraoch, or mix it. Everyone can play it like one desires, we have the choice and that is most important to me. All power to the user!
Public transportation is so good as an alternative to modern fast travel, recently I has been playing Cyberpunk 2077 and I always think "man if this game have a public transportation system like GTA 4 instead of the fast travel it would be so much better"
World of Warcraft also had thoughts similar to this. The reason why you can only teleport to major cities and must use a gryphon riding and boat travel network otherwise is to avoid taking you out of the experience by presenting a loading screen and ruining your sense of place and permenance. However, in order to facilitate logging out quickly as well as the rest system it gives you the hearthstone, which is basically mark/recall. Nowadays WoW is full of portals to an almost outrageous degree. Lessons were forgotten...
Death stranding is another example of fast travel done right. A feature not available until chapter 3 and comes with the cost of not being able to bring cargo. Its presentation is entertaining, lore friendly and not useless. By late game, assuming you put the effort in, you should be able to zipline anywhere.
You forgot the most important fast travel method: enchantment. No better feeling than making public transport obsolete with a pair of pants that allows you to leap across the whole island in just a few jumps.
A different fast travel system in a franchise was in old World of Warcraft (no idea what it is like now), but you would take a flying creature from one part of the map to the other in real time.
I have idea: you have to send out an npc to where you wanna fast travel. They walk there. When you’re there you can teleport to them (they have a teleportation device etc). This means, players must plan their trip, and have something to do whilst waiting for the npc to travel to the place.
Cyberpunk 2077 did fast travel really well, to use fast travel you have to walk or drive to a fast travel point, all of which are placed in bus stops or metro stations, implying you're just taking public transportation.
Here's a fast travel idea: consequences for fast travel, i.e fast travel requires dark magic and everytime you do it it spawns a shadow of the hero with the singular goal to hunt the hero down and possess them. At first this wouldn't be a big deal, but over time hundreds of these shadows could exist
I agree fast travel should have restrictions. With the exception of a 100 skill Alteration "teleport" spell. Just to give you the sense of being a powerful mage. And make the spell itself very difficult to acquire. It also gives a HUGE incentive for playing a mage.
Everquest 2, with griffins and boats. If you are a druid you can teleport to druid rings, and a wizard to spires. The griffins actually fly the route, so they take time and you get a sense of distance. I spent an enormous amount of time in Morrowind. It was a great game!
the mmo Ragnarok online, has a teleport network as you suggest, airship, mages and even boats. various routes. in official servers this system is so hated that you would be hard pressed to find a private server that does not replace this with fast warp npcs all over the place most players i know just dont want to invest time into learning a complex network of travel just to get one item they forgot
I loved how 2000s MMOs handled this: WoW and DAoC. Just a "taxi" NPC that takes you there, giving you time to finally hit that WC or fridge, among other things! And the "taxis" can go faster, that's fine.
Play the game how YOU want, but don't beg to take out a game mechanic that is very needed. Every person is different and have different lives, some of us have schedules and certain amount of time we can play, etc. I understand immersion is important, but so it real life. Fast travel is important to those who can't play games very long, as well as if you get too frustrated, instead of quitting or giving up you can just fast travel. It's also good for getting out of glitched positions like getting caught/clipping between two rocks and can't get out. Any way you look at it, you can't just remove mechanics that are there to give every player freedom to play in their own way. Thats the point, and I hope it stays that way, because games like Bethesda games, with pure free will, and not being stuck behind some kind of wall you can't get pass, is rare.
I love the Morrowind system! But this video reminds me of another good implementation, far older than Morrowind - Might and Magic 6 and 7 from the 90s (those are the only ones from the series that I've played, so I don't know what systems the others had). They might not exactly count as open world games, but whatever. The world map is split into square regions, each containing a town and the surrounding area, and if you walk over the edge of your region, you'll spend 5 in-game days and 5 units of food and move to the next region in that direction. But towns also have stables and/or ships that can take you to other regions (not just the adjacent ones) for a cost, which is of course a few days faster than walking. And the cool part - the available destinations are dependent on the weekday, so you really have to plan your trips lest you miss your ship by a day and have to wait for three days for the next ship to wherever you want to go. There were even some regions that could only be reached by ship, not by walking. This also makes you keep an eye on the in-game clock when adventuring, because like other businesses, the transit systems are closed at night - so if you want to get some adventuring in while waiting for your ride, you best make sure to get back to town in time.
i love the fast travel from horizon zero dawn. You need to make fast travel packs; more complex packs allow for greater travel. And you can only travel between select locations
Maybe I games like RDR they could make like a train line, so you have to walk to the station to take the train, and it gives you the option of instantly traveling or actually being in the train, looking at the views, etc until it reaches its destination
