Please watch the video before getting mad at me. Then when you are finished, feel free to be mad at me. So this video has picked up over the last few weeks, which is weird and neat. Anyway, I try to respond to comments, but I feel like I keep responding with the same thing, so in order to save everyone some time, here are some thoughts/concessions about this video that you might want to read before leaving a comment: 1. This video could be framed better. I "marketed" it in a way that comes off as if fast travel is inherently bad, which in hindsight was probably a mistake because a lot of people seem to be hung up on the first few seconds (and based on some of the comments I have been getting, in a handful of cases, I don't really think they have actually watched more than the first 5 seconds). Ultimately, my issue with fast travel boils down to how it used as a band-aid to cover up boring worlds and movement mechanics. So if your initial instinct to seeing this video title is to comment something like, "then just don't use it. But do you really wanna walk everywhere and be bored for 2 hours?" my answer is, no, no I don't; I want worlds that are fun to move around in that don't make me get the itch to fast travel. I typically try not to use it, but when the world offers me nothing of interest, it feels like a waste not to. My point is that if an element of a game is uninteresting enough that a large player-base feels compelled to just skip over it, shouldn't developers rethink that element of a game to make it more engaging? 2. The game at 0:30 is Dragon's Dogma. 3. Play games however you want to play them; just realize that they way you approach a game is not always going to be the same as how someone else approaches a game. Anyway, thanks for reading this if you did, and thanks for taking the time to click this video even if it wasn't your thing.
Yea, it is a single player game. No problem with fast travel. Risk vs reward is more of an mmo aspect. I can see it be detrimental to mmo games, but single player man we just don't got time to hold our controllers forward for 2 hours.
What's worse is when it's like skyrim, there is plenty of locations but it's the exact same fights with the exact same rewards every time so why bother going out of your way? If the dungeon itself or the reward aren't good then why waste your time when you could just get on with whatever quest you are doing?
@@buffkangaroodog one thing instated doing in Spider-man ps4 is play music and try to swing to the beat as I travel. It really helps and seems like something dorky Peter himself would do
@@buffkangaroodog Okay, just a second. Did you just say you 100% Spider-Man twice, and completed all got all trophies and the hard west difficulty, and yet you feel it gets olds after a bit of playing? Wtf did you expect! You played the game twice, not every game has infinite replay ability and that’s fine. I feel you’ve gotten more than your money’s worth and describing it the way you did is kinda short sighted. As long as you get something out of a game, it’s done it’s job, like now I’m playing Hollow Knight, and despite being absolutely head over heels for it, I’m sure once I beat it, despite saying I’ll lay it again on hard or 100% the game and trophies, I probably won’t. But that’s fine, because I know there only so much Hollow Knight I can play
@@picklenik9658 I only beat PS4 Spiderman one time(in one day btw) and I feel the same way. The webslinging improves on a lot of stuff but also holds ur hand way too much. Not mentioning my other problems with the game here. You ever hit the trigger a meter above the ground in that game? Spiderman literally floats as he shoots the web so you can't hit the ground. After you learn how to swing there's nothing creative you can do with it besides exactly what the developers intended.
"As long as you get something out of a game, its done its job" I guess I got some hours of out of the game but I dont have any interesting memories or an urge to go back to that game. It's good for younger gamers i think but if you're over 20 there's nothing in those games that hasn't been done to death in gaming already For me, that makes it a weak game. And a dissapointing Spider-Man game. Jesus, i said games like 30 fuckn times. Gaming!!!!!!
I would argue that 3rd person games tend to have more engaging movement because you have more spacial awareness, allowing for more interesting platforming.
thats the whole point. imagine just cause, you have a grappling hook, parachute and in newer titles a wingsuit, now give it first person and you will ruin the whole experience due to how dumb it would feel
@@Harsh-tf9he there are some really cool movement games in first person Titanfall 2's main campaign is super good and theres a grapple and wall running in that
@@BillSullivanReal but thats fps limited to that weird factory, the canyon like outdoors and arenas, im talking zipping around at mach 2, gunfire, cars (which are much faster than a titan), anti air fire, all while trying to destroy a massive military harbor which is super open, helicopters, wingsuits, exploding oil tanks, with first person view, your reactions would be much more fined tuned as you dont have that FOV boost that comes with third person, also how do you fast travel in titanfall? its a level based system not open world
@@Harsh-tf9he I was just talking about cool movement shit in games not the actual point in the video. There is definitely faster shit in other games but something about moving fast in first person just feels so nice
i think another big problem is the quests themselves. some man will ask you to travel from one side of the map to another just to pickup a sock and then travel back again. it's not worth the journey. that's why i feel like some developers make the quests with fast travel in mind and whenever some people (like me) try to play the game without fast travel, it feels pointless.
that's sort of what I do if a quest sounds cool or fun (or if I know it) I don't fast travel but if its another fetch quest its not worth the time and I just fast travel
Yes this, the main problem with fast travel (and the idea that "if you don't like it, don't use it") is that the game is generally built around it, the devs stop caring about making you travel to the other side of the world to make a stupid delivery instead of having a coherent quest design: 99% of the people should need help about something local, and a couple of longer questlines that are important to the area should end by giving you the option to travel to another location, giving you both a sense of the geography and a reason to travel (but only for rarer and more important reasons). This way you'd travel less, reducing the need for fast travel too, and people wouldn't be forced to use it. On top of that, fast travel mess certain types of quest and reduce your game design possibilities. I really like how Morrowind handled it with transportations and two spells being the only available methods of fast travel.
@@Megaman-2407 Do you really need to repeat your comment a second time, you have added no argument of worth, if a person isn't being swayed by your comment, do you think repeating yourself a second time will work? I highly doubt that. Absolutely no one was thinking that? Not a single person? There is always a percentage higher than 0% of any outcome to occur. Your joke is the exact thing that people were thinking. You have to much faith in the intelligence of humanity. It is funny because of the dislike bar. Plenty of people were thinking this, and I am disappointed you failed to comprehend this. I am also disappointed you failed to see my point. If in the unlikely event that you were serious, my comment would apply to you. But if you were joking, the comment would apply to the party that thinks similarly, only unironically. Thanks for making me ruin the joke btw....makes me look like an ass.
I think Daggerfall had a good fast traveling system. You got to choose if you were traveling recklessly or cautiously, if you stayed at inns on the way or if you camped out, and if you walked, rode a horse, or took a ship. Traveling recklessly got you there faster, but you would be low on health and fatigue when you arrived, and cautiously got you there slower, but you had full health/stamina and you'd always arrive during the day. Selecting “Inns” would subtract from your travel time but make the journey more expensive, while “Camping Out” will do just the opposite. Using boats would get you there fastest but would cost more money. Your quests were timed in this game, so you really had to consider how long your journey would take.
Bob Ross The Boss the only reason is - REALISM. In everything. I very dissapointed that bethesda desided to arcade all elements in the next elder scrolls series
This is the key point. I love fast travel if the game has uninteresting or bland space filler. Skyrim for example should have been open world areas you travel between instead of fully open world. Witcher 3 however I never fast traveled once in each map since it is such a well crafted world
And riding your horse just feels glorious in that game. Compare that with AC Odyssey and Origins, where riding a horse feels like riding a piece of moving plastic.
also this, a lot of devs are abusing the free roam/open world genre now since is so popular. Almost all new games try to do it. Thing is, not all games should be like that.
Yeah I also feel like open world games are actually getting TOO BIG now where travelling just becomes tedious with nothing but empty land to run around. So much country and desert, not enough buildings or neighborhoods to explore and walk around in.
@@NewOrderOfAlexandria Well the king of that was Daggerfall. That one was completely unplayable without fast travel (and you're explicitly told you're not supposed to ever actually walk through the forest)
i just watched this, and I IMMEDIATELY thought of Spider-Man as well. And Arkham City. when just moving your character around is fun and rewarding, you win. I haven't played the PS4 Spider-Man, but in Spider-Man 2012, it was awesome, and I WANTED to collect all the flying comics around the city, and did. The ONLY collectible quest in a game that I ever considered good enough to be its own game, because just moving around to collect them felt awesome.
Honestly, the Spider Man games immediately game to mind as well, not to mention Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance The amount of time I spent just swinging on that vine in Beach Bowl Galaxy is amazing
Generally speaking, most locations in open world games cannot be fast traveled to unless you have already been there, meaning you have already experienced the journey there and don't have to do it all over again. That being said, I do understand what your point is, and I'd say it's valid in the sense that fast travel should not be infinitely usable and have no cost in most games.
If its a game with in game currency (like most do) maybe have it so it costs money to travel, and the more you do it the more it starts to cost. Or maybe it costs more to travel further distances
The issue is not about traveling itself, but having things to do. If you always have interesting things to do in the way, you don't even notice the distance.
Breath of the wild felt super dense, but the map isn't that big, it's big but it doesn't take that long to cross from one corner of the world, I've done it before, it took less than 30 minutes and it is rewarding because of shrines and towers, but I've gotten pretty much every non quest shrine and I have every tower, so it is better to just fast travel.
Honestly, Skyrim’s wagons system would work really well for this. Remove the map fast travel options, set a marker somewhere, get a trip to the closest hold city, horse ride from there, bing bang boom.
Good point! That was especially the case once you have your Hearthfire manor and hire a personal wagon driver. The wagons could then take you to some many more locations besides just the capital cities.
David Alvarez Exactly! Also, I just recently got Red Dead Redemption 2 and it does a REALLY good job about its fast travel systems, at least as far as I’ve seen. There’s train stations you can use which take you to other stations, there’s carriages which can take you to some cities, but otherwise you gotta go on horseback. But with red dead, they don’t make the landscape filler. It seems like you can ALWAYS find something interesting in the landscape or a random encounter or whatever as you ride.
@@imtoolazytocomeupwithaclev2323 I haven't played RDR2 yet, but that sounds really good. The multiple in-game world fast travel options are such a better idea that just map based or menu based fast travel.
And what if I simply want to do normal fast travel and not waste time faffing about with wagons or walking. What if I don't have the time in the day to spend walking around aimlessly in the world and don't want to spend gold on it. What's wrong with the current system of fast travel? All it does is save time. It's not like the game becomes garbage because you are given the OPTION to skip a journey on foot to wherever. I certainly don't want this wagon thing to replace the current system, particularly in the case of high Hrothgar. I highly doubt this system would make sense if the wagon took you anywhere past the first step up to the place (although it would be quite amusing to imagine a wagon climbing the all those steps), and furthermore, I don't want to make that journey on foot because it's novelty doesn't last long after the first time.
I think a good example is Zelda BOTW. Sometimes theres never directions just suggestions, multiple ways to get to a place, and tons and tons of random encounters and quick and rewarding side quests. It makes you want to actually travel manually. :)
I think BOTW does a pretty good job too, although teleporting from anywhere (even in combat) makes danger pointless. But the way pausing works in BOTW is broken in this sense too since damage means nothing unless it’s a one hit kill.
It's one of the things that still makes GTA great. If you want to fast travel you have to call a taxi, be next to a main road, wait a minute, select a location and pay a small fee. It means that you'll only ever fast travel if absolutely necessary.
MoviesForLife The problem with GTA though is that the entire world is empty of anything to really do besides dick around. It's a false open world unfortunately.
But Most people in GTA singleplayer just have mods and mod menu and thats how you fast travel. By making you fast etc. Mods keep this series up because without it Singleplayer is mostly average, repetetive and boring. Sending you from one end to second end of the map. After 5hours where propably 3 was driving around this empty world I just fly with my car from one point to another
The first time I played Skyrim I didn’t even realize it had fast travel until I had put around 75 hours into the game and I loved every second of it honestly- I just let myself get absorbed into the world and would find myself jumping between all the different factions and groups quests as I would just do whatever quest or cave or temple or whatever interested me that was the closest
That’s what I loved about Skyrim, I would get side-tracked and just do whatever miscellaneous things that popped up before me and since time not being a factor I could just continue my original quest later on. I knew of fast travel since the beginning but honestly didn’t use it much since there were so many cool & exciting things to do in every single city, town, and even just random settlements in the middle of nowhere
I knew it had almost right from the beginning. Yet I opted not to use it - partially because I had little experience in video games, but mostly because I enjoyed exploring the game world so much I didn't want to use it.
And that's why I love the survival mod in skyrim because it only let you fast travel with carts and boats and also making a consequence for skipping time (but I don't play with it bc I want to have enough outfit to always be rp and stylish and these are heavy)
I would argue that Kingdom Come: Deliverance (KCD) has a "half" fast travel system. Yes you can "Fast Travel" to get places quicker than real time, but at the same time you still suffer in game events and consequences. (ie encounters, sleep deprivation and starvation). Its a pretty decent balance I would say.
I thought Kingdom Come was a really good example of a fast travel system, it really hammered home the fact that while you might not physically be moving the character to the next place, you're still moving through the world and are influenced by its effects. It meant I didn't feel like I was breaking the immersion when I did it as I still had to pay attention for something going wrong.
Yeah, the fast travel was good, but KC:D also worked for me in hardcore without the option to fast travel. Having to navigate by cardinal directions and landmarks felt very rewarding. Sure, riding the same way from Sasau to Ledetschko to Rattay was boring at times, but like many unpleasant experiences in life, in retrospect I look fondly upon my rides through the night.
You could also make a potion of resist mackiga 100% for one second, drink it, then switch to the boots of blinding speed. That way you get the speed and no blindness
@Brice Manthei I don't know how long and how hard you've tried to master it, so I won't tell you to just stick with it, but... I personally will admit I absolutely _sucked_ at the combat in KC:D initially. It definitely has a learning curve and it definitely takes some getting used to. Once it clicks with you though, you really will start to feel like the trained fighting machine a medieval knight is supposed to be.
@Brice Manthei the combat system sucks, just train combat until you get master strike and just murder everything by pressing the block button fast enough when they attack. No need to ever attack yourself, actually attacking is actually worse because enemies can master strike themselves which has no counter. Apart from that and the stupid auto lock during combat everything else is top notch. I love the archery and hunting
@Brice Manthei I really like the game for it's possibilities and storytelling! In terms of combat, the begining is awful, has someone said, you're a peasant... Then you start training and suddenly you are a freaking broken monster, murdering everything and everyone that tries to mess with you...
There was this Cartoon Network game called ,,Fusion Fall" where, if you decided to fast travel, you would be carried over the map and could look down at the terrain and your character in the meantime. i remember it being very satisfying to fast travel over areas recently uncovered.
Warcraft does this too in the early levels you travel on a griffion and overlook everything below you. I remember the first time flying over the Burning Steppes and thinking shit this place looks dangerous as fuck what if I suddenly fell down there right now. By the way Fusion Fall is coming back look up Fusion Fall Legacy and Retro
Yeah I loved those griffin fast travels when I played WoW many, many years ago. I remember feeling *really* immersed in that game, which imo is a feat considering it's an MMORPG.
well, Texas is just huge, period. it just is, no more to it. open world games are designed to give the illusion of size, but are actually relatively compact when it comes to content. so it should be possible to design an open world map that has just the right amount of content/encounters that makes travelling it exciting and unpredictable, without throwing too much in your face constantly. if the perfect balance is found, then the majority of players (excluding those that purely play open world games for the story and rush through as fast as possible) should WANT to travel and see what will happen. it's just really difficult to hit that nail on its head. most recent example I feel came very close to it was spider-man, though.
@@Kappacino It's not just the size of Texas, it's that there are really only like 5 distinct regions (of which you'll probably only pass through 2 or 3), so you have hours and hours and hours of the same empty, boring countryside. Driving from San Diego to Oregon isn't the same slog, and California is easily as long as Texas is wide.
@@austinbyrd4164 what the fuck is wrong with you? the person has no time to mindlessly travel and do useless virtual things because they want to play the main objective and head straight into the action, let them be, ur argument is 200 times worse than their's
@@carlossaliba3478 "mindlessly travel and do useless virtual things." Ok, so you can't read. Open world games shouldn't feel tedious, mindless, and useless when ising the open world. That's bad game design, and so is fast travel.
@@austinbyrd4164 how fucking stupid are you, like seriously, the person LITERALLY TOLD U THEY HAVE 6 KIDS AND WORKS FOR 8 HOURS A DAY, YOU THINK THEY HAVE TIME TO FUCKING WALK AROUND VIRTUAL TREES TO THEN START SHOOTING VIRTUAL ALIENS AFTER HALF AN HOUR?
@@wesnohathas1993 *you hate how fast travel is used to create a realistic amount of content by not requiring developers to create the ridiculous amount of content and mechanics that would be required for making every single second of travel in already complex and thorough games as dynamic as wannabe game critics expect them to be.
A game that I think did a good job with fast travel is “Ori and the Will of the Wisps” (sequel to Ori and the Blind Forest, although that one doesn’t actually have fast travel.) how it works is that there are things called “spirit wells” around the map, and if you go to one of those, you could teleport to any other spirit well. There weren’t that many in the map, (about 15 in the whole map, which was pretty big.) so if you wanted to travel to a specific location quickly, you would have to manually go towards the nearest spirit well, then teleport to the spirit well closest to your destination, then keep travelling until you get there. Also, there were enough different controls so that just moving around was really fun. You could dash, dash off of enemies, double jump or triple jump depending on which perks you have unlocked, you could use grapple to certain plants or enemies, dash off of projectiles, and it was generally just really fun to see how long you could stay off the ground, so travelling was still really fun. (There is however an upgrade that allows you to travel to spirit wells from anywhere you are, although it is pretty expensive, and there is never an upgrade that allows you to travel from anywhere to anywhere.) tl;dr Ori’s travelling is fun and interesting
Dark Souls 1 has the best fast-travel system ever. Because you only unlock it halfway through the game, it feels so much powerful. You feel like you earned it yourself, and now you deserve to use it as you want
GilCAnjos yeah for sure but Skyrim is a totally different kind of experience than dark souls. Dark souls is about the rewarding challenge and immersive world. Skyrim is also about immersion but it is also about creativity in building your character and doing all the quest and overall the fast travel system is really perfect for its type of gameplay style. You don’t have to use it if you don’t want to.
If the developers care about making an attractive world, you wouldn't feel it takes long to traverse, because the trip itself would be varied and interesting. However developing it takes time and companies nowadays wasted a lot of them already.
you get it! but this comment does make me wonder if you watched past the first minute, because I do explain that the problem actually comes from there not being an interesting alternative to boring-ass travel.
So is Taxes and having to relentlessly train to get good at your weapons. i am not sure you want to put in 200 to 500 hours just to good at shooting or swinging your sword.
IMO, it's actually very immersion breaking. It's realistic, yes, but realism and immersion are not the same thing, and sometimes, the former can actually ruin the latter.
This was honestly a big deal for me in Dying Light. Traveling around felt dangerous... Yet rewarding. I did so at night time also, which made for a far more intense gameplay because I could get detected, and know I wasn't nearly fast enough to outrun the volatiles. The parkour feels so good. The climbing feels somewhat real, and if you play on higher difficulties from the get-go, no levels into anything, EVERY SINGLE POINT AND LEVEL feels like a godsend. But hey, I got a soft spot for Dying Light
Don't watch muh videos and don't scrubskribe just cause 2 did it right cause you could spam grapple then parachute again and again and it was a ton of fun, and sometimes you could grapple between cars or even if you saw a helicopter flying low
I thought this was something the Witcher 3 did well, actually. Maybe I'm a bit of a completionist, but I thought the map being dotted with tons of little treasures and small adventures made moving from place to place quite fun. Whenever I needed to go somewhere, I would plot a course that usually involved two or three pitstops to question marks along the way.
Yeah, I agree. And even when all those question marks are resolved, you still sometimes run into a surprise bandit camp, or there's a pack of wolves or drowners to kill. And I never mind travelling through the Witcher 3 world because it never gets repetitive, and locations are generally quite recognisable. It never feels to me like the same filler content repeated over and over again. Kingdom Come: Deliverance also does it quite well, and has a much smaller world to begin with.
@@Bhoddisatva In Skyrim I would never fast travel. Since there were so many quests to do all the time, I would circle clockwise around the map to get to my quests, changing the direction every so often. Meant I was always a relatively small walk from my quest instead of crossing the entire map all the time
although i do like the witcher 3's world, i feel like the exploration is a bit underwhelming. the question mark map markers feel like a checklist and not just because i want to complete them all but because they are cookie cutter designed. not always but the majority of the time for me it just looks like an afterthought, like they just threw a chest or bandit camp in the middle of a forest. they are too predictable as well, in a game like skyrim there are some cookie cutter elements but majority of the time i see a building or camp i'm not sure what i will find there. it could be bandits, traders, a small settlement, or vacant and there is usually a reason why but in tw3 a bandit camp is just a bandit camp with the slightest change in scenery.
I feel that you are definitely right when you said that "Having fast travel or not caters to different types of players'', because in a game like Skyrim I actually enjoyed going mostly everywhere walking - and soaking up the virtual landscapes, atmospheres, the different explorables and environments along the way.
Honestly, as much as I understand the sense of limitlessness and wonder of exploration that some players get while playing open world games, I can only list a handful that I actually care for, and think the concept is overused and slightly overrated. I would much rather play a well-crated linear game than one that has an open world that is a complete waste of my time. If devs want to put in effort to give a world life, and make traversing it fun and interesting, then great. If it's just a huge, empty expanse that pads out the game's runtime with tedious travel, then I'm probably less inclined to play it. There are great open world games that use the concept effectively and the game is appropriately built around it, but oftentimes it just comes across as an obligatory thing that's thrown into the game just because that's what people seem to like, and my already limited free time is further wasted. For that reason, fast-travel is a blessing.
‘I would much rather play a well-created linear game than one that has an open world that is a complete waste of my time’ I agree with you on most of what you said but that can just be boiled down to I would rather play a good linear game than a bad open world one, Also I think the guy in the video was trying to say that fast travel is necessary as long as traveling from point A to point B isn’t interesting. (Sorry if this sounded rude or I didn’t understand your point)
"I can only list a handful that I actually care for" Can you share the titles of those exploration games that you thought were worthwhile? That sense of limitlessness and the wonder of exploration are exactly what I'm looking for right now, but I don't know where to even start looking. I've played BotW, and it's my favorite game of all time now. What should I play next?
Yes but there are occasions where the amount of time it takes to go back to firelink is ridiculous if you don’t have the lordvessel. For example the run back from the catacombs where you have to pass those annoying skeleton wheels or going back from demon ruins
@@Amoeba_Podre I'm sickly proud of myself for having managed that walk out of the Tomb of the Giants on foot without the Lord Vessel. I agree with you that you don't want to do it if you can avoid it but for me I had to. One I realized that my drake sword wasn't scaling I set about an epic quest to build the ultimate faith-powered balder side-sword and I had to sneak all the way down there for 1) the item that lets you make divine +6 and higher weapons and 2) white titanite chunks. I had to camp out in that pitch blackness until I'd grinded for enough shards then climb out of the hell hole with nothing but the clothes on my back and my wits. And, you know, a divine +5 balder side sword. And Greater Lightning Spear. My point is that it was hard and I'm proud of myself for doing it without fast travel and once I got the Lord Vessel I never did that ish again. Skeleton Wheels are THE hardest enemies in Dark Souls.
Nah. WoW my guy. the few forms of fast travel still feel immersive as they perfectly keep to the rheme of the game. Some of my favourite moments playing games has been travelling the world in WoW and meeting people along the way
@@beanie4882 Always loved the Zepplin and boat rides in WoW. Haven’t played the game in eons, but fast travel was fun in it for sure. Lots of fun meeting people like you said, and trolling people by attacking them on the ride etc lol. Lots of intense trips when traveling with people from the opposite faction. 😂
The problem is they make game worlds too big, thus they become boring due to lack of resources to make them interesting, and so fast travel becomes a necessity. This makes the world suddenly feel tiny and disconnected.
I totally agree, I felt this with Witcher 3. The map was just so massive that even though everyone said it had lots to do (game didn't feel that densely packed to me) I still go really bored riding the horse for hours. My favourite kind of games are just well crafted not to overly massive worlds like for example Elex that im currently playing has a real nice world and running around with your jetpack is enjoyable (game definitely has some big problems though). Probably the best game for fun travel though has to be Prototype, was so fun sprinting around and flying off buildings.
Honestly even though Fallout 4's map is bigger, I always somehow thought that Fallout 3's map was bigger until I actually looked it up. The reason I felt this way was because there was actually a good amount of space in between locations and also a lot more of the locations in Fallout 3 were unmarked, which lead to me actually travelling to get to them. I guess I didn't really feel like the map was bigger, but rather that it was more full and interesting. And with New Vegas, despite being a smaller map than both 3 and 4, it somehow had way more to do and way more ways to role play
I mostly never use fast travel because I like to fully immerse myself in being an adventurer and I like picking herbs and shooting mudcrabs on the side of the road but I don't think every gamer finds a two-hour virtual walk fun. I think fast travel encourages gamers who lean more toward action games to play RPGs. Some people just wanna kill some NPCs before work.
Plenty of ingredients to gather in skyrim. As long as you dont purposely max out skills too early it gives you a benefit. Random encounters with animals or people. As well. Honestly look at the real world.. citys with hardly anything in between.. what you are asking for is an immense undertaking that can spoil the atmosphere of a game. However a flying spell in skyrim could be legit.
Breath of the Wild fixes most of these problems, and I’m still massively grateful for fast travel. Yeah, there’s stuff to do everywhere, but if I want to do something specific, I don’t want to sit around for 5 hours traversing across the entire map for just one thing.
-GALE- dude I don't know what games you are playing but very very few are big enough that it would take an hour to get from one side of the map to another unless you're talking about an mmorpg. Ever since 2011 I haven't used fast travel in any game cause I feel like it takes something out of the immersion and world building and out of all the games I've played such as the witcher 3, fallout 4, skyrim, ff15, and gta v the only ones that take more than like ten minutes to get across are ff15 and maybe the witcher 3.
in my game, you can , at your base, teleport characters out into the wilderness. to anywhere, if you calibrate the machine right. but once they are out there, you can switch to them if you want, but they can't teleport back. they have to walk, take a taxi, bus, train, or ride the back of a car with a skateboard. this might be the best of both worlds since it will encourage "region-based" characters, who stay in a certain area and explore from there.
In skyrim you can do a mechanic fast travel with the carts, if you use mods you can disable fast travel, there's even mods which make the carts not a fade to black but a great viewing trip that sometimes interrupted by enemy encounters you need to face off, have frostfall with it and you can ask the cart driver for a temporary stop, pitch a tent and pass the night (now would be good to have the cart driver also pitch his tent), tis much better imo, too bad players have to actually mod to obtain that tho
One thing I love about Terraria is its own Fast Travel system. There are actually two being Teleportation and Pylons. For Teleportation, you can buy a Teleporter from the Steampunker(unlocked about halfway through the main game)and some wires and a trigger like a Pressure Plate from the Mechanic(unlocked in the early game). You then can hook it up to another Teleporter then another and then another. How Pylons work is that when an NPC reaches a certain Happiness Level, they will start selling a type of Pylon respective to their biome. So for example, if an NPC was really happy in the desert, they would sell a desert pylon. However, a drawback of these is that they only work near multiple NPCs and disable themselves whenever a threat presents itself like an Event or Boss. You also can only have one type of Pylon per world, which makes players strategise not just about maintaining NPC happiness to get the pylons but also strategising about where to put the towns and thus the pylons. By the way, NPCs will get pretty pissed if you concentrate them into one area as of the 1.4 update. I digress. This system lets players choose their own Fast Travel points and if they even need them. They could very well use minecarts, air mounts and even their own speed(for those who don’t know, Endgame Terraria gives you stuff that can make you incredibly fast). But then there’s those that choose to use Fast Travel. And even if you don’t use fast travel, it’s always a blast finding ways to make your round-the-world rollercoaster interact with the environment as much as possible and if you’re using an Air Mount or your own speed, it’s quite fun just coming close to the ground once in a while and continuing from there.
The problem with most Open World games is that the worlds aren’t really that interesting and Fast Travel is kind of a must. However, Terraria always lets you marvel at how past you f*cked up the overworld and the player’s max speed scales with how much you’re able to easily traverse quite well. The Jungle and the Evil Biome are both dead ends in the early game but once you come back with better gear or even a way to easily dodge everything, you can easily rush through with barely any obstruction. And when Terraria’s overworld starts to get boring, it initiates Hardmode around the start of the early midgame. It changes in so many ways be it in the sky, on the ground or underground. The world becomes more of a hazard than it ever was. Your god-Tier armor is now sh*t-tier. Your SSS-Tier weapons are now F-Tier. And once you’ve bounced back, you’ve acquired so many ways to quickly and easily change the fundamental core of the overworld that you can make your own fun. And that’s what I love about Terraria and its fast-travel system. I don’t even think I was talking about the fast-travel system for most of this monologue. I was talking about what else you can do.
I think Stalker had a great system of checks and balances for fast travel. Most locations were really big, but still easily navigable on foot. Big is good, too big is annoying. Plus, each area was worth exploring, with artifacts and enemy locations scattered intelligently. They did offer fast travel in the later games, but like you said, it took the player to a central location, and not where ever they wanted to go. It also cost money, so that made it a little less attractive.
It's insanely rough around the edges, but definitely worth a look. I made videos on the 3 games in the series. Tried to not be a fanboy, but failed miserably.
Razbuten there are also times where you would wait until you have better equipment to travel into a new area. I am Currently playing Call of Chernobyl and the starting area i chose was normal but areas around the place were VERY hostile. So after getting enought money for equipment i made my way to Rostok to make it my "Main" base. Its was hard and i nearly got killed but in the end it was so worth it.
I like the witcher's travel because when roach almost travels for me i get to enjoy the world and outrun small things i dont want to see. However fast travel is sadly needed because i simply dont have the time. Often i have half an hour two days of the work week. If i go on horse, and even get lost i do not get to progress in the game. It already takes me about a month or 4 to 8 to complete a single open world game like origins. Without fast travel it gets near impossible. Now one thing that works absolutely PERFECT for me as a trophy hunter is the "explore the entire world" trophy. Often i skip places, and when the story is done i revisit the entire world for the trophy, for instance in Origins with the parts of the world of GTA V. I get to actually see everything even though the story wast not a marathon either.
Totally agree, fast travel has to do with time more than anything to do with the actual game. GTA V was clever with that, would love that in more games.
When I was single I relished walking around for hours in open worlds trying to find every landmark and dungeon. Now that I have a family I have very limited game time so I need to maximize actual gameplay so fast travel is an absolute necessity.
I really liked Morrowind's approach to fast travel. You could use silt striders or boats to get between towns after paying some money, but that was it. You couldn't do it everywhere and it had it cost (small, but still). Also, I liked that when a quest told you to go to, for example, a dungeon, which is somewhere north-west of X city, you actually had to go north-west and search for it. Usually, it wouldn't even show on your world map! So while looking for that dungeon you could venture into some interesting NPCs, enemies, places, etc.
@@XaadeTheBlade No, you're wrong. I've played through Morrowind three times, I have found that the directions were allways very accurate and fun to figure out. The NPCs were never wrong to any regard in my experience.
@@MW-qt1ml I don't know if they were right or not, but I definitely got confused by their directions several times. It's been a long time so I don't recall specifically what I was getting hung up on but I vaguely recall it was misunderstanding landmarks or thinking something was a side-trail that wasn't or thinking something was part of a main road because I got confused by the textures or terrain. It's absurd when games let you follow a marker right up to the treasure chest the objective is in but getting to the nondescript cave nestled into blandly textured height-map should at least be straightforward. People will whine and complain at either extreme so just split the difference and let markers get you to the general area and let the player sort out the details.
STALKER has much smaller and more dangerous maps than most open-world games. Even in CoP with the largest maps, it still only takes a few minutes to walk from one side to the other, discounting anomalies and enemies.
Yo. I work for 12 hours and go to school for 4 hours. And on my 278th playthrough i dont want to have to walk from riften to solitude with the remaining free time that i have.
well this is exactly the point. We need fast travel because the travel is boring, but a more exciting solution would be to make the travel exciting instead. New encounters, varying landscape, more exploration, fun movement mecanics...
@@Player-si5rx I think what he meant is some people are too busy to spend time on a game that takes forever to fully enjoy. Adding more content and alternative travel options make the game more fun, sure. But for some others, it just pads the game out further which is fine for folks with the free time to do that kinda stuff, not so much for people who don't.
Spider-Man for ps4 really solves this, they give you fast travel since the beginning but I never used it at all since it was just so fun to swing around the city
I've been waiting to see someone talk about Spiderman! The game had a large yet rich environment combined with an amazing movement system making travel one of the best parts of the game.
At one point, I went to one end of the city and marked my destination to the other side of it. I did this just because of how much fun it is to swing through the city. I did and did not regret it, it was a lot of fun. I would recommend trying it some time.
One day I decided to start a new Skyrim playthrough without using fast travel, nor the compass, nor any hud, and suddenly any quest felt like an actual quest, like I was Frodo on his journey to Mordor, forcing me to actually observe mountains and rivers and towns I would come across in order to orient myself through the wilderness. And that really makes the game much more immersive and enjoyable.
Jay Turtle God I can focus on one mission then and finish it without distractions. Plus with a game as large as skyrim, I can easily get to the destination. I'm sure back in the day people playing morrow wind use to be like. Wtf am to do next? Where do I go. To me that can be frustrating. But also thats what I like,a different guy would like something else.
I feel like GTA did this perfectly, the map is big, but it's fun to traverse it in all the different vehicles and they have amazing driving mechanics. You can fast-travel, but you have to wait for the taxi and it costs money, so it has downsides. I found myself almost never doing it because it's just less fun.
Also the random encounters are something I really love in the Rockstar Games(GTA/RDR), and you cam only really find them if you travel around on the map.
@@Dell-ol6hb that's exactly what i was saying, i just didn't say it that way so as to avoid spoilers for folks who haven't played it yet. That's why i said "story reasons".
@@opinionatedarsehole6495 Really? Kkkk where? The coaches that you can't use because every single mission gives 1000000 bounty in your head and the stupid map on Arthur's tent that only work if you're actually there? Come on, give me a break
While kudos for everyone here being nice, your comment means nothing if you can't articulate yourself and explain why. There's nothing to respect there
You seem nice, may I ask as to why you think he is wrong? Do you like fast travel to save time? Do you think smaller more dense maps might open up the door for devs to simply add less content for the same price? I personally prefer Hub world style games but that is just me I guess. I did love W3 though.
This video makes no sense. So you want traveling or walking relatively slow to be fun by adding more encounters but you want the encounters to always be diverse but only sometimes because its a distraction or something so it should be short but unique and interesting...what the fuck
Skyrim? Quitchya bitchin' player.setav speedmult 200 I no longer Fast Travel. I AM BECOME FAST TRAVEL. I'm sure there are ways to handle this problem in many other games. Also, your video is too slow paced. I watched it all at 2x speed. Catch up, senpai.
I played through Breath of The Wild with no fast travel after beating the game the first time. It was an amazing experience that works really really well for that game. You are never in a "Wrong" place, so the journey from area to area was full of things to explore that I completely missed the first time around. That said, this probably won't work well for all games, especially ones that aren't designed with a never in the wrong place mindset. One very helpful feature in BOTW is the ability to track where you had been before. This allowed me to take a brand new different path to and from my destination every time which kept the experience fresh when revisiting the same areas multiple times. This also meant that the content was more specific to each area I was in, although that game does suffer a lot from reused puzzles and concepts popping up everywhere. I think a game needs to be designed so that the adventure is the journey and not just the activities that you do when you get to the destination in order to work well without fast travel. Without fast travel, nearly the whole game is the journey. Sadly I think there are very few games that even come close to achieving this.
a nice way to balance this is to fast travel NEAR your intend endpoint then walk from there so you can gent some adventureing done but also get to the place faster
Beyond good and evil had this figured out. You got vehicle upgrades as the game got bigger. It wasn't fast travel at all. At a certain point, you shifted from using your hovercraft into using a flying craft. Maybe zelda would benefit from adding a large flying bird as a step up from epona
Yeah, I thought the idea of the winglofts in Skyward Sword were pretty interesting, but I think there being a lack of a real overworld made it less interesting. Man, if you could get a bird later on in BotW, that would be amazing.
Imagine that the sky was perilous. And the first bird you earned had no defensive capabilities, making it risky. The next bird you got had some defensive capabilities and was more maneuverable. The next one had offensive capabilities. SO that it's not the hookshot or boomerang that opens up the world, it's your travel upgrades for fast travel
Just cause 3 is a perfect example of a game where fast travel is the laborious task; even travelling manually from one side of the map to the complete other side is SO FUN! and I rarely make it too my destination, I usually get distracted by other tasks along the way and end up doing something more fun than the objective I was aiming for anyway.
I love how you added different methods of fast travel. Fallout 4 and Skyrim are massively different mechanics from Dragons Dogma. I enjoy open world games and use fast travel rather frequently, but Dragons Dogma really set a higher bar for a more enjoyable experience. Finding the crystals and being able to place them as a fast travel marker was cool. Especially as theres only so many to go around. Makes you think about whether or not you'll go back to a location soon or not. I'd like to see more variations in a fast travel mechanic before I really put too much effort in discussing what would be best though
Fast travel isn't the REASON games don't have more content like this, it's the SOLUTION to the lack of new content between places you've already visited. In linear games, with stages or worlds or missions, this isn't an issue, because you're going from mission to mission, high point to high point. You're not trekking over the same paths, unless they've been tailor made to feel new and have an entirely different twist on them. In that way stage-based games are honestly like games that just have the fast travel built-in. Open world games don't have this option, nor is that what they're shooting to accomplish. What I honestly gather from this video is, "I want more content". Content to fill and make use of paths you've already traveled. But if you want more content, you need more money and development time. Changing or getting rid of fast travel isn't going to change this need. Time spent on the things you mention would mean less time for development for other areas that haven't been visited, and additional entirely fresh content. I would assume most developers feel new areas, missions, and larger worlds, is more important than making travel in areas you've already been to a little bit more glamorous. Partly because going through them over and over is always going to eventually feel stale. More content is better placed in areas you have not visited.
I agree but I think the reason this is happening is that players keep wanting these damn retarded massive open worlds. The content gets spread out for the same reasons you've mentioned. So the distances between anything interesting increase, making the voids harder to fill, making fast travel even more of a necessity. So fast travel is just the easy and reasonable solution to a problem created by people wanting a world that's constantly bigger with more content to explore. Even the fact that you have to travel large distances for quests is a consequence of people wanting to explore, since you keep sending them all over the place to give them an excuse to explore.
On some way I agree with you. On others I agree with the guy who made the video. I hate how easy it is to fast travel in modern games and how little explanation there is for it. There needs to be a system for fast travel that is explained within the world because otherwise it takes me out of the immersion. Also, I think there should be penalties for using fast travel otherwise there's never a reason NOT to use fast travel. Morrowind's taxi system comes to mind. You have to pay to travel, and pricing might change depending on whether the driver likes your or the economy. Skyrim sort of did this, but not really. Like, it lets you use a taxi system, but it's completely useless because you once you discover something for the first time you can just fast travel to it later on whenever you'd like. And there's no explanation for it either for why they can do this.
@adam giroir That's a non argument. I'm not against a fast travel system. I just want the system done better and in a way that helps the role playing experience.
I think fallout 3 traveling is pretty fun, though it’s old and had limitations, the random encounters always entertained me and there were enough of them to keep them fresh. I would like to see more games with more of a emphasis on short, entertaining random encounters that might also provide something to the player; a shop, a short in-dialogue quest, maybe even a special weapon or unique item. I feel like that would entice more players to explore while traveling
Part of what makes traveling in an open world is when the actual travel part of it is incorporated into regular gameplay. A great example would be Sea of Thieves. In Sea of Thieves, you get quests to anywhere from 1 to a dozen different islands and to get to each location, you and anyone you're playing with have to manage a ship. You need to adjust sails, steer, check your map and compass to make sure you know where you are and where you're going. There's also tons of leisure stuff from playing music, fishing, and cooking, which can be for fun or cook better healing items for your crew. You're also able and somewhat encouraged to consider stopping by every island between you and your destination, since there may be a few extra bits of treasure and supplies, maybe even another smaller quest to do on the way. The traveling to buried treasure is as important and engaging as the actual hunt across the island.
I hope the genre learns a few things from what Breath of the WIld did right with Open-World. Making movement and traversing the game world fun on it's own. And don't even get me started on the brilliant mechanic of unlocking fast travel points and filling in sections of the map with a system of towers that you can fly basically anywhere from.
Mister Guy What the hell did Dark Souls do?! There are no advanced movement mechanics, just generic running around. I don't think you understand the OP's comment at all. I'm going to ignore the fact that you compared Breath of The Wild's movement mechanics to the original Zelda game. That is just plain absurd, you sound like a troll.
Brungus I think Breath of the Wild fixed this issue a little bit, because they didn’t have markers on the screen you followed the whole time, and made movement a blast. Near the end game though, there isn’t really a reason not to fast travel, which is an issue. A way to fix that I think is to have loot scale up to how far the player is in the game, thus you want to find more of it, and taking down monster camps isn’t worthless by the end of the game.
Have you played the first dark souls game? You don't unlock 'fast travel' until you are well and truly into the game, and even then it's limited in that you can only warp to certain, major areas. Despite its late acquisition in the game, and its limited functionality, you don't feel like you have to run for hours because of the level design. You'll run through an area, and find that almost all areas link back to the 'hub' of the game, and as such can cross large sections of the map in less and less time as you progress and unlock shortcuts. It's quite an elegant solution to the sort of dilemma you had in fallout 4, with diamond city in the middle of the map and sanctuary in the top left corner. This is achieved by stacking most of the areas, using elevators and such to tackle the verticality, but it is done in a way that doesn't seem clunky like some other games I have played. Definitely recommend checking it out!
Dark souls and fallout 4 are entirely different though in terms of linearity. Dunno how anyone could do something similar in an open world, but I'd love to see it happen.
Balthazar Lai amazing that you brought up dark souls even tho what you mentioned is hard to apply to open world games like the witcher 3 or fallout but I think for games with similar level design to dark souls (metroidvania) fast travel literally kills them. As you said it was ok in dark souls since it was introduced after anor londo which is far into the game but ever since dark souls 1 fast travel has been in every soulsborne game from the beginning and the level design has gotten so much worse. Aside from one instance in bloodborne there hasn't been a soulsborne game after dark souls 1 where you can get excellently designed shortcuts to get you from one side of the map to the other while still making the world feel huge and coherent. It's a shame they lost that and I blame fast travel.
thats why you add on other genres in order to narrow it down. Action Adventure, Action RPG, Platforming Adventure, FPS Adventure, Action FPS. The term 'Metroidvania' wouldn't be so bothersome if you just went the way of Roguelike or Soulslike and just called it a 'metroid-like' but even then claiming every single game that is an adventure platformer with a large, interconnected world is trying to emulate metroid is absolutely stupid.
Any feature you can just ignore should be left in the game so players can choose. I usually completely ignore potions and foods of all kinds in all games. ESPECIALLY crafting them.
I horde them and end up with a billion things lmao, crafting on the other hand I’ll dabble in and see if it’s worth before disregarding it completely. An example would be enchanting vs alchemy in Skyrim. Enchanting was simple and fun, and messing around with the last perk of adding 2 to one thing was extremely fun for me. With alchemy where I’d have to taste and test every little thing which is something I wouldn’t have fun doing I strayed away from (except at one point I got bored and started doing it, and as it was “new” to me I enjoyed)
@@StripedJacket yeah, I'd like alchemy more if it weren't just for potions. I never really care about temporary consumables, it's just too much to pay attention to, except for strict no magic play throughs
That doesn't make sense because there's a potentially infinite number of set pieces you can conjure up that can be ignored. The best thing to do is to make each mechanic meaningful to the core experience of the game, rather than letting it subtract from it.
@@thatoneuser8600 nope. It can't subtract from the experience if it's optional. You don't like it? Don't use it. I don't use potions or food. It doesn't subtract from the experience because I'm not forced to use them. Occasionally, I make a character that doesn't use magic, so I do use potions. That option only adds to the experience in those rare occasions for me, or for people who use them regularly.
@@SnakeWasRight It certainly can and does throw off the experience of the game. 1. Depending on how cluttered your game is, having tons of optional things can impact the performance, memory space, and development speed of the game. 2. Depending on the type of optionality, it will just clutter the UI and make the game look messy and obtrusive. 3. It can throw off the game balancing if players didn't know that the game wasn't balanced around those optional items, thus leading to worse gaming experiences such as cheesing an otherwise difficult boss for a game centered around a particular theme that is now not able to be conveyed through the game. 4. They dilute the core experience by inherently being not very important to progress through the game, and so they might wrongly disenchant the player from exploring or killing enemies if they don't drop anything good or important, thus pushing them to skip content and believing they didn't miss much of anything.
That's why more and more people are calling for more linear games. Linear games get to have their gaming "butter" more concentrated for higher quality gameplay. If the difference between a 20 hours game and a 120 hours game is a 100 hours of walking, I'll take the first one. The transition from ME1 to ME2 is a good example of a mostly empty open world map vs, quoting OG Bioware, traveling to "bite-size" mission oriented locals; and than the morons decide to roll it back with fucking Andromeda with the mechanic of "Oh, you want to do a side quest? Why don't you go ahead and drive around aimlessly until you trigger the next stage of the quest. And of course we won't tell you when and where that random trigger happens, where's the exploring in that?". I love RPGs, but there's something to be said to spending more time role-playing and making decisions, and less time wandering aimlessly looking for stuff to do.
Fallout New Vegas with JSawyer mod, Hardcore mode and Very Hard difficulty and fast travel modded out makes traveling harder than some quests, especially when you're running out of food or water and almost all edible sources are deceased
Eh, idk. For me open world games have a higher replay value, especially in Bethesda titles like Skyrim and Fallout. To this day you can still find easter eggs and fun stuff to do long after the quests have been finished. GTA is another great open world with a lot of cool nuances and for me provides kind of an adrenaline rush when exploring. It's fun to just dick around and shoot random shit sometimes lol.
This is why I've always wanted an open world mario game. Travel has always been fun in mario games, with chaining together jumps, bouncing on cappy, and FLUDD's various nozzles. But the maps are never big enough to really explore this way for more than a few minutes.
To me, fast travel is like me watching a past recording of a sports game. Having to travel long distances without using fast travel is like having to watch commercials eventhough you have the ability to fast forward the recording.
And fast travel does not mean i want to get the game over with quickly. When I watch sports, I get excited during the game and it dies down when there is a commercial break. Pressing fast forward does not mean I want the sports game to finish.
That was kind of their first point, "open world adventure" games are losing that whole "open world" aspect because you can skip to the highlights. The problem being that the initial draw of the genre is contained within all of that content that you're skipping, roaming in that big immersive sandbox is the entire point. By using a menu to edit out all of the "dull bits" you're editing out the adventure itself and reducing the entire game to a series of cutscenes and dungeons. Now, that can be totally fine as its own thing, it's not wrong to have fun in that way. But it would be really nice if at least a few of the new open world RPGs were actually made for people that liked open world RPGs and not people that wanted to play a more typical action game that is a series of levels and boss battles but disguised as though it were an open world game.
I liked the system they used in Horizon Zero Dawn, where you had to craft a fast travel pack which included items needed for a long journey Until you unlocked the golden fast travel pack of course and could travel anywhere you want with the snap of a finger
*Problem:* One of the main things players will do in our game is boring, repetitive and time consuming. *Solution:* Eh, I cant be bothered to think of anything, just have them instantly teleport instead.
Osac that's not the problem...even the most interesting place becomes boring when you just want to get to the place behind it. The world of Skyrim isn't empty and it's not boring but when traveling through the same places for the 10th+ time you'd wish for a mechanic that let's you skip it. I understand that you wish for deeper quests but you can't expect *every* quest in let's just say whiterun to be done in a way that feels different for every walk, that wouldn't be immersive. You strive for immersion but neglect the fact that immersive traveling between places *is* boring and you want rich and dense worlds when this wouldn't be immersive aswell (like how people were mad that the arabic desert in MGS5 was empty wherever there wasn't an outpost...well duh). And skyrim in particular is still pretty darn good if you just don't use fast travel (with the exception of high-hrothgar, but that's by far the most extreme example I can think of). It's a matter of choice and dedication but let's face it: the obvious choice is the one that's more pleasant and fun. And if you regard immersion as more important than fun then go by that decision but don't expect the developers to deprive the majority of players from pleasant mechanics because you think it's immersion-breaking when full immersion was never the intention in the first place. Why do you think playing video games is one of the most fun activities for many people? Surely not because they put you through the same chores as RL does.
Good response, I do think that the choice should be there. But in some games it's there instead of content which is why I dislike it. In most cases it seems like a lazy method of getting around the fact that there's nothing to do between areas.
I admit I was focusing on Skyrim a little to much...of course there are many games that need much more depth. Especially 3rd person games like to put you into a huge world that's only huge for the sellpoint and don't have the gameplay mechanics to back it up. For those games basically don't mind what I said
Exploration is vastly different than Travel. Fast travel is vastly different than manual travel. If you want to travel on foot, you often end up exploring. If you fast travel, you just want to get from A to B. Use both to their strengths.
Hey, if you're on PC, and you want to make more interesting in, the original, Skyrim, combine the mods, "Frostfall," and, "iNeed," and refuse or turn off fast travel. Frostfall makes you vulnerable to the weather and can optionally turn of fast travel, and iNeed forces you to be well fed, hydrated, and rested.
the problem is that you shouldn't have to mod in stuff to make a game more interesting. As well as that doesn't change how frustrating it is to have to travel up and down high hrothgar several times because of how tedious and annoying it is
Honestly, even if they did have interactions when normal traveling like this, who really wants to be slowed down that much? Maybe they actually want to finish the quest they're on.
Jonathan Williams I feel that that was addressed in the video. He speaks briefly on quests designed to take you out of your way, this should either be interesting or simply not so far away. And it doesn’t have to slow you down that much, think of the Witcher 3 which keeps almost all quests within about a minute of where you start them.
Right, but he even spoke about how old RPGs had random encounters to keep you 'excited'. Really it was just lazy copy-pasting the same enemies all over the place that did nothing but slow you down, drain your resources, and leave you with nothing but a few experience points and gold pieces, just to drag your game out so it didn't seem like too short. Gosh, I hated that element of those games. This is what I *LOVE* about fast travel. Instead of pointless "miniencounters", the devs focused on having main quests, fleshed-out worlds and story, leaving you with big, long games that keep your focus and didn't need to rely on pointless lazy encounters.
That's true, but I'd count that as simply a failed attempt at making travel interesting. As someone who loves lore the 'points of interest' encountered in W3 were wonderful because almost all of them had a note or letter giving context to a nearby corpse or new information about the region you're in. I do think fast travel still deserves its place in games. (The Witcher is my fall back here b/c I'm replaying it right now)
Exactly! That sort of thing exists in most open world games, Skyrim, Witcher, etc. These games already have the encounters and side-quests we need, and still allows you to skip with fast travel. Those who wish to be entertained by such things can explore on foot, those who focus on their active quests can still accomplish their mission in a timely manner. This video was about the lack of such things, but there's still plenty to keep you busy and entertained.
I guess we should reference his original comment which states that his main complaint is the integration of fast travel due to the fact that the world is boring. Something that isn't even a main issue with Skyrim & Witcher because the world is interesting to wander across for the first however many hours. Although I honestly cannot remember if Skyrim's quests had you covering obscene distances.
....I just find it sort of amusing (and amazing) that we've gotten to the point where we can make video game worlds so detailed and on such a large scale that traversing them because of obligation rather than desire...becomes mundane and tedious. The reason I find this amusing is because that exactly mirrors real life. Like, exactly. Morrowind, I would say, is probably the archetype on how to do travel properly. You had multiple transit systems that you had to learn to get 80 percent of the way to anywhere you'd want to go, just to take the last leg on foot. That's optimal. So I guess, as in real life, the answer is to have a combination of transit and personal transportation optimized to moving a person around in space somewhat efficiently.
This is totally true. See people complain about manual travelling to be a bit tedious because of a lack of things to do, but the part of me that wants immersion actually often feels in games like TES that there's way too much happening between places. I suppose, as this youtuber kinda mentioned, the problem is that there's often quite a lot going on to slow you down, but it's often just incredibly repetitive and unchallenging; using Skyrim as an example, I never manually traveled if I could help it on vanilla because fighting off hoards of wolves and whatever the hell else was just totally trivial from basically level 1. However, when adding in a mod like Requiem where a level 1 character might well be instantly murdered by one lone wolf if not properly equipped and stocked, I found myself walking between places manually all the time; because it was a challenge. In my opinion, what's needed is not frequent entertainment in manual travel, it's sporadic real danger, which a lot of RPG games really fail to give you, especially the Elder Scrolls games I've played (only Skyrim and Oblivion properly). I also do think that the game has to be built around things generally as you say: automatic travel can take you around 80% of the way around the world, but the remaining 20% should be filled with significant dangers and rewards. The automatic travel should also make sense, if it takes you through a dangerous region it should be expensive and it should be obvious why the travel is actually safe, and perhaps even have a chance of being held up at some points by enemies; I never quite understood how the carriages in Skyrim were so cheap and why they were always safe.
In Morrowind it was obvious why travels are safe: Silt Strider is gigantic and all kinds of teleportation (Almsivi intervention, divine intervention, teleportation through Mages Guild, leaguestep) are safe by definition.
I get why morrowind appeals to people but I actually find its lack of transit and markers to be more of a turn-off than anything and it's stopped me from trying it several times. I suppose that, without this genre adding the convenience of those two features, it's just too much of a mouthful for someone like me to digest.
phuturephunk The Problem is, IRL, you need to travel without fast-travel, even though it's boring. But they can't make it like that in a videogame because the player wouldn want to play it. He can just stop playing, the game, cause he doesn't like playing it and play another game. In Real life, you need to have boring travel, in a videogame, you dont want to have it.
sorry for being late to the party but aion had a fast travel mode called flight transport that cost money and it was literally, like, a giant magical bird flies you from one point to another, and they even pan the camera so you can get a better look. cool as fuck and the world was gorgeous too so it fit really well
I think that Dying light had one of the best traveling systems in any game I've played. It's fun to run around on rooftops, do parkour, and maybe kill a few zombies on the way. Towards the middle of the game you even get a grappling hook to grapple to farther/higher places, just to make things a bit faster and easier. It's definitely top on my list :D
Cowbats Yeah IMO Dying Light did open world travel in a good way, and the way they limited the fast travel to and from the major areas was a smart Idea.
Shady Sam If there's anything Techland can do it's that they know how to make an open world game fun to travel around. Although they don't know how to make a good storyline or quests.
If designers couldn't rely on fast travel they'd also have to design quests better, i.e. at some point they'd notice it's not a great idea to make the player do repeated FedEx quests between towns opposite sides of the map. Fallout 2, did this well: you could go anywhere and didn't have to "finish" an area first, but in practice you would often progress from one place to another once you'd done all the available quests at the moment, pushing you further and further from where you started. When you went back to wrap up some later quest, it actually felt nostalgic to revisit the town. "Oh I haven't been here in a while, let's see what's happened with the merchants" etc. In short, there needs to be less reason to jump back-and-forth and more respect for the logistics of long-distance travel. Realistically, no hero on a quest to save the princess would make a week-long, expensive trip for hundreds of miles just to return some family heirloom for a peasant. It would also force the player to manage their itineraries better: "Now I have enough quests to turn in, I'll handle them with one trip." Another point is that open worlds have gotten unnecessarily big. Most of the time, it isn't justified. Look at Dark Souls: the map is seamlessly interconnected and you can go many directions, and once you unlock doors and pull down ladders you can bypass much of the challenging, meaningful routes you had to take the first time around - but they're still there. Obviously this doesn't work for a open world game set on a desert planet, but this multi-layered design would serve many games well. Another example is Gothic: the world is relatively small, but it is hand-crafted with optional routes that become viable when you level up and you don't really run out of things to do or places to see despite staying bearably close to hubs at all times. A bit more of this design philosophy would serve open-world games well.
Olli I thought morrowind did it well also. The circular map with silt strider that only go from certain towns to others still left plenty of openness to the game.
The Yakuza series is a great example on how to have a large area not be grating in travel. When traveling from one main story location to the next there is always a plethora of interesting interruptions that will keep things refreshing
A Swedish title is added: "Jag hatar snabb resa", which is a literal translation word by word, and doesn't convey the actual meaning. There's no established Swedish term, so you would probably have to go with something like "Jag hatar att kunna hoppa direkt till en plats på kartan". If you're curious how it works in games, it's usually just known as travel anyway, and not fast travel. With the context in the game, that's just "resa", but it wouldn't work in this title.
Part of the reason dying light is one of my favorite games of all time. I’ve never connected with a game world as much as I have with dying light in large part to the lack of a fast travel system.
Yeah, traveling is just fun, take the streets and you'll have to make your way trough hordes of zombies, take the rooftops and you'll have to constantly do parkour. If it gets too boring, you can always travel at night.
I wish it had it though, Sometimes I didn’t have the time to get back to the next safe house or back to where the quest wanted me. The parkour was amazing but sometimes I just wish we could have it.
I played the whole Main-Storyline of Skyrim without knowing about fast travel. Literally right after I defeated Alduin, I looked on the map and was like: "Wait, fast travel to that location? Thats a thing?!" Although the travelling was boring sometimes, it was cool to explore the world and not just warp from location to location.
Fallout 4 takes away fast travel with survival mode and plenty of stuff to do while travelling... Such as crying because every time you move you get every disease known to man, and then crying even more because every time you reach the objective you die and have to do the journey all over again.
Have you ever played Firefall? Very little fast travel, and interesting travel options, lemme explain: It shut down, but was the best MMO ever in my opinion, one of the reasons being the traveling... There were quite a few options: using your legs&jetpack, using a motorcycle, using glider pads, or dropships Your legs&jetpack were useful for small distances and getting up a hill or so. Your motorcycle is useful for medium distances over the roads that were laid out. The range of a glider depends on the initial height, so it's the fastest and the most beautiful if you started up high! A dropship would do one of two things for you: act as public transport between towns, or act as fast travel point between zones The thing that made travel the most fun, was the fact that you could choose to take part in whatever you happened to find on the way. The occasional abmush, very often other people gathering resources, an outpost getting ambushed, ect... It's so easy to implement, yet I've never ever found any other game where you can help random strangers! (strangers being both players and npc's.) So... Anyone got recommendations for games that do have that? :P
the whole point is that there SHOULDN'T BE a long path that takes hours to walk. he doesn't hate using fast travel, he hates that games are so lazily made that all the travel is so boring that you have to fast travel. wouldn't it just be better if the path was interesting and took a few minutes to walk across
Kira Fischer Skryim's open world has SO much empty space. It's definitely not a good thing. You could make a world with equally as many things to do as skyrim but just condense it and actually design it well enough to make exploration fun. The problem is skyrim is far too big to be worth it. It's like a giant ocean that is all 1cm deep. I'd rather have that water put into a lake so it would actually be deep enough to swim in.
They attempted in assassins creed odyssey to have no way points so you have to talk to random npcs to get directions. I think it made it more approachable as an open world.
@@MrBeast1901 That's the point we're making about fast travel hindering video games. Developers have to design an open world as if there is no fast travel at all. For example, Skyrim was designed with fast travel in mind right from the start. That's why you have to go to high Hrothgar so many times. If fast travel wasn't a thing in the game then you would probably only have gone there once or twice in the main story. People say without fast travel, you'd be wasting time traversing the map instead of doing engaging quests. But the thing is, it wouldn't be as tedious if developers actually thought about quest design with the open-world better.
this is what they did in Horizon Zero Dawn... you have to build a fast travel kit, which are finite... so that would impose a limitation and make the player think about using fast travel all the time...
Yeah but about 10-17 hours into the game you have the option to get a golden fast travel pack, which grants you infinite fast travels edit: I'm just saying that they shouldn't have added this in, not trying to debunk your statement
