What's the Deal with Fast Travel? 

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Latias/Latios in ORAS is still my favourite. Instead of teleporting, you could fly over the minimap on its back and land wherever there was a notable location. It gave you greater control and greater immersion in the region while being quick and convenient.

i tried playing BOTW without fast travel and i was surprised by how much hyrule started to feel like home, a trip from kakariko to death mountain is like a walk to the kitchen. i also became very attached to my horse and i appreciated the pain from having to travel on foot to the horse shrine if it died

The most fun I had in Skyrim was doing a "no fast travel except at carts" playthrough. There's so much you miss by fast travelling, it's insane !

When talking about fast travel I always want to bring up Morrowind. It mixes up several different forms of fast travel. There is boat that takes you between coastal cities, a big monster bug that acts as bus between certain towns and cities, mages' guild has teleportation network and several different spells for fast travel. The different forms of fast travel make for immersive experience, and learning a best route from place A to place B feels rewarding.

Fast travel is one of those features I've always been iffy on. I often feel disconnected from a game's setting and story when teleporting everywhere. I really enjoyed walking around the maps of Skyrim and FFXIV when I first started playing them. At the same time, travel is less of a "thing to do" and more of a space between action, and it can get boring between those actions. But I worry that this sense of boredom is not because travelling is uninteresting, but because I've been trained to do chores in an exceedingly optimal way. I can't help but feel as though the result of fast travel is not convenience, but instead feeding a Skinner box style obsession with efficiency.

In the world of Yakuza the district of Kamurocho was small enough to not really need fast travel, since you could cross the entire map in about 2 minutes or so. Although, fast travel is offered via taxis, the taxis only take you to the edges of the map so it there only used for crossing the entire city; saving you a minute of time.

People always complain about fast travelling in terms of immersion, but I think in terms of story-telling it makes a lot of sense. When you tell a story, you don't tell about every little detail the characters encounter; just the important events. We had games jump you from level to level long before Will Wright thought we wanted games where we watch our characters wash their hands after they use the toilet.

The most unique form of fast travel i have seen in a game was probably all the forms of fast travel in the mmo fusionfall. In that game, theres (almost?) No traditional teleport tavel system, instead, the game had sky bus stops and flying mojo jojo monkeys, which actively carry you to whatever area on their route you want to get to. No teleport, no loading screen, just you actively being carried throughout the game world, allowing you to also get a birds eye view of the map as you go, showing you further points of interest as you go. I loved this system, felt so natural and watching the horizon/skyline slowly change as you go from area to area was great. Honestly sad that more games have not done fast travel like this, though I understand it probably wouldn't work for most games.

I really like the dream nail in hollow knight, you can set up a gate wherever you want and teleport to it later. Since you only get to teleport to one place it doesnt let you skip regular travel and exploration. However it let you skip the section between a bench and a boss when youre tryharding and you get it late enough to really appreciate it

One of the reasons I think the interconnected world in Dark Souls 1 works so well is because fast travel is unlocked partway through the game and is limited to only certain bonfires. It forces the player to learn to traverse the world. In every other Souls game you can teleport to any bonfire (or equivalent) right from the beginning, and the series got more linear up until Elden Ring. If the player can just warp anywhere, there's less reason to make interesting paths through the world. And the connections that do exist feel pointless.

I really enjoyed FFXV where a form of fast travel is just take the car and let Ignis just drive you to where you are going, you can listen to music, everyone is just enjoying the ride. It had world immersion, story context, character development moments and you can see the world design

Morrowind had amazing fast travel. There's like six different in-universe fast travel systems that start off obtuse but are really easy to use once you understand them.

Gravity Rush comes to mind when I think about fast travel. In Gravity Rush, your main method of transportation is manipulating your own gravity to fall in any direction you want. It honestly pretty fun, flying across the game's giant sky city, finding all the places you can explore with your gravity-based abilities, I liked it so much that I never bothered with the game's fast travel, which was using man holes to get from place to place.

You should do an episode on change states in the world when backtracking. Like a peaceful tutorial village is later filled with demons, or a location was destroyed or frozen over. Examples: the main town square in Ocarina of Time, the Ashina Outskirts in Sekiro, or Leyndell in Elden Ring.

The car from FFXV. "Fast travel" was just you handing off the wheel to one of your buddies. Riding around the map taking in the sites and listening to the banter of the four friends was one of the best parts of that game.

For me, the horses never felt like a nerf or an inconvenience. Like all other forms of travel in the game, they have strengths and weaknesses. Horses are fast on long stretches of terrain, they give a sense of companionship to increase your emotional attachment, and they can travel automatically on paths which allows the player to look around and either take in the scenery or look for points of interest. When I got to a river it a cliff to steep to climb, that just meant I had to now figure out a new course of action and kept traveling fresh and exciting. I never got bored with the horse because I constantly switched between using the horse, climbing, paragliding, and shield surfing.

I once beat BOTW without using fast travel, I even got to 114 shrines without guide. It was one of the best experience, hyped to do that again in TOTK!

if you think about it, the lost woods in ocarina of time is kind of a fast travel system. if you know the way around you can use it to access several important areas, but only after reaching it first. if the area got expanded on a bit more you probably wouldn't have needed the warp songs

Rain World does something really interesting: fast travel is called passages, and they are unlocked through achievements. You are limited by only being able to use the passages you’ve unlocked once per play through, and each passage shows a unique scene based on the achievement when you use it

My personal favourite was sadly only in the late game, this was the latios/latias flute available in pokemon oras. It acted as a fly but also allowed you to be more engaged into the process and find hidden areas and pokemon

One interesting possibility is areas that can only be accessed by fast travel, such as Paper Mario's shiver city or Hollow Knight's stag nest. This can be a reward area for unlocking all the other fast travel points or a way of gating story progress and late game areas behind unlocking a postgame fast travel system.

To this day, Morrowind's is my favorite. It's all in-world travel. Boats, Mages, and stilt-striders. Some of it is even customizable with the Mark and Recall spells. There's also the levitation and jump spells, with some spells making you run faster.

I really liked fast travel in Dragon's Dogma. It requires a consumable item (you later get an unlimited one) and you may only travel to a very small handful of places by default. However, there was a second consumable item that allowed you to make your own travel points! They were quite limited, and you could pick them back up so they weren't a permanent investment.

Old School Runescape has some of the most fascinating fast travel mechanics I've ever seen; it has pretty much everything you just listed, to varying degrees. The Agility skill, in addition to allowing you to run for longer without getting tired, also opens up many useful shortcuts around the map. The Magic skill lets you cast teleport spells to various key locations, but your choices are limited by which spellbook you currently have selected. If you want to use a spell from a different spellbook, you need to buy or make teleport tablets from that spellbook or return to the correct altar to change out your spells. Many quests and achievement packs (called "diaries") give you items with infinite teleports to one very specific location. Enchanted jewelry allows you to teleport to a handful of locations, but must be recharged or recreated after a set number of uses. There are also like, 5 separate hub-to-hub transportation networks, most of which link nicely into each other and/or have global teleports nearby one of their hubs. It's complex and takes awhile to wrap your head around, but once you're in the midgame and have all the travel options unlocked, it is incredibly rewarding to zip from place to place using skills and items you worked for instead of waypoints you only need to visit.

I like how in Axiom Verge the Fast Travel is basically one big-ass head in the middle of the map which physically gets you to your destination and if you happen to fall off the head you're stranded somewhere in the hub and have to walk to the next destination.

I think BOTW horses specifically fill the niche of traveling to a place that you don't have fast travel points to. The roads in the game are actually fairly well laid out and horses will even steer themselves while riding on a road. If you are too underpowered or uninterested to go far off the main trail, horses make for a really convenient way to get to each of the towns or towers in the early game, giving you those fast travel points to jump start the rest of the games exploration.

I really like the fast travel options in Terraria. From the super convenient "instant go home" option of magic mirror/recall potions, to the cooperation encouraging wormhole potions, and even silliness of teleportation potions (which teleport you to a random location anywhere in the world). There's even 1 or 2 ways of setting up your own teleportation hub system, where the player can pick what the points of interest are for themselves and set up their own teleportation there, blending perfectly with the base building aspect of the game while still being s super useful QoL feature.

Xenoblade lets you fast travel to any points you've been to before at any time, but during story heavy segments where you're supposed to be trapped or wouldn't make sense for your character to leave a place until the story progresses, it prevents you from doing so. There's even an entire city that becomes unavailable for fast travel until the game is over after a point in the story, and it's the saddest one...

Soaring on Latias/Latios in Pokemon Alpha Saphire/Omega Ruby was a blast. Instead of the usual fly-based teleportation (which the game also had) you could play a flute, and fly through the skies of Hoenn in a controlled manner. It was pretty entertaining, and lets you reach some areas that you can't get to on foot, and have some wild pokemon encounters if you're careless enough to crash into a flock.

I love the way Metroid Dread structures itself. Like any good Metroidvania, you get more and more skip options while you go through the story thanks to gaining more abilities. But only at the very end of the game, right before the final boss, it open up a true teleportation style fast travel, using the previously two way only teleporters to let you get to ANY teleporter. It makes you explore the entire game just using what you got, but still opens up a useful thing for completion clean up purposes.

Towers are kind of infamous as fast travel and map discovery points, so I want to draw attention to the similar-but-different FN Sites in Xenoblade Chronicles X. They are marked by tall beacons of light which are visible from a moderate distance, but you can only be sure of their horizontal position. A good few are actually hidden or located surprisingly high or low, and sometimes it takes scanning your surroundings to figure out how to get to one, install a probe there, and unlock it as a fast travel destination. FN Sites are marked on the map, but instead of getting exact icons, they're indicated as being somewhere in a given "hex": one of dozens of bite-size sections of the regional map. Installing a probe at a site also reveals all of the adjacent map hexes (up to 6), which is much less powerful than unlocking the map for a whole area at once.

My favourite form of fast travel is probably Hub to Hub - There's a fast travel network you can access and slowly unlock, but you can only use it from it's stations and only ride it to it's stations. As for Breath of the Wild... My biggest issue with the horses weren't their inconveniences, but... I have a glider. Why would I use a horse rather than my glider? Not suited for some games, sure, but quite often I find teleportation from anywhere feels like it's an excuse for boring traversal. (I _do_ like the ability to set a fast travel point yourself and then either teleport to it at any point, or add that point to the network for hub to hub, mind)

The relationship between fast travel and overworld map presentation is also an interesting one to explore. A really great way to keep players from feeling overwhelmed by the scope of the game or confused by your map is to have the size of the default overworld map view scale with how far apart the farthest two discovered landmarks are. This gives the player a sense that the world is almost expanding along with their own knowledge, which is a really cool feeling. Generally if you do this and players ask, "Wait, how big IS this game?" it's in awe and appreciation, not fear or overwhelm. This doesn't necessarily work for every game; The smaller the scope of your game, the less interesting this is as an option. But it's a subtle trick you can use to make the story feel digestible - at least, until they take a break for a year and then try to come back to it. There's nothing for that.

The segment on BotW’s horses made me appreciate Torrent in Elden Ring even more. You can summon it from anywhere, and it can double jump to get over rough terrain. These simple additions made Torrent way more useful and practical than horses in most games.

The leyline founts of Shin Megami Tensei V are a pretty interesting form of fast travel in that they're essentially miniature towns. In addition to being your fast travel hubs, they're also where you go for everything from shopping to demon fusion, all in ways that tie into the fast travel mechanic.

I think a really cool Fast Travel System you missed was in GTA 5. If you lost or destroyed your car, you can just call a cab, which has both a fast travel, which is an extra cost, or you can speed up the driver and they will go a lot faster while still driving around the beautiful Los Santos. I personally loved this because the city is so amazing at night that I love watching it, and those in a rush can just pay extra.

Another use for fast travel that you didn't mention: navigation. If you're lost, then fast travelling can reset you to a known location where you can get your bearings again. The "Lumbridge home teleport" option in old school RuneScape is a perfect example of this. It's also useful if you just don't remember how to get somewhere, particularly if the world is a labyrinth. Hogwarts Legacy comes to mind, where the castle is basically a maze.

Yoku's Island Express has a great fast travel system, one of my favorites. They're called the Beelines, a series of bee hives that shoot you from one to the other. There are 3 lines, each of which starts at the center hub city and needs to be bought at the other end. The cool thing is that you can hop out at any of the hives, giving you a very granular way to decide where you want to end up. Some places even require you to fall there from the Beeline.

The horse in Botw also follows the paved path if you just start on it. That is to say, if you begin a trot on the path and put the controller down, the horse will keep on it no problem. it's not exactly fast, but it is certainly scenic

I don’t know why but I’ve always loved Bug Fables’ fast travel system. Not only is there a canon reason for it existing but I love how it only gives you a limited set of areas to go to. As you get farther of course you unlock new areas but it always will place you at the entrance or maybe even a little farther back. It is traveling rather quickly, yes, but it’s not so powerful that you can travel from the start of the game to the end within five seconds.

Terraria Pylons are a good example of fast travel. You have to build NPC houses in the correct biomes with the correct NPC's, but in return, you can teleport to a pylon from another pylon. There is a pylon that ignores these requirements, but good luck trying to get it. (I am talking about you, Universal Pylon.)

Tunic did it almost perfectly. Hubs, unlockable shortcuts, and the weird shortcuts that are there from the beginning, but are much easier to find from the "later" areas. I have a love-hate relationship with the last ones. It feels great discovering them, it's always mindblowing to think that these shortcuts were there from the beginning. They are everywhere. The problem is that the "early" entrances are so obscurely hidden in the isometric view that they are easy to miss even after you discovered them. Some of the unlockable shortcuts are hard to find even after unlocking (ropes are the worst offenders) I was really annoyed in the late game, which includes lots of backtracking. Movement always felt like unnecessary detours, because i knew that the world is full of shortcuts, I just couldn't find them again. If only the shortcuts were made a bit more visible after you discovered or unlocked them...

In Saints Row 1 and 2, there is a phone-number system. You can actually call up a taxi company and travel to any place on the map, this is interesting though because the game never mentions this once. The only way to naturally discover it is by dialing the numbers on the taxis throughout the map. Honestly though, the map is so small that you really dont need to fast travel.

I know you showed visuals of it in the video, but the rails in Sonic Frontiers really are a genius way to add faster travel as you progress

I feel like you should have talked about the fast travel system in Morrowind. That was so good. It has 3 modes of transportation with few overlapping "stations", so you always have to think a little to get to where you want to be.

Weirdest fast travel was OG Legend of Zelda. It’s a whistle you find in a dungeon, that summons a tornado that scoops up Link and takes him to a random dungeon you’ve visited before. So I could spend 5 minutes using the whistle to get to dungeons I don’t want to go to, or 10 minutes to just walk there.

I always like when games iterate fast travel is multiple ways like having a boat for islands, a spell to teleport, portals to different temples, busses that have different stops, trains, basically everything that can bring you from A to B, but like multiple options to get around the world.

I always felt like WoWs fast travel to very immersive. Much faster than walking by foot, but also make the world feel much more connected. Made it much more memorable too. Even all these years later I still remember the layout of WoWs map fairly well

I think a major component of not needing to use fast travel is good map design. For example, in Pokemon Violet, I tried to rematch the gyms without fast travel. I really enjoyed the challenge, because there were so many detours I could make. Granted, I'm still not done with it, as i have 4 or 5 more gyms to go. However, I can't wait to continue it.

Only thing I disagree with is that horses in botw are too realistic. Because... They're actually super unrealistic. Horses irl can be insanely surefooted, able to cross large rocks, go up terrifyingly steep hills, etc. There are literally horses bred specifically for crossing deserts! And horses can swim! People ride horses in water all the time. If they made horses in botw able to swim and realistically cross terrain, I'd probably never fast travel again

A weird game I enjoyed traveling around was Far Cry Primal. You started out having to walk around everywhere or teleport to outposts you had cleared, but you got more options overtime. As you advanced, you could tame more and larger creatures and could eventually ride some of them. They would teleport to you, were pretty easy to revive, and were very useful in combat. Most importantly, you could pet them all

In a weird way, the tornado god in Wind Waker is the one fast travel system that comes to mind that I remember fondly. I think it has to do with how well integrated it is in the world, where so many fast travel systems feel disconnected. The first half of the game the tornado has a somewhat intimidating presence, nonetheless that it might completely derail your progress by throwing you somewhere random on the map. The sea is so vast, that at the time you get to fight the tornado god and aquire his power, you already has a very good feeling of the great sea's scope and sense of distance, so that you never take the fast travel for granted. It feels awesome to gain the power of this giant thing that has been a threat looming out near the horizon so far and yet I like how it still only lets you travel to key areas, so that all the smaller islands never stop feeling like these remote places you have to go out of your way to get to explore. It's something I don't feel BOTW captured quite as well, where there are towers and shrines everywhere and you have the fast travel from near the start via the tablet. The whole way Wind Waker's mode of fast travel is structured just fuel my imagination. Oh, and it also lets you fly into the realm of that creepy fairy queen, which is so very memorable! I haven't played the hd remake so can't say how the fast sail affects these experiences.

I really like the teleportation prisms from Divinity Original Sin. Using one of the two prisms will teleport the character to the other prism - if it's held in the inventory then it will be teleported with them, but it can also be left on the ground and will not be teleported with the character. This allows you a lot of versatility in how you use them. Perhaps you give one to one character, and the other to another, and use it to bring them back together after splitting up for some reason. Or maybe you leave one in town and use it to teleport back to town quickly to do some shopping or something and then teleport back to where you were in a dungeon. But sometimes the prisms are required for solving a puzzle, effectively taking away your safety net of having one back in town because you need it there with you

The N64 Zeldas had the unique idea of playing songs to warp to different locations, but also had the spell Farore's Wind, which let you create your own checkpoint in a dungeon. The player will know better than anyone else where they want to be able to teleport to for the best convenience, right? An expanded version of this would give you a limited number of portable teleporters you can drop anywhere and retrieve at any time, with additional ones being items to seek out.

Fast travel from map to already discovered locations, like in Skyrim, has such a huge pitfall - the player might never approach (or depart from) location from any other angle than their first. It was legit common for me to unlock two locations next to another and never actually know what's between them...

My favourite fast-travel system is in Darksiders. It's just a teleport, but the way the world is built without loading screens means you gotta walk through a separate dimension to get from place to another.

It might be inconvenient to some, but I love dragging my horse around everywhere in BotW. I build a relationship with it, watching it's antics or begging it to carry me out of trouble.

There's a couple out there methods of fast travel, for example in Minecraft you have several ways to just move faster, with the Nether being a whole other dimension that doubles as a pseudo fast travel. In Terraria you almost from the start have access to teleportation back to spawn or a placed bed, but if you want to have a robust teleport network you have to build it first, incentivicing the player to explore and build towns.

Skies of Arcadia is interesting where you're in the airship from start to finish, where fast travel doesn't exist because Traveling is part of the game itself. But it's like Metroid where you have to find upgrades during the story to access more areas. It's basically if you took the Airship from FF7 overworld but made that the game with map size to scale, it's not boring to explore because of all the interesting POI you can find which add more lore to the game. It's honestly the closest thing we have to Laputa: Castle in the Sky and took the intro where you see all the islands into a video game.

As rudimentary as Xenoblade's fast travel is, one of the things I like about it is how it ties extra fast travel points to bonus boss completion (in 2/3, don't think in 1 IIRC). In addition to teleporting to waypoints, you can teleport to the grave of any "Unique Monster" that you've killed, which gives you (extra) incentive to hunt them down.

One of my favorite forms of fast travel was soaring in pokemon omega ruby/alpha sapphire. Pokemon has always had fly, which is obviously normal teleport fast travel locked behind a move and badge. Soaring let you see the map of hoenn as you fly over it, and you could see individual buildings like poke pokecenters as well as fly to routes. It was technically slower than just using fly, but I used it every time because it felt so much better.

This is one of my favorite game design topics because I feel like so few games ever get it just right. Off the top of my head, the two games that do it the absolute best are Dark Souls and Death Stranding, yet even then they both have issues. Before you get to Anor Londo, Dark Souls has utterly perfect traversal. The entire map is interconnected to adjacent areas through the use of shortcuts and there is NO option to fast travel. Most of the map feels accessible at any time by just catching a ride on an elevator or ladder like you pointed out, but there are certain points at which the shortcuts start to be less effective. This is actually a good thing though. Take Blighttown: Once you've gone off the beaten path, down into the depths, and you finally arrive at this monstrosity of a neighborhood, it starts to dawn on you that there's no easy way back up to the surface. What this creates is a distinct sense of these "domains" that branch off of the connected hub network where the further you get into one of these areas the harder it is to retreat, and eventually you get to a point where you're experiencing constant dread due to having no way out other than to just keep pushing forwards to try to find a way through. Except then, at the very end, you find that it actually somehow loops back into the wider network. So the cadence of the game is that you delve into a dungeon with no way out, get whatever resources you can find along the way, blast through the other end and find yourself back where you started, only now you're stronger and have new ways to upgrade your equipment. You do these constant excursions that keep looping back in on themselves until you take the final journey: the ascension. I'll admit, I hated the fact that after Sen's Fortress a bunch of goons just grab you and fly you over the wall on to the top of the city. That was the first "break" for me. Anor Londo itself is fucking awesome, but this was the first time you traveled between distinct areas (other than the very start but that was fine) through a teleport basically, so I felt robbed of making that final step of the journey. I really wanted to bust through those doors somehow, or at least scale the walls in some capacity. Either way, most of that experience is fantastic. After you get the Lord Vessel and have to teleport around everywhere, things become a lot less interesting. A lot of those later levels are still cool, but they're just too disconnected from everything else. Either way, the first half of Dark Souls is a perfect experience of feeling completely and utterly IN the world in a real sense yet without the hassles of backtracking, despite not having any teleportation system. Death Stranding is the other example and I think it makes a different mistake from Dark Souls. First of all, the 3rd area is just a boss fight, so it's not even a real area, but second of all, I really wish the first region wasn't separated from the main region of the game by a fast travel mechanic. I never revisited the first region even once after I left. However, all that aside, the gameplay loop of slowly expanding the road system, then the zipline system, getting better vehicles, etc, was extraordinary. The system of making deliveries made it always feel worth it to keep going back and forth between new and old areas, and the travel between those areas slowly gets faster and faster and safer and safer as you progress through the region. Then, and I found this really fun, but the snowy mountains make vehicle travel all but impossible, so it feels kind of like one of those Dark Souls "domains" where you have to really get in there and get lost with the only option being to make it through to the other side. Eventually you get the mountaintops connected to your wider zipline system, and that first moment of zipping through fresh skies with your hood down after so many hours of drowning in snow is just euphoric. Every other game other than those that have fantastic open worlds, mainly Breath of the Wild, Ghost of Tsushima, and Elden Ring, very rarely got me to feel the "stress" of being somewhere with no way out (Though Elden Ring does this quite often with many of its dungeons and indoor zones). The world is great and it's fun, but after the very first time traveling somewhere it instantly loses its charm because I'm just teleporting around willy-nilly. It made me feel like I wasn't really "there" in the same way. Now, one important counter example I want to bring up is the God of War games, specifically Ragnarok. Ho boy. This game has genuinely the worst of both worlds I think. First of all, I like hub-to-hub travel because it gives you more of a sense of being invested in the world since you can't just uproot yourself and teleport around whenever and wherever you want. You gotta make it to safety first, and that increases the tension and the feeling of actually *being* somewhere. However, an *extremely* important factor in having hub-to-hub travel is that the basic traversal itself has to be amazing. Ragnarok's traversal is, unfortunately, horrendous. There was a time when I was deep in the swamps of Vanaheim trying to find a chest I had missed and suddenly, right after finishing a long rock-climbing section, I realized I had already gone that way and that it was a dead end, so I turned around and saw the long rock-climbing trip in front of me and almost turned off my PS5 right then and there. I actually considered not even finishing the game, because what lay before me was about 5 minutes of holding the control stick, pressing x every few seconds, getting in a boat, holding control stick for a few more minutes, and then FINALLY I would get to actually go where I want. If it takes 5 minutes of being bored out of my mind just so that I can get back to actually playing the game, then something has gone terribly wrong on the design side. Traversal itself has to be fun, and it needs to be somewhat fast, especially if you're going to do hub-to-hub fast travel only. So all of that being said, I think developers need to get more creative with the way they keep players invested and immersed in the world. Dark Souls and Death Stranding mostly do a fantastic job and it's what makes them some of my favorite games of all time, but as a result they've left a bit of a hole in my heart any time I play a new game and they just give you free reign over the map. I understand how difficult it is to get this balance right, though, as so many games get it wrong. Just wish we could see some innovation on this front that other games would start to follow.

I haven't seen this in any game, but playing MMOs gave me a bit of a fast travel item concept. Imagine an item that holds only one teleport location, but every time you use it, the teleport location changes to the place you just teleported from. I call it the switch idol. Imagine you reach the trading hub area or equivalent area, auction house, etc. An NPC there is selling a switch idol, but you can only buy one and you can never lose it. When you buy it, it reads "Teleports you to [NPC you bought it from]" so you go to the next town and you use it and it does just that, except now it reads "Teleports you to [town you just teleported from]"

I put _thousands_ of hours into RuneScape as a teenager, and learning how to blend together all of its different fast-travel systems to traverse the enormous MMO world was something that I personally found _very_ satisfying way back when. There were teleport spells, but they only let you travel to major cities, and the cost of runes to cast those spells added up very quickly (especially before the game added the skill that lets you make them) and if you wanted to travel to a less-major city or a dungeon those teleport spells were just one step of the journey and you had to use the other options. Like the unlockable hub that lets you take air gliders to different, more remote specific points, or the unlockable hub that lets you teleport to specific magical teleportation trees, or the ships that you could ride between port cities, or the rickshaw cart that let you skip running through the jungle, or the very expensive but rechargeable amulet that gave you other specific teleportation points. As the game went on they added more and more travel options, first adding the ability to run instead of walk at the cost of an energy meter, which refilled _very_ slowly at first, but they added buskers around cities that you could sit and listen to their music to get a big boost of energy, and a "Home" teleport spell that could take you to the respawn point for free but only if you could sit down and cast it for 5 uninterrupted seconds, and then they changed the Home teleport into a Waypoint teleport that could take you to the entrance of major cities for free (which meant casting the spell that cost runes only gave a very minor convenience), or the network of Fairy Rings that you could use to travel between more remote areas. And they added more amulets, rings and necklaces that had _other_ specific teleport locations, and adding a myriad of quest rewards that had anywhere from 1-6 teleport locations. For a while it was pretty fun trying to keep track of _all_ the fast travel options so that you could plot more-direct routes to places, but eventually there were just too many and you could get anywhere in the world that has a reason to be there from anywhere in the world and it really made the game feel a lot smaller.

I feel the exact same way about Insomniac's spider man games. They could pretty much remove the fast travel system and it wouldn't make the game worse because simply moving around is so fun!

I can't remember if its L or ZL, but that button feature really helps w/ horses in BOTW. I was really annoyed by the seemingly Constant stopping and rearing of my horses when there was the slightest dip in terrain, but when you start to spend more time you can get the rhythm of it more- some terrain will be fine at walk and trot, but not canter, while other terrain will be impassable without cantering and/or jumping. L/ZL helps with getting them down any slope and helps with a decent few uphill slopes too. I also find that they're nice for keeping things immersed- fast travelling everywhere, though convenient in the short term, actually lessened my enjoyment of the game and I got really impatient and bored with anything that didn't have a shrine or tower right next to it. When I took the time to go the long way, not only did I almost always find chests or Koroks or minibosses, but I also found myself enjoying the game and the world so much more. It eventually led me to create a personal rule where I'm only allowed to fast travel from existing fast travel locations and safe places (like towns or Goddess statues). All of that said, I also just. Like horses irl. lol so thats probably part of it

I like how in Slime Rancher, there's both teleporters around the range to take you to other parts of the map, you can also get around a fair bit using the jetpack, which opens up a lot of shortcuts and lets you get into areas before you formally unlock them.

I think an interesting case for bad fast travel is Splatoon 3: The hub is big and beautiful, but walking is so slow it hurts. If you were in a battle, you'd normally swim to go fast, but trying to do do in the hub results in you going even slower. In the end, it's just easier to select the place you want to go from the menu screen... Unless you want to play Tableturf Battle, in which case you have to painfully walk to a hidden alley in the middle of nowhere instead.

I love it when the fast travel is done by magic. Like in early Elder Scrolls games. It not only makes it immersive to use, but also balances it, by making you earn it

In my modded skyrim setup I have traditional fast travel disabled. Instead you have to use carriages to get around or make a travel pack at a cooking pot which serves as a consumable item that can enable standard fast travel (though I make the conscious decision to limit myself to only traveling to settlements with the travel pack). The travel pack is also about 10 lbs which, for my requiem playthrough where weight matters much more, means that it's only really practical to carry 1 or 2 at a time. The result of this is a gameplay loop where I can travel between settlements quickly and easily as long as I have gold and if I'm planning to go do a dungeon or something I can make a travel pack to bring with me so that I still have to walk out to the dungeon on foot but once I'm finished with it I can use the pack to get back to a city and sell off of my loot instead of having to backtrack. In general I think this is a really good system because it rewards the player for planning out their journey in advance.

The sewer system in Paper Mario: TTYD is a neat example of a fast travel hub. As you continue along the game's progression and unlock new moves, you're able to navigate to new areas in the sewer that, lo and behold, bring you to warp pipes that connect to earlier stages. A neat Mario spin on this concept

One game I think of when it comes to shortcuts is “Pandora’s Tower.” That game let you discover different shortcuts in and out of the towers when needed since you were on a time limit when it came to making sure your loved one didn’t die from her curse.

I always wonder why that is in so many triple A games. I feel in many games it is used sometimes just cause most other games have them

Agreed a ton on Spider-man's fast travel, it’s so fun to just swing around that it’s not even necessary, and on the “there’s something to do on every corner” side, I remembered Ghost of Tsushima and how I barely fast traveled there for the same reason, there were a lot of collectibles and stuff to do along the way, I didn’t mind just running around finding them

One fast-travel method I didn't see you bring up is the paraglider, which turns pretty much any tall structure in the map into a transport hub to access the rest of the map in a straight line, often faster than walking speed.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt frustrated by botw's horse system. When I was introduced to it I could appreciate how it contributed to a sense of realism but in practice I was always anxious about it because I was constantly leaving my horse around to explore. I was constantly taken out of the joy of exploration from my mind fretting over leaving my horse behind and I felt stupid not using it just because of this because of how much faster it makes travelling

sometimes fast travels feels like cheating against the immersion, but faster is better most of the cases

I'm currently playing Breath of the Wild without fast travelling. It's such a better experience than the first time I played it, and I'm appreciating horses a lot more too. I'm also getting more familiar with the map, so Hyrule now feels like a place I actually know. The long running quests feels better too. I still haven't finished building Tarrey Town. I'm sure I could have, but now it actually feels like I'm helping build a place over time instead of zipping around the map looking for specific NPCs. I definitely recommend playing the game with no minimap and no fast travel. My sense of direction is a little too lacking to play the game with no map at all, but I'm sure other people could have fun with that as well.

I was thinking about the boat system in Pillars of Eternity 2, which I've been playing recently. You pick where you want to go on the map, and your ship will steer itself there. You can run into various events and things on the way so its not so boring just watching your ship go from one place to another, but its nice not having to actually captain the ship like in Black Flag, though that is fun sometimes too!

To me the funniest fast travel is the one that happened IRL. One minute Philip was south of Jerusalem talking to the Ethiopian official in charge of the treasury of Candace, queen of Ethiopia, and the next he suddenly appears at Azotus (Tel Ashdod). Man must have been so confused 😂🤣

Death Stranding has a really interesting version of fast travel and it comes in several parts: 1) You don't unlock it until a little bit into the story and is given an in-universe explanation for why it's possible to do it 2) Fast travel relies on a separate character to get you from point A to point B, and if the story dictates that they're unavailable fast travel is then temporarily not an option 3) They're hub-based, so you need to go to a safe room and can only teleport to another safe room 4) Safe rooms can, however, be placed manually in the world, by yourself or by other players due to how the multiplayer aspect of the game works 5) Death Stranding is basically Post Apocalyptic Mail Courier: The Game, but the packages you deliver aren't actually able to be brought with you through fast travel and have to be left behind at whatever safe room you're travelling from. So if you want to make a delivery, you aren't able to rely on fast travel and have to manually bring them through the world with you. 6) This also means that your vehicles and other equipment get left at whatever location you were just at, so you'll need to fabricate new ones or borrow other players' if you want to restock (There's probably more to it but I can't think of anything else rn lmao)

One idea I thought of was something inspired by the spell description for Teleportation Circle in D&D (relevant parts bolded for emphasis). _As you cast the spell, you draw a 10-foot-diameter circle on the ground _*_inscribed with sigils that link your location to a permanent teleportation circle of your choice whose sigil sequence you know_*_ and that is on the same plane of existence as you. A shimmering portal opens within the circle you drew and remains open until the end of your next turn. Any creature that enters the portal instantly appears within 5 feet of the destination circle or in the nearest unoccupied space if that space is occupied._ *_Many major temples, guilds, and other important places have permanent teleportation circles inscribed somewhere within their confines. Each such circle includes a unique sigil sequence - a string of magical runes arranged in a particular pattern._*_ When you first gain the ability to cast this spell, you learn the sigil sequences for two destinations on the Material Plane, determined by the DM. _*_You can learn additional sigil sequences during your adventures._*_ You can commit a new sigil sequence to memory after studying it for 1 minute._ _You can create a permanent teleportation circle by casting this spell in the same location every day for one year. You need not use the circle to teleport when you cast the spell in this way._ Basically, it would be a fast travel system that involves finding and memorizing in-game teleportation circles that you can then replicate anywhere via a sequence of button inputs (ala the ocarina songs in Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask).

Valheim has an interesting fast travel system. In the second biome, you get access to materials for making portals that you can put anywhere. However, you initially have limited resources, so you have to be strategic in where you place them at first. Also, you can't bring certain items, mostly different metals used to make and upgrade armor, forcing you to bring these back to base by boat or handcart.

Something I've noticed in the MMO space because of the prevalence of flight (especially unrestricted flight), designers have been more willing to push things underground, where ceiling caverns provide a hard limit on flight, if the player is allowed flight inside at all. Not a bad strategy overall, but it suuucks when the in-game map tools don't keep up with recording explorable areas.

I want to mention WoW’s taxi system. It’s like node based teleportation, except your taxi physically takes you from one node to another. The routes usually take you through some interesting scenery that looks great from your new perspective, and it maintains that feeling of having a huge, continuous open world. Compare that to teleportation where the feeling of scale and distance is lost. It’s also an opportunity for some downtime between all the questing and fighting.

I love the progression of travel in Xenoblade Chronicles X. There is fast travel, but just walking around is fast and fun, and there's lots to see, so I rarely would in the early game. By the time you start to want to go a little faster, you get your Skell, which transforms into a car. Then, around the time you've probably seen roughly everything you can reach via car, you unlock flying on your Skell, which is not only way faster, but also gets you to floating islands and other previously unreachable locations. Combine this with the collectopedia which is filled in with items you passively collect while travelling, and you get a game where moving around is so incentivized that I almost never fast travel.

Islets fast travel uses both portals and short cuts also as you progress you connect different islands to which creates new paths on preexisting islands

I like the recall spell.. cast once to mark the location, cast again to return. If you have a second use of it, you could mark your current quest hub and then the other for right at what you are doing.

I like how Chrono Trigger handles that. At the End of Time, the teleport hub, you got more stuff to do there than just teleporting. It's a place where you NEED to go in order to complete the game, but you can also learn magic moves, farm some items and get access to your airship (faster movement than walking).

Honestly, I think the ideal form of fast travel is just giving you the ability to fly at insane speeds on some kind of vehicle or winged creature that you can call upon at certain locations. The limiter would be that areas you haven't visited on foot yet have some kind of barrier/environmental hazard surrounding them that makes just landing there impossible. Kind of like how the Thunderhead worked in Skyward Sword.

I kind of like how the horses had limitations on BOTW. No horse can climb steep mountains or cross really deep rivers. It also has an affinity meter (that I believe helped with his status I think?). I believe they were designed to help a bit on main roads, to create bonds and to let you do the rest of the exploring on foot, when needed.

I think this is an area where tabletop games excel. Taking a ship to a city that's months away by foot can be as simple as the DM saying "okay that's 50gp per passenger and it will take 2d6+7 days at sea" or it can be a complicated skill and roleplay challenge where the players have to negotiate fare with the ship's captain (or even stow away) and then face various skill, roleplay, and combat challenges when the ship is inevitably attacked by a kraken. There's so much flexibility in deciding how fast or how granular you want travel to be.

Monster Hunter Rise has a lot of fast travel options: shortcuts built into the environment (e.g. tunnels), riding your Palamute to move faster, using the wirebug to jump across gaps, climbing walls to take shortcuts, using Great Wirebugs to zip between two predefined points, and the very small number of teleportation points, which are initially hidden and have to be discovered by accident.

I like when there's a fast travel location. Sky, Space, Cyberspace, different Dimension, just a Location for fast travel in which you need to open doors to another place by key from that place or something like that.

I really like it when fast travels are grounded in the game's universe and lore. For example, in Monster Hunter World, you essentially have a "teleport" fast travel to all of your camps on the map. But it isn't an actual teleport since magic isn't in the game. Instead, you call a tamed wingdrake and hook on to its talon with your slinger. The screen blacks out, and they take you to your camp. I really like the times however, when you get to see the full journey, and the screen doesn't just fade to black. Like in the Fatalis or Safi'Jiiva hunts, you get to see the wingdrake take you all the way to the arena. And on the normal maps, there are even wild wingdrakes that you can latch onto, and they'll fly you to areas of the map that don't have fast travel points. It's really immersive and cool to see the beautiful maps from a different perspective high in the air. The only thing I really wish could be changed about the wild wingdrakes is that their path should be marked on the map, because as they are, it's hard to memorize where each group will take you.

The metal gear series has my favorite sort of teleport system. The boxes you collect from each area serves as a disguise and a fast travel station. Most prevalent in phantom pain. Where there were a lot more stations for it due to the big open world map. You’d take the box out for the area you wanted to go to and wait at a post station. An npc car would drive by and then pick you up and deliver you to the location on your box.

Stardew Valley layers on more forms of fast travel over time. The order in which you acquire travel methods vary, but basically: you find single-use items that can teleport you to a particular location. Then you start finding crafting recipes to craft those single-use items, but some of them are expensive to make. Then you unlock minecarts that can take you between 3 or 4 points on the map. Then you learn to make coffee, which makes you walk faster, but your first coffee bean is hard to get. Then you get a horse, which can move even faster with coffee. Then you unlock a shortcut between the center of town and the southern edge of the map. Then you unlock an item that lets you set two points on your farm between which you can teleport. Then you can finally build permanent structures that lets you teleport from your farm to several locations and obtain a reusable item that can teleport you back to your farm. Your capabilities evolve over time in a fun and motivating way, and your progress in all parts of the game snowballs as you can do more in each day because you get to your destination more quickly.

One fast travel I like is actually on a minecraft server called wynncraft. The server has tons of data packs and such that make it an MMORPG without actually using mods. The map in Wynn has a huge ocean in the center of it. The game normally doesn't have any fast travel across land but the oceans are very expensive and plain. The fast travel they used is that a sailor will take you across the sea to wherever you need, for a certain amount of emeralds. There's no requirement to go to certain places, but almost every new mechanic or boss is locked behind quests, which require certain levels to begin. Otherwise your just fighting really strong enemies. My favorite part of it is that while your traveling, the captain will tell you stories that will lead you to other quest lines, give you miscellaneous Items, or just be interesting stories to hear. I think that as a whole, it's very good. The boat helps skip the boring ocean, but traveling across the land isn't to bad with horses.

10:09 You mention paying for the short cut. This is done in Bug Fables, but doubled. You pay for the tunnel system to open at each region, and then later on, there’s a guy in the tunnel you can pay each time to teleport you a few screens forward on the main area.