I'd be very happy with that. That's all I'm really asking for. Just simply let us choose to enable or disable it at the start of a new playthrough, and you cannot change it later on. That simple option would drastically increase my satisfaction with the game.

I wont teleport anywhere, and so the people that dont like that system.
If there is no such system, i wait for a mod (this means i'll save money buying the game discounted).

fast travel was great in morrowind, but not so good in oblivion. It ruined the sense of exploration and made the world seem much smaller. So fast travel more like morrowind and less like oblivion plz.

Well not everyone has the option to wait for a mod that enables (or disables, in this case) a certain feature.

I've said this before but I'd like to put it perhaps a bit more simply. Some might suggest the idea of a "hardcoe mode" like New Vegas which disables fast travel but I'd prefer something more "modular", like for instance there's a mod for Oblivion that has different ESP files which do different things to add various elements of realism to the game-so you can pick and choose which things you'd like to have be more realistic.

So I suggest having a modular collection of settings, one of these being fast travel. The game itself would include Morrowind-style travel for those who want to use it. True, it might not make so much sense if you already have fast travel enabled, but I could see myself using some combination of the two. For instance, I could use a travel service to get to a town nearby the dungeon I want to go to and then fast travel from there. There could also be a "hardcoe" version of Fast Travel similar to Daggerfall with a chance of getting attacked or running into a highwayman or something along the way at which point you'll be taken into an enemy encounter someplace partway through your travel route. Including some way to balance out fast travel by adding an element of risk to it might be nice.

Why are you concerned about how other people play the game? You don't like fast travel, then get a mod that disables it completely, and I'm sure someone could knock up a mod that will put in Morrowind transport systems. But I think you would still be whining about how other people playing the game shouldn't be allowed to fast travel because you don't like it. They used it in OB and FO3, and they will probably use it in Skyrim, and you don't HAVE to use it.

:clap:

After a while I never used fast travel

After that I always went by foot or horse and I always walked (unless in combat)

I don't mind if they bring it back but I do understand that people want a variety of transportation methods rather than the three that were presented in Oblivion.

Not everyone plays on the PC... How hard is that to understand?

Here's my own two cents, for what it's worth.

I simply don't have the time to invest in retreading the same areas over and over again. I can dig the whole "added immersion" thing, but it doesn't work for me. With a full-time job and a baby on the way (which will be almost a year old by the time this game comes out) I'm lucky to get in one solid hour of game time, at once, on most days.

Even spending five or ten minutes walking through somewhere I've already fully explored just because there's no practical alternatives, is quality time I could be putting to better use in another game.

Now, I'm not saying to make it exactly like this, but I thought Red Dead Redemption was a good example of the best of both worlds. I almost never used the fast travel in that game, but it was nice for when I just wanted to get on with it.

Physically trekking, however, was not only actively encouraged - but I knew that no matter what, something interesting was going to happen. It was nice to have both options.

To me, it's not about an either/or proposition. One shouldn't be at the expense of the other. They ideally ought to co-exist just fine. It's not about eliminating (or even limiting) fast-travel, but making it so you'd want to use it as little as possible.

I am 100% used to Oblivion fast travel. I think it's a good option.

I dont mind the fast travel as it is in OBLIVION but making it only possible from cities is a nice alternative if there are huge amount of cities in TES V SKYRIM. I think it was done in a similar way in TES 2 DAGGERFALL where you could only travel to locations that were cities or inhabited like a crypt but not just to a blank spot on the map even if you have been there previously.

i have nothing against it ... if you want to use it, then do it.. if you don't, don't. Simple as that.

People in this thread need to play Nehrim - it did fast travel rather well if a bit unbalanced.

You can teleport to pretty much any city but these require teleport runes, which cost money (about 100g, which in Nehrim is ASTRONOMICALLY HIGH as it's hard to earn money). Nehrim made these prohibitly expensive which is bad, but a similar concept could be used in Skyrim.

I really like the concept behind it - fast travel becames a tangeble cost/feature of the game world, not something built into the UI like a fast-forward button. It means that the quests aren't designed around using FT and the world isn't designed around it either - it becomes BETTER designed.

However if you have the luxury you can use FT - it'll just cost you something like in GTAIV.

RDR is a great example of good use of fast travel - it's there, but you DON'T want to use it unless you are in a rush to complete an objective or quest because the world and quest design is so interesting in of itself, that by fast traveling in RDR you miss out on a lot of good stuff that is interesting. Much of the exposition of the game is also done via travelling outside of fast travel which is a great narrative idea. Instead of you getting a quest and then the guy saying "Meet me there!" and you instantly teleport there (bad design), he tells you to get on your horse and to ride with him. As you are riding, events happen and this character is talking to you. A lot of this contributed to making the world feel more real, alive, and concrete. It wasn't just a platform for gameplay, it was a tangeble world that encouraged you to explore it instead of "skipping it".

Great design right there. It's a game where you can fast travel but the game isn't designed around using it all the time - after all RDR's world is massive and if you fast traveled all the time you'd miss out on the entire point of the game. Which is why it's important for a game like TESV to have that "real" world feeling and to design it to be more dynamic, natural and unpredictable. Oblivion SHOULD have been like this but it failed because the game relied on fast travel from a design standpoint - there simply were not enough incentives to not fast travel. And any incentives there were, were rather weak. Which is why Morrowind is brought up so much in this argument, because Morrowind's incentives for "walking it out" were much much stronger and more well done than Oblivion's (varied environements, no level scaled enemies, interesting dungions,etc).

When there is incentive to not fast travel, then it can be safely used in the game and not be something that ends up being a crutch. In Oblivion, it was one giant massive crutch. And that's what we from the anti-fast travel side don't want. After all, why do we fast travel? Because it's boring doing the same thing over and over again that we find bland and can easily predict. So, make the world not bland, make it alive, and make it so we can't easily predict it. THAT is how you can design a game with fast travel and have it not be a crutch, but a tool when you need it.

My personal opinion: It breaks immersion and let's players ignore the very best things the ES series has to offer.

I liked the way it worked in MW. Travel was a service and a business. You paid for the convenience to travel, and it only took you to places that you would realistically be taken by it.

I understand that some people want to spend as little time as possible doing something that they can't appreciate. So, I wouldn't necessarily deny them the right to do skip it, but I don't think it should be such a built in feature that it's always there. In Morrowind if you really wanted to get somewhere, you could use the console (at least in the PC version, you could). Instant travel through CoC was as immersion breaking as any other console commands, and that's where the feature belonged. IMO Skyrim should have the same option, but it should be with the rest of the immersion breaking options, and a built in system similar to Morrowind should be present in the game so that the gameworld can exist within itself and people can play it normally. If people want to move instantly, they still good through a console command.

Yes, they went from one extreme to another. Extreme tedium in Morrowind, to extremely dumbed down in Oblivion.

First off, travel is meaningless in Oblivion anyway. You can outrun anything, even on foot, so there is nothing interesting or challenging to be gained from travelling. I agree that it should be more like Morrowind and only let you travel massive distances between certain places. But that's just the start. I think there are other things they need to do to improve travel in this game. For example, they should allow you travel very quickly on foot or by horse. This way, you can have players travel long distances in real time, which preserves the feeling of a real world, and provides opportunity for action/adventure, and yet doesn't become incredibly tedious. See MMORPG's for an example, travelling with a Bard for example, is so fast that you couldn't possibly get bored, even on the longest of journeys.

In addition to this though, there need to be creatures that interrupt your travels. If they are a magic creature, they should have fast spells that will dispel any travel buffs you have, and perhaps even have an ensnare component in addition. If it's not a magic based creature, they should have weapons that achieve the same thing. Like arrows that include a debilitating poison, etc. This way you can make travel more meaningful, more important, and more interesting. You have to actually be careful for once, pay attention to where you are going, consider alternative routes, etc.. Should you get attacked, you need to be prepared to fight for your life. Unlike Oblivion, where you can just point your horses nose at wherever you want to go, hit auto run, and close your eyes.

Why is Morrowind's system not good enough? I think that's the most pertinent point of all. I hear all these arguments as to why fast travel shouldn't be taken away, but nothing as to why there there was anything wrong with Morrowind's system to begin with and why it needed any changing. In fact I'd love to know why they went away from Morrowind's system, it was great.

This travel route map for Morrowind pretty much covers the whole island of vvardenfell and allows you to get to and from major points of interest quickly and easily while retaining the immersion and sense of scale of the game world - http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/fullmap_travelroutes.png The Oblivion system compromises both this immersion and the sense of size and scale for the sake of convenience in order to pander to laziness. I think this argument of 'having both' is pretty ridiculous as well when Oblivion's system makes Morrowind's completely redundant. As I noted earlier, I accept that people want to player elder scrolls easy mode for some reason, and thus the style of travel system should be decided when you first start the game or tied to the difficulty level which is decided when you first start the game. If some in this thread want to talk about choice, where is the choice not to have access to fast travel if we don't want to?

I think there has been enough complaints levelled at Oblivion's travel system over the years for Bethesda to seriously rethink how travelling should be done. Going by the poll in this thread - http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?showtopic=1148785&st=60 we have a very clear majority who want something similar to the Morrowind system and I think these people should be catered to. Most of the features of Skyrim would be set in stone by now but I think the travel system is something that could be looked at and addressed in a relatively quick fashion and I do hope Bethesda do so.

Creatures interrupt you during sleeping or waiting, it makes no sense that they not interrupt you during travelling as well.

No it's not that simple. When the option exists, and it's so easy to use, its difficult to not use it. It's like getting a bunch of really good equipment and trying to not use any of it. And it feels silly to not use such a convenient feature when its just sitting right there, practically begging to be used.

All I want at the very least is the option to permanently disable fast travel at the start of a playthrough. That simple option would greatly improve my experience playing Skyrim. A Morrowind-like travel system would be a bonus.

I had this in its own thread but it got locked:

If Dragons are in TESV in the traditional sense, they could be an amazing alternative to Oblivion's fast travel system.

A lot of the more hardcoe TES fans do not like Oblivion fast travel and wish that Bethesda still went about things Morrowind style. However, completely removing the OB/FO3 fast travel system is an extremely unrealistic thing to ask of the devs. There are probably hundreds of thousands of more casual players who would get quite aggravated with the absence of this system. Here's my alternative.

Dragons totally appeal to a mainstream audience, just like easy fast travel. The reason many of us don't like that system is because it hampers the immersion factor. If a flying dragon mount was available to the player at some point further in the game (maybe as a reward for completing the main quest, or a questline of a specific faction) as well as a reinvention of the Morrowind style, location-to-location fast travel system, I don't think that mainstream audiences would complain too much about the absence of the OB/FO3 fast travel system. It would give everyone something to work toward that would make their exploring experience a lot easier, not to mention more entertaining (imagine soaring over the peaks of Skyrim on dragonback!). This would help keep up the immersion of the game as you would only have realistic fast travel options. At the same time it would completely cater to Bethesda's mainstream audience.

I know some of you would probably scoff at the idea Dragon mounts, but it could be the best way to bring fast travel back to Morrowind's level of immersion without pissing off a large amount of the game's mainstream fan base. I mean, the most popular RPG of all time (counting MMO's) WOW, does not have an immediate fast travel system beyond the level of mark and recall (hearthstone), but uses mounts, especially flying mounts, as the main form of fast travel transportation. It proves that you don't need am OB/FO3 style fast travel system to appeal to a wide and largely casual gaming audience.

Thoughts?

Alright, I have read a TON of these threads over time, so here are my two bottlecaps about it:

I would support the idea of having fast travel enabled/disabled at the start of the game - I think this would solve the problem entirely as long as there is a network in place for the 'disabled' folks to get around (i.e. silt strider, etc.).

I played maybe a total of 40 hours of Morrowind. I found the travel system to be neat at first but approaching tedium as time progressed. "Oh crap, I have to go to the other side of the map? Well, let me see where the nearest silt strider location is, okay, then I have to go to the mage's guild and teleport here, then I have to go here and then here, and then here, and at last I have to run to the quest location . . . fast forward 20 real time minutes . . . okay now I get to actually play!" This and the massively broken (IMO) combat system are the main reasons I only played 40 hours (that and cliff racers svcked balls).

When I started Oblivion I had no idea there was even a FT option. I ran everywhere, my athletics increased, I discovered a TON of locations, I fought some bandits and dungeon dwellers and looted them all, and one day while looking at my map I clicked on a town and it asked if I wanted to fast travel. I was already at about 40 hours of play time. From then on out I used fast travel, and I fast traveled my ass off. I discovered less, increased skills more slowly, and collected less loot. BUT, and I must stress this, when not exclusively questing I made it a point to try to discover as many locations as possible by just roaming the map. In doing this I discovered more, increased skills, and collected MOUNTAINS of loot. When I was close to being overencumbered and had more loot to take with me, I donned the Gray Fox's mask and fast traveled to the Waterfront and RAN RAN RAN my ass to my little shack so I could unload and remove the mask.

In the end I spent 400+ hours with that character including the SI expansion. If I didn't have the option to FT I would most likely have never finished the MQ, much less the Guilds/Factions, and I would have gotten bored with the incessant running around to find transportation back to areas to unload treasure.

I also would not be adverse to having random encounters while fast traveling as long as it wasn't every single time. I would NOT like to lose health or magic points as payment for fast travel because I didn't get to fight the opponents so how do they gauge the health loss? Using skills and such to generate it just wouldn't work for me.

I like my idea of having a Warp Point Travel System or keep Oblivions Fast Travel System but if you use Fast Travel you'll have a chance at a random encounter which could possibly be an enemy, a Random quest or something completely different.

stalker games had the perfect system. there was a major guide between the different maps but if you want to go to the anomalies or a particular area on the map you would have to find someone that could guide you there for a fee if you didnt want to run. they were walking about at random and so you may or may not come across one.......just like in real life looking for taxi.

its not a huge deal to me since i have a PC and fast travel can be easily modded. if im starting a game over for the upteenth time and want to bypass some of the more generic quests quickly i do far worse than fast travel......sometimes i use the movetoqt console command just to get the quest over with.

i've never found any problem with morrowind fast travel, but it seems other people did.
So i say: let's use both morrrowind and oblivion system. The player decide.