Meaning... Is it teleportation, is it just walking and you dont see yourself, is it some special skill the "Chosen One" gets?

I'm aware time passes while you travel, but, it's not as much time if i was to take a horse to the destination. Some kind of alternate, non-instant teleport type?

...Or, is it a completely mechanic-based gameplay feature Bethesda put in?

Its not unlike the Silt Strider service in TES III, except its free and done either on foot or on your horse. I believe it was implemented to make up for the lack of travel services and teleportation. Although I believe that fast travel was originally in Daggerfall.

Fast travel in OB is you walking to the destination and somehow not running into things you would on the road. It's for those who don't want to have to spend time running everywhere in real life.

Gameplay mechanic.

Time passing in fast travel is affected by what you carry, whether you're on a horse or not, what you're wearing, whatever.

I haven't heard of anyone in lore who fast travelled. Various teleportation spells only, but to set points only.

If fast travel exists in Cyrodiil, then why don't the legions just teleport everywhere? None of this horse rubbish. Voosh. No need for Numidium, we'll just fast travel the armies into Alinor and voila, city conquered. What about Morrowind. Voosh. Ten thousand troops in Almalexia (not literally) and tada.

Makes you think, why didn't the emperor just fast travel to safety?

All right.

Thanks for the answers: I just wanted a char who doesn't use magic at all, and if Fast Travel was Magic, then, well... I'll try to avoid it anyways.



As I said, maybe it's just for "Those Chosen by Fate" Like Champion of Cyrodiil.



*You cannot fast travel while in combat*
*You cannot fast travel from this location*
Uriel: "Sonofa..."

Fast travel is just a placeholder for the time it takes to get from one place to another.

Well if you want the lore response-

Akatosh the Burninator comes down from his hourglass palace way up in the sky while consorting with various Et'Ada after being hypnotically attracted to a pineapple shaped whistle that the hero magically posseses.

The true creator of this whistle was the great necromancer Mannimarco who used Akatosh to quickly ride around to act as a supervisor to his undead allies across Arena and beyond. This lazy abuse of the Dragon God of Time quickly made him lose his kick-ass skeletal form and revert to a magically challenged Altmer who uses a dagger in battle.

Seeing his opportunity Emperor Uriel Septim snuck up behind the dark lod and one-punch sneak attacked the King of Worms. He then summoned the firebreather with his summoning whistle to destroy Sutch which was complaining about high trade tarriffs and lack of attention. No one cared except one. Mehrunes Dagon was pissed. Destruction was his bizz not some doped up lizard with wings.

So Dagon sent his followers to retrieve the whistle so he could finally have a mount befitting his 4-armed doom. They succeeded in killing the Emperor but didn't count on fighting a PC. After 3 reloads that PC succeeded.

The Emperor had hidden the whistle in a useless amulet with a oiled chain. Thinking it useless he brought it to a grumpy old man who sent him on a quest to save another grumpy man.

After a few hours of pointless questing Dagon got impatient and decided to politely ask for the whistle. The Imperial guard however perceived his request as a demand for souls. They opened fire on the Prince but in the end only a small force of about 7 men were left to defend Martin, the last hope of the entire Empire.

Martin wasn't the smartest guy. He worshipped SANGUINE! That does something to your head I tell you.
Well anyway he BROKE the amulet and Akatosh came for some revenge. He ate Martin before punching Dagon in the groin. This underhanded technique called for the fight to finish in the Daedra's hood. And Akatosh who had recently in fact done a few gallons of skooma agreed.

After all was said and done the PC found a strangely shaped whistle on the ground...........this is his story

*Imperial March Theme*

Morrowind fast travel is where the serious lore apologies are called for.

I'll start: The Empire subsidizes ship and strider transport. They give out big payoffs to the operators, who charge a small fee to outlanders who must take advantage of native methods of transport. How else will the diplomats and men of business reach their destinations?

But the Guild Guides are just retarded.

Best explanation... ever.

One thing I dont get: How'd you figure Martin worshipped Sanguine?

On a serious note. I keep hearing this from alot of peole. I know he mentioned he was in a cult, but whose cult, he never said.

If you do Sanguine's quest, you get his rose. Go to Martin and he'll recognize it, meaning that he worshipped the Daedra once before and once had the Rose in his possession.

Total fast travel is a solution to a problem that was already solved by foot speed being increased to a point where it was no longer agonizingly slow a la Morrowind.

You know in books, when some character is going somewhere, anywhere really, and then the writer decides not to describe every single step that character takes during the journey? That's fast travel for ya.

edit: damn writers.

remind me to think about like a book you read, in much (fantasy) books, a traveltrip is not detailed in fully detail, only the parts where there is action, no-one cares about a peacefull trip between towns.

Wrong. It was originally in Arena.

In Arena, each city was surrounded by an infinite, randomly-generated wilderness. You simply couldn't walk from one to another. You could start a game, leave a city, put a weight on the "run forward" key and leave the computer running for two years; and you'll still be in that starting city's wilderness.

In Daggerfall, the wilderness was procedurally generated, the difference with random generation being that it was always the same landscape and features you got. And it was possible to walk from one destination to another. I remember I did walk all the way from Buccaneer's Den to Daggerfall once (with stops in cities and inns along the way). But it takes a very long time. Daggerfall was the only game of the series that had a nearly realistic scale (though, as always in this series, settlements were too small, looked nothing like medieval settlements, and there were not enough farmlands).

In Morrowind was introduced the Camelot model, meaning that you don't play in something that tries to be a real gameworld, but in a scaled-down version where you've got to imagine that one building is actually 100 buildings, and one NPC is actually 300 NPCs; something like that. (Numbers are very arbitrary and probably quite wrong. Cyrodiil should have something like 10 millions inhabitants, including sentient non-citizens such as goblins, ogres and minotaurs.) Hence, Camelot:
"Cyrodiil!"
"It's only a model."
"Shh!"

Now that this is said, in Arena and Daggerfall, when you fast-traveled, this brought to the screen a menu that wasn't simply "Travel to Sumplaiss Yes/No". You got a complicated menu giving you the time (in days) and the cost (in gold piece) your trip would take. And you had a lot of options: for example, you could choose to travel only on foot or by boat too (costs more but is faster if there is water between you and your destination), whether you camp in the wilderness or spend the nights in the inn (costs more but lets you arrive at your destination fully healed), and whether you take your time or hurry (travels faster, but arrives fatigued). So these options affected travel duration and cost. And in Daggerfall, fast travel spared the player countless boring real-time days wandering in a rather uninteresting procedural wilderness; while in Arena is was simply necessary to use it.




Fast travel is not teleportation. It's only fast for the player, not for the character. When you fast travel from a place to another, even in Oblivion, time passes. Go from Anvil to Cheydinhal and you'll see it quite blatantly. It's an abstraction of a boring long walk, not an instant magical teleportation.

This is firmly in the realm of pure gameplay. The lore is the same lore as, say, when Indiana Jones is moving from a place to another and all you see in the movie is a red line being traced over a map, rather than making you watch a real-time account of an uneventful boat trip over the Atlantic, followed by a plane trip (still in real time) from Britain to Egypt, etc. Imagine people on an Indiana Jones messageboard asking whether Indy magically teleport in ten seconds from the USA to Egypt by simply drawing lines with a marker on a map of the world -- this is the same thing as this thread. Imagine someone arguing that yes he does and it's ruining the lore of the movies, and you have the same thing as LH's post.

It's a bit like asking why the characters bother to sleep, all they need to do is to activate a bed for a few seconds and they're done, woosh, no need to rest for the full night! Except the night was spent during these few seconds.


If by "retarded" you mean "why can they only teleport you to other guildhalls while the Travellers' League could teleport me to any destination" I could somewhat agree.

If by "retarded" you mean "why can the mages teleport people" then I'll have to question whether you ever noticed the mark, recall, and intervention spells. Teleportation exists in the lore of the game.

As for the cost of transport, no need to invent subsidies. It's simply a screwy game economy. Fantasy economy is always meaningless anyway, what with the tradition of using the gold piece as the smallest unit of money, and things like a steel dagger costing as much as two brooms or a loaf of bread. (For a laugh, try to look at the value of an actual gold piece in the real world. Then compare the price of a dagger, a broom, and a loaf of bread.)

I think the odds of the "gold" coins in the TES games actually being made of pure gold are incredibly remote (see the value of gold jewellery in Ob). More likely, it's a mix of less valuable metals with only a tiny percentage of actual gold. Also, since when has a steel dagger cost as much as a loaf of bread? In Morrowind and Oblivion steel daggers are 20gp, while bread is 1 gp. Considering that in the TES world there would be far more production of steel daggers than there is in the real world, lowering the cost, and that bread would likely be more expensive than in real life, it's not as bad as you make out.

Or there could just be a whole lot more gold, making gold less valuable.

I doubt it. If the size of my collectors' Drake is any indication, a plain gold ring in Oblivion would be a fraction of a drake then. And yet it's worth 40.

The coin I have also is made to look tarnished, and gold doesn't (easily).

Oh nononono

Ships are not taxi cabs. You don't tell them where you want to go, you just follow their normal trade routes and get off whereever.

Yes. I daresay many of us have heard the same argument from Shades a few too many times. Yes, there isn't a schedule. Yes, there isn't a trade route and a ship just acts as a taxi, but those are called game mechanics. Nothing in Morrowind acted realistically, anyway. I don't see why you are complaining about this when NPC's in Morrowind do not even sleep.

Also, Kaivin, I wish that I had one of those big text-based Facepalm pictures on hand, because this Thread deserves one for asking such a silly, friggin' question.

Heh, I bet Magnus could come up with a "lore" explanation for fast travel. After all, he did invent something for the "teleportation" that got a Daggerfall character to his ship and back.

lol, most of you have no idea what I'm talking about. This is just a shout-out to any other old Daggerfools that might be around, though I suspect I'm the only one here.

I dont see how it's 'silly'.

Perhaps it was justified and I was not aware. Hence, you know, the question.

Morrowind was the only game not to have it

You're missing the gigantic chasm between gameplay mechanics that can (and should!) be justified and those that cannot. Oblivion's fast travel is one of the latter.

I don't see how it is not "silly". Asking this question is like asking "Why isn't every single step taken by the character recorded in the book? Did he just teleport there, or something?" Sounds silly, doesn't it? I just don't think that it's a legitimate question. But then again, I'm a little cranky at the moment. I can't turn my head to the left without my neck hurting.

Edit: Spelling.