Answer the poll and discuss if you wish xD

Yes. Why? Because when I'm just hauling junk to and from a location, I'll be damned if I walk back and forth two or three times.

Give the people the Morrowind option, too. Mainly so I don't have to listen to all that whining any more.

The Morrowind option is the best option. I know fast travel is optional, but I still don't like it. Morrowind had it right, where you have to catch a Silt Rider to get somewhere, or a boat. It adds to the immersion.

Fallout 3's system of Fast Travel would be perfect for Skyrim.

Daggerfall FT FTW

Maybe combining Oblivion fast travel and Morrowind. Such as when you fast travel it assumes you taken transportation required to get their.(money spent traveling)

"No, only a Morrowind style travel system (i.e. Mages Guild teleportation etc.)"

The Oblivion/Fallout3/New Vegas -system is tired and lazy solution which, in a way, hurts the experience. The Morrowind way works and feels alot better. And, if possible, they could additionally implement something similiar to the Gotgic/Risen teleporterstones (which the player needs to find/earn) to give some aid in traveling to certain wilderness hotspots (say, linking the Ayleid ruins or some shrines, or some such).

I've always found Oblivion's fast travel system to be semi-convenient...and about as helpful to immersion and role-playing as an anvil to the head. It's been a hard and fast rule for me from Day 2 of playing Oblivion to never, ever use it.

I much prefer Morrowind's system of guild guides (...why weren't these in Oblivion, Bethesda. Why.) and public transportation. It made sense in context of the world. It allowed you to get from point A to point B, or at least somewhere near your intended destination, without breaking immersion or roleplaying. Plus it gave you something to spend your inevitable stupidly-large piles of gold on.

So: not opposed to fast travel. I just want it done in the Morrowind style.

By the way, you've got to wonder why they put a fast travel system like Oblivion's in a game that's supposed to be all about the open world and exploration. Seems like one purpose defeats the other, IMHO.

I also would prefer the Morrowind style. This may also sound odd but I would like a real-time version of Morrowind style fast travel. In that I say pay to join a caravan, I can sit in a carriage and just watch the world pass by. With the option to get off randomly. Could even through in some random events like helping a caravan fend off bandits.

People seem to forget that you can't fast travel in Oblivion without visiting the place first, except if it's one of the cities. So if you didn't visit that ruin in the past, guess what? You aren't fast traveling there. And how many times did you actually visit the same cave or ruin more than a couple of times anyway?

It's not like you were forced to fast travel in Oblivion. You could simply not use it.

I'm with msa. Give us both options and both sides of the spectrum can be happy.

I would prefer a morrowind style system, but it's become pretty apparent that Bethesda isn't looking to ditch their current system.

This.

I fully expect laziness (both from the developers and gamers) to win over immersion.

im hoping for a morrowind style of fast travel to return, maybe bring back mark/recall as well

Where is the Daggerfall option? I voted option 3, like Oblivion with Morrowind. I loved Daggerfall since you can walk, cheapest, longest, to hoarse, faster a bit more expensive and carraige, fastest but most expensive as well.

I'll add in a Daggerfall option xD

Laziness from gamers?

I'll bite

Perhaps some have families, 2 jobs, and can only game perhaps an hour or two per week. Are they lazy for wanting to be able to spend what little game time they have PLAYING the game with fast travel instead of walking, moving by horse, etc.?

For the record, I voted for #3, both fast travel and MW style. Trying to stealth through a guildhall was fun

I'll let someone else take up the laziness of developers. I guess they are; I mean surely budget, time constraint, resources have nothing to do with it.

Morrowind had a system that I think was close to perfect, so I voted for the Morrowind fast travel.

I would hope for the system used in Morrowind, it added a level of thought that was lost with Oblivion in which the player could decide, "Which method of travel will I reach to get to location B the quickest, is it worth walking an extra few minutes to get to mages guild x to teleport or take a boat here and do the walking to the larger city later?"

With Oblivion it was always obvious to just fast travel to the closest spot on the map regardless of where you were at the time you needed to travel which I though kind of took from the immersion in the game.

I fully agree. Anyone who says people are "lazy" or what not for wanting fast travel is just ignorant. How many times does it have to be said, many people don't have time to just walk there and walk back after completing a quest. Spending 1/2 on just walking or traveling takes away dungeon crawling time that can be spent instead of just walking.

It also speaks of how uninmaginative people are as well. You want Morrowind fast travel, then make it yourself. Why do other people have to suffer? Oblvion had Morrowind fast travel. It's called use your imagination. Walk to the mages guild, and then teleport to another city that had a mages guild. Are people that unimaginative that they needed they hand held? I find it funny how many people say they hate having their hand held in Oblivion and here they are needing their hands held to have a Morrowind type FT system when it was in the game all along. Talk about hiporcits.

A good idea to appease everyone would be to at the start of the game allow for an option to choose full fast travel (and the Morrowind style options would still exist but wouldn't be necessary), and to choose only modes of transportation fast travel.

I think this polling is missing one or more options.

My personal take on it is something along the lines of fast travel + MW style travel facilities and spells, BUT, the fast travel should be limited. I don't think it's necessary to completely remove fast travel, but the problem with Oblivion was that you could fast travel almost everywhere at any time. Additionally, fast travel was always guaranteed to get you someplace safely, and ignored spells effects.

What I mean about that last bit is, let's say you have a feather potion, which allows you to move (e.g. you are over-encumbered when the feather effect is not active). You could travel from Leyawin to Bruma, or Cheydinhal to Anvil with that single feather potion - even though, if you weren't using fast travel, it would wear off long before the journey was over. In some ways this was good - Elder Scrolls games generally provide too-little means other than magic/potions to be able to carry a reasonable amount of loot in a single trip - although if you had teleportation magic, as in Morrowind, you can travel back and forth to a Merchant pretty quickly, so it's not so frustrating).

As others have said many times over the years, fast travel 'across the map' (e.g. where you are notionally running or riding your horse), should present random encounters. Various things could effect the chances of getting an encounter - if you are on a 'safe' road which is well-patrolled by the local militia(s) (I'd say the Imperial Legion, but as well all know, the Empire has fallen), perhaps the chance is very low. If you are on a little goat-path in the back country, or simply travelling cross-country on no road, the chance would be very high. If you're on a fast horse, the chance would be lower (e.g. you'd notionally outrun most enemies). Perhaps the player, through their actions, can make a dangerous road safer throughout gameplay (for example, perhaps the player completes some quest to, I dunno, guard a caravan of supplies to militia outposts along a particular road, and once those outposts are properly supplied, the roads become safer; or, perhaps the player defeats a faction of highwaymen which have been ambushing travelers on that road (maybe not just a single encampment, but perhaps a quest-arc which leads to killing off the leadership and a good chunk of the faction, leading to the remaining bandits becoming disorganized and ineffective).

There's all sorts of things which can be done to mix fast travel, and a travel system, in a way which remains immersive, and presents some reasonable challenge to players.

If they do bring back player teleportation magic, I do hope, however, they allow players to 'mark' more than a single destination. I always found that to be just a bit too limiting in Morrowind. I wouldn't want the other extreme, however, where players can mark unlimited locations. Maybe a limit, which might even increase with player skill in, e.g. alteration magic, or whatever school teleportation ends up in. So, perhaps the player can mark one location at a time in early levels, but could eventually mark 5 or 10 locations. Maybe instead of skill-based, the number of markable locations could be limited by a rare object - e.g. to 'mark' a location, you have to drop an 'anchor' object at the destination, then cast mark on the 'anchor'. You could then pick up that anchor in the future to drop it at a different location. When you cast "Recall", you could be presented a list of currently marked/anchored locations. Or, perhaps do like the old Ultima-Online from like 1995 did - they had a 'runebook', with runes. You marked the runes at a location, then later, to recall to that location, you cast the teleportation spell on the rune which was 'storing' the location to recall too (the one risk I see with that particular idea is that it might invite a lawsuit from EA, who bought up Origin back in the late 90s, so I think I'd not *too* closely imitate their game mechanic, unless maybe gamesas can get them to 'license' the idea for not too much money).

Morrowind's fast travel system did not take much more time than Oblivion's to use, the main difference was that Morrowind's system was realistic, immersive, and required intelligent thought to use. All things that people who play games should appreciate.

Oblivion's fast travel system was a two click ordeal that had no consequences and required no thought. It was immersion-breaking and unrealistic to a fault. This kind of system is the product of lazy gamers who do not play games, they watch them. The kind of games that appeal to those people are not much different than movies (i.e. limited interaction with rapid-fire action sequences).

The Morrowind system was almost perfect. The only thing they needed to do was expand upon it (more locations, combo travel plans, etc.). Instead, they catered to the FPS crowd and removed an element that helped contribute to the definition of "open world RPG".

I think it would be nice to see fast travel points on the board of the road, like if you took the bus (Far Cry 2), but not any travel points in the middle of nowhere.

Morrowind's style just wasn't that good, it was unrealistic and ridiculous.

Mage's guild teleportation in Daggerfall was a privilege of the upper crust of the guild, and now they're teleporting every dog jerking [censored] who walks through the door for ten or fifteen bucks? That was a terrible plan. Giant fleas and their owners take you overland any time you want for ten bucks? You couldn't feed an animal that size if you charged three hundred bucks a ride. Fishermen in small boats will row you up and down the coastline for fifteen bucks? That would take all day, and then they've got to row back. There's no way they aren't taking a huge loss over their fishing industry. Gondolas. The best idea yet of transport, but with the dock being thirty feet below the boardwalk and the city being small, it's faster to walk where you want in almost every case. Bad city design on that part. Intervention spells? Treating the blessings of the Gods as average [censored] spells that require no interest in religion at all? Real slick, Todd. Mark and Recall were fine, but I would prefer Anchor/Recall and Mark/Call as separate spells so you can teleport things to you. Not that the proplyon indexes were terrible or anything, but they were a pain to put together and they didn't take you anywhere useful.

What they should do is an overhaul that addresses many facets of the travel system, and the maps in general. Maps like http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/0/6812/208206-black_marsh_map_oblivion_large.jpg look good in the game, and they aren't terribly time consuming to put out. Considering that, I say they make a ton of the maps and integrate them into the game world.

I'd firstly suggest that you'd have to buy all the maps you were going to use, as well as the compass. They had a wet compass in Redguard, so we know they can be items. Next, you'd need to buy the map or get the guide to the town if you wanted anything zoomed in. Buildings wouldn't have mini-maps or anything, they weren't tourist friendly. For more detailed maps of places outside the city, you'd have to talk up scouts and local mapmakers to get a map of the smaller piece of terrain, and to put landmarks and locations on there. As always, you can either pay for information about the area, or you can work for it with exploration.

Using the maps this way, you can also use them to fast travel. The map interface should be http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/fcry2mapbig.jpg so you don't have to be in a menu to operate. The animation to bring those out looked alright too.

To fast travel with them, you'll need to be able to navagate the paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. The more you know, the better you'll be able to fast travel. The Outdoorsman skill will let you be better at dead reckoning and fast travel off the roads, while better Equestrianism skill will let you evade fast travel traps along the way.

When you get a quest from someone, they'll point to where it is on your most relevant map and you'll mark it. None of that quest marker business, so you can't mark people with it. Only locations.

As a standard, many maps need to be wrong, or just flat out lies. In this time, the boundaries are only somewhat agreed upon. Disputes over borders are still a common thing, and maps are one of the best ways to lay claim to something. Each noble would likely have his own type of map for his or her interests, and make their subjects see it their way. There shouldn't really be an official map of what is what in the world, and the overall map needs to look quite a bit like http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/457/26326036.jpg. It shows the major cities, a couple major roads, and the basic outlines of topography, but it's a pretty sparse map.

Then, maps by membership. Chances are that they aren't going to map every wayshrine of Arkay on a merchant's travel map, so you'd have to talk to the right people. Find someone in the town who worships Arkay, and don't forget that the society is henotheistic. Believing in Mara doesn't mean you give a crap about Kynareth. Getting maps as rewards again will be a great thing.

Lastly, you can sell locations to people. If you find an unmarked trade route, you can sell that info to some bandits. If you find out where the Baron's summer getaway house is, you can tell his enemies, or for a lesser price the Thieves guild. The guild might resell the info to the Baron's enemies, and clean house once they're through with the place. You guys might remember in Daggerfall being able to choose how you finish quests by taking evidence to someone related to the quest for a different outcome. There was a time Helseth was having you deliver a message for him, but you could take it to Barenziah for her approval and reward. You'll also remember revealing the mine to the elf in Vivic city in Morrowind, and that he gave you a daedric weapon for it. That's the kind of deals you should be able to work out. It's up to you to find and sell what they might be interested in.

I don't really mind. As long as I'm not forced to use quick travel.

Although my preference would be for a Morrowind-style network of travel. I liked that you had to go to certain places and then transfer to other places to get near where you wanted to be.

I also hope they bring back mark and recall. I always got a real sense of achievement when I remembered to use one before I fought my way through a dungeon. And a great sense of despair when I found that I'd run out of recall potions.