Oh, quit hiding behind the frickin' opinion defense, you either got an argument to rebut me or you don't. And some of us don't exactly have the luxury of pissing away hour after hour trudging along a road for the millionth time. You want to do so, you go right the hell ahead, but the rest of us have better things to do than waste time with repetative, pointless actions that have no real benifit.

Well presumably if devs do come in here it is the subjects that get brought up a billion times a minute that will really catch their attention, so I think it's good if the most hot-button issues keep coming up in different ways as different people ebb and flow through the forums.

As I said I just want more options, and I'll put my system in here for those who didn't see it:

1) All 'fast-travel' gives you the option to 'live' it ie: watch as you sit there and watch the world go by around you. You can also press a button at any time to 'sleep through the journey' and end up straight there.

2) Types of fast travel are varied and depend on the location you leave from and arrive at, as well as the safety of the travel (chances of being attacked/ambushed), speed of travel and comfort.

3) Fast travel can be done between ports, cities, towns, villages and guilds, each depending on the type of travel to get from one to another.

4) Travel types:

A - Pack-Horse - this can be a variety of animals actually depending on the province (guar/silt-strider/elephant/camel/etc). It is the least safe, chance of being attacked by animals, bandits etc at 10% (depending on route). It is the fastest land-based travel but must follow roads. It is also the cheapest. Pack-horses can be taken from villages, towns and cities. Not very comfortable, sleeping while traveling is not very restorative (25% peaceful sleep in a bed).

B - Chariot - This is the middle-ground for land-based travel. Medium safety, chances being attacked at 5% (depending on route). Medium cost, medium speed, travels between towns and cities. Medium comfort, sleeping is mildly restorative (50% peaceful sleep in a bed).

C - Carriage/Caravan - Slowest, most heavily guarded land-based travel. High safety, chances being attacked at 1% (depending on route), high cost and possibility of riding with other travelers who can be conversed with inside the carriage (could be random npcs or quest-givers, ya never know). Travels between cities only. Sleep is pretty comfortable (75% peaceful sleep in a bed).

D - Ships - As fast as the Pack-Horse but it won't feel like it. Very safe (very slim chance of being attacked by pirates). Other NPCs on board and you get your own little cabin with a bed. Very comfortable at about 90% of peaceful sleep in a bed. Can only go port-to-port and only travels through water (of course). This would be tough to justify in a place that was Summerset Isle or if the entire mainland wasn't open to players. But options are good.

E - Mage Teleport - Presuming the Mage's guild still exists or the two off-shoots still offer this service, teleports will be open to the public, however, they will be very expensive for non-members and members get a hefty discount depending on rank (highest ranks don't pay at all). They teleport from pad-to-pad of course, generally in guildhalls or other important public structures. There is a slim chance, 1% or so that you will be momentarily dumped into a plain of Oblivion and have to fight your way out (more like an ethereal plain rather than Dagon's lava-world from TES4 and very small). Travel time depends on how fast you can load the location you end up at (but is otherwise instantaneous) and the loading is hidden from the player by a 'warp space tunnel' effect. There are of course no restorative effects.

F - Secret Traveling System - Perhaps something like the Propylons or the Ayleid Steps mod which is the most convenient travel system but has to be unlocked via quests and such but adds a wide array travel points, but from ancient and often difficult-to-reach or enemy-inhabited places. You pay nothing and it is instant but you have to really 'earn' that.

G - Mark/Recall - A spell requiring a higher level magic-user and a quest to rediscover how it works (since Tamriel has clearly, erm, 'forgotten' just like with levitation/flying). Again, convenient but has to be earned.

5) All terrestrial travel systems happen in real-time, which means its much like sitting on a bench or (in the ship's case) walking around a building but it happens to be moving. So you can always dismount your horse, jump out of the chariot/carriage or dive overboard from the ship (probably not the best idea though). Jumping from a moving vehicle can be harmful and once you sleep you won't wake up again til the journey's over so if you want to get off half-way you'll have to wait it out. You can also attempt to hijack A-D in one way or another. With a good enough Horsemanship/Equestrian skill you can stop the horse and take it where you like. It will only be a 'crime' if you don't show up to your intended destination after a day's delay. Chariot you can simply kill the driver and take the reins, but if anyone else is on the road the crime will be reported to nearby authorities. Carriage is more complex to hijack as guards will be present and the ship will be the hardest. Presuming there is a whole ship-owning system that is, you should be able to fight your way to the captain and if/when you kill him, the other crew stand down and you are 'the captain' at least until they reach port and one of them rats you out (maybe).

6) All travel types should be able to be seen traveling with or without the player, as well as the trade system that works in tandem with the travel system (merchant caravans/horse couriers/merchants on foot). You should also be able to 'hitch a ride' with any travelers (except people walking of course) at any time along roads, it simply costs more and you are dependent on their destination. But again it works the same way and you can get off any time as long as you don't sleep.

7) You of course will have the choice to buy/own your own mount and/or walk everywhere if you are so inclined.

8) If there is no Oblivion-style insta-travel system then certain other aspects will have to compensate, like how wildlife AI works (ie: more realism/docile/territorial wildlife instead of suicidal/insane wildlife) and quest locations could not require a journey to the other side of the world just to drop off an amulet to someone. Treating the quests more like an MMO where the difficulty of quest also took into account how far you have to travel to get there, is good, but one should never go from one end to the other, unless the starting and ending locations are nearby to the fast-travel points I've detailed above.

Highly complex system, yes, but would make the world feel that much more real, alive and immersive and may be a lot more 'work' for Bethesda, but I hope they really knuckle down and up the ante with this next one instead of just phoning in something because it's a guaranteed hit.

Fast travel is like any other game feature in that it needs to be well made and fit with the game to be "good," and is not inherently bad, just like any other game feature. In application it's the same between games; you don't "experience" anything in the game world. All you experience is a loading screen. Oblivion's wasn't well implemented, and its game world wasn't large enough to effectively argue that the system was necessary, which made it hard to defend. If they had made it so that you could only insta-travel between cities, and didn't design quests that regularly made you go to the moon and back, the people who complain now probably wouldn't have hated it much and its proponents probably wouldn't much miss it.

Many people, like myself, want a larger game world for the next installment. With a significant enough size increase some form of fast travel will be necessary, and relying only on specific locational types (like silt striders and boats) becomes increasingly unfeasible. You could still be left walking for an hour just to reach the nearest service, that or the land will be ridiculously saturated with them. Teleportation spells are handy but also limited, and not much use to people who don't want to play a mage. Fast travel was absolutely necessary in Daggerfall. I'm not expecting another game that size anytime soon, but I won't be surprised if they try to keep increasing the map size.

My main beef with Oblivion's style is its poor implementation. It's a bad showing, not a bad concept. It supposedly simulates walking and skips the process for convenience, but it doesn't really represent any sort of actual walking I've ever heard of. I won't go into detail right now on my own envisioned system, but just because a wizard teleported you there one time doesn't mean you should be able to summon yourself to the top of Hard To Climb Mountain any time you please. Just as I don't want the game to pat you on the back and let you win at combat even though you blundered into a dangerous position with no supplies or skill, I don't want it to present a foreboding wilderness as seen from the windows of my velvet-lined carriage. However, I also don't want to walk the same trail between cities thirty times. I've seen the path and everything of interest near it, I'm not exploring anymore. Morrowind's between-cities fast travel worked fine for it and would have been fine for Oblivion, with an extra step; being able to go anywhere on the network, just throw in the extra cost of the second fare. City travel is fine for current-sized games, but if the map gets larger we're going to need a walking-based form...just one that actually simulates walking, hopefully.

Out of curiosity, besides not giving you points towards Athletics, how does OFT not simulate walking?

I mean, how can you really simulate walking any more than "you were there, you're now here, and you ain't got a horse"? Excepting the whole food/water/sleep thing, which I sure as hell doubt bethesda is suddenly going to throw in.

Some of us BOUGHT the games for that "flimsy facade" that you don't care about. Not all of us play for the adrenaline rush of combat, and some of us actually would like "choices" in our RPG. I have no problem with the idea of FT, but it was badly implemented in OB, with ***NO*** facade to hide the ugly fact that you're just skipping the parts you personally don't like. The series CAN cater to both viewpoints, but OB didn't.

Yeah, it's definitely a tough balancing act, and I'm with you on the hope for a larger game-world (fingers still crossed for the nigh-on-impossible full mainland) and the compensation that would be required to make the game feel both alive and also a ton of fun. My system attempts in some way to get to that and assumes a massive game-world (not just Summerset or Skyrim). Where you list all the things you don't want to do, there are options for you not to have to, depending on you, the player, and your personal tastes/wants etc.

I will share this fun little tidbit though. Back when I first played OB there was a very early 'life' mod which required eating/drinking/sleeping etc and I once had an experience where I fast-traveled across the map and when I got there I instantly collapsed and couldn't get up because in the hours that had ticked by during my load-screen-walk I had gotten incredibly hungry and thirsty and tired and my fatigue was all gone and my health was almost all gone, because I didn't prepare for the journey. It actually took me a couple of reloads to remember I had the mod on and that it wasn't some weird bug, and after, eating, drinking and resting a bit before setting off, I arrived there standing, at least.

This of course is an example of the compensation you might be talking about. Yeah you might have magically appeared at the top of Everest with the click of a button, but your character didn't, your character scaled that bastard and then prodded you when he'd arrived. It is a small concern and the majority of OB players (consolites) often require a bit more instant gratification than having to eat, drink and sleep before using a feature like fast-travel (and I myself like to get into the thick of things pretty fast) but if they do implement a sleep/eat/drink system they'll have to balance that somehow at least!

Fast travel that takes the same time as walking without enemy encounter to me is wrong. Why bother with it. I would like teleportation or a form of riding thats takes half the time as walking.

Fast travel in MW didn't bother me because stores were open and people were awake, as for Oblivion not the case. So in MW, I didn't care to walk or fast travel.

I do like stores and people to shut down at night but would like a faster form of fast travel. In oblivion, I made a teleport mod on PC and for my PS3 version a speedy / invisible spell. If it was close to closing hours I would use these, if not I just walked. I never use the default fast travel in Oblivion.

Do you mean the actual physical time or the simulated game-time that is skipped over for the player but not the character?

That is what I don't like about Oblivion (And Daggerfall's) fast travel as well.
In Oblivion, walking from a city to a dungeon is dangerous and you'll most likely get a few encounters on the way, which will delay you at arriving at your location. If you fast travel, time passes as if you walked a straight line with no encounter/obstacle.

Getting the occasional random encounter (Hostile or not) would be an excellent addition to fast traveling.

Lets say I walk from Skingrad to Anvil and it takes 45 minutes in-game time to get there without enemies. Now I am back at Skingrad and fast travel to Anvil and it takes the same in-game time.

Basically, by not doing anything to differentiate itself from teleportation. Time taken is a crow's flight thing; it doesn't matter if you've been there, or what the terrain is. There's no threat to health or supplies. Fatigue and health actually regenerate during fast travel, at the same rate as if you were sleeping. Obstacles that might impede walking, like rivers and mountains, provide no hindrance at all even if they're literally impossible to walk over manually. Anything that might have been scripted to happen on that route, such as a highwayman attack, does not happen. If it's been marked on your not-very-detailed map you can flawlessly hike directly to some obscure location in the center of a dense forest, as if such a thing would be remotely feasible.

Ideally I'd like a variety of travel options; spells, services, mounts, secret passages, scouts, etc, and walking-based. But the reason we invent those other forms is because walking is not the easiest, safest, and fastest travel method of all, as it is in Oblivion. I want convenience to be given when possible, but not for that convenience to usurp valid acts of difficulty. In that regard fast travel needs assistance from quest design, too. Quests shouldn't be sending you way out into the wilderness for no good reason. I don't need to be sent to the Chasm of Awfulness for a crystal ball, return, then find out they actually want two and have to go back again. Morrowind and Oblivion both show this. I can't remember how many times Morrowind sent me to clear out some bandits, then told me they can be found on the other side of two mountain ranges hundreds of miles away by map scale. These bandits are clearly insane, as is the quest-giver for expecting this of some guy he's known for five minutes doing it for fifty bucks.

Granted, effectively portraying walking-based fast travel requires adding some features not in those games (but that's for another post), but even without survivalist features you can do things like, say, add a failure rate that increases the further you go from civilization, risking that the character becomes "lost," depositing them in some random spot between points A and B without any "You are Here" signs and removing ability to attempt the fast travel again until they find some road or landmark. Combining easy walking between cities, various travel options that can take you between towns or local wilderness with minimal difficulty, and quests that don't burden you with ridiculous tasks, I think there'd be plenty of convenience for getting around without trivializing far exploration. You'd still face significant treks going out into the middle of nowhere, but that's going of the point of going to the middle of nowhere.

idk, i got ticked off in the suggestions thread. And I was more ticked off that people were getting so ticked off. Anyone getting ticked off at this?


Its like a dance, you see. And I svck at dancing; I'm white like the inside of an oreo.

So onto OB vs MW -> TESV fast travel:
You mentioned OB cutting out the middle man, and MW having unnescicary steps (I did not get the whole conversation, so help me out if this part is wrong).
summoned creatures, fire damage, drain health, absorb health, longblade, poison, bows. These are all mediums for damage, and if something is not working as it should, it should be fixed, not cut. I will not appreciate the weapon cuts that happened in OB. And I do not appreciate 0% chance of failure. I hope for Bethesda; that they can include a system with good fast travel, good weapons, and a good magic, all in a good world and a good combat system. There, I want TESV to be good.

And I voted for fast travel. It has to exist before it can be good.

Sorry I'm kind of new to TES so I havn't gotten a chance yet to play Morrowind but I'll there when I've finished some more stuff in OB, but anyways I was wondering what the fast travel was like in Morrowind. Also I like the idea of suffering consequences for using, but they shouldn't overdo it otherwise it will be too annoying to possible be immersive... And I would start to question it when the same group of bandits attacked me everytime I travel to some abandoned ruin after having killed them three times. I think there are some ways they could have made fast travel interesting, but I agree that in OB at least I was too simple and unexplained.

That's not an accurate poll, then. I voted for fast travel because I wanted a Morrowind style fast travel. Morrowind has fast travel, just not an idiotic one...

For the most part you have "travel services." The actual act (being in one place, loading screen, being in another place) is the same, but with a set selection of destinations instead of going anywhere you've been from wherever you are. There are silt striders in some cities who can take you to other cities with one, boats at coastal cities that can take you to other coastal cities, and teleport services in the mage's guild that can take you to other guild halls. Sparsely populated areas tend not to have those services, so getting around there typically involves lots of walking. You also have teleport spells that aren't in Oblivion (since they obviously aren't necessary); Mark/Recall, which set a target point you can teleport to with Recall at any time until you make a new Mark, Divine Intervention (takes you to nearest Imperial shrine), and Almsivi Intervention (takes you to nearest dunmer shrine). While not fast-travel, there are also a couple other spells not in Oblivion, Jump and Levitate, which can shave off a considerable amount of travel effort.

EDIT: Rehkarid's reply was way more informative and complete heh...

Basically fast travel in MW consisted of taking a boat or riding an animal called a silt-strider from town-to-town and it cost money depending on distance. If you wanted to go anywhere but a town or port, you had to walk. For some people this was pretty fun, for some others it was not. There weren't any random encounters and it still felt like a teleport when you used the strider or boat but that was that extra step and you did have to pay so it was more of a balancing act.

This brings up a whole thought-process for me in terms of how developers go from sequel to sequel and the thought-process behind some of the changes, but I think it's gonna require a separate thread...

I guess I would tick off both camps, because I would love a game or mod that enabled the "real time" travel in Morrowind. Get on the longboat, and actually sail across the sea or along the coast, seeing the land and sea. Get on the Silt Strider, and watch the land beneath you pass as the large creatures walked from one station to the other.

That's what I LOVED about Starfire's NPC mods. Now, when I travel from town to town, I can actually SEE NPC's teleporting to and from each city. That whole facet added improved the game as much as MCA and Children or Morrowind. Finally, magic (other than Nord children practicing casting) is seen in a magical world. To me, this was missing from vanilla Morrowind. Flying and teleporting are parts of the game for the character, but you almost never see teleporting and you never see flying other than CliffRacers.

Unless I truly need it for quest or distance, I don't even use the fast travel in Morrowind. So much to miss that way.

Just for me.

I'm pretty ambivalent about fast-travel, don't give a rat's ass either way as long as it isn't like Morrowind with a lot of missions forcing you to escort slow-ass people over barren, hard-to-navigate wastes with cliffracers diving in at you. The system both games used was ok, save for the gripe about the missions in Morrowind, but I just don't get the intense hostility to Oblivion's fast-travel system. I mean, the game is not putting a gun up to your head and telling you to use FT or you get it. Some like to crawl to that "temptation is too great" excuse but that just means you aren't as good an RP'er as you like to believe.

That said, whether they have toggleable Fast-Travel or just Travel Services is no concern of mine, as long as if it's just Travel Service like Morrowind, it's varied, not too expensive, and they have more convenient locations. Like certain services having posts in the wilds or frontier for travelers' convenience would be nice.

Thanks for replying man That sounds really cool actually, I could see that really adding to the role-playing experience and the immersion, I would definitly like to see that in TES5!

I think fast travel should be pricy, difficult, and rare, but a perk for maybe a level 100 alteration skill would be the ability to transport anywhere at anytime.

hmm. Effectively slow travel. Yep, I can't say I would look forward to it. Meh, to each his own.

I recall Todd Howard remarking during Oblivion's E3 presentation that Bethesda strives to, "[start] over from scratch with each installment and reinvent the wheel" with every chapter of the series. In some ways this is beneficial as it gives one a chance to come up with some totally innovative and refreshing new systems without worrying about faithfulness to its predecessor, but in other ways, given what an unoptimized mess Bethesda's games are, I fear it may have a more literal design/programming meaning as well. :brokencomputer:

Cost all your gold, from Skingrad to Chorrol but makes a trip to Anvil first and get to your destination 2 days later. There's your pricey and difficult fast travel.

Voted "yes" even though I hardly ever use Fast Travel. My heart wants to say "no", but the truth is it's a great feature. Time passes when we use it (therefore it's not a true teleport, which would feel kinda phony to me). Those who use FT all the time miss out on lots of random stuff, though; they wind up missing roughly half of the TES game's spontaneous nature.

The Hero of Kvatch, one who stormed or slinked alone and victorious through the planes of Oblivion ... needs a travel service or a babysitter to guarantee his safety when he travels from Cheydinhal to Skingrad. Okay.