I tried to not fast travel but half the time you fill up with too much stuff you can even carry before you get to where you are going, even with a companion. I have to fast travel constantly just to sell crap and leave a lot of stuff behind. The lack of feather potions and feather enchants sort of forces you to fast travel to sell stuff. Additionally it feels a little mundane traveling all that way for a small misc quest just because in my mind I want to see new content and I know it's going to take an hour and a half to walk there in real time with all the random encounters.

Where are the traveling merchants from fallout? I've seen one or two in Skyrim and they typically have very little gold and are useless. Even settlements seem to have little in the way of useful bartering. A couple small tweaks could make this game better so you don't have to fast travel as much.

That's the problem with including fast travel. The moment it was in was the moment that any consideration for travel distance was out. It's just assumed that people will fast travel, so it doesn't matter if you have to travel across the entire game world several times to complete a single quest line.

Because I'm a pure mage and alchemy is almost a necessity for pure-mages, I VERY rarely use fast travel so that I get to pick as many alchemy ingredients as possible. Usually the only time I fast travel is to go from one end of town to the other faster (like going from the Jarl's place to the front gate)

I've rode a horse from Markarth to Riften, cannot say I'm in a hurry to do it again even though it's my preferred method of getting around, the horses are weak, two swipes from a bear and it's over, the map is useless for navigating(please don't tell me these intelligent folk would not have clearly marked roads on their hand drawn maps, yet we get the equivalent of a useless GPS map)

I attempt to limit myself when using fast travel, but if it's a side quest with little reward I'll fast travel on the return journey.

For the record, none of that has anything to do with serious role playing.

I always fast travel... XD I hate walking!

Sometimes i ride on Shadowmere though...

Carriages svck. Might as well fast travel and say you took one than pay 50 to do what you could do for free (unless you've not been to the city you want to visit.)

I think carriages should have been like taking a cab in GTA4; You actually sit in the back and they go to the place as if you were walking there, but you of course have no control of the carriage. You could optionally pay a bit more to make the trip instant.

omg another fast travel thread. Who Cares? Use it or don't. Use carriages or don't. You don't get any style points for either option. If you don't know what will make the game fun for YOU, nobody can help you.The implementation this time was much better than oblivion.

I carridge around. But seriously sometimes I just go bleh can't be arsed to trek to X. I then fast travel and pretend it never happened

I'm another one of those who don't fast travel. Worse, my char walks everywhere, so it takes me ages to get anything done. I guess I'm just not one of those "results oriented" people.

I did ride in the carriage a couple times, and that's okay, but after watching a few videos of things I've already done, I see that I don't like play the real players do.

I'm a little over 30 hours into playing and have yet to use fast travel of any sort, that includes carriages of course. Skyrim without fast travel is more than possible, you just need to learn to exercise a little self control...or use the carriages if that doesn't break your rp.

I don't chase realism like my life depends on it; if I did, I wouldn't be saving and loading at all, I would be playing on 'Master' settings not 'Expert', I'd be eating and sleeping like one should in real life, I'd only be carrying 1/20th of what I'm aloud to carry by default and I wouldn't be using the quest marker at all.

I have to say: I always walk to a location first before fast traveling to it but what I'm saying is: you probably employ at least one or two of the aforementioned realism breakers so why turn a blind eye to fast travel? You must have a poor imagination if you need to walk the distance every time to grasp the feeling of adventure. I fast travel because I can imagine the journey: the walking, an encounter with a foe or two along the way, etc, etc:

Anyway... Solutions: 1) use a carriage to the nearest settlement and then walk or.. 2) use a horse, much faster than walking. 3) If you decide to go by foot, avoid contact with enemies if you can, I know all too well when on a journey somewhere you encounter some bandits and end up clearing out their whole fort for half an hour and picking up another quest before carrying on to your route. 4) Use your imagination a bit and fast travel; you know the area, you can imagine the relatively mundane task of walking to and from that location.

OK?

1. So far I have only used fast travel so that I can haul the loot from a cave,temple, etc. to a general store that is not reachable without 12 to 13 hr of constant holding the "W" key so that I can do it step by step the hard way while overloaded with goods.
2. What is all this talk about going around mountains? My characters just go over them. It did tend to confuse Lydia to no end while she was still living and it might take 45 min to an hour for her to catch up as she was not so good at following where her Thane lead.

I got to level 51 with no "fast travel" (Only use carriages). It's great because some of the keeps have a stables and some don't. What ends up happening is sometimes I won't go to "outskirt" towns that are a 1 way trip. And I am not 100% certain but I think the price of the carriage reflects if there is a stable there or not. Higher price = no stable and you are paying for his return trip.

I maxed out the dragon shout list "words of power" request.... with no fast travel. People complain about doing those stairs once or twice. I have probably climbed them 30 or so times, maybe, probably more. The thing is though, it is a different adventure each time. Doing it so many times makes it truly feel like a pilgrimage.

Also, Bethesda did a fantastic job of making "everywhere in-between" feel like somewhere distinct and interesting so I never feel like I am traveling through boredom. Opting out of fast travel also makes the world feel a hell of a lot larger than if you included it.

This is what works for me... I'll amass a ton of "misc" quests and I'll hold off on doing them until one of the "major" quest lines has me in the general area. I think this makes sense from an RP perspective too because I doubt Dovakiin would just randomly race from one edge of Skyrim to the other just to complete the little delivery quests the moment he gets them.

I do understand what the OP is saying, and sometimes when I find myself going "ugh... It's all the way over there?" I use that as a good reason to save to game and take a break. Usually when I start up playing again I'm refreshed and more open to the idea of a long horse ride.

I find travel by foot much better with HUD opacity at 0% and not looking at the map. I actually got lost when I had to run away from Riverwood. Apparently I made them mad. My only gripe about having to turn off the hud this way is that some important things aren't visible, like if doors are locked or if an item you're looking at is owned or not.

Really though, turning the hud off and going without the map greatly enhances exploration.

I just started playing without fast travel, and I really like it. You get a better sense of the scale of Skyrim (obviously) and the surroundings are too beautiful to squander with teleportation. The stock map is pretty worthless though when it comes to trying to figure out which road will take you where you want to go (though the road signs help a lot). I ended up tweaking my .ini to make the map more useful, and printed out an illustrated one so that I could tell where the roads were.

One thing I really want to do once the Creation Kit is released is see if I can make it so that the quest list reorganizes itself whenever you open it up, sorting the quests by which ones are closest - the obvious solution to those quests that have you bouncing all over the map and back is to wait until something else brings you to the area. But with 60 or so quests in your list, it's damn near impossible to tell which ones are in the neighborhood.

Well said Buds. :foodndrink:

I don't mind using fast travel it ads up the travel time that it takes for your character to get through so it works for me. I just imagine my character is traveling and it saves the tedium of having to travel all the way back to the quest giver myself.

I use fast travel usually after a quest and am loaded down with goods, also to replenish supplies. My husband tends to just run everywhere with very little FT and yes he gets into loads of scraqes and mishaps but he enjoys it immensely.

It's kinda the point of a game like this. It's an open world with stuff happening all over the place. Many other games lock your physical world to a very small area which gets old quite quickly. It is an adventure game, have an adventure.