And thus you're saying that you don't want other players to have it available. Simple.

You don't have to use it at all. Tone it down yourself.

I think fast travel is fine and want it to remain available, so it doesn't need to be toned down. I have no-fast-travel games going and it is very easy to choose not to use it in those games.

However, I do think there are some things that need to be toned *up* for the times we do not choose to use fast travel. We need descriptive journal entries and directions on where to go. Not just something like "Bring Carla the amulet." The journal needs to remind us what the amulet is and provide us with real directions as to where we are bringing it. (Like Morrowind did.) We also need to continue to have multiple ways of getting around...boats, silt striders, mark & recall, divine intervention, etc.

Doesn't mean at all that we need to tone down or get rid of fast travel. Fast travel in and of itself isn't the problem.

Folks don't want to use self control, they would rather have the game leash them.

The option is there, and I use it when I don't have a lot of playtime, but when I can actually sit down and play I forget it's even there.

"There are ghouls nearby go kill them!"

*checks pipboy, Ghouls are all the way across the map*

"Optional" isn't optional if the entire game is designed around it. When you're not given specific directions in dialog or something marked on a map, and the only way you have a reasonable chance to find something is to FT to it, then it's NOT "optional" at all. Having a magic compass that always points exactly to the specific quest objective is one work-around, but even worse from a RP perspective than not having alternate transportation options.


Morrowind had FT, but it was smoothly integrated into the game world in the form of boats, "silt strider" taxis services, and Guild Guide teleportation services at the Mages Guild, with different services being available depending on location. You could also use spells, potions, and enchantments to teleport to a few select locations. The quests gave specific directions in most cases (although a handful of the hundreds of quests were wrong), so it was sometimes up to you to search the indicated area for the actual objective. The search itself was half of the quest.

So in other words, a game which the core mechanics of, are a hybird between the mechanics of the older TES games, and the newer TES games... Perhaps that could work out well. Maybe Oblivion and Daggerfall were too randomized, and the mistake of both series was trying to entirely replace hand placed design with random design.


The more I think about it, the more it seems Bethesda's most common design mistake, is entirely trying to entirely replace an already good feature with another, when it would be a better idea to combine features together, rather than entirely try to replace other features with something else.




I'd say you're both right to an extent. If you can use a mod that gives you the option to turn off fast travel it is easy to not do it, but if you don't have such a mod installed it's extremely easy to accidentally fast travel and get frustrated by it.


Tbh I think Oblivion was the worst in this regard, forcing you to either non immersively click the map or not fast travel at all, Morrowind did it my personal favorite way, but so many people demand map click travel that it'd be a financial suicide mission to bankruptcy to not include it in future TES games- with that in mind, I think Skyrim so long as you include those mods I talked about, seems to be an in between. It still has map clicking to travel, but it also has more immersive forms of fast travel.


I think some of this just really comes to unmodded TES games having a very flawed "difficulty strider" that only directly effects combat. And honestly Skyrim was much better than Oblivion in this way.

How is it "extremely easy to accidentally fast travel?" In all the years I have played Elder Scrolls games I have never once accidentally fast traveled.

I have no idea, when you click on a marker you get a big pop up asking you if you want to Fast Travel to the location.

Its not purely optional. Its there for you to use. Its already built into the game.

I'm from the old school where you had to travel a lot and figure things out on your own etc. Developers like the guys at Capcom who designed Dragons Dogma did not have a standard fast travel system in it. The reason they said? It ruins immersion, for the most part I agree.

Thats the point I'm trying to make.

Not trying to create a fire here, it's no big deal. It's actually more of a minor quip for me but a quip nonetheless. Moving on.

Right, except...its not. While the argument (and rightly so) can be made for Fallout 4, theres never a point when fast travel os either encouraged or discouraged. Its just sorta...there. In Skyrim or Oblivion, theres never a point where using it to any extent is touched upon. For all intents and purposes, it is completely optional, and choosing to use it or not doesn't really change anything.


You want an example of a game that encourages it? Fallout 4. The game is pretty terrible about the whole thing. Putting Radiant Quests on far flung reaches of the map is one thing, but when your Settlements are under fire with a time limit to complete it? Yeah, that gets irritating for someone that doesn't use FT quick.


So, unless that issue becomes relevent in TES VI, the issue is pretty small all together. It exists for people who like that sort of thing, and those that don't aren't missing out on anything unless the temptation is that strong. Only FT system in this context I liked was New Vegas, since utilizing it requires resources in HC mode.Though, it does become trivial by the time it'd become useful.

I have no objection to any game having fast travel as an option, but increasingly I find myself noticing how BGS games are built around the feature in a way that makes avoiding it almost impossible. In Fallout 4 it's simply unfeasible to play without fast travel after the first couple of hours, as almost every quest has you jumping to the furthermost reaches of the map with little rhyme or reason, and the rewards don't justify the time and effort spent doing it without fast travel on 95% of occasions. In doing so the map begins to feel absurdly small - why on earth would some guy in a hut in the southern marshes want me to kill ghouls up on the northern coast?

The Witcher 3 did a far better job of keeping the player within a particular region of the map for extended periods, and at least managed to justify quests that made you travel longer distances by giving some meaning to the journey, as opposed to it just being arbitrary. It made me feel far more invested in the local towns and townspeople within each part of the map - to say nothing of how Skellige and Velen themselves were also so distinct (although it'd be nice to have had Skellige accessible from the mainland without fast travel, obviously).

I also recall Red Dead Redemption being very well-paced without needing to use more than a handful of carriage rides, although being so many years ago I could be viewing it with rose-tinted glasses.

I actually found it to be the opposite. I used fast travel in Wild Hunt far more than I tend to in Bethesda games, because it's so calmed boring to run around. At least in Bethesda games there's SOMETHING happening, beyond your horse glitching out and half-phasing through a hill. In Wild Hunt it's the same pack of wild dogs every time you go over the hill... If there's even anything there at all. And the total lack of identity to all but a handful of NPCs stripped any iota of attachment to them for me. Oh look, there goes generic pesant 106, off to have as unique a day as a a Mayfly trying to reproduce before it dies.


There is something to be said for maintaining a degree of locallity to activities, though. The Fighters Guild in Balmora shouldn't be getting contracts in the Grasslands, for instance. But then again, the Countess in Bravil shouldn't be taking a Sunday stroll to see her mother in Chorall either. That sort of mixing dramatically shrinks the world and while appropriate enough for Fallout (3, 4 and New Vegas handling far smaller regions than any TES game has) it's a huge break in the suspension of disbelief in TES. Suddenly, two of the largest cities in Tamriel aren't thousands of kilometers apart, they're close enough that you can eat breakfast in one and be to the other by lunch.


Bethesda really should be making fast travel a more focal part of their games... By making the game worlds larger. Morrowind was literally the only one that didn't have a to-point fast travel system, and that system really helps create the illusion of size by disconnecting the act of traveling from the distance covered. You dont have the cognitive association with traveling from Whiterun to Solitude takijg only a few hours, because you don't experience it first hand. Morrowind got around this by having fast travel mechanisms like teleportation and Silt Striders, but it still started to feel strange when those mysterious Daedric Ruins were 3 minutes outside a major city.

I guess we'll agree to disagree on The Witcher 3 (I didn't think it was perfect - just better than Fallout 4). But all your other points I totally agree with, and would like to see BGS address those in the next TES game.

I definitely agree that the map size scale needs to be significantly increased and I have a feeling that BGS knows that. My only worry in regards to the map size increasing/city size increasing would be them taking an even more... Skyrimmy approach towards dialogue, where numerous NPCs are just one-clickers. It's probably honestly the main thing that would get to me and was my main gripe about Skyrim.

I think something that could solve a bit of the problem with factions needing to only take contracts in their particular area, would be just having a large number of factions as a whole, although that's certainly easier said than done. It seems the faction number seems to somewhat decrease in quantity, while increasing in terms of cinematics. I definitely think that there needs to be a cinematic/story-driven element to each faction, but I don't think 4 - 6 factions is sufficient, personally. This is just my opinion, though.

It happened to me trying to put the Map Marker very close to a city, accidentally clicking the city, trying to hastily cancel it asking me if I want to travel to the city, me accidentally pressing yes, then being frustrated I hadn't saved my game right before that happened.


I think Skyrim was much actually better than Oblivion in that regard, in that it had forms of fast travel that didn't involve clicking the map. Unlike with Oblivion a mod to disable fast travel solved that problem for me, though I think there still should've been an option in the vanilla game menu to disable fast travel- with it enabled by default of course. It takes up valuable precious mod space when I have to use a mod for something like that.


When I think of TES 6 I worry about the storyline, attributes, factions and so on, but I think Skyrim was actually a positive change from Oblivion in that way.




Personally less factions in recent TES games, has negatively effected my enjoyment levels of them.

There are quests in Oblivion that have you running back and forth between the same two points all the way across the map. Two in particular are http://uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Separated_at_Birth (pick it up in Chorrol in the west end of the map, go all the way to Cheydinhal in the east end of the map, then go all the way back to Chorrol), and http://uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Tears_of_the_Savior (start way in the south in Leyawiin, go up north to the Imperial City more than halfway across the map, go back south to Leyawiin, go up north past the Imperial City into the northern mountain ranges, then go all the way back south to Leyawiin). The lack of North, East, and South bridges from the Imperial City makes it worse, since you have to take the long way around. There are more quests like this, these are just two that stick out in my mind as being really annoying.


There's also issues with quests that, while not as far apart between the starting point and the target, do have you going back and forth over the same pathway, where all the times after that first one is just boring. Of course, a big part of this problem is how the games have been progressively making the time in-between encounters be easy-recoup time (Oblivion's 100% safe wilderness resting to heal, and Skyrim's auto-health regen, along with the general increase in carrying capacity and potion availability)... it ends up making the travel time be the down-time of the game, rather than part of the questing.

Fallout 4 also has the added issue of energy for Power Armor. To properly use Power Armor, you need Power Cores. While using Power Armor, your Power Cores slowly deplete. With fast travel, you don't use up any of your Power Cores, whereas you would have if you walked.


If these things aren't strongly encouraging fast travel, I don't know what is.

The problem is, ultimately, by having fast travel as a core, non-optional part of the game that can't be disabled, it influences the design of the quests and activities since the designers can rely on the player having and using fast-travel. They don't need to worry about if the player doesn't have fast travel, because they will, and as a result, they design the game with that in mind. They don't need to worry about quests that send you back and forth multiple times across the whole map, they don't need to worry if there's enough power cores for players using power armor to walk everywhere, etc, because there's fast travel always available.

One of the worst examples of this, for me, are two consecutive Mages Guild quests. "Vahtacen's Secret" sends us to Vahtacen, close to the eastern border of the map. The next quest, "Necromancer's Moon," sends us to Dark Fissure Cave...right right next to Vahtacen! They had to have assumed we would fast travel to these two locations. For those of us who travel everywhere on foot or on horseback, these quests are a real pain in the butt.

Worse, there were a number of quests given where the directions were "north of here" or "to the east", etc. "North of here" could mean half way across the map to the north-west, which the stated directions would never have led you to. The only alternatives were either using the magical quest compass or to FT there with your magic map, neither if which is particularly well suited for a Role-playing game.


It doesn't bother me if FT is available for those who want to use it, as long as there are viable alternatives suitably integrated into the game world for those who do not.


More importantly, the interesting details of the culture, religion, and politics of the game province (or portion of a province) really need to be played up better in the next installment.

Yes, and this begins as soon as we exit the sewers too. The "directions" for very first quest location we are given in Oblivion is "near the city of Chorrol." That's it. And then the game tells us explicitly to follow the compass marker to get there.

If this is the case, I'd consider it to be a bug. In all previous games, time passes when you fast-travel, as if you had actually walked the distance, and timers on things like spells or buffs run out during FT.

I don't see what fast travel has to do with directions. An NPC mentions where something is, and that location appears on your map as if they had pointed it out on your map. You're still free to go there on foot, and have to if it's your first time there, using your map as a guide. Nothing magical about that, and I actually prefer it that way... being able to find/forge my own way there rather than being given step-by-step directions that I have to follow explicitly to the letter, or end up forever lost (to say nothing of when the directions can end up wrong, due to writing errors or late quest changes; or the issues caused by randomized quest parameters, such that there aren't necessarily any set directions to give). For most out-of-the-way locations, it would even make sense that you can know roughly where it is, but not have step-by-step directions to get there (for being supposed nomads, you get surprisingly detailed and accurate directions to Ashlander camps..).

After Oblivion (or Fallout 3?) you can't fast travel to a place you haven't been to, anyway. Even the main cities.

Perhaps. I think it's because you use up Power Cores by actually doing things (walking, running, etc) rather than simply time passing while in Power Armor. Fast travel does move time forward, but the game never considered the player character to be doing anything during that time -- they just teleport with a time-skip.

They'd need to calculate time passing based on walk/run speed, and then drain the power core by how much they would have ran for that amount of time (making sure to account for one power core draining and another being automatically used). There may also need to be a warning to let the player know how much energy it would use for a given fast travel.