Oblivion: Fast Travel as the only viable means of getting around vast amounts of territory
Morrowind: Paid travel services from city to city that made traversing more realistic and immersive

TBH I really don't see how the answer to your question isn't blatantly obvious.

I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or not.

In any case, I don't think things like carriages or boats should offer travel services between warring factions' territory. But absolutely there should be travel with a factions borders and between neutral zones. Teleportion services would, of course, not really be limited by borders, and these could offer a wider reach.

No, I'm not rationalizing. I'm observing the blatantly obvious difference between using a one second feather/strength spell, and using a transportation service to move goods. This is what I was arguing.

Ideally, transportation services would be the only way to transport large quantities of loot. I'd like to see a much more robust system in general, offering shipping, cart and carriage transport for any and all of the junk I decide to pick up in my travels. And you are correct that moving large quantities of items should cost more to transport. Morrowind's system is only an improvement in that it's better than Oblivion, not because it's perfect. It's only a step in the right direction.

If anything, fast travel is even more a requirement in Morrowind what with the steep slopes obstructing your path. It's even less viable to walk from Ald'ruhn to Nchuleftingth than to walk from Chorrol to Anvil. But for some reason Oblivion is the game built around fast travel? :confused:



I am in the camp of "Immersion needs to be put on hold at times for playability's sake, even if it goes against what I personally want from the game because I realize I am not the only player" if that's where you're coming from



If we can believe that you are loading all the excess loot onto a boat. Why are you not charged extra? Why do you not have to wait an extra 2-3 hours to load your loot? Morrowind just provides you with a convenient excuse for exploitation. Both systems exploit the game mechanics to allow transportation of a massive amount of goods due to how fast travel is handled in both games, a simple teleportation-like movement that speeds time up to sync with your simulated journey.

If you want, we could bring horses into the equation. Or scrolls of icarian flight.

The money could be the assumed cost of food & rest on your way to the destination. It could work,

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!!!! I want it to be free. I like free things... In morrowind I almost never used fast travel because I saw it as "Another thing to spend my hard earned gold on."

pleh!

I don't think so. Fast travel is an out of game cheat. I don't mean to put it down, I know a lot of people like it and that's fine but essentially it's a cheat. It makes no attempt to explain (in game) how you're going from point A to point B. So I don't think charging for it would work.

I would like to see an alternative to it where there is an ingame fast travel service (be it a spell or a mage teleports you or you ride on the back of an ox, whatever) where you would pay. I would like it to cost quite a lot so I wouldn't be tempted to over use it.

If there was both then everyone would be happy.

The problem is that there are so few games available to those who do want a fully immersive experience. The thing is, the Elder Scrolls has, in the past, provided a believable, well developed world, but is now moving in the wrong direction. Instead of building on the previous installments' philosophy towards immersion, believability, and expanding outwards, the trend seems to be making things smaller, less grand.

Beyond that, I feel "playability" used as a justification is about as worthwhile and meaningful as "fun". The terms are far too nebulous and subjective to offer anything in terms of solid reasoning.

But you do recognize that there is, at the very list, a clear difference between a one second spell indiscriminately providing hours of an effect, and a transportation that actually is physically capable of transporting large quantities of goods, but only has a single flat rate charge? Right? In the latter case, you have a poorly designed economy. In the former you are completely disregarding the laws of physics for no discernable reason.

And as I said, I agree there should be a variable transportation fee depending on whether you are transporting freight versus purchasing a personal boarding pass.

Things like saddlebags and horse-drawn carts are exactly what I would like to see. Icarian scrolls are alright, but I feel they made sense mostly in the context of how you found them. They were little better than novelties in terms of actual usefulness.

TBH its only blatantly obvious to you because you are wrong. Just because a method of travel isn't viable doesn't mean that the game wants you to use the fastest travel possible. In RDR You could run out to a field and camp, and then go anywhere in the game. But you could also ride, or walk. Just because an option is available and faster doesn't mean that any other option is obsolete and shouldn't be used. Otherwise I would just fly to work everyday.

Paying is fine, but IMO you should only be able to fast travel to cities not to Inns, caves, dungeons etc. I way better option which is medium and requires some exploration to be done every time u fast raver

And I feel the same way about the term "immersion" anymore. It's such a buzzword around here. It's become more of a sentence enhancing spice word than anything. Want to give your argument a little more oomph? Call it immersive and suddenly the opposition is not immersive and is everything wrong with gaming today.



No, I don't, because I an looking mechanically at how fast travel works. Oblivion fast travel does not inexplicably allow you to make a 1 second feather spell last hours because that is an EXPLOIT. A bug, a glitch, an oversight. It was never purposefully programmed into the game. It is quite obvious you were not supposed to travel when overweight since Oblivion DOES have a check for that before you travel in the first place. The reason it works is because people exploit the system. The very same reason why in Morrowind you can permanently apply spells using a glitch. Sure you can claim that you're toying with magic and learned a forbidden ritual that permanently infuses you with magic, but mechanically, it's an exploit.

Whichever form of fast travel that they put into the game, I will be happy. If I do not want to use the form of fast travel, I won't use it. After all, the game is Betheseda's and we are just being allowed to play in it, so the choice of what is included is theirs, not ours. And I trust them to do what is right for the game.

Daggerfalls fast travel system was the best IMO.

You could travel fast or slow, but traveling fast mean't you could arrive at a dangerous time (night) when monsters and bandits sometimes snuck into cities.

You could also choose to rest at Inns (which would cost money) or camp (which would make the trip take longer).

But considering there were no time limits for quests in Morrowind or Oblivion (which is stupid IMO), I'm guessing that taking a longer trip wouldn't bother anyone.

this pretty much somes up the attitude of people who defend oblivions system. :rolleyes:

Except immersion in a gameworld actually means something. It means creating a believable, consistent, coherent world. This applies to fast travel in that it operate much in the same fashion as Mark/Recall, but is not actually a spell, nor does it have any associated costs. I'm sure you'd have a lot more people a lot less upset with the way fast travel was changed if things like contracting a disease, losing health/magicka, etc were integrated into the "click the map and go there" system. If they brought back things like having an option to use inns versus living off the land and having pros and cons associated with each. But even adding this would not excuse a lack of travel options because travel services do exist virtually everywhere. And if you are going to include travel services as set pieces, you should definitely make them mechanically relevant.

"Playability", however, doesn't mean anything. I mean, unless you actually break the game, it will have playability.

The world that overlays the mechanics is still worthwhile and still adds to the believability of what is happening. Are you really arguing that the "how" isn't important? That as long as, mechanically, we arrive at the same result nothing else matters? Because I can really see that as justifying a lot of sloppy world design and limitations forced on players.

In Deus Ex, you had skills and augmentation implants. Each granted you varying abilities, some overlapped more than others. In the sequel, they dropped the skills and only had implants. Mechanically, much of what you could do was the same. But it offered a lot less in terms of a believable character system.

No. It doesn't solve the problem between the two, and it just makes Oblivions system worse.

I still think both, having alternatives, are the only way to make everyone happy. Sure you could fast travel for free, making the travel services redundant, but who wouldn't pay to avoid entering the menu?

This. It's not about money. It's about immersion. If you add a logical reason why it would cost money, like a carriage or boat, sure but otherwise it would do nothing for immersion.

But immersion has the problem of, each person has their own views of what is immersion and what is not. That is where using the term immersion has its problems, because it is a very subjective term, which of course playability is too. Ultimately the game is what each player makes of it, what choices they make to do in the game, what quests they do and how they complete them.

Not really. Some people are fine with lesser degrees of immersion, but there's a pretty clear line of progression.

That's why something like Star Fox is less immersive than a flight simulator using a full cockpit control system. This doesn't mean the former is less enjoyable, but it is enjoyable for different reasons. It's my position that the Elder Scrolls should tend towards the latter case more so than the former. There are plenty of fantrasy action games if you want a more straight-forward approach. There are not very many immersive, simulative game experiences, though. And TES now seems to be moving in the opposite direction it was going before.

It means as much as playability, meaning nothing objective.

I've seen people claim Vvardenfell is immersive because it makes you believe to be in another world with its foreign landscape and Cyrodiil unimmersive because the landscape is too familiar.

To the contrary, I believe Cyrodiil is immersive because it is somewhere I could actually picture myself being, while Morrowind is much too exotic to allow for immersion.

Which is right?



I'm not sure you understand what I'm getting at. Let me draw a parallel:

In Oblivion you can duplicate items via a glitch that you must knowingly take advantage of. Would you say Morrowind's menu system is better, based solely on the fact that the duplication glitch does not exist in Morrowind?

Ofcause and i can only speak for myself, though it seems i am not alone about this one. I was just explaining why this wouldn't make the fast travel system better for me, infact it would probably make it worse but i completely understand why some people would like this idea since fast travel would atleast have consequences but that's only part of it if you ask me. What really made the Morrowind system great was that it made the world feel more alive and real. There was a logical explanation why and how your character just jumped to the other side of the map. That's what made the Morrowind fast travel great IMO.

Morrowind was such an accomplishment in world design because it could make you feel immersed in such an alien landscape and culture. Oblivion felt like Disneyland, colorful and shallow.

But that's purely opinion. I'd rather point at actual, real discrepancies (like a lack of transporation services, any real industry, etc) that made Oblivion feel less real.

I was responding only to the idea that cargo transport via boat was exactly as believable as cargo transported on a person. This is what the original claim was, that it was okay for Oblivion to have such a glaring flaw because Morrowind's transport service was also flawed. My point was that Morrowind's flaw at least made sense in terms of physics: a boat can carry large amounts of cargo, a person cannot. Whether it is ultimately a bug or not is irrelevant, as the poster I responded to seemed to think it was okay as implemented. I've since explained that neither system is perfect, but at least Morrowind's is a step in right direction. It's like this:

Oblivion fast travel <-----< Morrowind Transportation Services <---------------------------< Ideal Transport System

The point being, you can't justify using a flawed system because one alternative is also flawed. There will always be flaws, but it's important to be moving in the right direction. Morrowind's system will always make more sense than Oblivion's even though it's transporters do not account for how much [censored] you might be lugging around. And in turn, some deeper hypothetical system will always be better than Morrowind's because it's accounted for the flaws present in that system. If, after implementing this new system, we find more flaws, it does not justify reverting to a simpler system.

No, it's completely relevant:



You implied that an EXPLOIT in Oblivion's fast travel system was less believable than a similar EXPLOIT in Morrowind's system. Because like it or not, you can indeed take 17k suits of daedric with you on gondola ride despite being completely impossible physically.

This isn't about flaws in a system. This is about outright BUGS. Something you must knowingly, and willingly exploit in order for it to stop being believable.

But the fact of the matter is, they have to make the game accessible to the most players as possible, and most of the players are going to be casual players, so for them the Oblivion style fast travel is the best option, as it is the easiest to use and implement. Whether there is an in-game reason or not for it, it is what is makes the most sense for them to use. It all boils down to economics, really. No, not everyone is going to like it, not everyone is going to like every part of the game. I despise the Dark Brotherhood, but I know they will be in the game, so I will just avoid playing that part of the game.

I fail to see how Oblivion's fast travel system is cheating. Time passes just like in Morrowind, the only difference is that you walked/ran somewhere rather than rode on a creature. So far the main argument everyone seems to be spreading is that Morrowind's method was more immersible.... How??? If I fast travel in Oblivion, my character walks/runs to the destination. It is safe to assume that you walk along the road, which in all the time I have played, has been relatively safe with few enemy encounters, providing I did not stray to far from the path by accident. And the few times I have encountered enemies, I have either dealt with them successfully, or been assisted by a guard. Worst case scenario, you run away from your opponent which is quite effective in itself. Someone will have to explain to me how that is a cheat, especially since if I run long enough, I can avoid any danger to my character, even on the hardest difficulty and with various mods.

As for the feather problem, that is a glitch, which was previously stated by another poster. Oblivion has check's in place to prevent fast traveling while over-burdened and it took me quite a while before I actually figured that one out myself. However, glitches and exploits exist in both games, they take advantages of loopholes in the system and various things that developers never foresaw. Due to this fact, this should be left entirely from the discussion because it contributes absolutely nothing to the actual argument on which system is better.

Personally; KEY WORD HERE; I prefer Oblivion's fast travel system. Why? Because I have no desire to walk everywhere I go. I did that when I first started playing, I would walk the streets; explore the beaches; scale the mountains. However after the 20+ hour mark in the game, I got tired with it. I would fast travel the the nearest city that I needed, then set out on a hike to my destination. Which is exactly what Morrowind's system is like, with the exception that you walk instead of paying for a cab. Plus, can you really picture giant bugs walking around Cyrodiil? They fit into the Morrowind style, theme, and universe/country, however I cannot picture them strolling through the Oblivion plains.

Implementation of both would be shiny. Unlike Oblivion, have only the main city where your character starts on the map (Which I will get into in a minute). Like Oblivion, make it a requirement that you must find the destination before you can fast travel to it using the map (Oblivion's system). However, offer Striders (Or whatever is Skyrim appropriate) to the world that will take players to other cities for a fee, including cities that have yet to be discovered (Major cities only though). I would also like to see Mark & Recall and teleportation spells added as well. However, if only one system can be implemented, let it be Oblivion's system. Any character can walk somewhere, so allow their character to do so through the use of the map.


Now, just quickly onto the map. From what I understand currently, you will have to discover the cities before the fast travel system is available. However, depending on your characters back-story, (Such as Oblivion's), it would make absolutely no sense to have to discover the cities. I have, at this point in time, not left my city. However I know where and how to get to the various cities and towns that are nearby, even more so with the various signs that are posted. So for those of you complaining about immersion being broken due to Oblivion's fast travel system, explain how the immersion is not broken.

Like "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!!.......unless you deposit 500 spetims"