OH GOD, This thread again.

Surely there's a difference between shortening a journey that lasts multiple days and shortening journeys through a country you can run completely across in fairly short order.

Yes, that's what I meant about Fast Travel with style. Random encounters, getting lost even though you know the road, getting a disease, fees, or whatever.


Then ignore this, it's OPTIONAL. :teehee:

Sounds good for a fast travel system. Makes more sense than just showing up at your destination with some game time gone by.

I always pretended the character had rolling black outs. "Hmm, I was just in Kvatch but now i'm in Bruma, and time has definitely passed...."

I like it if it's implemented properly. If it's where you have to pay travel service or maintain a vehicle, then I like it. If it's just "Press A to teleport" then it feels like cheating to me.

Fast travel is a simple, time compressed method to get from point A to point B. But you are traveling as though you are invisible, untouchable, and you have your eyes closed.

Horses in Oblivion were not a very good method of travel. Half the time, it was just faster to run. Most of the horses ran like they were stomach deep in pudding.

If traveling were made out to be fun. An enjoyable experience that you don't mind doing, then fast travel could probably be eliminated entirely. Fast horses. Dragons. Mounted combat. These kinds of things would make traveling a joy.

Just Cause 2. 26 times larger than Oblivion. An open world game. It is a destroy things-have fun type of game, and it has fast travel explained in narrative(intradiegetic, thanks greatcarbuncle).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJwITIhqUgc

Notice it takes over 30 seconds with cutscenes skipped, think why is that. If JC devs can bother to add it, I expect more from RPG developers. It is that simple.

Damn good word ain't it.

So I guess you don't roleplay.You cannot say fast travel si not optionol, no one is orceing you to do it.I know its just tempting too use it sometimes. Lets be honest, no one either use fast travel all the time or never.Its an in between, you use it whne ou don't feel like walking a road you have walked 1,000 times.

I wouldn't mind a system like you said but there people seem to make the current fast travel system as the bain of TES.


Self control.

That is not the problem. Games are not religious abstinence simulators. If there ever comes a point when a player has to go out of their way to play the game in a manner that is not what the developers expected outside of role playing a certain character then the game is flawed.

If someone has to avoid using fast travel to feel immersed in the game world then the system is flawed. It's hardly a minority of TES fans who complain about this. Indeed, fast travel is a raging debate outside of the Bethesda forums. There are two sides to this debate - those who want fast travel but want the game to perform its role as dungeon master and impose some light restrictions on it and want a damn explanation for why it's there, and those who seem to think that instead of complaining, players should shut their eyes and pretend that certain aspects of the game don't exist (and then play the game against the way it was built. For example, Oblivion's quests often sent you to the other end of Cyrodiil for a trinket to collect, but the only efficient method to get there was fast travel. If there were other ways to get there almost as easily, perfect. But there aren't)

Or it's not flawed. You can't please all of the people all of the time, right?


I'll agree with this, that running around/ignore it isn't really a viable answer. The game was designed with OB's mode of Fast Travel in mind. However, I don't believe that players can't use their imagination to make a game more to their own liking. Must everything be done for the player? Must a game meet everyone's goals? How? I accept that no game will ever meet my idea of perfection, and that's OK.

I like having options.
To stroll leisurely and explore the area at length, which has it's own rewards, or when pressed for time, to utilize magical, mechanical, or natural forms of quicker transportation.
People who complain that fast travel is cheating impress me as a group of holier than thou whiners.
To those who don't like my attitude, too bad.
Just think of the experience points you lose next time you decide to drive to the grocery, work, or school. You lose so much flying instead of walking cross country to your destination. Horses, bikes, motorized vehicles, hot air ballons, trains, camels, canoes, rowboats, motorboats....swim or walk.

I find it useful to be quite honest. Sometimes when I'm very calm, I enjoy hoofing it. But say I die or something, I'm to hot headed to want to just explore. I'll turn it into a 'Let's get this crap done with then." And move on. The great thing about Fast Travel being optional is, in Oblivion, if I want to look at the beautiful trees? I could stroll along. If I was in a crunch for time while exploring Post-War D.C.? Then Fast Travel is my friend.

I know and agree with you that there is a certain balance that needs to be struck in terms of balancing the wants of a player base. However, I simply don't believe that the people complaining about point and click teleportation travel are an insignificant minority - I really think that it's a huge part of any RPG that deserves to be given more consideration than BGS are willing to give it.

I cite BGS even though this is a thread on fast travel in general because I am fine with RDR's, DA:O's, ME's or Assassin's Creed's methods of fast travel. BGS seem to be the only RPG developers that think that it's a minor issue.

never mind.

I've been trying not to post much in this thread, but I would like a clearer understanding of the annoyance that Fast Travel seems to cause (at this point) nearly half of the people who voted.
Of the two groups that you divide everyone into, I don't know of anyone that falls into the second group (and I'm not sure that I understand what it is exactly). I was inclined to put myself in the first group, but when I read it more closely, I realized that I don't exactly understand that one either. I want Fast travel, I want the game to serve as 'Dungeon Master'; but I'm lost on the notion of "light restriction" and what that might be (or even why that might be).

Would you ~well could you rephrase it somewhat, or elaborate a bit more on what exact points you mean.

See... I know exactly the situation you describe, but I don't understand what adverse part "Fast Travel" plays in it. Are you saying that because of the distance involved, and the fact that you will just have to turn around and come back when you get there, that you resort to Fast Travel?

I've never found it to be a big deal. I'm surprised how often I see topics about it.
You can choose to not use it?
People are only cheating themselves out of enjoying all the game has to offer when they use it.

I do use it from time to time. When I only have an hour to game and it takes 20 minutes to get from A to B... Kinda hard to get stuff done when on a schedule.

Whether fast travel is nice or not, depends much on the game. For example, playing games like Daggerfall and Arcanum without taking advantage of fast travel would be insane and extremely time consuming.

While in some other games it doesn't only save the time of the player, but also make the game noticeably easier. If you just escaped a difficult dungeon and is very low on HP, you can easily just fast travel to safety instead of carefully going back and hope you won't encounter any enemies on the way. Or if you do meet some enemy you don't want to fight, you can just run in a random direction until the enemy is far away enough and just use fast travel.

That said, I'm pleased that Oblivion had fast travel. Doing the Nerevarine & Hortator quests in Morrowind just running back and fourth all over Vvardenfell were hardly fun.

I like to foot it first time around to explore and take in scenery. After that, I like to use fast travel, for many of the reasons already stated.

I agree with most of your post, but I do not understand the viewpoint that one is cheating one's self out of enjoying, when anticipated boredom is often the reason one chooses to use fast travel.

**Edit: The original Bards Tale did not have Fast travel. You had to walk everywhere in first person; and not only that... To those that want full real life immersion. Bards Tale was one up on every RPG game since! (You could be in a dungeon several floors down, and lose your torch, and not have enough magic to cast a light spell ~This meant that you had to walk back upstairs to the surface in utter (0,0,0) pitch blackness. (no auto-map either, you had to make you own ~and IMO it'd be cheating to read it when you are supposed to be in the dark).

As I recall, (not from personal experience :laugh:) its estimated to take 48 real hours to walk from coast to coast in Arcanum.

I have always considered 'fast travel' in Oblivion to be broken for this one reason. It was not like that in Fallout where you could die on the trip. (Though its true, if you managed to run away from combat, you could usually escape; and it was exploitable when you were on the edge of the map).

"You don't have to use it" starts sounding very shallow when you realize the game is designed in such a way that you are expected to use fast travel. Let's take a standard fed-ex quest for example. You're in Leyawiin and a shop keeper needs you to deliver some apples to a guy in Bruma. He says he will reward you for your time when you return. So you take the apples, fast travel to Bruma, give the guy the apples, fast travel back to Leyawiin, and receive your reward of 300 gold. Not bad for 5 minutes worth of work.

Now imagine if you had decided to walk the entire way. The trip in real time takes somewhere between 1 to 2 hours on foot, maybe 20 to 30 minutes on horseback. Now if you travel all that way on foot to drop off apples, fighting off bandits, imps, trolls and who knows what else, and you get back and find that your big reward is a measly 300 gold, how is that going to make you feel? I can tell you how it feels because I've done the "refuse to use it" thing since day one of playing Oblivion and I'm sick and tired of hours of effort being wasted on petty rewards.

Try it, and check the time.

This is what is meant by the "Time compressed" Poll option. That answer means that while the game does not auto-walk your PC in realtime to the next town, it does consider the PC to have made the trip in person, and resumes realtime play once they arrive.

In Fallout (1) your PC could read books to improve their skills, but reading took time, (and the amount depended on the PC's intelligence); A low IQ PC might spend the whole day on the book and have it be dark by the time they finished it. (Fallout does not depict them reading the book for the whole day ~while you watch). This is the same concept upon which Fast travel is based.

I don't have anything against it, I just choose not to use it. In fact, I think it's a pretty good thing to have in a game that's as big as this for the more impatient or casual RPGers who are more interested in getting right to the point rather than enjoying the journey.

However, I don't like that Bethesda basically used it as an excuse to not add in the more immersive forms of travel that Morrowind had, or even try to add in new immersive ones. Horses were a nice attempt, but they didn't exactly do them very well.

So, I don't mind it, but I also don't like that the game basically revolves around it.




You completely missed the point he was trying to make. He was talking about real time, not in-game time.

I honestly wasn't sure if he knew. :shrug:
(I'm positive that a lot of players don't know that time passes in the game.)