I just used "quick travel" for the first time since I started playing.

I went from Crowhaven to the Imperial City with one mouse click.

Since my character doesn't have a teleport spell or anything similar, I sort of feel like I was cheating.

Do any of you agree, or do you think Quick Travel is just a necessary part of the game?

No more than quick save is.
For that matter, no more than a health bar is. How many people do you know can take a war hammer to the face and survive because their HP didn't run out?

Games are fictional. There's no such thing as cheating in a single player game especially.

Lots of people agree, that's why there are even mods out there to disable fast travel. I don't have a problem with it personally, but after my first couple playthroughs I realized how much I was missing by hopping from one quest location to the next just to "finish off" the quest. Much of Oblivion's reward as a game comes from just wandering around, enjoying the landscape, and seeing what you'll discover.

After a while I started only using fast travel when I was on horseback, to travel from one stable to another stable, just because it can be annoying having to dismount 50 times along the road to kill wolves and bandits, only to have them ignore me and kill my horse. Nowadays, I have mods to help with the horse problem, so I ride if I feel like it, or I use a nifty mod called Cyrodiil Travel Services that lets me pay a travel agent to take me between cities if I'm really, really in a hurry.

The only way I consider fast travel "necessary", is occasionally even in a vanilla game, you'll run into a bad spawn and your game will just continually crash at a certain point or certain time. One of the few ways around it is to fast travel someplace else until the bad spawn resets.

Not at all. I fast travel when I'm just not in the mood to walk/run/ride from town to town. Although I do enjoy walking through the Great Forest and riding around Lake Rumare. There are some amazing sites in Cyrodiil!

I occasionally use fast travel, and simply regard it as an uneventful trip between the two places. Time passes when you fast travel, as if you had actually walked by road. I am most likely to use it on the return trip from someplace, because I know that all the enemies on the road have been killed, and it really will be uneventful.

Its not cheating because first of all, its an RPG... you can do whatever you want and its not online... second of all Bethesda put it in the game intentionally.

Personally I feel it kind of ruins the game because you miss out on so much. Especially if you are RP'ing

No it's not, Fast Travel is a great option if you don't have the time to travel from one city to another or if you want to advance the roleplay further. I did that yesterday with the Bravil Reccomendation mission traveling back to the Imperial City. I killed all the enemies on my way originally and it was within 3 days. I would've wasted 5-10 minutes walking back when I could've took 10-15 seconds to get where I needed to go.

Well put, glargg and I concur. Road trips and traveling through the wilderness is beautiful but there are those times when a well and recently traveled trip can be assumed to have safely occurred. This is always a subject of debate when it comes up. I confess I fall into the 'hey, it's optional to use or not as you see fit' crowd. I feel more options are always good because I would rather set my own limitations than be issued them by the game's developers.

For what it's worth, if you look at the quest structure of say the Fighters Guild, it seems clear to me that the developers were anticipating the use of fast travel as you get sent like an errand girl from one town clear across Cyrodill only to return - again and again. Lol.

No. It’s part of the vanilla game. Use it or not, whatever is your preference. To me, it would quickly get boring running down the same road over and over when you were hauling multiple loads of loot back from Rockmilk. There is not much of my map that my character hasn’t explored, but she does that when she is adventuring, not just jumping from here to there to buy more empty Soul Gems. Drop in at Lord Drads for some Milk Thistle, or try the trails in the far north for some bears and Ogre. Fast travel is a part of my game.

One of my fun things to do is to fast travel to all the bandit camps for a little head bashing and loot collecting. And if that doesn’t provide enough excitement, then try jumping from Oblivion Gate to Oblivion Gate.

If you don't want to justify it by saying it's a teleportation spell, you can call it highway hypnosis, or something.

Players should do want they want to do, when they want to do it, how they want to do it, is my attitude. Find it fun to fast travel? Then fast travel. Find it more fun to avoid fast traveling? Then avoid fast traveling. The issue has been solved. Now go play the game.

I dislike rigid, unbreakable rules. My dislike of rules is one of the reasons I prefer the Elder Scrolls games over the more Dungeons-and-Dragons-esque games made by other companies. I not only want to the freedom to make up my own rules, I want to the freedom to be able to change my mind about my own rules.

In general, I tend to not like Oblivion's map-based fast travel very much because it is fast travel initiated by the player. Morrowind's Silt Striders and Skyrim's carriages is fast travel initiated by the character. I am more comfortable with that. But I will do either if the mood strikes me and I don't worry whether doing so is "cheating" or not.

If I am going from one city to another and I do not wish to make any stops along the way, I often fast-travel. And I always limit myself to fast-traveling only somewhere that is capable of tending to horses. So I can't fast travel to that Ayleid ruin in the middle of nowhere, but I CAN fast travel to someplace like Roxey Inn. Oh, and I also only fast-travel while on horseback, giving me good reason to buy them.

It's kinda like Morrowind's system, where fast travel was only performed between settlements, with the fee being a large up-front charge for the privilege instead of a small sum for every trip. I carry this behavior over to Skyrim, as well, though since there are carriages in Skyrim, that also provides an option for if I simply don't want to own a horse.

I always thought that it was, mind you I still don't fast travel in the Northern Province either...

This. Back in our tabletop days, we never did things in real-time like we do with vid games. If you traveled between 2 destinations, a dice roll was made. If you rolled a certain set of numbers (let's say 2 or below on a 6-sided die), an encounter is made, usually with an enemy or enemies. If you rolled another a 3, 4, 5, or 6, there was no encounter, the trip was "uneventful", and there was no reason to spend any more time with the game than necessary.

That being said, in TES games, there are plenty of reasons to not fast-travel. Those who fast-travel all the time will miss out on plenty of beautiful scenery, random encounters, and hidden dwellings. They will basically miss out on half the game. I don't consider FT to be cheating, though. Some people don't have time to walk, run, or ride everywhere. Other people don't want to bother with snail-travel.

I feel that travelling normally gives me a greater feeling of accomplishment, like I've really been on a long journey!

Having said that, I got tempted last night and clicked FAST TRAVEL for the first time.

I'm not sure its cheating, I just think the creators of the game should have built something into the structure of the game that explains it... like paying for a transport with gold, or using items or spells to teleport.

Just giving the character ability to teleport without penalty is a bit of a stretch...

Just my 2 septims, hahahah..

Wahooka

P.S. Can you fast travel is Skyrim?

Everyone has pretty much said it all already. It can be useful if you want to get to someplace quickly if you want your journey to be uneventful.


Yes you can, and there is also a carriage system between major cities as an alternative.

This.

I only really use fast travel when I wanna dump stuff. I started using it excessively when I was on the shivering isles because I had so much collected loot that I wanted to dump quickly so I could go back for more. But everything between the mysterious door and skingrad had been discovered so I wasn't missing out on much.

It's not really a cheat because it was placed into the game by the designers themselves for intentional use. How often you use it, if at all, is entirely dependent upon you.

I was a bit disappointed that the game opens with places you've never been to, but can fast travel to immediately. I think it would have been better if visiting on foot first was an absolute rule.

I think I'd like to see fast travel implemented as interruptible, so if there was a bandit along the road, you'd have to stop and deal with him, and then resume, but I'm not about to start writing a mod for that.

Heh. But it's possible to use a fast-travel at the beginning of a game, and then roleplay it that his or her game starts from wherever this location is. That's what I did with http://chorrol.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=5031. Started her with a previous character's save (which was made just before exiting the sewers in the beginning) and then fast-traveled to the Chestnut Handy Stables. Granted, now that that's been done, Ann won't ever be fast-traveled again, but still...

..I'm just saying that some of us find some beneficial things to do with this, especially in a roleplay sense.


This sounds kinda like the way Final Fantasy does it, am I right? It's been awhile since I've popped FF in, though, so my memory might be playing tricks on me, here.

There are benefits to not fast traveling, your skills will go up faster.

A lot of games have the interrupted fast travel. The first two Fallout games work that way, and Arcanum does, also.

That's only a benefit if you want your skills to go up faster.

I totally agree with this. How can you fast travel to a place you've never been? You wouldn't know how to get there!!!

I feel this is a BUILT IN CHEAT that the programmers put in the game.

Do the programmers ever read this forum?

The compass is a bit of a cheat as well, to be honest. How would a red arrow just appear on your map and guide you to somewhere?

I thought Morrowind was better in this regard, but I couldn't stand all the TEXT!!!

If you use http://tes.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=26389, you can (if you want) disable all those starting markers so that you actually do have to go find places before you can fast travel back to them. (It's also very handy for keeping track of dungeons that you've cleared out, or ones you want to come back to, not to mention adding markers for wayshrines and other stuff). OOO also disables starting markers by default. And there's tons of ways to disable the quest marker on the compass. (All assuming you're not playing on a console, heh).

The compass is a bit of a cheat, but for the developer, rather than the player. If you're supposed to know where someone is, in order to complete a quest, then either you need all the other characters to be able to point him out (literally), or an artificial means to do the same thing. Morrowind's solution was to describe the location - hence all the text - and not let the NPC move. Oblivion lets them wander around, so it needed a dynamic location method, and that was the compromise they chose. Anything else would likely have got too complicated for them to program.

For static locations, I don't think it makes much difference. If an NPC has put a mark on my map for the house/cave/whatever, then adding an arrow does nothing.

Good points and I agree. Nor is it cheating to lower the difficulty setting since it′s also a part of the game mechanics. It′s really only a matter of what you prefer, and I for one prefer to roam the landscape and enjoy the scenery