On another note, I don't get what people find so unimmersive about Oblivion's travel. Your idea sounds good and I'm not trying to bash it, but I'm okay with the idea of my character travelling without me for a short period of time and just having the mechanic be the mechanic it is.
First, I want to start off by saying that I like fast travel and don't want it to be removed from the game. However, what bothered me about Oblivion's fast travel mechanic was the lack of costs, consequences, or limitations whatsoever. Not to mention the fact that it didn't
really simulate walking or riding your horse. So, all in all, it felt more like a cheat, or at a minimum, a poorly implemented game mechanic. Here are a few points to consider with regard to Oblivion's fast travel mechanic, just as food for thought:
A: Walking or riding your horse would actually take
longer than using fast travel
*.
B: You bypass any enemies or obstacles you might have encountered along the way, and arrive at your destination without any fatigue, magicka, or health depleted.
C: No potions are 'used' from your inventory to simulate replenishing the aforementioned resources.
D: You manage to completely bypass any locations that you would have otherwise discovered during your journey.
E: You are somehow able to stretch a feather potion/spell for the entire duration of your journey while using FT, but somehow can't manage to perform the same 'trick' while travelling by horse or foot.
* I've recently tested this 'theory', and in every scenario, using FT was faster than running or riding a horse by at least an hour of in-game time. This leaves me to conclude that travel time is calculated by drawing a straight line from point A to point B when using FT, which, BTW, is not always possible due to obstacles in your path.
So, when you look at the 'evidence' (and I am using the term loosely here), fast travel as it was implemented in Oblivion was more akin to using, say, a 50 point levitation spell. That is about the only way I could rationalize why my character was able to circumvent any of the situations or obstacles listed above. That is until I remember that levitation
doesn't exist is banned in Cyrodiil (although somehow thieves continue to steal, and necromancers still raise undead, despite both activities being illegal). And yet, that still is not an adequate explanation to address how I am able to make it all the way to my destination without having to use additional feather potions and/or deplete at least some of my magicka reserves while being overburdened with loot. Lastly, transportation services existed in some form in both Daggerfall and Morrowind, so it is a bit perplexing why they were completely absent in the
capital of the Empire.
Now, Morrowind's FT mechanic was not perfect by any means, but I was able to rationalize to some extent why I was able to carry heavy loads over a long distance, or why my character was not attacked by cliffracers or bandits. I could say the same for Daggerfall. When it comes to Oblivion's FT, however, I have to make excuses rather than rationalizations. That is why, IMHO, Oblivion's system fails to suspend my disbelief, and is, therefore, 'immersion breaking'.
As for other people's comments, Morrowind's fast-travel was no different in the immersion aspect. I fail to see how paying a person and fading out from your character's life for a short journey is any more immersive than just fading out from your character's life for a short journey. Time passes in both games. Events, encounters, and the showing of the actual travel part are skipped in both games... and cliffracers would not stop attacking a person just because they're on a ship or a giant bug.
Even if that is true, and I personally don't completely agree that it is, why not use a FT system similar to Daggerfall's? All the tedium is removed while keeping a system that, at a minimum, puts a few minor limitations on the mechanic and allows for
some suspension of disbelief.