Since the introduction of morrowind, which had a basic fast travel system, but people modded in recall and mark abilities. In oblivion fast travel was much more prominent. And there have always been 2 sides to the story. One set of players said they didnt wanna run for 1hr across the globe. Others say fast travel kills exploring.

Well when darkfall online introduced fast travel, it made more people do less travel via mount or foot. To counter that they added in wilderness treasures. Which were random spawning chests, food crates etc. So why cant skyrim have this? Its total random spawn location, and random loots. This could be scaled to level, and give a possible benifit to the explorer, or make people maybe want to walk or run to the next town, and if managed correctly, be balanced.

Just my 2 cents.

Maybe.... But would little camps and protectors (bandits or whoever owns the chest) spawn as well? It seems rather odd to have chests just lying about the country side.

People modded in mark and recall? Those were always in Morrowind.

Eh. I don't like random loot so having them be there would not interest me at all and would not deter me from fast traveling. However, I've heard that there will be no more randomly generated landscape like there was in Oblivion, so that's enough for me to ditch fast traveling for the most part and go exploring.

mark and recall wasn't modded in. thats vanilla morrowind.

There are always little things to explore and find if you travel on foot or on horseback. You miss all those if you fast travel. But then if you fast travel you don't necessarily want to explore at that particular moment. I don't see why there is such rumination about fast travel. If you want to quickly get somewhere you can do so. If you want to explore then you can walk and run etc. Now if there are other options such as boat ferries and official travel points then that's even better.
And yes mark, recall, divine and almsivi interventions were in vanilla morrowind

I'm not going to say that mark and recall was not modded in, but existed in the original game, cause that has been said before. Oh, darn... I just said it. :sadvaultboy:

I would like more interesting things to find in the wilderness, but I don't think it's really a solution for the fast travel dilemma.

You should only be able to fast travel to cities,

But yeah, compared to Morrowind, Oblivion seemed to have fewer random ecounters in the middle of the wilderness. All your quest started in a town/daedric shrine.

Nah, random chests? That would ruin other things.

It's better to just "fix" fast travel itself, rather than looking at other things. It's not that hard.

I really don't like the idea of random chests....

Besides fast travel does not ruin exploration. A prime example I've given many time on this forum is Red Dead Redemption. That game has fast travel from anywhere to anywhere. You don't even have to originally discover a location first. Just place your waypoint there, select fast travel and boom.

Guess what? I never once used this feature in single player. Why? Because the game world was just so beautiful and they did riding horses correctly. It felt right. You know what riding a horse did? It enabled me to outrun all the annoying creatures that might try to attack me while I'm on my merry way. Or better yet I could just trample them.

Now let's look at why I used fast travel in both Morrowind and Oblivion:

In Morrowind I did so because of time. As in I did not have an hour to walk from Vivec to Dagon Fel. OR because I had already explored the areas I would have been traveling through and didn't feel up to doing it again. OR I didn't want to get attacked by a thousand cliffracers on my way.

In Oblivion I used fast travel for the same first reason. Time. Not everyone has the time in their busy real life to walk from point A to point B a billion times. Secondly, Oblivion did not have a sense of exploration for me, not because of fast travel but because everything was to my level. I knew that cave over there would have X monsters because I was Y level. And it would have Z loot. What's the point in even going there the first time?

Now in Skyrim they are fixing that problem. All of the trees, foliage and so on is hand placed. So no more random bland forests. The dungeons are more akin to Fallout 3 in the sense of they will have unique things to them AND they are not all tied to your level. Creatures also don't constantly level with you forever.

So, what have we learned today? Fast travel does not ruin exploration in anyway whatsoever. Other systems that go alongside it can. Such as; horses being ridiculous, map markers that take away the need to actually explore, randomly and level generated stuff that is predictable. And so on.

I like this idea of random placed chests, but only if they are guarded. And by all means, don't scale the loot to your level! That's exactly what half-ruined Oblivion on me. I want the loot to be scaled only with the strength of the respective mobs guarding the chest. If I'm level 5 and they are level 13, and I manage somehow to lure some beasts to kill them, I want to find good treasure there, to reward my cunning and my effort and my time.

Dilemma? What dilemma?

I know, right?

It's only a dilemma if you complain about it but still use it. :nope:

I think they should just make it a toggle. Personally, I loved the morrowind system that did not include an innate fast travel system. I become so attached to the world. Being able to remember every single city with a silt strider felt pretty damn good. In oblivion, the game pace felt somewhat rushed to me. It was almost kind of grindish, in which I just fast traveled to each location and skipped the environments that the place actually reside in. In a way, Morrowind almost forced the player to become accustom to the world (after running/hopping in front of Vivec thousands of times, you become pretty attached to it).

So Fast Travel does not ruin exploration because in an entirely separate game that had it you personally didn't use it? Riiiigghhht.

Besides that terrible argument I agree. If the countryside wasn't bland and repetitive than it would be worth exploring. Seeing how it is supposed to be this time we don't have a lot to worry about. If we have mounts and they look better and work better than there is no problem.

i really dont see why fast travel is such a huge deal. if you don't like it DON'T USE IT why is that so hard for some people?

becuase people think they deserve more than that they need a system where you actually travel using different modes of transportation, but fast travel is already in and it sounds like it was in Oblivion so I think this argument is over

I have an idea if you like exploring and think fast travel kills exploration and you dont like ti dont use it.

If you like fast travel use it.

I am a genius. Just my 2 cents.

I think they have improved the fast travel system, so guys don't worry, our complaints haven't fallen on deaf ears. One indication of this is the talk of NPC's leading you to locations and giving you more specific directions. Remember they were slightly rushed when making OB, with Skyrim they haven't had to deal with this issue.

As for the OP's suggestions for the love of god NO. I really hate random chests in the wilderness that contain sweet loot, it's just really unrealistic and breaks immersion for me. I see this as a very old feature of many older games that will eventually be phased out, except in JRPGS of course but they don't count. :spotted owl:

Hum, You don't HAVE to use Fast Travel?

My comparison to a game that has incredibly similar travel systems to Oblivion and is also a huge open world sandbox game is a terrible argument for why fast travel doesn't ruin exploration? Congratulations on not thinking things out and going out of your way to be a jerk.
Example, your options for travel in both games are: Walk, ride a horse, fast travel. Oh and let's not forget how Todd Howard himself used Red Dead Redemption as a example of how they could better do horses.

In response to if mounts would be in the game: (Game Informer show)
[..] "There were things with the Oblivion horses. We liked having them. They weren't the greatest implementation of horses. And now you see things come out like Red Dead. There are more horses in games, and we feel like just the basic implementation we did in Oblivion isn't going to be good enough." - Todd Howard.

So yeah, my argument is invalid because Bethesda never looks to other games for what people like and how they can improve things. OH right... They have team meetings in their demo room at their office where they play the games in question and discuss just that.

I'd like to see a no FT option in either the config menu or no FT in hardcoe mode. That might solve the problem altogether.

Sorry I shoulda been more clear. mark and recall were part of plain old morrowind. However it was one spot you visited, marked, and recalled back. People modded multiple spots. Which is more of a fast travel system. Sure you could have randomized camps and spawns.

Or you could do treasure maps that could be bought from town, or done as loot, with random locations, which force you to look at maps, and landscape, and go dig them up. Just something to see some of the landscape. Because someone spent a lot of time making that valley that the game never takes you in.

In Daggerfall you really had to, there was no point to walking unless you wanted to waste real life hours and you would probably end up hopelessly lost.

Why not add a morrowind-style transportation instead of fast-travel and give mark/recall back?
It worked in Morrowind and most people loved it.


And random treasure in wilderness just to MAKE people explore, sounds like a boring idea to me.

I dont quite understand the people that want a FT option to turn it on or off, when its always an option to use? :confused: