Oops wrong thread, that got lock.

The only way I could ever see that it would affect quest design is that they won't have those encounters on the roadside like they did in Morrowind. The only reason I say that is because that's what Todd was talking about when transition from the Daggerfall style to the Morrowind style of travel. Where the Morrowind style will allow them to add all kinds of road side stuff that they are expecting people to come across, like in the quote from Todd in the interview found http://imperial-library.info/content/interviews-MW-team.



But I think the notion that fast-travel inhibits quest design in general is about as unfounded as it inhibiting the landscape.

Well that's the point, I have been saying that fast travel has no effect on quest design whatsoever. I was just saying it has negative effect on quests and if he really believed it did have an effect on quest design, it would only have improved them, not saying it actually had any effect on quest design, because that's just silly. He was just saying that fast travel made quest design unimaginative, which is obviously not the fact.

Even if the game has fast travel there needs to be alternatives, like carriage and boat travel options. Am I supposed to assume that whenever any NPC wants to travel they walk? That completely kills immersion.

How? NPCs walk, that's the truth. Mainly I don't see what is so incredible about someone walking to travel. Walking was the main means of travel for the masses in TES mythos and in real life up until the 20th century. I don't see how it is immersion breaking when the world really isn't big, it's not like they are traveling 50 miles when they walk, so it's fine. Not everyone travels by mount or some kind of public commuter service. A public commuter service is the unbelievable, immersion breaker to me in the setting of TES or any similar world.

Well it depends on what way you look at it. In the games the time moves faster to simulate that the land is much larger than it appears in-game. In the lore the land is supposed to be on the scale of Daggerfall if not larger. So in the cases of NPC's not walking everywhere (like from city to city) it's not too far-fetched that people wouldn't want to walk thousands of miles, but would rather ride in a carriage, or use something like a Silt-Strider.

Well even in Daggerfall, someone wouldn't travel thousands of miles walking from one end to the other, it was more like a couple hundred. But people have to realize there will be stops while walking or riding a silt-strider or carriage. It's still well within reason to walk all that way. In the past (and in third world countries today) 50 miles is walking distance, while walking distance is a few miles to most people these days. It's a very different world people need to realize and walking is an actual form of travel and it's not out of reason for someone to walk insane distances and that be normal. Not to mention, when you mount up, it speeds up your fast travel depending on how fast your horse is.

But, even if it would happen, it's still not realistic to not have other options. It's not like just because people did walk that they didn't use other methods as well. I think that's all he was saying. Even though people can walk, there are still going to be other methods of traveling.

It's perfectly realistic to not have other options. There was no reason to have boats in Oblivion because there were only two possible destinations in the game by boat. In lore, traveling was done on foot or by horse. Morrowind had the siltstriders they could use the shells for shelter. It's perfectly within reason to not see any other form of travel, because there doesn't have to be because there isn't any evidence to the contrary. I'm not saying there can't be caravans but saying that it's not realistic to not have them is incorrect.

Before this thread ends i want to tell you why Morrowind's travel network is flawed.

Firstly, Immersion is right out the window when it's obvious that it exists for me alone. Fix this by making them have a schedule so they aren't always available and it defeats the purpose.

Secondly, travel systems are a means to open up the map even faster than Oblivion's(having the major towns already found) as you can leap frog to every inhabited(travel viable) local by lvl 2-3. Fix this by limiting where you can travel to without finding first and it deafeats the purpose once again.

Lastly, Travel networks are not too bad in the beginning but come end game it's a tedious hassle to get around.

Fast travel takes care of both needs because when your exploring every inch of the terrain you have no desire to get somewhere quickly but once you've seen the majority of the map that is when FT keeps most of us going so we can finish exploring by removing the tedium of traveling the same road 100's of times.

I use fast travel near end game and not before i feel I'm not missing something by skipping the trip. The world is not large enough to warrant travel networks(with all of it's flaws) other than for travel to other world spaces and FT can not be removed for end game reasons.

Bethesda has done the math with changeable working models and decided that travel networks are not for TES. Respect that and move on already.

I agree that travel by boat wouldn't make since in Cyrodiil if you're going from one location in Cyrodiil to another in Cyrodiil, since you would have to go all the way around Elsweyr, and Valenwood. But if people were to go from Anvil to a coastal city in Hammerfell by ship, you cannot argue that that would not make sense.

What are you talking about there is no traveling other than walking, or horse in lore? Two notable parts, one comes directly from the intro to Morrowind The other from Daggerfall

There are probably many other examples, I can remember even in the Real Barenziah it mentioned carriages plenty of times.

I didn't say that traveling was only done on foot or by horse, I said that traveling was done by those two options in context of the previous conversation of how that's how the masses typically travel. The carriages are for royalty or the wealthy.

Well from my experience of OB - it certainly did . There were certain quest's which were much less inspired than other's, and it just so happened those quest's revolved around fast travel.

I'll try and give some example's to back up my statement , but my memory is a bit rusty

There were instances in OB - esp in the FG where it was almost ridiculas to not use fast travel .. you would do the favor/fetch quest , and still he would'nt promote you.. he would say ''meat ,go see some bloke in anvil. and this was after bring me fetch me w/e 7 hr's walking from Cheydinhal - to leyawin and back, i still had to travel to Anvil for contract , why the hell do i have to goto Anvil to get another Job ? Why cant he give me the job .. oh its ok you can FT .
And that example is pertinant to the whole FG quest line.



Yeah nice1 dev's very insipred and imaginative desicion that was lol


Now on the other side of the coin , there was the paranoia quest or umbcano adventure quest or the akaviri ring reward quest , wwhich didnt require FT , and was better for it.

I challange any pro FT person to play the whole FG questline without FT and then tell me with a straight face -its imaginative.
I gurantee you will pull you hair out in frustration, when for the nth time he say goto Anvil or vice versa for contracts.(over and over again -its a long time walking).

But that only happened in a very few number of quests in Oblivion. That however was almost every quest in Morrowind and in Morrowind they gave you incredibly vague directions half the time. Almost every quest in Morrowind was a fetch quest and many of them would take you from Balmora to Sheogorad or to Azura's coast. There was plenty of the far off quests that you needed fast travel for in Morrowind as well and fast travel didn't inspire those quests. Most of Oblivion's quests were highly elaborate and fun quests while Morrowind's were usually fetch or kill quests.



What about the Dark Brotherhood quests? You had to travel far for them. If you think about it, there weren't really that many quests that required fast travel constantly to complete and the ones that did require FT to get it done in a manageable time weren't bad. I mean, think about the apocalypse quest, you didn't have to fast travel. Even the quest where you had to save the guy that couldn't repay his debt and got sent to the hunt was a far distance from the start point but you used the boat to get there and back.

Not in the text I quoted. You just said that "In lore, traveling was done on foot or by horse."

But if that's what you were implying was that the masses don't use carriages, then I could see that as an argument seeing as I don't have any lore evidence to the contrary (all the texts I know about with carriages and ships just talk about royalty).

[edit]Well hold on a minute, what about trade caravans? It doesn't matter, I don't need lore to back it up. I still think it would add more realism to have carriages, and horse carts.

Why Oblivion's fast-travel is a completely subjective matter which I think rocks:

It's convenient, gets the job it's meant to get done, and is completely optional. By that last bit, I'm not making a "don't like it, don't use it" statement, I'm commenting on my love for exploration and long walks yet that I love to use fast-travel to skip routes I've already been along and to quickly make it to any location I've already been to when I need to with either method being an option... unlike in Arena and Daggerfall.

Yeah, fast travel in Daggerfall wasn't optional if you wanted to finish the quest within the year :rofl:

You can walk instead of FTing in Daggerfall if you like holding down the W key for 14 hours real-time. :tongue:

That's so nonsensical. Plenty of the Dark Brotherhood quests made use of fast travel and I think we can all agree that they were far and away better designed than their Morrowind counterparts in the Morag Tong. MT quests were pretty much always a cut and dry "go here, kill him" deal no matter where you went. Stealing Roderick's medicine and replacing it with a poison while remaining undetected, in a cavern crawling with henchmen would not have been made "better" if it were to have happened outside of Cheydinhal. :banghead:

If Bethesda had the time and manpower to place roads with inns, unique dungeons, and unique encounters all within a decent radius of one another while keeping the scale of Daggerfall, I might have actually found such extensive travelling to be fun, to be honest.

oops' Man to become the FG champion without FT , its so annoying
By nature im a patient person , but this quest line tested me to the limit

Firstly, Morrowind is an aging game, everything is flawed... No NPCs had schedules so in theory everyone was "there just for you"; they were awake 24 hours a day and never moved very far from their standard location. If a Morrowind STYLE travel system was implemented in Skyrim, seeing as how much NPC behaviour improved already in Oblivion, NPCs would probably also use it more realistically.

Secondly, I am a bit ashamed to admit it in a thread like this, as I am not a user of fast travel, but "don't like it? Don't use it" worked for me in Oblivion. I didn't like it, so I didn't use it, only very rarely (the only time I would always use it was the quest after Kvatch where you had to escort Martin and Jauffre to Cloud Ruler, the companion system just svcked too much...).

Third, this worked for me in Oblivion as there were actually not much room for a Morrowind style travel system (to be understood as: there are no silt striders and uhm... where would you go by boat? The only semi plausible thing would be horse carriage). In Morrowind I didn't think of it as a 'fast travel system', as people refer to it in here (unlike I would with Oblivions), I just thought it was convenient: "I need to get to Khuul. Oh, there is a boat! I don't feel like exploring and I actually do have a quest I need to take care of in Khuul - I'll take the boat".


Here is a thought... Imagine this: There is somewhere on the map a big tundra or something that is known to house giants and also it's really [censored] cold so no normal person would walk (you can if you'd like, but unless you are level 10 you are probably not leaving with your [censored] intact). Hence, there is a sled service. You cannot fast travel from a location one side of the tundra to one on the other, but you can fast travel to the city close to the tundra (or walk/ride if you prefer like I do) and from there take the sled to the other side.
This could also work if there are ginormous lakes or something, then fast travel would just take more time as it would simulate the PC walking AROUND the lake, or you would have the choice of paying x gold for a ferryman to take you across.

An alternative to the tundra thing, if fast travel supporters are too lazy to 'click' more than twice, you could just click the location beyond the tundra on your fast travel map and a box would appear asking whether you are willing to pay x gold for the sled, thus skipping that extra link.

Yes? :spotted owl:

It would certainly make you appreciate the scale of the game in a whole new way.


Even with fast travel becoming the FG champion was annoying. I think it was the least inspired questline. Then again I'm not a fan of "go here, clear out this cave" questlines.

The other guilds, on the other hand, were very interesting IMO.

Here is an interesting question. It is not for any one argument, but:

If MW had the Oblivion style fast travel would it be better off then its current system?

I didnt play the DB questline so cant comment o.O

But the contract shifting between Anvil and Cheydinhal , was imo a very annoying, design descion .