Some good points made so far



Much of the problem with Oblivion's system is with its lack of alternatives. While OP would like to see Oblivion's system destroyed and never spoken of again, he does acknowledge that some players enjoy it and that simply adding alternatives is a far preferable course of action to almost everyone. Read: OP is not solely saying that Oblivion's system must go.

This thread is highlighting the desirability of added alternatives to Oblivion's fast travel system more than it is waging a crusade against it.

The “don’t like it, don’t use it” argument is total flapjack
It is. It’s invalid for everything. If someone doesn’t like something about a game, then they have a right as a customer to offer constructive feedback on how it can be improved. Ignoring the parts of the game that they don’t like won’t make the game any better for them.

Leaving that aside, for gameplay features as integral as fast travel, ignoring it is impossible to do while preserving a coherent and enjoyable gameplay experience. It’s like telling someone to ignore the combat - you cannot do it and continue to play the game the way it was intended by BGS to be enjoyed.
This is because of the way that Oblivion was designed. There are three primary factors that severely discourage people from ignoring Oblivion’s fast travel system:

• Trivial quests will regularly send you to the other side of the overworld because quest designers are - rightly - expecting players to utilise the fast travel system that they have been given.
  
• There are no alternatives to teleportation fast travel except for walking, which takes ages, or riding, which is often even slower.
  
• The landscape is boring. Much of Oblivion’s landscape is randomly generated and thus featureless. There is no aesthetic incentive to take the scenic route.

So we have a game that frequently makes players choose between instant teleportation to their destination or a long slog across a boring and repetitive game world that, by level twenty, is filled with minotaur lords. There might technically be a choice there, but gee, BGS really aren’t making it easy on us roleplayers now are they? Which leads nicely onto point 2:

Oblivion’s teleporting method of fast travel makes no sense
Once upon a time, role playing gamers had to gather together in real life for their fantasy hit. This would be doled out by the Dungeon Master, who knew intimately the rules of the game and the intricacies of the game world. They would make sure that everything was consistent, fair and - most importantly - believable. It would have violated the ‘believable’ bit if Tarkwin decided that he wanted to travel to the Mages’ Guild from the other side of FantasyVille and the only price to pay was a shift in time. No random encounters, no gold, no fatigue. Nothing.

Fast forward thirty years or so, and now DMs have been widely replaced by videogames. The purpose of the videogame is to set up a believable world for us to play in and then - in the case of BGS games - let us do whatever the hell we want. The game must be believable to be enjoyable, and to be believable it has to be consistent and it has to have certain restrictions that reflect the behaviour of familiar things. For instance, you can’t kill Mrs X outside in a crowd of people without becoming a criminal; it takes ages to kill a heavily armoured person with your untrained fists; and you can’t teleport across the world by clicking on a map. Wait, what?

Precisely. There is the key difference between Morrowind’s and Oblivion’s respective systems: Morrowind’s requires you to go to an appropriate vendor of fast travel services - a boatman, Mages’ Guild teleporter or silt strider driver - and pay them a negligible but nevertheless present fee for the service of instant travel. Oblivion’s requires you to be outside (which doesn’t make much sense in the game world - only as a balancing mechanic) and open your map and click on where you would like to go. The former gives a believable and lore-consistent explanation of how you suddenly find yourself on the other side of map, the latter is just lazy.

Another word for Morrowind’s fast travel system is ‘intradiegetic’ - “contained within the narrative”. The game is doing its job as DM by giving the player a reason for the feature being there that makes sense within the game world, and levying a believable fee for such a feature. The player uses it without having to suspend their disbelief, and all is well.


The aim of this thread was never to put forward a solution to Oblivion’s system, as this has been done countless times before only to fall on deaf ears. No, the purpose of this thread was to make those deaf ears more receptive. However, do feel free to discuss it at length now we all know that “don’t like it, don’t use it” is a silly argument that only silly people use.

I love it when someone posts a thread and then forbids any debate.

No, you can't ignore combat. But you can avoid walking down the same bloody stretch of road 400 times. I love Morrowind, but I regularly stop playing it because it's dull, dull, dull to have to look at that stretch between Balmora and Pelagiad and be attacked by the descendants of the same brainless rats anytime you want to go somewhere. Going anyplace on the west coast more than once is teeth grittingly dull.

There's going to be fast travel. Deal.

Constructive feedback isn't [censored]ing about how it ruins the game. IF you don't Like it avoid it. "but that doesn't make it any better" well it doesn't make it any worse either so your point is invalid.

^ Edit: Yes, ignoring fast travel does make Oblivion worse. It makes travelling an absolute chore. Please read the entire post.


... but I didn't forbid debate. Quite the opposite, in fact.


That is a fault more in Morrowind's run speed and landscape diversity than with its fast travel system.

I have accepted that there will be fast travel. I am trying to offer my opinion on how it can be perfected while doing my best to educate people at large on the forums that the "don't like it, don't use it" argument is bogus.

I preferred Oblivion's fast travel system over Morrowind's.

Yeah, while I totally agree with all your points, to completely piss out the fires of debate without even allowing it was a pretty lame move. As long as the world design is inspiring (NV, FO3) I won't fast travel, and I haven't fast traveled in either of the Aforementioned games. However, in Oblivion, I made gratuitous use of the feature, mostly because of the Minotaur Lords every few meters.

I think some common ground would be, buying a mount unlocks the Fast Travel feature. You wind up having to discover locations to travel there anyway. This will (mostly) please all the roleplayers, and the "Restriction" will probably be missed entirely by the "Core" audience.

Don't like it, don't use.

It just never bothered me. No one forces you to use it.
This has been said before, because it's the truth. I played Morrowind with a Fast-travel mod, because I thought it was dumb they removed it.

I like, so leave it. I'm sorry you don't, but I guess you can always not use it.

Care to explain why? :turned:


Bu... but... I didn't! Where are people getting this from!?

Oblivion's landscape was boring? News to me. I found it very interesting to explore. Especially when you stumble upon some lake or the like in the country-side.

To be fair the OP's first point is logical. He essentially said what is true, that avoiding a game mechanic (like fast travel) isn't a viable option if the creators of the game intend on the user employing that game mechanic by design. It is painfully obvious that Oblivion intended the user to use not only fast travel but a compass too (when doing quests). I have personal experience with this because I played that game for 20+ hours without a quest compass, dungeon indicator or fast travel and believe me it didn't sit well on many occasion.

As to some of the other things I believe he makes good points. Try to look past the opinion and focus on the facts that are being presented.

So, okay, the problem you have is not with fast travel at all, but the feeling that traveling without using fast travel is a chore and not rewarding like it was in Morrowind. So don't complain about fast travel because it is not the problem. Randomly generated landscape was the problem, and that has been changed for Skyrim. They already announced hand-crafted landscape.

Also, for the love of Azura, learn to suspend your disbelief. "Fast travel doesn't make sense" is your own fault, because it makes perfect sense to me. When I fast travel, I just pretend that my character is walking there without any significant events between his/her current location and the place I'm fast traveling to. You can't fast travel to undiscovered locations, so it's not like you don't know how you got there because you've been there before.

Roleplayers have been doing it for decades, you can't roleplay without suspending your disbelief.

I agree with what you wrote, but not for the reasons you listed.

I would even settle for fast travel with encounters, or avoiding the feature altogether if the landscape is well constructed and interesting.

Really?
:rolleyes:

The thing about fast travel is were encouraged to use it. Since a game is built around an easy broad fix such as Oblivion fast travel the devs could probrably not care what the game world would feel like if you just decided to walk everywhere thus ignoring problems with just walking. Most areas of interest will be bunched around the location markers and takes away from actual exploration. If they just added a series of FT travel options(boats, caravans) it would allow for a more immersing gamelay instead of just waling across the whole damn road or just instant traveling with no consequences.

Guys, let's try to keep this a civil discussion and leave the 'I think I'm funny while raising my postcount with a pointless response' at the door. The OP has presented you with a pretty indepth opinion and I'm pretty interested to see how things will proceed from there. So try to think before pressing 'Reply' and let's have a decent discussion instead of stupid oneliners without clarification that only give new definition to the word 'ignorance'.


Thanks

Milt

shouldn't this be in the oblivion section of the forums?

^ No, because the discussion on how to improve the series for future instalments is here, and that's what this thread is for.


No, I have no problem with fast travel. I support fast travel. It's essential in big free roam games to avoid tedium. I just hate Oblivion's fast travel system, which is why I went to pains to be specific to that game every time I mentioned its fast travel system

This was also true in Morrowind and very popular,


A tabletop AD&D session jump from the preparation to the target area, it does not involve a l0 minutes hike to the target, expanded to1 hour as the players want to harvest plants, have to fight some imps and kill some nearby bandits. Common Oblivion gameplay.
It does not involve a hike back to town and out again if the players has forgotten the quest object. This happened to me in Morrowind.

Morrowind transport system was also totally unrealistic, the boats and Silt Strider should not always be where waiting for you, they should have realistic schedules like travelling once or twice every day. They should also have random delays as sailboats depend on the wind, so arriving at one place you had to wait for the next boat.

I agree with your post, it′s kinda sad to still hear people comment "If you don′t like it, don′t use it" because using something the makers of the game made to be integral for the enjoyment of the game, even while it is not very believable, very sad.

I′d love to see the outrage if you were given 9999 HP at start and every enemy attack only did 1 damage and every single enemy in the game had 9999 HP and every attacking move only did 1 damage except 1 super move that would kill them in 1 hit, oh and you would start with the super move, it would remove all depth from combat in the same way as depth was removed from traveling in Oblivion.

"Don′t like using the super move on every single enemy ? Well just don′t use it then, you can still play like that"

It′s a stupid argument.

The game does not have to be believable to be enjoyable.

Clicking at a marker on the map to get somewhere is somewhat logical. Instead of actually seeing the travel, you're just runing up there while the game loads. And while that is lazy, it's more "believable" than say using magic to get from one place to another, and more "realistic" too.

But seriously though, there's a reason this issue may fall on deaf ears; Bethesda doesn't care about this particular "issue" that some like and some dislike. Bethesda has the final say so, so in the end it doesn't matter how many people are shouting out "don't like it, don't use it" argument.

I love every single word of it. I am sick and tired of that kind of arguments too. Sometimes I believe these people don't even read other suggestions and opinions since they seem to keep telling the same story for eternity or they're oblivious to them either way somehow.

Okay I'll explain why I prefer Oblivion's fast travel- it's more immersive for me. I would prefer to remain immersed in the quest I'm currently playing (by fast travelling to the places I need to go), than be immersed in the idea of the world as a real place (and having to have my questing constantly get interrupted by the need to find travel services)

I still really enjoy exploring the world and I spent tons and tons of hours doing it in Oblivion, but because of it's fast travel system, I got to choose when I wanted to explore Oblivion's world, and I could also choose when I simply wanted to get on with my quests. This works really well for me

Yep. Easy to be simple when one ignores all the flaws, like the bland landscape that's created that way because the developers knew everyone would be teleporting "fast traveling" everywhere and not see how much they had neglected any attempt at making an interesting world. Simple when you don't have to come up with any explanations because "walking on autopilot" explains itself. Simply run the landscape generator, throw in some generic trees, add a few copypasta dungeons, call it a game and watch the cash roll in.

I'm currently sitting on the fence over this one. I like to explore and experience new landscapes, but I don't want to be forced to explore them countless times. I like being able to chose between the two, to get the "best of both worlds". And please bring back the silt strides and Mages' Guild Teleport.

I have to agree, except Cyrodiil being dull, regardless of how many agree, it's still opinion, but however much sense fast travel only between towns, or a teleport stone network, or whatever, makes, the fact is we are stuck with a find it, click on map to return mechanic.
I do not mean any offense, but complaining after the fact, however justified, is not going to achieve anything. The only thing left to do , imho, is hope some of the more glaring errors, towns already flagged as destinations, fast travel faster than running there, have been addressed.

THEN DON'T USE IT.. -.-