» Wed Oct 20, 2010 7:37 pm ... imagine some of the fun, curious, or downright scary things that could happen when the system is designed by people who have months... if not years... to implement it creatively. You'd get all kinds of awesomeness. Bands of local Guild-types. Goblin Warparties. Local Cultists. Dragon-Hunters. Traveling merchants. Traveling salesmen, Bandits and Rouges, Homeless Beggars, Hunters, Mining Camps, Bards and other Performers, nomadic warriors, and so on.
There's an insane amount of gameplay value there, and it gets missed when you design your game to have an 'Easy Button' like Oblivion does. Oblivion's dungeons and combat encounters get stale after the first couple hours. The only REAL action is all in dungeons. Anything else is boring. They're all sporadic and random. It's always one or two enemies, never anything interesting, and so damn repetitive that eventually you WANT to just skip it.
But when you have interesting encounters, where the battles are engaging and the miscellaneous sorts are fun and captivating, you begin to -enjoy- the experience of traveling again. You'll fast travel from one place to another IN HOPES of getting one of these encounters, because it will mean new treasures and new quests and new chances to earn fame or infamy.
That's what fast travel ought to be about.
There's an insane amount of gameplay value there, and it gets missed when you design your game to have an 'Easy Button' like Oblivion does. Oblivion's dungeons and combat encounters get stale after the first couple hours. The only REAL action is all in dungeons. Anything else is boring. They're all sporadic and random. It's always one or two enemies, never anything interesting, and so damn repetitive that eventually you WANT to just skip it.
But when you have interesting encounters, where the battles are engaging and the miscellaneous sorts are fun and captivating, you begin to -enjoy- the experience of traveling again. You'll fast travel from one place to another IN HOPES of getting one of these encounters, because it will mean new treasures and new quests and new chances to earn fame or infamy.
That's what fast travel ought to be about.
Also, you try to fit the most exciting part of the game in a space that is a mandatory thing on your way to a quest. Most times I fast travel is because a quest is telling me to go cross the world for some objective I should immediately get to. Getting into all kinds of adventures on the way to that is just making the game less focused. Besides, as the guards tell you, "stay on the roads, it's safe there". If these random encounters should be anywhere it's in the wilderness and in small settlements. I'd prefer the fast travel being safe and limited to the main roads (inns, villages, cities) just because it's much easier to implement and would make the game less annoying. After all, in red dead redemption I didn't particularly mind the 46th time some random NPC was being robbed by some random bandits. I just rode past them.
