Your opinion on "fast travelling" in open-world RPGs

[Astoria]

You don't have to fast travel you know. It's just there for conviencence if you get sick of wandering between places which can get annoying at times. I use it a fair bit because I get sick of being attacked by random creatures and using up all my ammo but I do wander around when I start exploring a new area. And seriously 15 hours? In my current game I've played over 70 and am still a fair way off finshing.

 

[LookingGlass]

Two other things:

1. Leaving the fast travel option in is obiously fine if there are other significantly faster than walking (faster than horses in Oblivion) methods of travel. Then you can satisfy people like me and those who just want to get where they're going in a hurry. My desire to remove the feature is probably unnecessary.


2. Idea for medieval-themed games: Catapult you to your next destination. Think about it, you can pay to be catapulted from city to city into big nets or whatever. You get there almost immediately, but you can watch your character go flying across the map.

 

[Sgt. Dante]

I reckon the Fallout 3 system was ok. Having to find the location first before you could fast travel. It required you to walk there at least once.

But say, in Assassin's Creed. You were forced to go to the location via horse each time. Didn't see many people praise THAT system.

Exactly this,

In a huge single player game if you don't wanna fast travel then don't it's really as easy as that. But on the other side of the coin if you HAVE to walk everywhere, especially in a game as huge and slow as fallout3 I know that most gamers would probably have turned it off in boredom.

As a parrallel consider Just Casue 2. If you want to you can fast travel, or you can steal a jet/car/ motorbike/ whatever and travel there yourself, yes it'll take a few mins tops to get anywhere on the map dependant of your method of choice, but imagine you had to walk, or your only transport option was the tuk-tuk (for those who don't know a 3 wheeled minivan that moves pretty damned slowly)

How blisteringly dull would that be?

Walking everywhere in Fallout3 every time would quickly become tedious.

 

[nbamaniac]

Well, fast-travelling has always been the player's CHOICE. I say leave it in. It adds a lot of convenience when you get sick of all the walking.. >.<

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

As with all of these topics, the best answer is, "It depends on the game."

 

[Twilight_guy]

Sandboxes need a fast travel system. No one wants to spend 20 minutes walking accost a big open city to get to the next destination. Infamous 2 had a small sandbox and trapseing from one corner to the next was a pain int he ass for even that short walk. Imagine if Just Cause 2 had no fast travel. Even a hijacked plane wouldn't be fast enough let alone walking. That said, i can understand feeling like the jump cut to your destination removes something from the game. What games need is a fast travel system where you can actually see the landscape fly by and choose to stop. Still in some games even that would take too long since if you go slow enough to see stuff then it would still be lots of dead time to get anywhere. Oh well, if the answer was simply we wouldn't be debating it.

 

[Android2137]

In a huge single player game if you don't wanna fast travel then don't it's really as easy as that. But on the other side of the coin if you HAVE to walk everywhere, especially in a game as huge and slow as fallout3 I know that most gamers would probably have turned it off in boredom.

As a parrallel consider Just Casue 2. If you want to you can fast travel, or you can steal a jet/car/ motorbike/ whatever and travel there yourself, yes it'll take a few mins tops to get anywhere on the map dependant of your method of choice, but imagine you had to walk, or your only transport option was the tuk-tuk (for those who don't know a 3 wheeled minivan that moves pretty damned slowly)

How blisteringly dull would that be?

Walking everywhere in Fallout3 every time would quickly become tedious.

Actually your statement made me thing about a couple of things. In Just Cause 2, you not only procure your means of transportation, but I assume what you do on the way there. (Never played the game myself.) Traveling an open world is probably less dull and tedious when you can do things on your way to your destination (like intentionally break traffic laws, destroy property, and what other stuff people do when playing GTA and the like). This brings up a question. Which is worse: missing some of that fun due to fast transport or slow boring repetitive tedium due to absence of it? Personally, I vote the latter.

 

[SextusMaximus]

I think fast travelling is done best in Red Dead Redemption.

E.G. If you want to fast travel, you have to go to a specific fast travel destination in town, you can't just FT out of a dungeon (Not RDR, I mean in something like Oblivion). But yeah, I generally like Fast Travel anyway.

 

[Smooth Operator]

If the game needs it then the developer failed on transport design, you only really get to know/experience/appreciate the world if you travel in it, fast travel just completely slices that opportunity off.
I never felt the need to fast-travel in GTA because transportation was so fun, that problem was solved ages ago others simply need to learn from them.

But if you haven't got time to flesh out your game you take a cheap cop-out, which is fine but it's still a cheap cop-out that we expect will be fixed by the next game.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

Of course one could quite rightly argue that much of the game is missed out on by using a fast-travel system. In FO3 in particular, where as the "lone wanderer" in a post-apocalyptic wasteland using the fast-travel system (FTS from hereon) actually means there's little wandering and little time spent alone in a wasteland. It also means that the hours spent by devs crafting beautiful sights could go wasted as many players never make it that far.

The sad part is that given the choice of having it or not, I would rather have it. The thought of walking from the Imperial City to Cheydinhall is scary indeed and I'd rather uninstall the game than have to make that journey. I hate it in MMOs (even knowing that the main point in those situations is a needless time sink to extend players subscriptions by) and I'm not fond of it offline either.

I think Morrowind's silt-striders were a neat compromise. The major journeys were taken care of quickly but each area got thoroughly explored. My ideal however would be quite simple and elegant. The single biggest gripe I have with having to make the long lonely trudge isn't necessarily the time, it's the being *forced* to stop to fight monsters/bandits against my will when my objective at that point is to get to point B.

So, give me a teleport/train/silt-strider network for intercity travel, a horse for exploring when I'm searching for something and don't mind being interrupted and a pegasus/the gift of flight for when I just want to freaking get somewhere without being swarmed by 20 level 100 gizkas. Oh and map markers...I like map markers but they don't always have to be absolutely precise. Point to the correct vicinity and that's good enough. That's the best compromise between having no guide at all and being pointed at precisely where to go.

 

[rossatdi]

I thought the Fallout 3 system was pretty solid, not letting you fast travel to places you haven't found yet. I definitely set off wandering in FO3 much more than Oblivion.

Morrowind's system was fantastic and felt very realistic (in an in game sense) and kept up the immersion. Oblivion's was just a little easy.

 

[Sgt. Dante]

I reckon the Fallout 3 system was ok. Having to find the location first before you could fast travel. It required you to walk there at least once.

But say, in Assassin's Creed. You were forced to go to the location via horse each time. Didn't see many people praise THAT system.

Exactly this,

In a huge single player game if you don't wanna fast travel then don't it's really as easy as that. But on the other side of the coin if you HAVE to walk everywhere, especially in a game as huge and slow as fallout3 I know that most gamers would probably have turned it off in boredom.

As a parrallel consider Just Casue 2. If you want to you can fast travel, or you can steal a jet/car/ motorbike/ whatever and travel there yourself, yes it'll take a few mins tops to get anywhere on the map dependant of your method of choice, but imagine you had to walk, or your only transport option was the tuk-tuk (for those who don't know a 3 wheeled minivan that moves pretty damned slowly)

How blisteringly dull would that be?

Walking everywhere in Fallout3 every time would quickly become tedious.

That is...an awful example. Fallout and Elder Scrolls are massive, open world RPG's, rich with places to explore and people to meet. Just Cause 2 is a game about blowing shit up while doing gravity defying stunts in a range of vehicles.

Yes, but all the people you meet are at the places you're trying to get to. I dunno about you but the only people i ever met between locations were banidits and various kinds of things that wanted to eat my face.

As for my example they're almost exactly the same, games that are prohibitively large to get around on foot, that have a fast travel system. In this regard I actually think Just Cause 2 is a better game, because an open world is only as good as the way you travel around it. Genre and style aren't all that important in this question, "how do you traverse the world?".

 

[Treblaine]

If you hated the fast travel system so much why did you use it? To my knowledge it has always been voluntary.

But if the game depends on you using the system...

Look, I think he wants some way of swiftly getting from place to place but not something that spoils the impression of scale. So basically a plane, jet-pack, hover-speeder or whatever.

It is easy to code in a mechanism to teleport from place to place, it's lazy for the developers and undermines the experience.

I think a game like Fallout is in dire need of some sort of vehicle, or something to travel fast at around 20-30 miles and hour, like a horse or rocket-scooter.

Yes, this exactly. On that note, the lack of jetpacks in games is somewhat disturbing to me.

Immersion is such a hard thing to come by that I hate when it's broken. E.g. manual saving in survival horror games is an absolute killer (the one thing I hate about Silent Hill 2).

[small]Ah jetpacks. I understand the reasonable fear that jetpacks may be over-exposed and becoem bring but there has been such a complete lack. Slightly off topic but I think jetpacks have gone because game worlds are so narrowly animated (why spend polygons on the roofs of houses?) and gameplay so linearly controlled they don't want people breaking scripted events with the ability to move in full Three Dimensions.[/small]

Yes, it's all a matter of balance.

if travel is too slow then the world appears tediously large and intractable.
If travel is instantaneous then the world appears tiny.

RPGs aren't the only games guilty of this, ALL games that purpourt to be over a huge or global scale yet just flit from one location to another are cheating you out of that scale. They need to do SOMETHING to indicate scale.

CoD4 did a tiny touch that helped, the "briefing" (about as brief as it gets for military ops) is told from a satellite perspective showing the continent you are on, zooming in and out to show tanks and troops moving, then finally a crash-zoom to the surfcae, ithe camera looks up and you are in boots on the ground.

Latter games had mush less of this or even none at all.

I think MGS4 is the worst example. You apparently (from subtitles) globe-hop from "somewhere in Middle East" to "Somewhere in Europe" to "Somewhere in south America". It was all unncessecary too, the entire game could have been set in a single country connected geographically

EDIT (STUPID ***** Posted before I'd finished typing)

MGS3 was perfect, the long air-drop and looking over that ridge onto the vast Russian Forests was really that "you're not in Kansas any more" moment. Then (more or less) kept you in the same world for the whole game steadily progressing into a stronghold of the Ural mountains.

Thing with RPGs is the overworld is randomly populated with stuff, dozens and dozens of mini challenges to gain XP, collect loot, or just have fun killing orcs or meeting important NPCs. That I think is what most slows me down when on a quest: distractions.

Yet those distractions are what makes the world seem alive, make you feel that you are running over hyrule field, not just a massive green polygon.

The balance I think is something that moves you quickly and directly but you cannot just stop and get back on again. Something like a train, something you can literally just jump on and watch the world go by at swift speed and don't want to jump off as the next one may not come for a while and would be too hard to jump onto anyway.

If I was coding it and the character was on a Mission Quest, I'd play God and skew down the probability for high-value random encounters (AND LET THE PLAYER KNOW THIS), so you will only ever find general supplies. Then there is no need to get distracted from your quest unless you desperately need general supplies. The time for searching/grinding for valuables is between quests.

 

[badgersprite]

I'm in favour of it being an option, purely because there comes a point when running back and forth down the same road just to finish a quest gets really fucking annoying. I can't tell you how many times I've run back and forth between cities in Oblivion. There are times where it's just not worth it when you're only going there to talk to one guy who immediately sends you back to the town you just came from.

Or, as you say, some other speedier mode of travel, like riding a dragon or some medieval fantasy version of a train.

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

I'm in favour of it being an option, purely because there comes a point when running back and forth down the same road just to finish a quest gets really fucking annoying. I can't tell you how many times I've run back and forth between cities in Oblivion. There are times where it's just not worth it when you're only going there to talk to one guy who immediately sends you back to the town you just came from.

not to mention its a blessing on the 10th playthrough.


okay...now im creeped out, my captcha says 'done that' this isnt the first time its said something related...

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

I never felt the need to fast-travel in GTA because transportation was so fun, that problem was solved ages ago others simply need to learn from them.

I have to admit that you have a good point here. In San Andreas, when I needed to make a major cross city journey, I'd head to the nearest airport/helipad and steal a plane/copter.

It got to the point where I even had a system....get to airport, steal car, drive it up to corner of wall, jump on car and hop over the fence, steal Learjet. That was actually fun to do. And now that you mention it, it worked because it was fun, making use of in game mechanics. Are there other ways where something like this could work? A way of crossing a map quickly when wanted within the game itself?

But at the same time, I would enjoy a game more if I had the option of not always having to make a long journey, particularly if that journey can fail (eg. cops shoot me, bandits, long falls, etc). Yes it's fine the first time or two as I explore a new world but it swiftly gets old and monotonous. That's the problem. Fast travel tried to get around it by forcing players to journey to a place the old fashioned way at least once before they could then fast travel to it.

 

[Bebus]

I loved, loved, LOVED the Wind Waker travel style. I loved the sailing. It was smooth and relaxing, with the waves peppered by the occasional shark, or the little gem collecting mini games that did not slow you down or take you off course.

But there was also fast travel there. You could fast travel to about 7 of the 49 map squares, meaning you could cut out some of the ridiculous cross map sailing, but still had to go a fair distance when you travelled.

You also only unlocked the ability to fast travel part of the way into the game, so you were forced to do a fair bit of sailing before hand.

I want to play Wind Waker again...

 

[Lucane]

I reckon the Fallout 3 system was ok. Having to find the location first before you could fast travel. It required you to walk there at least once.

But say, in Assassin's Creed. You were forced to go to the location via horse each time. Didn't see many people praise THAT system.

The 1st one? Only till you traveled to each main city once then when you got new chapters to back to the same ones you had an option to fast travel pop-up it's only when the story needed you to ride somewhere and it's apart of the key events.

OT:Fast Traveling's fine with me,with games not always being able to save at any given time having limited save point locations hinders time constrained players or those of us who just don't want to wade threw low level enemies who would only be there to give you pennies compared to your current level intended opponents.

 

[TheMariner]

Fast traveling for me all depends on the size of the open world. In something the size of Oblivion (~16 square miles) maybe it's not necessary. Or if you must have it, you should only be able to fast travel between cities. Now, if we're talking about something the size of Daggerfall (~62,400 square miles), then a fast travel system is a must in my opinion, with a city-based fast travel being the minimum of what you must implement.

Either that or make the normal travel options much faster. Take for example Just Cause 2, which has a map roughly 400 square miles in size. That's insanely huge if you mean to walk or take a car or boat. However, if you hijack a military jet, that 400 square miles seems like nothing.

Either way, you're supposed to absorb the powers of the dragons you kill in Skyrim, right? I can't imagine the power of flight would be out of the question. And if it's not written into the game by Bethesda, you can rest assured that some intrepid modder is going to do it for you.

 

[zerobudgetgamer]

It's the warp spell. You can go to places instantly so long as you traveled there first.

When you think of it in that perspective, it has been around for decades.

Thank god. I was afraid I was the only person here who "had the gall" to play an oldschool/J-RPG. Seriously, most games with Warp Spells even have the decency to allow you to teleport to any point of interest that you have ever visited, so even if you come across a quest that has you backtrack to an old dungeon, you can just Warp right to it; at worst, you'd be able to Warp to the town that was right next to it.