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

[Bat Vader]

I have to admit that I tended to to abuse the fast travel system in Fallout 3. That was mainly because I got sick of having to go through ghoul or super-mutant infested tunnels every time I wanted to visit a city.

I hardly use the fast travel system in New Vegas. That is mainly because everything is out in the open and I don't have to go through tunnels when I want to visit a new location.

 

[Imbechile]

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

Because I don't want to walk from Leyawiin to Anvil just to complete a simple fetch quest. Morrowind gave you the chance to travel from town to town. In oblivion it's either fast travel or hiking.
IMO it needs to be removed.

 

[Triangulon]

I agree with it in principle, however it needs to be limited and justified. I liked it Morrowind, as it made sense. In Oblivion or Fallout not so much. A faster method of travel, i.e. horseback would be prefferable for me. In Skyrim I wouldn't mind seeing limited fast travel in the form of some kind of teleportation spell.

 

[Knusper]

I don't mind it in games, but if your game is really good and actually interesting to explore, it isn't necessary. I never fast-travelled in Fallout 3 and New Vegas because I loved to meet interesting people, see interesting places and kill large Deathclaws.

Oblivion on the other hand, all you can find is more woodland and more bandits, minotaurs and goblins so there was o incentive to explore

 

[newdarkcloud]

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.

Where does everybody get this from? In Assassin's Creed, you only had to go to a city via horse the first time. Then, you could fast travel there. Admittedly the game had flaws, but this just isn't one of them.

 

[Vidi Kitty]

Probably been said... but don't use it? In Fallout 3, I used the fast travel system only a few times when I had already been to everything between me and my destination. An option to turn it on and off would be nice and all, but someone who truly wants to get into their character and experience the world shouldn't need to have an option to make it possible. Options are optional because you are not required or forced to use them.

 

[Dexiro]

With some games like Oblivion where there's a lot of copy/paste I was actually thankful for the fast travel, but when there's actually a good deal to explore and quests don't require too much travelling I prefer regular exploration.

Taxi's, mounts and teleportation scrolls/spells make for much more interesting exploration.

 

[Treblaine]

The issue here isn't "fast" travel, it is more accurately "insta-travel".

But this can work with the right framing and I think you could use Star Trek as a model, with their other literary licence of the Teleporter. Star Trek it worked as it almost always had an establishing shot of the ship orbiting the planet, then inside the ship, then down onto the planet where the environment was so different.

Do "insta-travel" systems do the same? The danger is if one end of the map looks more or less the same as the other if you insta-travel to that other place with the same type of soil, buildings and characters. it needs to have that contrast between the USS Enterprise bridge and Alien Planet.

Going back to a "lite"-RPG like Legend of Zelda they often do it better than the hardcore RPGs as each area has such different feel from location to location.

From the dreamy pastoral farmland with meandering music, the ambient sound of farm life dougy laid back country folk, contrasted with the desert land of dramatic music, echoey ambient sounds from the rock walls with spry local.

Does the extreme north of the Fallout world look any different from the extreme south?

That's what can make insta-travel really bad, if the world is too homogenous. Novel locations should not be constrained to DLC packs, they should be there from the start and integrated with the game world.

 

[Frybird]

I don't really got the time/patience to take large games slowly. Also, i'm easily bored.

So you can drive, i'll go over the Case Notes.

 

[baker80]

WHAT?

FFS I've wasted hours of my life.

Nah, he's just full of shit. That only applies to the Director's Cut version, if you got early retail instead you were fucked.

 

[nicholaxxx]

if you have to find the place first, I'm fine with it, in oblivion, however, it removes all need to actually explore the world with "I need to get here... HURR DURR FAST TRAVEL" one fo the reasons why I didn't like oblivion, personally.

 

[Peter Croft]

*gasp* blashphemy!

 

[Xaio30]

I feel that the oblivion kind of fast-travel completely strips away my immersion. Now I could simply ignore it, but that would force me to walk/horse whenever I wanted somewhere.

What I propose to Skyrim and similar games is traveling services that costs in-game money. Like small boats, carriages, caravans, rangers etc. that takes a small toll and then transport you to predefined places.

 

[Vault Citizen]

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

Because I don't want to walk from Leyawiin to Anvil just to complete a simple fetch quest. Morrowind gave you the chance to travel from town to town. In oblivion it's either fast travel or hiking.
IMO it needs to be removed.

What about using a horse?

 

[Baby Tea]

I say that if the map is more than ~15 square kilometers, you need Oblivion style fast travel. Otherwise it will get really, really tedious. More RP oriented options should still be there, though. No excuse for that.

I can agree with this.
However, I will add that my 'big' character in Oblivion, the one who discovered every location, who did every quest in the vanilla game (Pre-Shivering Isles), and who kicked so much ass it was unfair (My Altmer Pure-Mage), was the one who I made the conscious choice to never, ever use fast travel. Ever.

I have walked the length and breadth of Cyrodil, and it was freaking epic.

You really get a much better scope of the size of the land when someone asks you to go to Anvil from Cheydinhal or Bruma and you are gearing up for the long haul. Plus I was able to use my powers and skills far more often, saw WAY more stuff, had some very fun off-script moments (Blasting a bear with a fireball and see his corpse tumbling through the air, over a cliff, down a hill, and into several trees. Hilarious), and over-all made me just fall in love with the game. I liked it before, but my no-fast-travel playthrough sealed the deal.

I'll be doing the same in Skyrim. No fast travel, unless they give me a 'Be here in 2 days to save the guy from that other guy!' option. Then, naturally, my character would want to help. So RP choices only. Otherwise? Walking or horseback only.

Can't wait.

 

[The Wykydtron]

Well i think it's needed in most open world RPG's. Take Persona 3 for example, it look me way too long to find the fast travel guy and i was starting to get sick of running around the school, checking the shop and then back to the school to continue a few Social Links. I was doing this basically every single day.

Oh and off topic completely, the MC's secondary running animation in Persona 3 is freakin' awesome

 

[Platypusbill101]

The main reason I stopped playing (and never finished) Morrowind was because of the tedious amount of walking around I had to do. It just dragged on too much for me.

Despite this, I completely agree that fast-travelling detracts from the game. Had the horses been faster in Oblivion, that would've been just fine. As it was, all but the best horses were barely better than walking.

Yep my character could outrun my horse. A slight workaround could be to buff the horse´s speed but it´s a bit inconvenient and not very immersive.

 

[Curlythelock]

I love being able to fast travel, I don't find having to spend 10 minutes walking/riding to another area just to finish a quest immersive, I find it annoying.

 

[Mark Hardigan]

I agree 85 percent and disagree 15. If you need fast travel in your RPG, you're doing it wrong. This is one of the major flaws, in my opinion, of Oblivion. The only way to not use fast travel is to use a horse, because the atmosphere and landscape are about as exciting as a stale saltine cracker. Sure, there's of salt there to keep your interest up for about 1.3 seconds, but the resulting feeling is mostly a resounding, "Meh."

Contrast that with Morrowind, where every inch of the world is highly detailed (at least for 2002) and the atmosphere is an endless deep void that you can get lost in for hours. You start off on a quest and three hours later all you've done is wander around the world and gotten lost in a sand storm. The silt striders were there, of course, for player luxury more than atmosphere, but they weren't a crutch as they were in Oblivion or in some instances in Fallout 3.

Fallout 3 has a much more rich atmosphere and landscape, making fast travel much more of a luxury for players strapped for time than a necessity like it is in Oblivion. While I would have preferred a less immersion-breaking mechanic (such as a motorcycle or a car a la Fallout 2), I found myself many times taking the long trek to a location rather than using the fast travel.

With that said, however, I believe that there needs to be some sort of 'fast travel,' for those players strapped for time. At my age, many of my friends are getting married, having children, et cetera. Many of my friends who used to be gamers cited their main reason for not playing an open-world game like Fallout 3 was that they didn't have time.

With their full time job and their children, they don't have time to sit down and play a 4-hour session of one game. Most of these friends in question loved Morrowind, and they love open world RPGs and most kinds of RPGs in general. And for these types of players, I think designers do them a disservice if they do not allow them a time-cutting mechanic like fast travel. Because for most of these friends, the only way they could enjoy Fallout 3, is if they took close to a year to complete. They don't have the time to drop 150-200 hours in a game within a 3 month time span. Heck, I barely have enough time to do that, and I'm not married, nor do I have children.

So while designers should not ever use fast travel as a crutch/excuse for lazy design (as I think they did in many areas of Oblivion - and even, dare I say, a few areas in Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas) I think it is a mechanic that needs to be included if the designers do not wish to exclude those players who do not have the flexible time schedule of high school students and college students. Otherwise, gamers who are having families of their own will not be able to enjoy them to the same degree.

 

[x EvilErmine x]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned New Vegas Hardcore mode fast travel. That worked well IMO because you CAN fast travel across the entire map if you like...except you will die of dehydration. So you couldn't just use it all the time but it was useful to help you shorten a journey by walking to a point and then fast traveling the rest of the way. Or to get to a close location without having the tedium of walking the whole way and maybe having to take a big detour to avoid a map barrier. (Wall, blocked road, big rocks, etc...).