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

[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...).

 

[frehls]

hue

 

[Zhukov]

I understand why people don't like it, and I half agree with them.

But that stance is utterly overwhelmed by the sheer practicality of a fast-travel system.

At the end of the day, fuck your open world. I have stuff to do and more engaging games to play. I don't really want to spend twenty minutes watching a guy on a screen trudge through a copy-pasted landscape.

 

[BSCCollateral]

Depends on the environment. InFAMOUS 2's New Marais is dense, complex, and small. You travel by jumping from one roof to another or using grindwires and lightning tether. There's always new system generated content (kidnapping, bombs, mimes) to deal with on the way.

Fallout 3's is sprawling and comparatively empty. You walk, and walk, and walk. The only "new content" with each transit is random encounters with mole rats.

One game needs fast travel; the other doesn't. The designers got it right.

 

[Hugga_Bear]

No, sometimes I don't have the time to walk. Sometimes I just want to do the quests because taking twenty minutes time to wander through areas I've already wandered through just isn't very fun.

I like fast travel, it works. You don't have to use it (and I normally don't) but if you're short on time, bored of walking or just the type who wants to do each quest rather than immerse into the game then it's there for you. If they force you to do it then it sucks. Having the option isn't the same.

 

[JourneyThroughHell]

If you think Fallout 3 would be a better game if it excluded the fast travel system, you're simply wrong. Not in that, "it's your opinion I disagree with", type of deal. Nope. You're just wrong. And I'm pretty sure you've been pointed out as to why that is - nobody's forcing you to use it. And if you think "you might", that's your own fucking problem, definitely has nothing to do with the game.

I could kinda forgive open-world games that have vehicles for the lack of a fast-travel system. Games where you walk? No. Never. Walking isn't fun. You might enjoy it for the thirty minutes you spend pretending to be Bear Grylls, but then you'll probably get tired of the same random encounters and holding down "w". Hell, you might use them toothpicks to keep it pressed.

Fast travel abolishes filler, makes experiences condensed, rich and not shit. Some people don't like aimlessly wandering around empty, copypasted worlds. I'm glad that developers are catching up to that fact.

 

[Meggiepants]

Partly your fault? Partly?

How about completely. If you think fast travel breaks your immersion of a game, don't use it. That's like saying we shouldn't have the temptation of a "casual" setting on a game because that would make it too easy. There is nothing, nothing, forcing you to use fast travel. In a game like Fallout, fast travel is essential for people like me. I don't just play a great sandbox game like Fallout 3 for twenty hours. I spend days in there. I want to be able to fast travel and avoid the parts of the game I don't like. I want to skip the metro tunnels on my third playthrough. I don't want to have to trudge back and forth to Rivet City every time I want to sell my stuff.

As a matter of fact, better Fast Travel would have done wonders in a game like Fallout NV. If they had included more Fast Travel points into the Strip, it would have been far less immersion breaking than the 3-6 load screens I had to endure depending on where in the Strip I wanted to go.

Don't get me wrong, I like to do some wandering in the wastes. But when I am done spending an hour exploring every nook and cranny in section A6 of the grid, I just might want to fast travel back to my home to drop off my loot. I'm pretty good with pretending like it took all night to get there. I don't need the extra fifteen minutes of walking time.

 

[ELD3RGoD]

I generally don't use it unless it involves a quest going back and forth between two locations I have already travelled between before. I find it more enjoyable to ride around on a horse or use city travel, but If i'm getting annoyed by seeing the same landscape over and over, i'll skip it out.

 

[weker]

snip

People have time, spending an hour on travelling is not entertaining for many.
Also you have the option to not take fast travel.
I used fast travel loads but you still have to find the locations first, this made me find loads of locations.

 

[WolfThomas]

I thought Morrowind's was my favourite, yes it is there. There are silt striders that take you to adjacent cities, boats which take you to towns with ports, mages who teleport you to another guild (often the cheapest). Then spells of divine and almsivi's intervention that take you to the nearest temple or shrine depending on your religious (or geographical) needs. Mark and recall you allow you to return to that one spot you'd just found but needed to go back home to dump loot or buy more potions.

If none of that worked there was still levitate, walk on water, icarian flight spells (with slow fall of course) and boots of blinding speed.

It requires you to be a little savvy but give far more immersion, my perfect version would be it with perhaps a home portal spell like Diablo.

 

[oktalist]

Yeah, the fun of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for me is in the travelling, immersing myself in the atmosphere, thinking at any moment a bloodsucker could jump out of the shadows at me. Fast-travelling would defeat the whole point of the game for me.

But if it fits the game, then as long as the fast-travelling is implemented in a way that maintains immersion (i.e. it's not a "magic" warp point, but rather a mass transit system where you can buy a ticket to ride somewhere) then it's not a problem.

 

[SemiHumanTarget]

oooh, I have been waiting for a thread like this!

I think fast travel is a bad design choice for epic RPGs. Fast travel discourages exploration and discovery, which are basically the backbone of modern western RPGs. Morrowind had a perfect design for this. Fast travel was restricted to certain major cities, and only then with a small fee and certain caveats. The fast travel was not just an instant warp feature, but rather an actual service within the game world that helped flesh out the mythos and provided atmosphere while also giving players a convenient option. The beauty of it was that it gave you access to a certain proximity and not an extremely exact coordinate on the map.

Compare this to New Vegas and Oblivion, where instant travel anywhere was possible with no in-game explanation. Sorry, but I don't buy that. It robs immersion from the player and also discourages some of the very things that make RPGs so appealing.

People may complain that a lack of fast travel makes a game tedious, but I think if you actually feel that way, it isn't because of a lack of fast travel but as a result of poor game design. I think oblivion and new vegas necessitated fast travel because of their overabundance of back-and-forth fetch quests and backtracking. I think if a game is developed correctly, a player can be guided through the game world without fast travel, minus the excessive backtracking.

 

[Nazulu]

I agree with you, for the most part. I do find fast-travel takes a LOT away from open-world RPGs. Sure, you can just not use the function, but the temptation is strong and it gives the developers an excuse to copy-past areas or just generally put less thought into landscaping.

Really made Oblivion seem small and minimal in comparison to Morrowind. I agree that the Silt Striders method of fast-travel was a better idea, and made more sense from an in-world perspective. Honestly, I would rather games go back to this kind of system.

But that's purely my opinion. I prefer the immersion to convenience, much of the consumer base prefers the latter.

Pretty much what I was gonna say.

I've noticed with most RPG games though, that they make all these quests where you need to go back and forth over very long distances and this is why most people will want teleporting (and so do I). They either have to get rid of those kind of quests completely or make it an interesting challenge a long the way for the RPG to work without a fast traveling system. Unfortunately, this probably does require a lot more effort.

 

[Minjoltr]

Wasn't a fan of fast travel in Oblivion. I'm aware that if you don't like it you don't have to use it but they don't put in an alternative method of transport and hiking your carcass all the way from one edge of the map to the other gets tedious. I don't think it would have been hard for them to add a cart which would go from each town with the option to stop at inns along the way; something similar to the system in Morrowind or WoW.
I think Gothic 3 (I don't remember much of Gothic 2 and I've not played the original) got it half right. The people from each town wanted you to do stuff for them locally so you didn't have to run back and forth across the massive worldmap doing tasks for them.

 

[Wintio]

I personally have always felt that Runescape did fast travelling the best. Once you have a proper character, you can fast travel pretty much anywhere you like... But you need to use a variety of methods, sometimes linking several methods together. From regular magic (and two other spell books that offered different teleports) to enchanted items or jewelery, to canoes, hot-air balloons, fairy rings, gnome gliders... the list was endless and had to be unlocked in many different ways depending on the area.

You still have a massive world, still have fast travel, but every method is different depending on what makes sense for that area. Immersion + fast travel = victory (plus a smug feeling when you find a slightly faster way of getting to an out of the way area).