For me, Morrowind did fast travel best by making it completely diegetic. You had Mark and Recall spells that let you go back to one specific spot, Divine Intervention and Almsivi Intervention spells (and scrolls) to teleport to the nearest location that fit that spell, traveling by Silt Strider or Boat, and finally use the teleportation services of the mages' guild to travel between their various guild headquarters. And still, there were some areas that were so remote or dangerous that no one would be able to take you there, and that made perfect sense and still preserved this element of exploration and discovery. You couldn't fast travel to every single tomb/cave/mine/ruin, you had to still walk/levitate/jump your way there from the nearest "safe" location. Of course, I think the reason Morrowind's system works so well is that it was designed that way, and the explorable map of Vvardenfell is also small enough that you would absolutely be able to walk around without so many issues. Many newer games boast huge areas that you would absolutely get bored exploring because they're kind of empty (no time or budget to make so many POIs), and especially so because quests are designed with fast travel included, assuming the player will fast travel back to the quest giver or fast travel between locations to complete objectives.
Couldn't agree more, Morrowind's "fast travel" wasn't really fast travel, it was travel that you had to put effort into that just wasn't shown as a passage of time, but you still had to learn spells, cast those spells, go to the places to set marks, walk out of the predecided places that interventions took you to, or pay a fee to use the silt striders and mage teleport services. It was, in my opinion, absolutely flawless,. and it baffles me why they butchered this system with the release of Oblivion and onwards.
@@Sevaekorbecause they wanted to sell more games. And as cool as they were as things when you were invested they are an obvious friction that would stop them selling lots of copies. Plus the maps in Oblivion and Skyrim were much bigger. You miss a lot in both, especially Skyrim, in terms of random encounters if you just zip everywhere. They built in a bunch of stuff to encourage you not to fast travel. You miss out on finding new caves, forts, dungeons as well. They aren't quest specific, you just won't find them unless you explore the map. The thing is you don't actually have to use the fast travel in those games. Either just don't use it, or if you can't resist mod it out. I've played Skyrim a bunch of times where I've set that I can't fast travel and it's a good way to play. As Tim says there are loads of ways it can be limited. From hardcore like Dragons Dogma 2 where you need a rare resource, to fixed points you have to go to. People will still complain. There's no winning with this.
I really like how Kingdom Come: Deliverance did fast travel. You see your marker on the map and it actually follows roads, time is passing accordingly, and the world is still simulated in general. There was just one issue with it. If you happened to travel during the night through a town, and didn't equip a torch beforehand, you'd get a fine or even a bounty on your head, as roaming town streets at night without a light source was a crime in medieval Bohemia.
I kind of feel that Kingdom Come: Deliverance has 'faster' travel rather than the fast travel system of other games. Instead of just the screen fading to black and you 'teleport' to your intended location, instead you follow your character across a simulated map as time and events flow accordingly. The fact you can get ambushed and killed does make the experience rather frustrating at times.
Yeah, it always made me think early on in the game, if I really wanted to risk the possibility of getting ambushed by fast traveling. You really made sure you were ready before you clicked that fast travel button
One really interesting case study for Fast Travel is the Fighters Guild in Oblivion. If you try and complete that quest line without fast travelling, it's insane. You have to travel across the map to get the smallest of quest updates only to then have to travel back to the other side of the map to tell an NPC. They clearly had no expectation you would not be fast travelling for that quest line.
I didn’t know oblivion had fast travel until the end of a summer playing it when I accidentally hit the wrong button when trying to place a map marker on chorrol, probably trying to return there after a fighters guild quest. I had to take a walk after that.
just a side thought, maybe they didn't expect you to just b-line the quests. most rpgs before it you'd get a quest as an excuse to go to a place to learn about the place and roleplay in it. I think its more of in incentive to go places and less a demand for the quest reward.
Less people have this mindset nowadays I believe, it's more a matter of "completing everything there is to do" instead of establishing a roleplay preference. @@mikeuniturtle3722
I think they planned for you to do the guild quest line on the side as you're playing the game and finish it as a high level character nearing the end of the game. Unfortunately in Oblivion the world levels up with you, so you can just speedrun the quest line since they can't really pace your progress by putting higher level enemies in your path.
@@mikeuniturtle3722 We're talking about post-oblivion and fallout Bethesda. They totally expected you to fast travel through. You make a good counter point though.
I think my favorite method of fast travel is one similar to the last one you mentioned. In Fallout 4, Survival Mode disables fast travel. However, I am a loot goblin at heart and especially so when scavenging for stuff to build bases. Someone created a mod that allows fast travel in Survival Mode, but only when you're at a Settlement you've set up _and_ between settlements that have a caravan. So you have to real travel to every location, but once you get back to one settlement you can go to any other. It was a very immersive experience and it made me engage with the settlement system in a way I hadn't in my previous playthroughs. It gave me reason to find and build settlements, and make sure they were secure enough that I could invite settlers who would then become the caravaneers. The excitement of tracing my route back to the settlement I started my scavenging run from, couldn't be matched. With the robot-building DLC I built each caravan with a heavily armored sentry bot so I could headcanon that they were equal parts caravan and security patrol, further justifying why I could safely "look away" as it were from traveling.
One of my favorite theoretical solutions is that objects other than the player can fast travel. In this case, it would be you drop off your horde at an outpost, and NPCs caravan it to town to sell it for you. Or in a magical fantasy setting you can teleport nonliving items around at town stations (bank, send a broken household sword to your smith at home to repair, etc). But the player has to walk to go places.
Making robots into Caravaners was one of my favorite aspects of that dlc. I miss fo4, but not enough to install it again after all if the playthroughs I did.
As a fellow loot goblin, I'm a big fan of travel by vertibird, as well as using vault 88 as a home base. Its several entrances make it relatively easy to get to, as long as you're kind of close to one of them.
One underrated element of fast travel is it gives you a sort of ripcord that actually can encourage going off the beaten path. You can go off down some odd road and explore it deeply, follow some interesting weird thing you spotted, and even if it wasn't anything important, you aren't then trudging back down an empty road. Even if it was some neat secret, you can more confidently pursue something in a weird cranny because you know you can then extricate yourself with a teleport.
Fallout and Arcanum have my favorite form of overworld travel, it still allows the world to have scale, but removes most of the tedium of walking through an open plain for 20 minutes straight, that's just my opinion obviously.
I always most enjoyed fast travel in Morrowind. Silt Striders, boats, Mages Guild offer different routes, connecting different cities and have monetary cost. This way sometimes it could be like public transportation with transits between lines. Also fun intervention magic of teleports to closest temple (not any of your choice). And Mark/Recall to be able to teleport to single previously marked location. And if you were not a mage, you'd most likely rely on scrolls, which aren't free and not readily available in large amounts.
@@Vasenkov yeah Morrowind fast travel felt like taking a train, versus just teleporting in Witcher 3. Granted teleportin just saves so much time, it's hard to say no.
@@chaserseven2886 walk to signpost and you get teleported to any other signpost. Same with boats and harbor signs. They are quite common. Maybe the wording confused you? It's not opening a teleport, but it's like a teleport compared to Morrowind.
I think another positive with Morrowind's fast travel is that, as you touched on with the public transport comparison, the routes are fixed. Like you can't just go to a silt strider station and travel to any other fast travel point on the map, you can only travel to the next stop on the route. And the reason I say this is a positive is because it actually involves some mental engagement on part of the player, you need to plan your route out in advance, and your reward for learning these routes is that you become more efficient at travelling. Morrowind basically takes fast travel and turns it into a learnable skill.
I also liked the Morrowind Systems, especially that it was so broken up. I had set my Recall position so that i could either use the Propylon Chambers of the fortresses or use an Intervention Spell to get to a Temple close to a Mages Guild this way you could zoom around the map pretty quickly but it felt earned because you had to jump through a lot of hoops to make the connections possible. Also you mostly could only travel to centers of civilisation and had to explore the wilds by walking there. I believe that making quality of life features something that can be earned by gameplay way better then getting a slightly better weapon as a quest reward.
One of the issues with fast travel is when it's not diegetic and the game is designed with that in mind Try doing the main quest in Skyrim without fast travel - the section before you go to sovngarde is you walking to the throat of the world, then to whiterun, then back to the throat, then back to whiterun. Those two locations are close to each other *on the map*, but take like... I don't know, 30 minutes? an hour? of walking between the two each time. Which would be fine if you were actually walking to new places and had a chance of seeing new stuff, and not just pingponging between the two
Also the lack of traveling skills. No more athletics or acrobatics, no Jump spell, no levitation, no nothin. A late-game Morrowind character is going to zip and zoom past huge distances without any issues, that game really makes you feel like a demi-god with simply moving from point A to point B. Hate how they removed all of that.
@@LordZylokBut then those skills/spells/stats become essentially necessary, even if you're not roleplaying a character where it makes sense to pick them.
Skyrim is the poster of a game designed around both fast travel and quest markers. Quests don't have any detail of where expecting you to follow the marker. Quests were also designed with fast travel in mind. Someone will tell you they were out one afternoon and dropped something, and that place is a 5 days walk from where they live. Like you were out one afternoon on the other side of the country.... sure. In my thousands of hours of skyrim I've not used fast travel for most of them, but you can really see how they designed the game under the assumption you would be fast traveling and there is little thought put into locality of quests.
It also makes a nonsense of the games' storylines, if you stop to think about what's happening. Sure, from the player's perspective, it might only be a few minutes spent clicking through a menu. But the player-character actually has to travel that distance, on foot or on horse. And while time and space in these games is compressed, in-universe there are supposed to be hundreds of miles between the major cities. But NPCs will just casually tell you to walk the entire breadth of the country, just to have a 5-sentence conversation with another NPC, who then tells you to walk all the way back. This would, in any real scenario, take weeks if not months of travel-time. In Oblivion, there's supposed to be an apocalypse underway. In Skyrim, there's supposed to be an apocalypse, AND a civil war underway. You'd think the NPCs would want to make more efficient use of the player-character's time, but nope!
@@PedroGomes-cx7ku Maybe I'm just very patient, but back when I played Morrowind for the first time, I went with an exclusively melee build (i.e. I refused to touch magic) and can't remember having any trouble traveling around. The fact that there are NPCs that will essentially let you fast travel around pretty much gets rid of the issue.
I absolutely love how Fallout 4's Survival Mode handled fast travel. Non-diegetic fast travel is disabled entirely, so you have to travel entirely manually and are at the mercy of random encounters early on, but after the ends of Acts 1 and 2, you can unlock new quasi-fast travel options as you gain membership in the various main factions. The two methods of fast travel are limited, (and the more robust of the two has a monetary and time cost,) so travel on foot is still necessary, but you no longer have to jog across the entire map to dump your loot at home. And of course, once you're in Act 3, you must commit to aligning yourself with one of the factions, and you have to give up at least one means of fast travel depending on which one you pick.
That's what I wanted to write as well. Fallout 4's Survival Mode disabled traditional fast travel and because of that each venture into the wasteland was an adventure. Random encounters, limited supplies. I had to plan my trips, take what I needed, leave space for new loot. This way of playing was much more immersive then the standard mode. And after I joined the Brotherhood I could call for a Vertibird taxi :)
@@vast634 As can the Minutemen! The ending really just comes down to the Institute winning or being destroyed, and way that impacts fast travel is either keeping the teleporter or keeping vertibirds, respectively. I looked it up, and was disappointed to find out that even if you convince the Minutemen to align with the Institute and continue down that path, they just don't get a working vertibird.
I like the Dragon's Dogma fast travel system. You can teleprompter around by using consumables called ferry ferrystones, but they're relatively hard to come by. (unless you but them from vendors which are really expensive.) Also you can only fast travel to port crystals which are items you can place anywhere in the world, but there's only a limited amount you can place. Also there are carts that allow you to essentially fast travel from certain towns that you'll frequently see on the roads, and time actually passes when you fast travel with them.
FWIW, I usually don't like fast travel but end up using it out of necessity. To me, when I'm playing a game that has quests making me bounce between locations back and forth, it feels designed with fast travel in mind. I like games where the major hubs for the most part have local quests that don't rely on going to other hubs. STALKER games are like this, and going to another hub feels like a real trek that you have to get ready for. The Wasteland 2 and 3 games have overworld travel that really feels like modernized classic Fallout. I like that vendors in WL3 pop up on the overworld with an option to interact without the additional step of pulling you out of the overworld
Fast travel is quite a weird thing... on one hand you want to have the player organically traverse the world without teleporting around, on the other hand going the same route without anything going on is boring. There are solutions to that, but it is important to recognize this as a problem that needs solving. 1. It is only usable in certain situations, certain places (from and to). Like a portal network. Not usable from anywhere, not to anywhere. 2. It has to be unlocked by more effort just having been there. Quests? Something similar to crafting? Or tied to attributes? 3. Add (random) encounters when traveling on the same roads. 4. Make these paths change somehow. Or repopulate areas which have been cleared by the player, but not by simply having everything respawn 1:1. 5. Give it a cooldown or resource cost. Money or some kind of fuel. 6. When fast traveling, have a chance that something challenging happens and gets interrupted. Maybe the chance increases every time the player fast travels until it happens and resets. 7. It provides some negative effect, like being weaker temporarily. Weary from traveling through dull places. 8. Classic WoW has one solution: No teleport, instead flying or traveling by ship. It takes time and costs money. Not the most elegant solution, but still one.
The big problem really is making regular traversal rewarding. Random encounters are difficult to make rewarding once the players has, erm, encountered each one. This is skippable content that doesn't sell games like bosses do, so it's difficult to justify dev effort and budget for an appropriately large variety. It is also difficult to tune rewards: if the reward is kept small, random encounters become less and less worth the time to play through them as the player progresses in power/wealth (and what's worse, at the same time as the player exhausts novel encounter content), but if you scale rewards you get power and wealth inflation that creates much bigger problems.
The vertibird fast travel mechanic in fallout 4 survival has some upsides: 1 - it's locked behind a faction quest halfway through the game, so the first few areas have to be done without it 2 - it takes time for the vertibird to land at you, and time to fly you to your destination, such that it's only beneficial when travelling half the map or more 3 - it's slightly risky - you can be shot out of the sky by some enemies, but you can avoid that by choosing safer routes if you know where those enemies are, or be so well armoured and buffed that you can survive a hit anyway 4 - an in game reason why you can't do it out of interiors as vertibirds can't go through walls 5 - as the vertibird travels, I don't need to be at the keyboard for a minute, so I can get up and stretch my legs without stopping the game
@@jsullivan2112 If you played on Very Hard or easier, then the actual ingame fast travel makes these worthless Or if you played on survival before the new survival mode
An interesting alternative for open RPGs would be something more like "automated travel" where if you're on a path you can travel along the path/road with zero input and an increased time scale modifier. Interestingly you can mod Daggerfall Unity to behave like this, and while its very rough around the edges it captures the feeling of traveling quite well, where you have to look at your map and think "oh so I've got to take a left at the next fork and then a right and that will take me to the town". This method also allows for the cool stuff like seeing places of interest and stopping to check them out as well as random encounters etc.
I kinda like the way Morrowind did fast travel. Taxi system via the silt striders. Gotta pay a little to travel but it makes repeat playthroughs easier when you know where the locations you can fast travel to are.
To this day I like the travel system of Fallout the best. You get a sense of time AND distance traveled. As a side effect you really planned your routes instead of just clicking every place, because the order doesn't really matter. Also in Fallout I always had this feeling you get with road movies. I wish more games still had this system (or maybe a similar one, maybe even an improved one) implemented instead of clicking on the map somewhere, then waiting through a loading screen and appearing magically as if nothing happened in the meantime. Make the journey an adventure... set up a camp to rest with a campfire and everything. There was a superb mod for Skyrim where you had to do exactly that... even collecting fire wood and warming up at the fire, etc. That was so awesome, it changed the whole game for me and I never fast traveled with that mod at all. But maybe that's just me...
I love baked in world fast travel. Silt striders connect several land routes. Boats connect several ports. Mages guild lets you teleport between other mages guilds. Propylon indexes let you teleport between these ancient dunmner strongholds. Some cost gold some are free/rewarded.
When I played Dying Light (which doesn't have fast travel) I noticed that I paid a lot more attention to my environment. It felt neat to get to know the city really well and being able to navigate it efficiently using landmarks. I played Fallout 4 around the same time. After having played Dyling LIght I also started to notice how fragmented the world felt when you constantly jump from location to location. I noticed I never got nearly as familiar with the Fallout 4 world as I did with the Dying Light world despite playing Fallout 4 a lot more.
My favorite iteration of fast travel is in Old School RuneScape. Starting out everyone has the ability to teleport back to the beginning town and that's it. You have to explore the world, do quests, level up your magic before you get access to teleports. Until then you can pay boats to charter you to port cities or level up your Woodcutting to make a canoe to travel up and down rivers. Once you build up some coin by playing the game you can get items with limited teleports to certain areas, or build up your levels to the point where you can do a quest that unlocks unlimited travel between select points throughout the world but it's a fairly high level quest. The point is that there's no real way a new, inexperienced player is going to be able to just zip around the map doing whatever they want right off the bat. You have to work for it.
I really like how Daggerfall did it. Quests were timed, so the travel time *really* matters. That travel time could be reduced by getting a horse or hiring a boat if you needed to go really far, paying extra. That's especially cool, since money has weight in Daggerfall and you can't just tell the boat guy or a tavern keep to take it from your savings. You need to account travel costs into what you bring. You can also speed it up by resting less in between stops, but then you'll show up without your health, stamina and mana regenerated and will either need to rest a few hours in front of the dungeon, where enemies can interrupt that rest before you're fully rested, killing you, or try to take on the dungeon with reduced health. For the return journey, you'll usually have money from the dungeon you raided, but if you got hit a lot and your medicine skill isn't very high, you might've spent too much time in the dungeon and now you don't have time to get back before the quest expires, an issue you can circumvent if you get teleportation spells, giving you more time to do your quests. You also might not have any coin because you dropped 6k to make room for that cool sword worth 16k. All makes fast travel a lot more interesting than just clicking a location and you're there, with no downsides, something I'd like to see more RPGs try to do.
Kingdom Come Deliverance is an example of one of my favorite fast travel systems. it has similar random encounters to fallout 1 and 2. and you don't fast travel in straight line. you are auto pathed onto a road. meaning anything inbetween you have to go there yourself.
Tim, you are great! Thank you for keeping up with all of these wonderful videos over the past year and a half! As someone with a lifelong passion for designing and building games, thank you for sharing your knowledge, experience, and opinions! Truly you are appreciated.
I had a problem with Skyrim with how fast travel works. I thought what if you would pay a dragon soul to teleport, which makes sense. I downloaded a mod as someone else thought this and now makes fast traveling to whiterun or unlocking a shout an easy choice. But it’s very nice when I need to go to solitude and riften.
I personally enjoyed the Psijic Teleport mod, which gives you some more immersive options. At Alteration 100, you could learn a spell that let you teleport to pre-set or custom markers, and charges a very high Magicka cost based on the distance. Of course, that was only accessible to magic-style players, but it was still a lot of fun.
Kingdom Come Deliverance hardcore mode was absolutely perfect, especially with quest markers. In hardcore mode, you don't know where your character is on your in-game map, and you have to rely on the time of day (location of the sun) to find North and local points of interest to figure out where you are. However, when you're like 15-20 meters from your objective, the quest marker pops up just because that's when you really need it the most. Finding an NPC who might be at their job during the day or at their house sleeping at night. Or some obscure book or item you need to find in a world where that might otherwise be impossible and frustrating. It's the best of both: immersion while traveling, and quality of life and time saving once you're there.
damn didn't know that even the map features change so dramatically if you're playing on a higher difficulty. Imagine the amount of work that took. Most people won't even play on those difficulties so wouldn't even know about them (myself included, but now I'm gonna play it again on hardcore mode just for this). Props to the devs, they're awesome.
@ hardcore mode in the beginning is insanely hard because you have a moment where you have to race to another town before you bleed out, so you kind of need to know the overall map and you don’t have quest markers to guide you. But its probably the most immersive gaming experience I can recommend.
It was a sweet addition to the immersion to navigate without a GPS mode. Not sure how hard it would have been without first completing the game with GPS on. I'll try in the sequel :D
6:30 in my opinion this is more about the dissonance between wanting to play optimally and wanting a challenge. It's hard to pose limitations on yourself that go against best decision making practices, so it would be better to have a difficulty setting where quest markers are automatically turned off than having the player do so manually
i like the fast travel in Kingdom Come Deliverance, where it takes you to the world map and you follow your character's journey. Along the way you are more likely to encounter random events that range from travellers on the road, bandits. you also get a % choice to ignore it which the percentage is based on your skills and the difficulty of the encounter. say 4 bandits in full plate armour which at the start of the game is quite difficult even for experienced players. this incentivises player exploration as a new player is likely to want to try fast travelling and will very likely end up sprinting through the woods as fast as they can getting themselves lost. There are also only a few fast travel points across the map which are all towns or settlements in key areas so journeys have to be planned properly, you may not be able to do something at the closest fast travel point to your quest so you gotta make sure you're ready to go before you go. Which i think is neat. One of my favourite games, if anyone hasn't tried it i couldn't recommend it more
Completely agree. I also like RDR2, were you have trains and stagecoaches that travel to fixed points (it's a bit watered down by upgrading the map so you can travel from campsite to previously visited areas, but still) I also have a very fond memory of a RPG series from the 90s (German games that were probably not very popular anywhere else) Similar to fallout you traveled through an overland map, but only on set paths. But it added survival stuff too, like you had to eat and drink. Every night you had to camp, set watch or you increased the chance of dangerous encounters, could send someone out to hunt and find water and someone looking for herbs. Also the characters could get ill and then needed said medicine to cure. On my first try, without any knowledge on RPGs I had one of the best experiences ever. My group traveled down south, exploring the map. First through green woods, then up the mountains, slowly rations got low, game got scarcer, weather changed and it got winter. So my group traveled through high mountain in early winter, only wearing summer gear, no food and the first characters got a cold when the thin shoes of the first character broke due to wear. So the party was basically lost out in the mountains, days or weeks away from the next city, freezing, starving, sick, in summer gear with broken or nearly broken shoes. Trodding over rocky paths, slowly moving forward without much hope when a dialog popped up "on the right you see a path, you want to follow?", sure what ever... And a short walk later "you found the entrance to a hidden dwarven City, want to enter?" I think I never ever after had such a joy finding a place in a game since then 😂
Metaphor did it strait makingnit litteral teleportation, but limited only to going to major cities. You still took three days to reach a dungeon, but can go back in time for dinner at the inn you're staying at. Combined with strict time limits (pretty much constantly you gotta get your stuff done in 10days or something), I think it works out well and is even plot relevant.
4:32 Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous both have fast travel systems; though the one in Kingmaker is more of a mid-late game thing. Both of them place restrictions on fast travel that I think work quite well, though. In both games, fast travel is tied in to the games kingdom building/campaign management layer, with teleportation circles being buildable at any player owned settlement.This means that there are a limited number of locations where you can built a teleportation circle, and the player must have established control over said location in order for it to be built. Building a teleportation circle also uses up a valuable building slot; meaning that there is a permanent opportunity cost along with the resource cost of actually building the teleporter. Both games actually have mechanical reasons for the player to fast travel as well. Traveling will tire your party out, requiring that you make camp to rest. This presents a challenge for the player, because both games have add a cost to resting outside of a safe area. Kingmaker has camping supplies whereas Wrath has its abyssal corruption system, with the players party taking increasingly severe debuffs over time as they rest until they do so in a safe area. In Kingmaker especially, teleportation is actually a pretty pivotal upgrade- given how much emphases Kingmaker places on time management. In Wrath of the Righteous, a player controlled fort can even be lost in the campaign layer if it is taken by the enemy, meaning that if the player neglects crusade management their ability to fast travel to a certain location might wind up being cut off entirely until it is re-taken. Over all I really like the way the Pathfinder CRPG's handle travel in general, fast travel included.
Interesting discussion! I am reminded why I like the way Dragon Age Origins handles it. When you're traveling, there are often encounters along the way that can be dealt with in multiple ways. It keeps things fresh and a bit unpredictable. I guess fast travel works if it's done thoughtfully and not in a way that's just glorified teleportation. Imagine if you chose a Mage Class in an RPG, and you could unlock a perk that enabled you to teleport to towns and cities. That'd be cool!
I liked the way fast travel was handled in Dark Souls 1, where a) you only unlocked fast travel quite late in the game, after you had already explored most of the world on foot, and b) you could only travel from a bonfire to another bonfire you'd previously visited. This solves a number of problems with fast travel, while still giving its main advantage of not having to trek back and forth across the whole map once you've already explored everything. Another nice system was the teleport stones from Gothic, where you could only teleport to a location after you found its teleport stone item, which were usually in a place that you had to have explored the surrounding area quite thoroughly to reach, or as a reward for a late quest in that area.
DS1 also took the time to lay out a world with lots of shortcuts and alternate routes to make travel easier before you get to teleport between bonfires.
I start every game thinking “I’m not going to use the fast travel. It breaks immersion.” And then about halfway through the game, I’ll get tired of walking around everywhere and want to get to the next thing. I appreciate it when developers give me enough to make it feel like the fast travel is reasonable because otherwise I’ll start using it and complain about how it breaks immersion.
Hey man, at least you're honest! I'm the same way! I usually have to mod it out to remove the temptation which is so weird because some of my best memories in gaming aren't from big quests or boss fights, but the unplanned in-between. For me personally, the desire to rely on fast travel is often a symptom of a boring world.
nothing breaks immersion more than boredom and uninstalling a game tho. as time gets more precious this feeling grows, now if fast travel and manual saves don't exist I'll just bail on a game.
I think that Dragon's Dogma approached fast travel in an interesting way that I haven't seen in any other game. In Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen fast travel is essentially teleportation that requires the use of a consumable item that is incredibly rare and prohibitively expensive to buy (in Dark Arisen you're given an eternal ferrystone that you can use infinitely and completely bypass the price on fast travel but it is completely optional). The fast travel implementation is also fun cus it is diegetic. Sure you throw a stone up in the air that opens a literal portal that teleports you to where you wanna go but it's not just a menu option that you click, which is how it is in a lot of games that allow fast travel. Also the game has another cool fast travel mechanic. Normally there are permanent fast travel points inside towns. But you can also literally create and move your own fast travel point!!! You have items called Port Crystals that you can store in your inventory (again they are incredibly rare and also heavy so it's hard to carry around) and then place them anywhere you want which allows you to fast travel to that place. This is really fun and useful because say you're doing a quest where it tells you to get a specific item but either you've stored it in a chest in town or the item is only available somewhere far away; well you can just place a port crystal and then you can instantly teleport back to the quest location after you got your item. I used this to cheese some NPC quests where they'd tell you to guide them to a specific place. I would find out where they wanted to go and then go there before initiating the quest to put a port crystal there. Then I would initiate the quest and instantly teleport to that port crystal. Since the NPC is added to your party when the quest starts they would also be teleported with you. And viola.. I've instantly completed the quest without having to protect this stupid weakling through poison infested swamps. I personally don't think the exorbitant price and scarcity placed on fast travel in Dragon's Dogma 1 is worth it because the game is incredibly dull to travel in, so anything that forces you to travel more is just gonna be annoying and worse, tedious. The game lives by it's combat not it's exploration so it was prolly a good decision to create a fast travel item with infinite charges to bypass it. But the ideas employed in it are stellar and could fit another game. Ooooh I just thought of another one - Kingdom Come : Deliverance. You can just open a map and click on a place and you'll go there but it's not teleportation. Fast travel in KCD just removes player agency. What I mean by that is that if you want to go to a place that you've already been to but you don't want to sit and guide your player character to that place then KCD's fast travel has you covered. When you start fast travelling in KCD, the character sprite on the map starts moving towards the destination by following the paths laid out on the map. So the game guides the player character to the destination instead of the player. Now this is a very important distinction because everything that exists between your starting and ending points will still affect you as they will pop up as encounters and will force you to engage with it. An example - In the city of Rattay (second town) there's a rule that you have to have a torch up when you're travelling inside the town at night (people who travel without torches are usually up to no good). Of course I didn't know this the first time I played the game. So around nightime I decided to go back to my bed outside of town and opted to fast travel to it. While my player sprite on the map was moving suddenly a message popped up and forced me into the game. Turns out it's a guard who has caught me travelling without a torch and is angry at me. I cannot express to you how amazed I was by this. It was soo cool. Stuff like this happens all the time in KCD if you fast travel. If there are bandits on the way then they will aggro you even if you're fast travelling and cut it short by throwing you into a shakedown or, eventual, fight.
Thank you for the video. A cool feature for a game with encumbrance system would be muscle for hire. You employ porters or scavengers who go into a place after you are done with it and they collect loot. You have to pay them. Then it gives you new quest opportunities. For example you notice they did not pick up some items you go to confront them and it turns out they were selling stuff on the side. They went behind your back and now you have a conpelling way to tie them into the game world. You can hire different people who are more trust worthy or investigate why they went behind your back. Maybe the scavengers discovered a secret passage that was unexplored before and you have a reason to go back. Maybe some of them got stuck underground and you have to rescue them or the items they looted.
I'd say fixed/predetermined fast travel locations are the best way to do it. With those you can have the fun of needing to plan your journeys, while still not forced to walk wast distances all the time. And when you want to have specific areas of the map appear remote and desolate, having them afar from fast travel locations greatly helps to create that atmosphere. I think it's a massive disservice to a game to strip it from the ability to make you sometimes feel a bit lost in the wilderness.
I think the biggest issue I have with fast travel (in its most common application) is that it encourages a complete detachment from the world you're meant to be inhabiting. People have already said about the cases I like that come to mind, being Morrowind and Dragon's Dogma, which essentially use diegetic taxi systems between specific settlements. In both of those games, traversal and exploration of the world are their cores, and both are designed in such a way to expect players to be following roads, directions and/or signage. As others have said, quests in Skyrim and Oblivion were clearly designed with use of the fast travel system in mind, requiring repeated movement between very distant spots for brief, menial tasks, and I feel like the experience there ends up being a highlight reel of an adventure as opposed to a feeling of being somewhere. Figuring out directions and spatial relativity is really satisfying when spaces are designed to encourage that, and it's a shame that so many players expect an unreasonably densely populated world that they'll be skimming over like a throwaway magazine regardless.
An companion piece would be how to make on foot travel exciting for players. Fast travel i think is a symptom of walking/journey feeling boring to do in most games.
I like how every time Tim mentions the Cave of Despair, I cannot help but think of the journey to the Isle of Despair in Arcanum. And one cannot simply travel the Isle of Despair, or teleport to or from there.
I remember STALKER (clear sky?) had a really good fast travel system in the form of 'guides' who you could hire to take you places. I always prefer immersive options like that as they can add to the vibe of the game as well as acting like a money sink. The Bethesda style 'instant teleport anywhere with no drawbacks' has always felt like it sucks the fun out of the game a bit for all the reasons Tim covers in the video. It's like playing with an infinite ammo cheat on or something.
I played WoW back in the initial release and going forward with my kids, before the quest markers. I would read the quests with them and we'd go together to find these locations. That was both fun, and encouraged them to read and navigate.
Your suggestion on how to do fast travel only from towns is how STALKER 2 does it. In every town/settlement/safezone there are guide-people which will guide you to other towns which have also have guides, but you have to talk to these guides to fast travel, so no running to another point of interest and then fast traveling back to town. I found it added to the gritty brutal atmosphere and it forced me to explore a lot more than I likely would have, although it also led to some frustrating experiences. For example, because of choices I made in the story I lost access to a certain guide in a town next to a quest marker I had to do, leading to me having to run about 3.5km in game from the nearest town with a guide (most other runs were 700m-1.5km), to the objective, and then back to the town. The quest placement was in a corner of the map I had already explored for another branch of the story, so I already knew the route to take and all the points of interest or danger, which made it quite a boring trek. Perhaps it falls more on the map-design or quest placement in the world than fast traveling, but its just something I thought of when you mentioned that example.
I personally like when there are caravans or dedicated traveling wagons where you can spend gold (currency) to go to major cities, in Skyrim you can pay some guys that sit in wagons just outside the major cities to go to other major cities, but not all travellers can take you to every city, they take you to nearby cities. So if you want to travel across the map, you have to take one trip to a city on the center of the map, and then another to the other side.
The first time I played skyrim, I did not know fast travel was an option, so I played without, and without the horse carriages, and without horses because I don't like mounted gameplay. It was fantastic! Really fun... until inventory weight management came into play a bit too hard with dragon bones. I ran with a mod to disable the weight for those, and it was fantastic once more. I like how Gothic 2 did their fast travel. Starting at the halfway point into the game, you'd get runes to specific important hubs, but still rarely. Oh, and the only maps in the game were hand-drawn maps bought from a trader, so you had to look for landmarks for orientation. I wish that was more common in RPGs.
Hey Tim, its me! I personally think of fast travel as both a QOL and a necessary feature. This doesnt apply to every game as you rightfully mentioned that "risky travels" could be part of the gameplay. I however think about it like this: everything a player can easily do but the only thing is costs is time, its okay to let them skip it
while not a crpg, s.t.a.l.k.e.r. not having fast travel only immersed me more into the game, having planning my trips, thinking about routes i take, i know i'd totally miss out on that feeling if it had a fast travel system
Best implemented way of fast travel that felt organic was made back in 90s in Might and Magic 6 7 and 8 . You can "fast travel " only if you go to stable house and pay fee to travel to another city that have stable house. that could be possible only in major cities . That was best option as game encourage you to explore map and not just fast travel from any small location to another.
I'm building a TTRPG and how you described handling fast-travel is more-or-less how I'm doing it. The GM makes Nodes in the world-map and the players have to get there and activate the fast-travel node for it to work, then you can only fast-travel between nodes. The idea is that it helps you explore deeper and deeper into the wilderness, but you don't get to "skip" and time still matters.
Hi Tim, I’m an arcade game developer and currently manage my own cabinet at the bar where I work, showcasing a game I created. I’ve always appreciated your thoughtful insights and off-the-cuff commentary on game design and the industry. It got me wondering-did you spend much time with arcade games in your youth? Did any of those experiences shape your approach to game design over the years? I sometimes feel like your generation played a role in the shift from the social fun of arcades to the rise of immersive single-player experiences with deeper emotional resonance. Fallout, for example, represents that shift brilliantly. I’d love to hear your thoughts on whether arcade-style games influenced your early design choices, or if you think the industry’s move toward more narrative-driven games was inevitable. Either way, thank you for your weekly insights and the thoughtful way you share your knowledge. It’s a joy to listen to someone with such a rich understanding of game development and history.
Running your own arcade cab with your own game is a fantastic achievement, and one that I wouldn't have thought practical in 2024. Kudos to you, sir. Hope it has gone well?
I find your reasoning on why fast travel diminishes a game so compelling. I will disable fast travel for my next FNV playthrough. Who knows, I might find something new. Thank you so much Tim.
I've had this random musing about adding detail to a fast travel system to the point it becomes a mini-game. Take Fallout or Arcanum style fast travel and increase the complexity until there is a proto game loop there. Then use it as a complimentary game loop to the main RPG, X-com style, Explore towns and dungeons to get stuff to help you travel to find new towns and dungeons...
I've actually hoped for a new game that used the Fallout 1 travel system. I remember playing Fallout 1 and 2 as a kid and travelling was so exciting and suspenseful. Traveling back from a huge fight with 1 HP and no stimpacks, hoping you can reach a town and sell all your loot without encounters. But it didn't take that much time either. I never even thought Fallout didn't have fast travel. Just a *better* one. Fast travel PLUS!
I really loved the fast travel in Cyberpunk 2077. There were terminals all over, as well as the Metro system, that could take you anywhere if you went and used them. But often when you determined your route to where you wanted to go, there wasn't really one that close, that I would decide to just drive to my destination anyway. Just that little bit of extra friction of having to find a nearby terminal prevented me from just fast traveling whenever I want to move any decent distance at all, to only when I have to go somewhere really far.
My favorite style of fast travel is when it makes in-game sense, like the institute teleporter and vertibirds in fallout 4. You have to unlock them and can lose access to them, and with the vertibirds you get to look out and see things you might want to shoot at/ stop for
I think it can be useful to take a step back and look at what problem(s) fast travel is trying to solve. One common reason games "need" fast travel is how often the player wants/needs to travel around the world for quests or services. So you could ease up on the importance of fast travel by reducing how much the player might want to just bounce around the map (i.e. maybe avoid a quest where you go from Town A to Town C, talk to someone for a second, then return to Town A to talk to someone else).
Honestly the best system i've seen so far for fast travel is in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games. There you can fast travel between towns and landmarks, but not by yourself. You pay an npc called a guide to "guide" you to a town or landmark, doesnt matter if you've been to the town or landmark or if you're encumbered. The price of the trip usually depends on distance.
In terms of fast travel I much prefer if it's inherently a part of the in game world, such as cart travel or using some sort of bus or taxi or whatever, as long as doing so isn't incredibly tedious. But I really love having an overworld map where you can simulate your party traveling and have randomised encounters that work like they do in fallout 1/2, where you have the areas where certain random encounters can trigger, so they're a little bit randomised in terms of location but still localised around specific places in the world map.
One thing on status effects, back in Daggerfall (which had a very early implementation of fast travel without random encounters) the game would inform you if you'd been infected with a disease or were poisoned if you tried to travel and that there was a possibility of your character dying if you went ahead anyway, which was pretty neat, although it could lead to some frustrations if you had to load a save before you caught a disease/were poisoned if you didn't have the means to cure yourself.
I love the town only fast travel because it solves the problem I have as a player. I don't wanna waste time doing "nothing". while clicking just to move to a location might be an actual nothing of an interaction, it saves me so much time. If i interact with a menu for 3 seconds to get to a place I've already been instead of a 3-minute journey I feel as though I've gained time somehow. It's truly crazy how games are just magic in how they present actions done in the world created by designers.
TES3, I remember this one quest in NW Vvardenfell, where it was ashy, smokey, and dark...And the directions were given generally in the dialogue. The first time, I spent a few hours looking for it and found multiple other places I had never been to. In future playthroughs, I also had trouble finding it. It was partly going around in the dark and partly the ash weather. But, though I wanted to go to that objective, and it would be something like a waste of time in many cases today, even if it were new to me, there is a uniqueness to that experience which is immortal to me. I trecked through ash weather up and down hills and ravines to find that cave. I entered that secluded cave. I acquired the item(ceremonial bow from a tomb?). I completed that quest. There was no help. Also, I rested outside wearing a special robe with Sun Damage on it...And I rested too long into the day, so I was insta-killed. TES5, they had the wagon fast travel outside the city, and you could use it to go to a city you had not been to before(thus could not normally fast travel to). I think mounts, vehicles, and powers are the best way to resolve fast travel, especially in multiplayer. This makes them world game mechanics instead of meta game mechanics.
Your idea was used in Far Cry 2 where you could only fast travel to bus stations. It still meant you had some challenging enemies to go round/fight. Interesting vid thanks
Dragon's Dogma has an interesting fast travel system where you can manually place the markers anywhere in the world. Then you had to use a item that teleports you to that location. I thought it was cool to have players place them where they thought they would frequent more often. DD2 introduced fast travel via cart, but only from certain villages and the main cities. Other than that, you're on your own two feet.
I would love if a diegetic fast travel system in an RPG was locked behind the technology or magic of a specific faction and you had to find some way to steal it if you wanted access as a different faction.
I personally love the idea of fast travel being an in-game ability of some sort, like casting a spell and using mana etc to transport yourself to a different location. And maybe you have to perform some kind of ritual or cast a spell to make a place sensitive to the magic so you can get there with the fast travel teleport. This makes it more of a choice to use it, since it would take s lot of resources etc. Generally speaking I love it when games make their mechanics a part of the world, instead of just having video game logic that you have to swallow.
I guess it also is the necessary tool to deal with "world bloat". If it takes 3 hours to hike across the map, and there is a ton of running back and forth due to for example fetch quests, the double padding (too big a map to keep it tight and the "filler quests") makes a game extremely time consuming, to a degree where hiking doesn't feel fulfilling anymore. So, if there is enough interesting going in in the world, the player will be less inclined to fast travel, or, if the design is tight, so one doesn't have to travel great distances all the time, the occasional long hike will be a fulfilling part of the story instead of mind numbing commute. And for random encounters. Cliff Razers can go to heII for all that I care... They are so frustrating 😅 Anyway, loved the video, it's always great food for thought
I think the ease with which you can fast travel correlates directly with how sandboxy the game feels. For that reason, I prefer it as a very late-game feature, one that I feel like I’ve earned and with plenty of the restrictions you mentioned. For that reason I always like to see fast travel incorporated well into the game world, like something you unlock from a series of difficult side quests.
I downloaded a mod for fallout 4 where you get a buildable permanent vertibird which is one of my favorite things in any game. It totally breaks the lore and it doesn’t make sense especially when NPC vertibirds are like mosquitos but it’s fun. It has a mountable minigun and I think some storage and flies around the overworld I think like the limited signal grenades let you do. But it just stays where it lands and it gives you an extraction point you have to be able to get back to, and it doesn’t go exactly where you want it has to find a landing location. This solves so many of the cheesy problems and it makes it better by being fun. When flying you can see enemy fire coming at you and you can shoot back. You get a Birds Eye view of the world. And you can land or easily end up in hot areas taking heavy fire. I forget if it takes damage but having to protect it is fun too with the penalty being not having any ride home and having to spend a ton of resources building another one at a camp.
Metaphor: ReFantazio only allows fast travel between main towns, any other places take travel time and consume calendar days between big events in the story. This system blends into the gameplay and story context very well
I liked how Fallout (not sure if it's 1 or 2) had caravan travel. You got to basically fast travel but time passed and you had sometimes had random encounters to go through. Sometimes felt more dangerous than solo travel but I think it was faster.
Probably an automatic virus scan. The one notification you should probably still care about. lol Not that Microsoft Defender is great, but better than nothing.
Kingdom come deliverance had your character move along a map like in old school isometric rpg’s and I think it did well for the game. I’m not sure you need fast travel even if it’s expected. As long as you don’t physically (so to speak) have to walk to every location I think most people are satisfied and those who aren’t will learn to love it
Have to agree that morrowind did it wonderfully. The only thing to hold against Morrowind was its journal system, while immersive, made it an absolute pain if you got a random quest on the way somewhere and decided to go finish what you were doing first, then got distracted, then finally circled back around 20 hours later and had to flip through 50 pages of text to find that one journal entry that hinted that you should go south from... somewhere on a road. I remember not completing a quest to help some woman who fell in love with a Bandit for like, 100 hours, by accident because of it. That said, I think one of my favorite memories of Oblivion was specifically _not_ using fast travel at all. I did the Dark brotherhood questline, and while traveling down to their base from a town I ran into wagons, bandits, all sorts of fun little encounters that got me loot and things to sell I wouldn't have had if I fast traveled. It made the world feel lived in and like I was a part of it.
Hey Tim, you mentioned before that you had a graduate degree in Artificial Intelligence. I was wondering, as someone who aspires to be a video game AI programmer, what your thoughts are on designing NPC AI; for combat, ambient AI, etc and the efforts made by developers to make NPCs decisions seem “smart”, while players instead see them as cheating or dumb. What I find interesting is the disconnect between the player and designer/programmer’s perception of how intelligent an NPC is. An NPC that’s given flanking behaviour might seem like random movement to the player, who can’t see the code, and reactions to stimuli like hearing, might seem like the NPC is cheating, if sound cues aren’t made obvious to the player. Many games try to communicate an NPC’s thought process through dialogue: “I’m going to check that sound out” but I’m wondering what are less in-your-face methods. TL;DR: AI is only as smart as players think they are; having a “smart” NPC doesn’t matter if players don’t understand the reasoning behind its actions. Pac-Man had extremely simple AI, (essentially random movement) for the ghosts, but many people thought they were strategising to get them.
In a lot of open world RPGs with fast travel, I go exploring for the majority of it. Then I use fast travel late in the game, when either I'm going back to old areas because a new quest has sent me there, or I'm just finishing up things. That was decidedly not the case with Oblivion once I saw how copy/paste a lot of the dungeons and caves are, and that's a pretty famous early "fast travel anywhere, anytime" RPG that probably sets most people's expectations of the system. I do prefer things like vehicles, waypoints, or even the Dragon Quest method of "you can warp to these places, after you've manually visited them." (side note: I think it's fair to credit DQ with this as it started in the 3rd entry back in the 80s, though I'm sure some Ultima games or early adventure games had some shortcut/warp systems) Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen does a really awesome fast travel system for the explorers out there. You can fast travel to anywhere you can set up a warp stone, but you've gotta manually place the warp stones. The Dark Arisen version of the game also gives you a permanent version of the teleport consumable that was used in the base game, so once you've done the legwork of setting up your fast travel points, you can use them at your leisure. I think Dragon's Dogma 2 does something similar, but I've heard the execution of it is worse. Mot totally sure if that's true, or lots of people got the game not knowing what they were getting into, as all I've seen of it indicates it's a very faithful sequel to the original.
Another solution is making fast travel resource-dependent. Few examples: 1. Costs basic currency to use (so it will be relatively costly at the start and less of an issue when you are further in and swimming in cash). 2. Fast travel points need to be manually activated by expending a rare and finite resource. 3. Fast travel is on some type of cooldown, for example once per in-game day. Might allow exceeding the limit by causing some negative status on the player.
Solasta: Crown of the Magister has an interesting take on fast travel. When you do that from the map, time continues to flow, so if there is a timed event, it may trigger,mor it may be night when you reach your destination. Essentially, it is literally fast travel, the game just accelerates what you could have done manually, with the same outcome.
FO3 does update the game clock with -so called- fast travel, but they don't seem to use it for anything. IIRC it takes three hours to walk from Vault 101 to Rivet City via fast travel. I would not play FO3 or New Vegas if they didn't offer map travel. @9:33 This reflects the mental state of the PC at the time; traveling direct, and paying little or no heed to their surroundings. IMO fast travel should increase the odds of being caught off guard at hostile encounters. @5:01 How does this make any logical sense? (Excepting the case of being overburdened to the point of immobility.) It annoyed the hell out of me that New Vegas prohibited map travel if the PC had crippled legs when that is the situation (above all others) where abstracted map travel is of the most use. No one should have to spend 15-20 minutes watching their PC limp back to Goodsprings to visit the doctor; it's absurd. They should be able to choose Goodsprings on the map, and advance the game clock to however long it took to walk there, and ideally the greater the time taken, the greater the risk of random encounters along the way.
While I agree with your points - Vegas has no map travel. It's got fast travel between discovered locations. Seems what you want is actually overworld travel like og fallout. It's not very popular in 3d games for some reason tho.
@@zhulikkulik "Seems what you want is actually overworld travel like og fallout." Well that's a given, of course. But I did mean discovered location; every PC starts in Goodsprings after all. The contention was that the developers somehow rationalized that not being able to walk fast equates to not being able to use the abstracted fast travel.
My personal favorite flavor of fast travel will always be the Diablo/DnD types where you have spells or scrolls that let you get around, but don't mess with discovery as much. You could always adapt that type of thing for futuristic settings and have it be a peace of tech.
7:00 I remember playing SpiderMan 2018, I turned off questmarkers so I can swing freely without any in-world clutter (only minimap) And when I got to the minimap location. I didn't know if the entrance was on the roof or on the ground. There was not obvious door or entrance for the player. Turning on Questmarker, It was one of 3 doors on the roof that are exactly the same. or it was a unsuspicious roof vent etc.
I wonder if fast travel could be a way to add more random encounters. In a game like Skyrim, you could spawn sitting on the fast travel cart, and have to react to a bandit ambush (before resuming FT by getting back on the cart, or wandering off to explore instead). If the encounter is non-hostile, the player could be prompted whilst still on the map if they want to interact with the trader, refugees, travellers etc. or just press on without loading. Chance of encounter types could be influenced by the locations being traversed through. Travel time could lead to camping at night, unless you took an express travel coach between towns. Maybe you can specify stealth fast travel, which takes much longer (although only relevant/worthwhile if any game systems are time dependent) I've just suggested months of work, but it's something I'd like to see explored 😅
In game travel often feels like work to players instead of productive play time. I solve this in my designs by letting the player earn ways to alleviate this "work" by providing different in world solutions they can aquire. For example they might fight their way up a tower and discover a hang-glider that can whisk them back to town or somewhere else. Perhaps they can pay for a stagecoach or cab to deliver them... paid methods like these also serve as a way to balance your economy, serving as sinks for player money. The player could even purchase a stagecoach and hire a driver for 2-way travel and the ability to load it up with loot. Using these methods saves travel time, but I also place unique crafting materials or helpful resources along the route which the player can't gather if the the route is bypassed, meaning they must either purchase them or go on gathering missions. I believe the issue is best resolved by weaving fast travel into the narritive and systems of the game.
Fast travel (teleportation style) is about the destination. Slower travel styles (walking, riding, non-instant transport) are more about the journey assuming interesting things happen enough along the way for this to be worthwhile.
I far prefer travel systems like Fallout, Arcanum and Morrowind. Often fast travel may as well be a teleport. Even when time passes many games don't do much with the passage of time or day/night cycles. There are a lot of interesting possibilities but they aren't often explored. One game that comes to mind that had an interesting system was Dragon's Dogma. You used an expensive consumable to fast travel (until they patched in an unlimited use item) and could only travel to either the main town or to one of a limited number of stones you could place anywhere in the world.
I do think fsst travel is way overused to a detriment but it is important fot many styles of games as well. Good topic and video. I think Morrowind was peak fast travel design. Those striders are still so iconic and memorable, decades later.
I like it when games make fast travel a service, like in Morrowind or the GTA games. Red Dead 2 does it well also, with the trains and carriages and the camp upgrades
My plan for 2nd or 3rd game is to have both, teleports between sections of map and animated map travel with some short dialogue quips instead of just fast travel everywhere. And because it will be 2D there is no need for a loadscreen anyway. Because fast travel usually means just a loadscreen teleport. Effectively the safe telepoint locations will be there to make you spend less time when traveling to combat locations.
I think the main takeaway from this video for me is: If you don't want a fast travel in your game - you better have a very good reason to not include it
There's a lot of chat about this in regards to RPGs but I think another great example is Death Stranding. Not only is fast travel super restricted, but even walking anywhere is absurdly difficult, and with an extremely limited inventory. The player has to build the actual roads they're going to use themselves! The investment in the area for the player is huge. But also it's kind of what the whole game ends up being about, just like Morrowind was for a lot of people.
The Witcher 3 puts stashes in a number of map locations. For instance, you can drop your items in your stash in White Orchard and pick them up in Novigrad. Personally, I like instant fast travel - it just simplifies things for me. And I"m not screwed if I traveled to the wrong location - which happens more often than I like. (I have a propensity for typos.)
Best fast travel I’ve seen is when it works with the game’s lore or magic system and doesn’t break immersion. Using the zoom spell in Dragon Quest to teleport but hitting your head on the ceiling if inside a dungeon. Using a ferrystone to travel to a portcrystal in Dragon’s Dogma. The portals, a.k.a. gates of travel, in Blasphemous. Or in Blasphemous, Dark Souls, or other games like those, opening up shortcuts to other areas is a great alternative to fast travel that makes the game more immersive and the game world more cohesive. Also, finally obtaining the lord vessel in Dark Souls made fast travel feel more satisfying and well earned because of all that preceded it.
Honestly I really liked the fast travel system in horizon zero dawn, where in the beginning it’s a very limited resource when the places your going are very close together, and as places get further apart, you can craft/purchase more of this resource, and then in the very late game, where the map is huge, you can use very rare resources to either craft better armor, weapons, or get an unlimited fast travel, depending on which you value most
For me, Morrowind did fast travel best by making it completely diegetic. You had Mark and Recall spells that let you go back to one specific spot, Divine Intervention and Almsivi Intervention spells (and scrolls) to teleport to the nearest location that fit that spell, traveling by Silt Strider or Boat, and finally use the teleportation services of the mages' guild to travel between their various guild headquarters. And still, there were some areas that were so remote or dangerous that no one would be able to take you there, and that made perfect sense and still preserved this element of exploration and discovery. You couldn't fast travel to every single tomb/cave/mine/ruin, you had to still walk/levitate/jump your way there from the nearest "safe" location.
Of course, I think the reason Morrowind's system works so well is that it was designed that way, and the explorable map of Vvardenfell is also small enough that you would absolutely be able to walk around without so many issues. Many newer games boast huge areas that you would absolutely get bored exploring because they're kind of empty (no time or budget to make so many POIs), and especially so because quests are designed with fast travel included, assuming the player will fast travel back to the quest giver or fast travel between locations to complete objectives.
Morrowind had so many great ideas that were basically never seen again in games of it's kind.
Diegetic fast travel is the best - its also a really excellent way to reward your players. A new mode or destination is way better than a +1 sword.
Couldn't agree more, Morrowind's "fast travel" wasn't really fast travel, it was travel that you had to put effort into that just wasn't shown as a passage of time, but you still had to learn spells, cast those spells, go to the places to set marks, walk out of the predecided places that interventions took you to, or pay a fee to use the silt striders and mage teleport services. It was, in my opinion, absolutely flawless,. and it baffles me why they butchered this system with the release of Oblivion and onwards.
@@Sevaekorbecause they wanted to sell more games. And as cool as they were as things when you were invested they are an obvious friction that would stop them selling lots of copies. Plus the maps in Oblivion and Skyrim were much bigger. You miss a lot in both, especially Skyrim, in terms of random encounters if you just zip everywhere. They built in a bunch of stuff to encourage you not to fast travel. You miss out on finding new caves, forts, dungeons as well. They aren't quest specific, you just won't find them unless you explore the map.
The thing is you don't actually have to use the fast travel in those games. Either just don't use it, or if you can't resist mod it out. I've played Skyrim a bunch of times where I've set that I can't fast travel and it's a good way to play.
As Tim says there are loads of ways it can be limited. From hardcore like Dragons Dogma 2 where you need a rare resource, to fixed points you have to go to. People will still complain. There's no winning with this.
There were also the Propylon Indexes in the old Dunmeri forts, though few used them due to the difficulty in collecting them all
I really like how Kingdom Come: Deliverance did fast travel. You see your marker on the map and it actually follows roads, time is passing accordingly, and the world is still simulated in general. There was just one issue with it. If you happened to travel during the night through a town, and didn't equip a torch beforehand, you'd get a fine or even a bounty on your head, as roaming town streets at night without a light source was a crime in medieval Bohemia.
omg I also immediately thought of this.
I kind of feel that Kingdom Come: Deliverance has 'faster' travel rather than the fast travel system of other games. Instead of just the screen fading to black and you 'teleport' to your intended location, instead you follow your character across a simulated map as time and events flow accordingly. The fact you can get ambushed and killed does make the experience rather frustrating at times.
Jesus Christ be praised.
Yeah, it always made me think early on in the game, if I really wanted to risk the possibility of getting ambushed by fast traveling. You really made sure you were ready before you clicked that fast travel button
Dark Souls did awesome, you had to get an item midgame that gave you fast travel. Then restricted where you could go with it.
One really interesting case study for Fast Travel is the Fighters Guild in Oblivion. If you try and complete that quest line without fast travelling, it's insane. You have to travel across the map to get the smallest of quest updates only to then have to travel back to the other side of the map to tell an NPC. They clearly had no expectation you would not be fast travelling for that quest line.
I didn’t know oblivion had fast travel until the end of a summer playing it when I accidentally hit the wrong button when trying to place a map marker on chorrol, probably trying to return there after a fighters guild quest. I had to take a walk after that.
just a side thought, maybe they didn't expect you to just b-line the quests. most rpgs before it you'd get a quest as an excuse to go to a place to learn about the place and roleplay in it. I think its more of in incentive to go places and less a demand for the quest reward.
Less people have this mindset nowadays I believe, it's more a matter of "completing everything there is to do" instead of establishing a roleplay preference. @@mikeuniturtle3722
I think they planned for you to do the guild quest line on the side as you're playing the game and finish it as a high level character nearing the end of the game. Unfortunately in Oblivion the world levels up with you, so you can just speedrun the quest line since they can't really pace your progress by putting higher level enemies in your path.
@@mikeuniturtle3722 We're talking about post-oblivion and fallout Bethesda. They totally expected you to fast travel through.
You make a good counter point though.
I think my favorite method of fast travel is one similar to the last one you mentioned. In Fallout 4, Survival Mode disables fast travel. However, I am a loot goblin at heart and especially so when scavenging for stuff to build bases. Someone created a mod that allows fast travel in Survival Mode, but only when you're at a Settlement you've set up _and_ between settlements that have a caravan. So you have to real travel to every location, but once you get back to one settlement you can go to any other. It was a very immersive experience and it made me engage with the settlement system in a way I hadn't in my previous playthroughs. It gave me reason to find and build settlements, and make sure they were secure enough that I could invite settlers who would then become the caravaneers. The excitement of tracing my route back to the settlement I started my scavenging run from, couldn't be matched.
With the robot-building DLC I built each caravan with a heavily armored sentry bot so I could headcanon that they were equal parts caravan and security patrol, further justifying why I could safely "look away" as it were from traveling.
One of my favorite theoretical solutions is that objects other than the player can fast travel. In this case, it would be you drop off your horde at an outpost, and NPCs caravan it to town to sell it for you. Or in a magical fantasy setting you can teleport nonliving items around at town stations (bank, send a broken household sword to your smith at home to repair, etc). But the player has to walk to go places.
Making robots into Caravaners was one of my favorite aspects of that dlc. I miss fo4, but not enough to install it again after all if the playthroughs I did.
As a fellow loot goblin, I'm a big fan of travel by vertibird, as well as using vault 88 as a home base. Its several entrances make it relatively easy to get to, as long as you're kind of close to one of them.
One underrated element of fast travel is it gives you a sort of ripcord that actually can encourage going off the beaten path. You can go off down some odd road and explore it deeply, follow some interesting weird thing you spotted, and even if it wasn't anything important, you aren't then trudging back down an empty road. Even if it was some neat secret, you can more confidently pursue something in a weird cranny because you know you can then extricate yourself with a teleport.
Fallout and Arcanum have my favorite form of overworld travel, it still allows the world to have scale, but removes most of the tedium of walking through an open plain for 20 minutes straight, that's just my opinion obviously.
And the Wasteland-games 😊
I always most enjoyed fast travel in Morrowind. Silt Striders, boats, Mages Guild offer different routes, connecting different cities and have monetary cost.
This way sometimes it could be like public transportation with transits between lines.
Also fun intervention magic of teleports to closest temple (not any of your choice). And Mark/Recall to be able to teleport to single previously marked location. And if you were not a mage, you'd most likely rely on scrolls, which aren't free and not readily available in large amounts.
@@Vasenkov yeah Morrowind fast travel felt like taking a train, versus just teleporting in Witcher 3. Granted teleportin just saves so much time, it's hard to say no.
@@FathDaniel witcher 3 has teleporting?
@@chaserseven2886 walk to signpost and you get teleported to any other signpost. Same with boats and harbor signs. They are quite common.
Maybe the wording confused you? It's not opening a teleport, but it's like a teleport compared to Morrowind.
I think another positive with Morrowind's fast travel is that, as you touched on with the public transport comparison, the routes are fixed. Like you can't just go to a silt strider station and travel to any other fast travel point on the map, you can only travel to the next stop on the route. And the reason I say this is a positive is because it actually involves some mental engagement on part of the player, you need to plan your route out in advance, and your reward for learning these routes is that you become more efficient at travelling. Morrowind basically takes fast travel and turns it into a learnable skill.
I also liked the Morrowind Systems, especially that it was so broken up. I had set my Recall position so that i could either use the Propylon Chambers of the fortresses or use an Intervention Spell to get to a Temple close to a Mages Guild this way you could zoom around the map pretty quickly but it felt earned because you had to jump through a lot of hoops to make the connections possible. Also you mostly could only travel to centers of civilisation and had to explore the wilds by walking there. I believe that making quality of life features something that can be earned by gameplay way better then getting a slightly better weapon as a quest reward.
One of the issues with fast travel is when it's not diegetic and the game is designed with that in mind
Try doing the main quest in Skyrim without fast travel - the section before you go to sovngarde is you walking to the throat of the world, then to whiterun, then back to the throat, then back to whiterun. Those two locations are close to each other *on the map*, but take like... I don't know, 30 minutes? an hour? of walking between the two each time. Which would be fine if you were actually walking to new places and had a chance of seeing new stuff, and not just pingponging between the two
Also the lack of traveling skills. No more athletics or acrobatics, no Jump spell, no levitation, no nothin.
A late-game Morrowind character is going to zip and zoom past huge distances without any issues, that game really makes you feel like a demi-god with simply moving from point A to point B. Hate how they removed all of that.
@@LordZylokBut then those skills/spells/stats become essentially necessary, even if you're not roleplaying a character where it makes sense to pick them.
Skyrim is the poster of a game designed around both fast travel and quest markers. Quests don't have any detail of where expecting you to follow the marker. Quests were also designed with fast travel in mind. Someone will tell you they were out one afternoon and dropped something, and that place is a 5 days walk from where they live. Like you were out one afternoon on the other side of the country.... sure. In my thousands of hours of skyrim I've not used fast travel for most of them, but you can really see how they designed the game under the assumption you would be fast traveling and there is little thought put into locality of quests.
It also makes a nonsense of the games' storylines, if you stop to think about what's happening. Sure, from the player's perspective, it might only be a few minutes spent clicking through a menu. But the player-character actually has to travel that distance, on foot or on horse. And while time and space in these games is compressed, in-universe there are supposed to be hundreds of miles between the major cities.
But NPCs will just casually tell you to walk the entire breadth of the country, just to have a 5-sentence conversation with another NPC, who then tells you to walk all the way back. This would, in any real scenario, take weeks if not months of travel-time. In Oblivion, there's supposed to be an apocalypse underway. In Skyrim, there's supposed to be an apocalypse, AND a civil war underway. You'd think the NPCs would want to make more efficient use of the player-character's time, but nope!
@@PedroGomes-cx7ku Maybe I'm just very patient, but back when I played Morrowind for the first time, I went with an exclusively melee build (i.e. I refused to touch magic) and can't remember having any trouble traveling around. The fact that there are NPCs that will essentially let you fast travel around pretty much gets rid of the issue.
I absolutely love how Fallout 4's Survival Mode handled fast travel. Non-diegetic fast travel is disabled entirely, so you have to travel entirely manually and are at the mercy of random encounters early on, but after the ends of Acts 1 and 2, you can unlock new quasi-fast travel options as you gain membership in the various main factions. The two methods of fast travel are limited, (and the more robust of the two has a monetary and time cost,) so travel on foot is still necessary, but you no longer have to jog across the entire map to dump your loot at home.
And of course, once you're in Act 3, you must commit to aligning yourself with one of the factions, and you have to give up at least one means of fast travel depending on which one you pick.
The railroad can also allow travel via vertibird.
That's what I wanted to write as well. Fallout 4's Survival Mode disabled traditional fast travel and because of that each venture into the wasteland was an adventure. Random encounters, limited supplies. I had to plan my trips, take what I needed, leave space for new loot. This way of playing was much more immersive then the standard mode.
And after I joined the Brotherhood I could call for a Vertibird taxi :)
@@vast634 As can the Minutemen! The ending really just comes down to the Institute winning or being destroyed, and way that impacts fast travel is either keeping the teleporter or keeping vertibirds, respectively.
I looked it up, and was disappointed to find out that even if you convince the Minutemen to align with the Institute and continue down that path, they just don't get a working vertibird.
I like the Dragon's Dogma fast travel system. You can teleprompter around by using consumables called ferry ferrystones, but they're relatively hard to come by. (unless you but them from vendors which are really expensive.) Also you can only fast travel to port crystals which are items you can place anywhere in the world, but there's only a limited amount you can place. Also there are carts that allow you to essentially fast travel from certain towns that you'll frequently see on the roads, and time actually passes when you fast travel with them.
Yea DD2 had the perfect balance imo.
It left it entirely up to the player, and the more you played the game, the more accessible it was.
FWIW, I usually don't like fast travel but end up using it out of necessity. To me, when I'm playing a game that has quests making me bounce between locations back and forth, it feels designed with fast travel in mind. I like games where the major hubs for the most part have local quests that don't rely on going to other hubs. STALKER games are like this, and going to another hub feels like a real trek that you have to get ready for.
The Wasteland 2 and 3 games have overworld travel that really feels like modernized classic Fallout. I like that vendors in WL3 pop up on the overworld with an option to interact without the additional step of pulling you out of the overworld
Fast travel is quite a weird thing... on one hand you want to have the player organically traverse the world without teleporting around, on the other hand going the same route without anything going on is boring. There are solutions to that, but it is important to recognize this as a problem that needs solving.
1. It is only usable in certain situations, certain places (from and to). Like a portal network. Not usable from anywhere, not to anywhere.
2. It has to be unlocked by more effort just having been there. Quests? Something similar to crafting? Or tied to attributes?
3. Add (random) encounters when traveling on the same roads.
4. Make these paths change somehow. Or repopulate areas which have been cleared by the player, but not by simply having everything respawn 1:1.
5. Give it a cooldown or resource cost. Money or some kind of fuel.
6. When fast traveling, have a chance that something challenging happens and gets interrupted. Maybe the chance increases every time the player fast travels until it happens and resets.
7. It provides some negative effect, like being weaker temporarily. Weary from traveling through dull places.
8. Classic WoW has one solution: No teleport, instead flying or traveling by ship. It takes time and costs money. Not the most elegant solution, but still one.
The big problem really is making regular traversal rewarding. Random encounters are difficult to make rewarding once the players has, erm, encountered each one. This is skippable content that doesn't sell games like bosses do, so it's difficult to justify dev effort and budget for an appropriately large variety. It is also difficult to tune rewards: if the reward is kept small, random encounters become less and less worth the time to play through them as the player progresses in power/wealth (and what's worse, at the same time as the player exhausts novel encounter content), but if you scale rewards you get power and wealth inflation that creates much bigger problems.
The vertibird fast travel mechanic in fallout 4 survival has some upsides:
1 - it's locked behind a faction quest halfway through the game, so the first few areas have to be done without it
2 - it takes time for the vertibird to land at you, and time to fly you to your destination, such that it's only beneficial when travelling half the map or more
3 - it's slightly risky - you can be shot out of the sky by some enemies, but you can avoid that by choosing safer routes if you know where those enemies are, or be so well armoured and buffed that you can survive a hit anyway
4 - an in game reason why you can't do it out of interiors as vertibirds can't go through walls
5 - as the vertibird travels, I don't need to be at the keyboard for a minute, so I can get up and stretch my legs without stopping the game
Why do I not remember this in Fallout 4?
@@jsullivan2112 If you played on Very Hard or easier, then the actual ingame fast travel makes these worthless
Or if you played on survival before the new survival mode
@ Oh it's survival mode.
An interesting alternative for open RPGs would be something more like "automated travel" where if you're on a path you can travel along the path/road with zero input and an increased time scale modifier. Interestingly you can mod Daggerfall Unity to behave like this, and while its very rough around the edges it captures the feeling of traveling quite well, where you have to look at your map and think "oh so I've got to take a left at the next fork and then a right and that will take me to the town". This method also allows for the cool stuff like seeing places of interest and stopping to check them out as well as random encounters etc.
I kinda like the way Morrowind did fast travel. Taxi system via the silt striders. Gotta pay a little to travel but it makes repeat playthroughs easier when you know where the locations you can fast travel to are.
To this day I like the travel system of Fallout the best. You get a sense of time AND distance traveled. As a side effect you really planned your routes instead of just clicking every place, because the order doesn't really matter. Also in Fallout I always had this feeling you get with road movies. I wish more games still had this system (or maybe a similar one, maybe even an improved one) implemented instead of clicking on the map somewhere, then waiting through a loading screen and appearing magically as if nothing happened in the meantime. Make the journey an adventure... set up a camp to rest with a campfire and everything. There was a superb mod for Skyrim where you had to do exactly that... even collecting fire wood and warming up at the fire, etc. That was so awesome, it changed the whole game for me and I never fast traveled with that mod at all. But maybe that's just me...
My favourite fast travel system is in Morrowind. "Fast travel" baked into the world with specific routes, mechanics, costs, etc i like.
I love baked in world fast travel. Silt striders connect several land routes. Boats connect several ports. Mages guild lets you teleport between other mages guilds. Propylon indexes let you teleport between these ancient dunmner strongholds. Some cost gold some are free/rewarded.
When I played Dying Light (which doesn't have fast travel) I noticed that I paid a lot more attention to my environment. It felt neat to get to know the city really well and being able to navigate it efficiently using landmarks.
I played Fallout 4 around the same time. After having played Dyling LIght I also started to notice how fragmented the world felt when you constantly jump from location to location. I noticed I never got nearly as familiar with the Fallout 4 world as I did with the Dying Light world despite playing Fallout 4 a lot more.
My favorite iteration of fast travel is in Old School RuneScape. Starting out everyone has the ability to teleport back to the beginning town and that's it. You have to explore the world, do quests, level up your magic before you get access to teleports. Until then you can pay boats to charter you to port cities or level up your Woodcutting to make a canoe to travel up and down rivers. Once you build up some coin by playing the game you can get items with limited teleports to certain areas, or build up your levels to the point where you can do a quest that unlocks unlimited travel between select points throughout the world but it's a fairly high level quest.
The point is that there's no real way a new, inexperienced player is going to be able to just zip around the map doing whatever they want right off the bat. You have to work for it.
I really like how Daggerfall did it. Quests were timed, so the travel time *really* matters. That travel time could be reduced by getting a horse or hiring a boat if you needed to go really far, paying extra. That's especially cool, since money has weight in Daggerfall and you can't just tell the boat guy or a tavern keep to take it from your savings. You need to account travel costs into what you bring. You can also speed it up by resting less in between stops, but then you'll show up without your health, stamina and mana regenerated and will either need to rest a few hours in front of the dungeon, where enemies can interrupt that rest before you're fully rested, killing you, or try to take on the dungeon with reduced health. For the return journey, you'll usually have money from the dungeon you raided, but if you got hit a lot and your medicine skill isn't very high, you might've spent too much time in the dungeon and now you don't have time to get back before the quest expires, an issue you can circumvent if you get teleportation spells, giving you more time to do your quests. You also might not have any coin because you dropped 6k to make room for that cool sword worth 16k. All makes fast travel a lot more interesting than just clicking a location and you're there, with no downsides, something I'd like to see more RPGs try to do.
Kingdom Come Deliverance is an example of one of my favorite fast travel systems. it has similar random encounters to fallout 1 and 2. and you don't fast travel in straight line. you are auto pathed onto a road. meaning anything inbetween you have to go there yourself.
Tim, you are great! Thank you for keeping up with all of these wonderful videos over the past year and a half! As someone with a lifelong passion for designing and building games, thank you for sharing your knowledge, experience, and opinions! Truly you are appreciated.
I had a problem with Skyrim with how fast travel works. I thought what if you would pay a dragon soul to teleport, which makes sense. I downloaded a mod as someone else thought this and now makes fast traveling to whiterun or unlocking a shout an easy choice. But it’s very nice when I need to go to solitude and riften.
I personally enjoyed the Psijic Teleport mod, which gives you some more immersive options. At Alteration 100, you could learn a spell that let you teleport to pre-set or custom markers, and charges a very high Magicka cost based on the distance. Of course, that was only accessible to magic-style players, but it was still a lot of fun.
Kingdom Come Deliverance hardcore mode was absolutely perfect, especially with quest markers. In hardcore mode, you don't know where your character is on your in-game map, and you have to rely on the time of day (location of the sun) to find North and local points of interest to figure out where you are. However, when you're like 15-20 meters from your objective, the quest marker pops up just because that's when you really need it the most. Finding an NPC who might be at their job during the day or at their house sleeping at night. Or some obscure book or item you need to find in a world where that might otherwise be impossible and frustrating. It's the best of both: immersion while traveling, and quality of life and time saving once you're there.
damn didn't know that even the map features change so dramatically if you're playing on a higher difficulty. Imagine the amount of work that took. Most people won't even play on those difficulties so wouldn't even know about them (myself included, but now I'm gonna play it again on hardcore mode just for this). Props to the devs, they're awesome.
@ hardcore mode in the beginning is insanely hard because you have a moment where you have to race to another town before you bleed out, so you kind of need to know the overall map and you don’t have quest markers to guide you. But its probably the most immersive gaming experience I can recommend.
It was a sweet addition to the immersion to navigate without a GPS mode. Not sure how hard it would have been without first completing the game with GPS on. I'll try in the sequel :D
6:30 in my opinion this is more about the dissonance between wanting to play optimally and wanting a challenge. It's hard to pose limitations on yourself that go against best decision making practices, so it would be better to have a difficulty setting where quest markers are automatically turned off than having the player do so manually
i like the fast travel in Kingdom Come Deliverance, where it takes you to the world map and you follow your character's journey. Along the way you are more likely to encounter random events that range from travellers on the road, bandits. you also get a % choice to ignore it which the percentage is based on your skills and the difficulty of the encounter. say 4 bandits in full plate armour which at the start of the game is quite difficult even for experienced players. this incentivises player exploration as a new player is likely to want to try fast travelling and will very likely end up sprinting through the woods as fast as they can getting themselves lost. There are also only a few fast travel points across the map which are all towns or settlements in key areas so journeys have to be planned properly, you may not be able to do something at the closest fast travel point to your quest so you gotta make sure you're ready to go before you go. Which i think is neat.
One of my favourite games, if anyone hasn't tried it i couldn't recommend it more
I like Arcanums as well. But not Witcher 3 which has hilariously boring points of interest. No story at those exclamation points!!
Completely agree.
I also like RDR2, were you have trains and stagecoaches that travel to fixed points (it's a bit watered down by upgrading the map so you can travel from campsite to previously visited areas, but still)
I also have a very fond memory of a RPG series from the 90s (German games that were probably not very popular anywhere else)
Similar to fallout you traveled through an overland map, but only on set paths. But it added survival stuff too, like you had to eat and drink. Every night you had to camp, set watch or you increased the chance of dangerous encounters, could send someone out to hunt and find water and someone looking for herbs. Also the characters could get ill and then needed said medicine to cure.
On my first try, without any knowledge on RPGs I had one of the best experiences ever.
My group traveled down south, exploring the map. First through green woods, then up the mountains, slowly rations got low, game got scarcer, weather changed and it got winter. So my group traveled through high mountain in early winter, only wearing summer gear, no food and the first characters got a cold when the thin shoes of the first character broke due to wear.
So the party was basically lost out in the mountains, days or weeks away from the next city, freezing, starving, sick, in summer gear with broken or nearly broken shoes. Trodding over rocky paths, slowly moving forward without much hope when a dialog popped up "on the right you see a path, you want to follow?", sure what ever... And a short walk later "you found the entrance to a hidden dwarven City, want to enter?"
I think I never ever after had such a joy finding a place in a game since then 😂
@@Glimmlampe1982 Mind sharing the name of the German RPG series?
@paulie-g that's "Das Schwarze Auge" I think in english it's "the dark eye"
@@Glimmlampe1982 Cheers, didn't realise it was a tabletop RPG, that's probably why I haven't heard of it. Looks interesting.
Metaphor did it strait makingnit litteral teleportation, but limited only to going to major cities. You still took three days to reach a dungeon, but can go back in time for dinner at the inn you're staying at.
Combined with strict time limits (pretty much constantly you gotta get your stuff done in 10days or something), I think it works out well and is even plot relevant.
4:32 Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous both have fast travel systems; though the one in Kingmaker is more of a mid-late game thing. Both of them place restrictions on fast travel that I think work quite well, though.
In both games, fast travel is tied in to the games kingdom building/campaign management layer, with teleportation circles being buildable at any player owned settlement.This means that there are a limited number of locations where you can built a teleportation circle, and the player must have established control over said location in order for it to be built. Building a teleportation circle also uses up a valuable building slot; meaning that there is a permanent opportunity cost along with the resource cost of actually building the teleporter.
Both games actually have mechanical reasons for the player to fast travel as well. Traveling will tire your party out, requiring that you make camp to rest. This presents a challenge for the player, because both games have add a cost to resting outside of a safe area. Kingmaker has camping supplies whereas Wrath has its abyssal corruption system, with the players party taking increasingly severe debuffs over time as they rest until they do so in a safe area. In Kingmaker especially, teleportation is actually a pretty pivotal upgrade- given how much emphases Kingmaker places on time management. In Wrath of the Righteous, a player controlled fort can even be lost in the campaign layer if it is taken by the enemy, meaning that if the player neglects crusade management their ability to fast travel to a certain location might wind up being cut off entirely until it is re-taken.
Over all I really like the way the Pathfinder CRPG's handle travel in general, fast travel included.
Interesting discussion! I am reminded why I like the way Dragon Age Origins handles it. When you're traveling, there are often encounters along the way that can be dealt with in multiple ways. It keeps things fresh and a bit unpredictable.
I guess fast travel works if it's done thoughtfully and not in a way that's just glorified teleportation. Imagine if you chose a Mage Class in an RPG, and you could unlock a perk that enabled you to teleport to towns and cities. That'd be cool!
4:30 Depends on which Pathfinder you played. Wrath of the Righteous has a teleporting system that allows you to go back to base instantly.
I liked the way fast travel was handled in Dark Souls 1, where a) you only unlocked fast travel quite late in the game, after you had already explored most of the world on foot, and b) you could only travel from a bonfire to another bonfire you'd previously visited.
This solves a number of problems with fast travel, while still giving its main advantage of not having to trek back and forth across the whole map once you've already explored everything.
Another nice system was the teleport stones from Gothic, where you could only teleport to a location after you found its teleport stone item, which were usually in a place that you had to have explored the surrounding area quite thoroughly to reach, or as a reward for a late quest in that area.
DS1 also took the time to lay out a world with lots of shortcuts and alternate routes to make travel easier before you get to teleport between bonfires.
I start every game thinking “I’m not going to use the fast travel. It breaks immersion.” And then about halfway through the game, I’ll get tired of walking around everywhere and want to get to the next thing. I appreciate it when developers give me enough to make it feel like the fast travel is reasonable because otherwise I’ll start using it and complain about how it breaks immersion.
Hey man, at least you're honest! I'm the same way! I usually have to mod it out to remove the temptation which is so weird because some of my best memories in gaming aren't from big quests or boss fights, but the unplanned in-between.
For me personally, the desire to rely on fast travel is often a symptom of a boring world.
nothing breaks immersion more than boredom and uninstalling a game tho. as time gets more precious this feeling grows, now if fast travel and manual saves don't exist I'll just bail on a game.
Very interesting, I haven’t developed a full opinion worth sharing yet but I want to show support, I like these talk videos Tim
I think that Dragon's Dogma approached fast travel in an interesting way that I haven't seen in any other game. In Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen fast travel is essentially teleportation that requires the use of a consumable item that is incredibly rare and prohibitively expensive to buy (in Dark Arisen you're given an eternal ferrystone that you can use infinitely and completely bypass the price on fast travel but it is completely optional). The fast travel implementation is also fun cus it is diegetic. Sure you throw a stone up in the air that opens a literal portal that teleports you to where you wanna go but it's not just a menu option that you click, which is how it is in a lot of games that allow fast travel.
Also the game has another cool fast travel mechanic. Normally there are permanent fast travel points inside towns. But you can also literally create and move your own fast travel point!!! You have items called Port Crystals that you can store in your inventory (again they are incredibly rare and also heavy so it's hard to carry around) and then place them anywhere you want which allows you to fast travel to that place. This is really fun and useful because say you're doing a quest where it tells you to get a specific item but either you've stored it in a chest in town or the item is only available somewhere far away; well you can just place a port crystal and then you can instantly teleport back to the quest location after you got your item.
I used this to cheese some NPC quests where they'd tell you to guide them to a specific place. I would find out where they wanted to go and then go there before initiating the quest to put a port crystal there. Then I would initiate the quest and instantly teleport to that port crystal. Since the NPC is added to your party when the quest starts they would also be teleported with you. And viola.. I've instantly completed the quest without having to protect this stupid weakling through poison infested swamps.
I personally don't think the exorbitant price and scarcity placed on fast travel in Dragon's Dogma 1 is worth it because the game is incredibly dull to travel in, so anything that forces you to travel more is just gonna be annoying and worse, tedious. The game lives by it's combat not it's exploration so it was prolly a good decision to create a fast travel item with infinite charges to bypass it. But the ideas employed in it are stellar and could fit another game.
Ooooh I just thought of another one - Kingdom Come : Deliverance. You can just open a map and click on a place and you'll go there but it's not teleportation. Fast travel in KCD just removes player agency. What I mean by that is that if you want to go to a place that you've already been to but you don't want to sit and guide your player character to that place then KCD's fast travel has you covered. When you start fast travelling in KCD, the character sprite on the map starts moving towards the destination by following the paths laid out on the map. So the game guides the player character to the destination instead of the player. Now this is a very important distinction because everything that exists between your starting and ending points will still affect you as they will pop up as encounters and will force you to engage with it.
An example - In the city of Rattay (second town) there's a rule that you have to have a torch up when you're travelling inside the town at night (people who travel without torches are usually up to no good). Of course I didn't know this the first time I played the game. So around nightime I decided to go back to my bed outside of town and opted to fast travel to it. While my player sprite on the map was moving suddenly a message popped up and forced me into the game. Turns out it's a guard who has caught me travelling without a torch and is angry at me.
I cannot express to you how amazed I was by this. It was soo cool. Stuff like this happens all the time in KCD if you fast travel. If there are bandits on the way then they will aggro you even if you're fast travelling and cut it short by throwing you into a shakedown or, eventual, fight.
TIL a new word that I'd been grasping at for years. Cheers!
I'm not a game dev nor do I aspire to be one but I love watching these videos. They're super interesting to me!
Thank you for the video.
A cool feature for a game with encumbrance system would be muscle for hire. You employ porters or scavengers who go into a place after you are done with it and they collect loot. You have to pay them. Then it gives you new quest opportunities. For example you notice they did not pick up some items you go to confront them and it turns out they were selling stuff on the side. They went behind your back and now you have a conpelling way to tie them into the game world. You can hire different people who are more trust worthy or investigate why they went behind your back. Maybe the scavengers discovered a secret passage that was unexplored before and you have a reason to go back. Maybe some of them got stuck underground and you have to rescue them or the items they looted.
I'd say fixed/predetermined fast travel locations are the best way to do it. With those you can have the fun of needing to plan your journeys, while still not forced to walk wast distances all the time. And when you want to have specific areas of the map appear remote and desolate, having them afar from fast travel locations greatly helps to create that atmosphere. I think it's a massive disservice to a game to strip it from the ability to make you sometimes feel a bit lost in the wilderness.
I think the biggest issue I have with fast travel (in its most common application) is that it encourages a complete detachment from the world you're meant to be inhabiting. People have already said about the cases I like that come to mind, being Morrowind and Dragon's Dogma, which essentially use diegetic taxi systems between specific settlements. In both of those games, traversal and exploration of the world are their cores, and both are designed in such a way to expect players to be following roads, directions and/or signage. As others have said, quests in Skyrim and Oblivion were clearly designed with use of the fast travel system in mind, requiring repeated movement between very distant spots for brief, menial tasks, and I feel like the experience there ends up being a highlight reel of an adventure as opposed to a feeling of being somewhere. Figuring out directions and spatial relativity is really satisfying when spaces are designed to encourage that, and it's a shame that so many players expect an unreasonably densely populated world that they'll be skimming over like a throwaway magazine regardless.
An companion piece would be how to make on foot travel exciting for players. Fast travel i think is a symptom of walking/journey feeling boring to do in most games.
I like how every time Tim mentions the Cave of Despair, I cannot help but think of the journey to the Isle of Despair in Arcanum. And one cannot simply travel the Isle of Despair, or teleport to or from there.
I remember STALKER (clear sky?) had a really good fast travel system in the form of 'guides' who you could hire to take you places. I always prefer immersive options like that as they can add to the vibe of the game as well as acting like a money sink.
The Bethesda style 'instant teleport anywhere with no drawbacks' has always felt like it sucks the fun out of the game a bit for all the reasons Tim covers in the video. It's like playing with an infinite ammo cheat on or something.
I played WoW back in the initial release and going forward with my kids, before the quest markers. I would read the quests with them and we'd go together to find these locations. That was both fun, and encouraged them to read and navigate.
I recall Barrens chat being full of people asking where to find Mankrik's wife.
Your suggestion on how to do fast travel only from towns is how STALKER 2 does it. In every town/settlement/safezone there are guide-people which will guide you to other towns which have also have guides, but you have to talk to these guides to fast travel, so no running to another point of interest and then fast traveling back to town.
I found it added to the gritty brutal atmosphere and it forced me to explore a lot more than I likely would have, although it also led to some frustrating experiences. For example, because of choices I made in the story I lost access to a certain guide in a town next to a quest marker I had to do, leading to me having to run about 3.5km in game from the nearest town with a guide (most other runs were 700m-1.5km), to the objective, and then back to the town. The quest placement was in a corner of the map I had already explored for another branch of the story, so I already knew the route to take and all the points of interest or danger, which made it quite a boring trek.
Perhaps it falls more on the map-design or quest placement in the world than fast traveling, but its just something I thought of when you mentioned that example.
I personally like when there are caravans or dedicated traveling wagons where you can spend gold (currency) to go to major cities, in Skyrim you can pay some guys that sit in wagons just outside the major cities to go to other major cities, but not all travellers can take you to every city, they take you to nearby cities.
So if you want to travel across the map, you have to take one trip to a city on the center of the map, and then another to the other side.
The first time I played skyrim, I did not know fast travel was an option, so I played without, and without the horse carriages, and without horses because I don't like mounted gameplay.
It was fantastic! Really fun... until inventory weight management came into play a bit too hard with dragon bones. I ran with a mod to disable the weight for those, and it was fantastic once more.
I like how Gothic 2 did their fast travel. Starting at the halfway point into the game, you'd get runes to specific important hubs, but still rarely. Oh, and the only maps in the game were hand-drawn maps bought from a trader, so you had to look for landmarks for orientation. I wish that was more common in RPGs.
Hey Tim, its me! I personally think of fast travel as both a QOL and a necessary feature. This doesnt apply to every game as you rightfully mentioned that "risky travels" could be part of the gameplay. I however think about it like this: everything a player can easily do but the only thing is costs is time, its okay to let them skip it
while not a crpg, s.t.a.l.k.e.r. not having fast travel only immersed me more into the game, having planning my trips, thinking about routes i take, i know i'd totally miss out on that feeling if it had a fast travel system
Then don't use fast travel if you don't want to, lol.
Best implemented way of fast travel that felt organic was made back in 90s in Might and Magic 6 7 and 8 . You can "fast travel " only if you go to stable house and pay fee to travel to another city that have stable house. that could be possible only in major cities . That was best option as game encourage you to explore map and not just fast travel from any small location to another.
I'm building a TTRPG and how you described handling fast-travel is more-or-less how I'm doing it.
The GM makes Nodes in the world-map and the players have to get there and activate the fast-travel node for it to work, then you can only fast-travel between nodes. The idea is that it helps you explore deeper and deeper into the wilderness, but you don't get to "skip" and time still matters.
Hi Tim,
I’m an arcade game developer and currently manage my own cabinet at the bar where I work, showcasing a game I created. I’ve always appreciated your thoughtful insights and off-the-cuff commentary on game design and the industry. It got me wondering-did you spend much time with arcade games in your youth? Did any of those experiences shape your approach to game design over the years?
I sometimes feel like your generation played a role in the shift from the social fun of arcades to the rise of immersive single-player experiences with deeper emotional resonance. Fallout, for example, represents that shift brilliantly. I’d love to hear your thoughts on whether arcade-style games influenced your early design choices, or if you think the industry’s move toward more narrative-driven games was inevitable.
Either way, thank you for your weekly insights and the thoughtful way you share your knowledge. It’s a joy to listen to someone with such a rich understanding of game development and history.
Running your own arcade cab with your own game is a fantastic achievement, and one that I wouldn't have thought practical in 2024. Kudos to you, sir. Hope it has gone well?
I find your reasoning on why fast travel diminishes a game so compelling. I will disable fast travel for my next FNV playthrough. Who knows, I might find something new. Thank you so much Tim.
I've had this random musing about adding detail to a fast travel system to the point it becomes a mini-game. Take Fallout or Arcanum style fast travel and increase the complexity until there is a proto game loop there. Then use it as a complimentary game loop to the main RPG, X-com style, Explore towns and dungeons to get stuff to help you travel to find new towns and dungeons...
I like how it's done in underrail. There are trains going between cities as well as rifts which add more locations you can travel to.
It's so fun when fast travel becomes a mini game within the game itself
I've actually hoped for a new game that used the Fallout 1 travel system.
I remember playing Fallout 1 and 2 as a kid and travelling was so exciting and suspenseful.
Traveling back from a huge fight with 1 HP and no stimpacks, hoping you can reach a town and sell all your loot without encounters.
But it didn't take that much time either. I never even thought Fallout didn't have fast travel. Just a *better* one.
Fast travel PLUS!
I really loved the fast travel in Cyberpunk 2077. There were terminals all over, as well as the Metro system, that could take you anywhere if you went and used them. But often when you determined your route to where you wanted to go, there wasn't really one that close, that I would decide to just drive to my destination anyway. Just that little bit of extra friction of having to find a nearby terminal prevented me from just fast traveling whenever I want to move any decent distance at all, to only when I have to go somewhere really far.
My favorite style of fast travel is when it makes in-game sense, like the institute teleporter and vertibirds in fallout 4. You have to unlock them and can lose access to them, and with the vertibirds you get to look out and see things you might want to shoot at/ stop for
I think it can be useful to take a step back and look at what problem(s) fast travel is trying to solve. One common reason games "need" fast travel is how often the player wants/needs to travel around the world for quests or services. So you could ease up on the importance of fast travel by reducing how much the player might want to just bounce around the map (i.e. maybe avoid a quest where you go from Town A to Town C, talk to someone for a second, then return to Town A to talk to someone else).
Honestly the best system i've seen so far for fast travel is in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games. There you can fast travel between towns and landmarks, but not by yourself. You pay an npc called a guide to "guide" you to a town or landmark, doesnt matter if you've been to the town or landmark or if you're encumbered. The price of the trip usually depends on distance.
In terms of fast travel I much prefer if it's inherently a part of the in game world, such as cart travel or using some sort of bus or taxi or whatever, as long as doing so isn't incredibly tedious. But I really love having an overworld map where you can simulate your party traveling and have randomised encounters that work like they do in fallout 1/2, where you have the areas where certain random encounters can trigger, so they're a little bit randomised in terms of location but still localised around specific places in the world map.
One thing on status effects, back in Daggerfall (which had a very early implementation of fast travel without random encounters) the game would inform you if you'd been infected with a disease or were poisoned if you tried to travel and that there was a possibility of your character dying if you went ahead anyway, which was pretty neat, although it could lead to some frustrations if you had to load a save before you caught a disease/were poisoned if you didn't have the means to cure yourself.
I love the town only fast travel because it solves the problem I have as a player. I don't wanna waste time doing "nothing". while clicking just to move to a location might be an actual nothing of an interaction, it saves me so much time. If i interact with a menu for 3 seconds to get to a place I've already been instead of a 3-minute journey I feel as though I've gained time somehow. It's truly crazy how games are just magic in how they present actions done in the world created by designers.
TES3, I remember this one quest in NW Vvardenfell, where it was ashy, smokey, and dark...And the directions were given generally in the dialogue. The first time, I spent a few hours looking for it and found multiple other places I had never been to.
In future playthroughs, I also had trouble finding it. It was partly going around in the dark and partly the ash weather. But, though I wanted to go to that objective, and it would be something like a waste of time in many cases today, even if it were new to me, there is a uniqueness to that experience which is immortal to me. I trecked through ash weather up and down hills and ravines to find that cave. I entered that secluded cave. I acquired the item(ceremonial bow from a tomb?). I completed that quest. There was no help.
Also, I rested outside wearing a special robe with Sun Damage on it...And I rested too long into the day, so I was insta-killed.
TES5, they had the wagon fast travel outside the city, and you could use it to go to a city you had not been to before(thus could not normally fast travel to).
I think mounts, vehicles, and powers are the best way to resolve fast travel, especially in multiplayer. This makes them world game mechanics instead of meta game mechanics.
Your idea was used in Far Cry 2 where you could only fast travel to bus stations. It still meant you had some challenging enemies to go round/fight. Interesting vid thanks
Far Cry 6 had awesome fast travel.
Lol the infamous respawning enemy checkpoints.
Dragon's Dogma has an interesting fast travel system where you can manually place the markers anywhere in the world. Then you had to use a item that teleports you to that location. I thought it was cool to have players place them where they thought they would frequent more often. DD2 introduced fast travel via cart, but only from certain villages and the main cities. Other than that, you're on your own two feet.
I would love if a diegetic fast travel system in an RPG was locked behind the technology or magic of a specific faction and you had to find some way to steal it if you wanted access as a different faction.
I personally love the idea of fast travel being an in-game ability of some sort, like casting a spell and using mana etc to transport yourself to a different location. And maybe you have to perform some kind of ritual or cast a spell to make a place sensitive to the magic so you can get there with the fast travel teleport.
This makes it more of a choice to use it, since it would take s lot of resources etc.
Generally speaking I love it when games make their mechanics a part of the world, instead of just having video game logic that you have to swallow.
I guess it also is the necessary tool to deal with "world bloat".
If it takes 3 hours to hike across the map, and there is a ton of running back and forth due to for example fetch quests, the double padding (too big a map to keep it tight and the "filler quests") makes a game extremely time consuming, to a degree where hiking doesn't feel fulfilling anymore. So, if there is enough interesting going in in the world, the player will be less inclined to fast travel, or, if the design is tight, so one doesn't have to travel great distances all the time, the occasional long hike will be a fulfilling part of the story instead of mind numbing commute.
And for random encounters. Cliff Razers can go to heII for all that I care... They are so frustrating 😅
Anyway, loved the video, it's always great food for thought
I think the ease with which you can fast travel correlates directly with how sandboxy the game feels. For that reason, I prefer it as a very late-game feature, one that I feel like I’ve earned and with plenty of the restrictions you mentioned.
For that reason I always like to see fast travel incorporated well into the game world, like something you unlock from a series of difficult side quests.
I downloaded a mod for fallout 4 where you get a buildable permanent vertibird which is one of my favorite things in any game. It totally breaks the lore and it doesn’t make sense especially when NPC vertibirds are like mosquitos but it’s fun. It has a mountable minigun and I think some storage and flies around the overworld I think like the limited signal grenades let you do. But it just stays where it lands and it gives you an extraction point you have to be able to get back to, and it doesn’t go exactly where you want it has to find a landing location.
This solves so many of the cheesy problems and it makes it better by being fun.
When flying you can see enemy fire coming at you and you can shoot back. You get a Birds Eye view of the world. And you can land or easily end up in hot areas taking heavy fire. I forget if it takes damage but having to protect it is fun too with the penalty being not having any ride home and having to spend a ton of resources building another one at a camp.
Metaphor: ReFantazio only allows fast travel between main towns, any other places take travel time and consume calendar days between big events in the story. This system blends into the gameplay and story context very well
My favourite examples of thematic fast travel systems would be Morrowind [Silt Strider, Mages Guild, Boats] and STALKER [Guides]
I missed Morrowind [Call/Recall]
Also VTM: Bloodlines [Cab/Taxi Driver]
I liked how Fallout (not sure if it's 1 or 2) had caravan travel. You got to basically fast travel but time passed and you had sometimes had random encounters to go through. Sometimes felt more dangerous than solo travel but I think it was faster.
"Thanks Windows." Classic Windows... You turn off notifications and disable sounds and it still comes up.
use linux. windows is malwareOS.
I miss those days compared to Copilot AI & one drive storage etc forced on us
@Rocinante808 one drive being the default and when it runs out of storage immediately to prompt them to sell you more storage is peak capitalism
Probably an automatic virus scan. The one notification you should probably still care about. lol Not that Microsoft Defender is great, but better than nothing.
im about to switch to linux before they make me "upgrade" to windows 11 next year. that Recall "feature" is creppy asf
Kingdom come deliverance had your character move along a map like in old school isometric rpg’s and I think it did well for the game. I’m not sure you need fast travel even if it’s expected. As long as you don’t physically (so to speak) have to walk to every location I think most people are satisfied and those who aren’t will learn to love it
Have to agree that morrowind did it wonderfully. The only thing to hold against Morrowind was its journal system, while immersive, made it an absolute pain if you got a random quest on the way somewhere and decided to go finish what you were doing first, then got distracted, then finally circled back around 20 hours later and had to flip through 50 pages of text to find that one journal entry that hinted that you should go south from... somewhere on a road. I remember not completing a quest to help some woman who fell in love with a Bandit for like, 100 hours, by accident because of it.
That said, I think one of my favorite memories of Oblivion was specifically _not_ using fast travel at all. I did the Dark brotherhood questline, and while traveling down to their base from a town I ran into wagons, bandits, all sorts of fun little encounters that got me loot and things to sell I wouldn't have had if I fast traveled. It made the world feel lived in and like I was a part of it.
Hey Tim, you mentioned before that you had a graduate degree in Artificial Intelligence.
I was wondering, as someone who aspires to be a video game AI programmer, what your thoughts are on designing NPC AI; for combat, ambient AI, etc and the efforts made by developers to make NPCs decisions seem “smart”, while players instead see them as cheating or dumb.
What I find interesting is the disconnect between the player and designer/programmer’s perception of how intelligent an NPC is. An NPC that’s given flanking behaviour might seem like random movement to the player, who can’t see the code, and reactions to stimuli like hearing, might seem like the NPC is cheating, if sound cues aren’t made obvious to the player.
Many games try to communicate an NPC’s thought process through dialogue: “I’m going to check that sound out” but I’m wondering what are less in-your-face methods.
TL;DR: AI is only as smart as players think they are; having a “smart” NPC doesn’t matter if players don’t understand the reasoning behind its actions. Pac-Man had extremely simple AI, (essentially random movement) for the ghosts, but many people thought they were strategising to get them.
I think you will like the video scheduled to post in 2 days.
@@CainOnGames I’ll stay tuned
In a lot of open world RPGs with fast travel, I go exploring for the majority of it. Then I use fast travel late in the game, when either I'm going back to old areas because a new quest has sent me there, or I'm just finishing up things. That was decidedly not the case with Oblivion once I saw how copy/paste a lot of the dungeons and caves are, and that's a pretty famous early "fast travel anywhere, anytime" RPG that probably sets most people's expectations of the system.
I do prefer things like vehicles, waypoints, or even the Dragon Quest method of "you can warp to these places, after you've manually visited them." (side note: I think it's fair to credit DQ with this as it started in the 3rd entry back in the 80s, though I'm sure some Ultima games or early adventure games had some shortcut/warp systems)
Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen does a really awesome fast travel system for the explorers out there. You can fast travel to anywhere you can set up a warp stone, but you've gotta manually place the warp stones. The Dark Arisen version of the game also gives you a permanent version of the teleport consumable that was used in the base game, so once you've done the legwork of setting up your fast travel points, you can use them at your leisure. I think Dragon's Dogma 2 does something similar, but I've heard the execution of it is worse. Mot totally sure if that's true, or lots of people got the game not knowing what they were getting into, as all I've seen of it indicates it's a very faithful sequel to the original.
Another solution is making fast travel resource-dependent. Few examples:
1. Costs basic currency to use (so it will be relatively costly at the start and less of an issue when you are further in and swimming in cash).
2. Fast travel points need to be manually activated by expending a rare and finite resource.
3. Fast travel is on some type of cooldown, for example once per in-game day. Might allow exceeding the limit by causing some negative status on the player.
Solasta: Crown of the Magister has an interesting take on fast travel. When you do that from the map, time continues to flow, so if there is a timed event, it may trigger,mor it may be night when you reach your destination. Essentially, it is literally fast travel, the game just accelerates what you could have done manually, with the same outcome.
100% agree, also love the town travel limitation idea
FO3 does update the game clock with -so called- fast travel, but they don't seem to use it for anything. IIRC it takes three hours to walk from Vault 101 to Rivet City via fast travel.
I would not play FO3 or New Vegas if they didn't offer map travel.
@9:33 This reflects the mental state of the PC at the time; traveling direct, and paying little or no heed to their surroundings. IMO fast travel should increase the odds of being caught off guard at hostile encounters.
@5:01 How does this make any logical sense? (Excepting the case of being overburdened to the point of immobility.) It annoyed the hell out of me that New Vegas prohibited map travel if the PC had crippled legs when that is the situation (above all others) where abstracted map travel is of the most use.
No one should have to spend 15-20 minutes watching their PC limp back to Goodsprings to visit the doctor; it's absurd. They should be able to choose Goodsprings on the map, and advance the game clock to however long it took to walk there, and ideally the greater the time taken, the greater the risk of random encounters along the way.
While I agree with your points - Vegas has no map travel. It's got fast travel between discovered locations. Seems what you want is actually overworld travel like og fallout. It's not very popular in 3d games for some reason tho.
@@zhulikkulik "Seems what you want is actually overworld travel like og fallout."
Well that's a given, of course. But I did mean discovered location; every PC starts in Goodsprings after all.
The contention was that the developers somehow rationalized that not being able to walk fast equates to not being able to use the abstracted fast travel.
My personal favorite flavor of fast travel will always be the Diablo/DnD types where you have spells or scrolls that let you get around, but don't mess with discovery as much. You could always adapt that type of thing for futuristic settings and have it be a peace of tech.
7:00 I remember playing SpiderMan 2018, I turned off questmarkers so I can swing freely without any in-world clutter (only minimap) And when I got to the minimap location. I didn't know if the entrance was on the roof or on the ground. There was not obvious door or entrance for the player. Turning on Questmarker, It was one of 3 doors on the roof that are exactly the same. or it was a unsuspicious roof vent etc.
I wonder if fast travel could be a way to add more random encounters. In a game like Skyrim, you could spawn sitting on the fast travel cart, and have to react to a bandit ambush (before resuming FT by getting back on the cart, or wandering off to explore instead).
If the encounter is non-hostile, the player could be prompted whilst still on the map if they want to interact with the trader, refugees, travellers etc. or just press on without loading.
Chance of encounter types could be influenced by the locations being traversed through.
Travel time could lead to camping at night, unless you took an express travel coach between towns.
Maybe you can specify stealth fast travel, which takes much longer (although only relevant/worthwhile if any game systems are time dependent)
I've just suggested months of work, but it's something I'd like to see explored 😅
In game travel often feels like work to players instead of productive play time. I solve this in my designs by letting the player earn ways to alleviate this "work" by providing different in world solutions they can aquire. For example they might fight their way up a tower and discover a hang-glider that can whisk them back to town or somewhere else. Perhaps they can pay for a stagecoach or cab to deliver them... paid methods like these also serve as a way to balance your economy, serving as sinks for player money. The player could even purchase a stagecoach and hire a driver for 2-way travel and the ability to load it up with loot. Using these methods saves travel time, but I also place unique crafting materials or helpful resources along the route which the player can't gather if the the route is bypassed, meaning they must either purchase them or go on gathering missions. I believe the issue is best resolved by weaving fast travel into the narritive and systems of the game.
Fast travel (teleportation style) is about the destination. Slower travel styles (walking, riding, non-instant transport) are more about the journey assuming interesting things happen enough along the way for this to be worthwhile.
Thing about arguments against fast travel is that they are really only arguments against choice, since you can always choose not to fast travel.
I far prefer travel systems like Fallout, Arcanum and Morrowind. Often fast travel may as well be a teleport. Even when time passes many games don't do much with the passage of time or day/night cycles. There are a lot of interesting possibilities but they aren't often explored. One game that comes to mind that had an interesting system was Dragon's Dogma. You used an expensive consumable to fast travel (until they patched in an unlimited use item) and could only travel to either the main town or to one of a limited number of stones you could place anywhere in the world.
I like that "only fast travel to towns" idea, makes a lot of sense.
I do think fsst travel is way overused to a detriment but it is important fot many styles of games as well.
Good topic and video. I think Morrowind was peak fast travel design. Those striders are still so iconic and memorable, decades later.
I like it when games make fast travel a service, like in Morrowind or the GTA games. Red Dead 2 does it well also, with the trains and carriages and the camp upgrades
Tim there was 'Fast Travel' in Arcanum...the 'Teleport' Spell.
My plan for 2nd or 3rd game is to have both, teleports between sections of map and animated map travel with some short dialogue quips instead of just fast travel everywhere. And because it will be 2D there is no need for a loadscreen anyway. Because fast travel usually means just a loadscreen teleport.
Effectively the safe telepoint locations will be there to make you spend less time when traveling to combat locations.
I think the main takeaway from this video for me is:
If you don't want a fast travel in your game - you better have a very good reason to not include it
There's a lot of chat about this in regards to RPGs but I think another great example is Death Stranding. Not only is fast travel super restricted, but even walking anywhere is absurdly difficult, and with an extremely limited inventory. The player has to build the actual roads they're going to use themselves! The investment in the area for the player is huge. But also it's kind of what the whole game ends up being about, just like Morrowind was for a lot of people.
The Witcher 3 puts stashes in a number of map locations. For instance, you can drop your items in your stash in White Orchard and pick them up in Novigrad.
Personally, I like instant fast travel - it just simplifies things for me. And I"m not screwed if I traveled to the wrong location - which happens more often than I like. (I have a propensity for typos.)
I really like how the game Grounded had zip lines that functioned as a sort of fast travel.
Best fast travel I’ve seen is when it works with the game’s lore or magic system and doesn’t break immersion. Using the zoom spell in Dragon Quest to teleport but hitting your head on the ceiling if inside a dungeon. Using a ferrystone to travel to a portcrystal in Dragon’s Dogma. The portals, a.k.a. gates of travel, in Blasphemous. Or in Blasphemous, Dark Souls, or other games like those, opening up shortcuts to other areas is a great alternative to fast travel that makes the game more immersive and the game world more cohesive. Also, finally obtaining the lord vessel in Dark Souls made fast travel feel more satisfying and well earned because of all that preceded it.
Honestly I really liked the fast travel system in horizon zero dawn, where in the beginning it’s a very limited resource when the places your going are very close together, and as places get further apart, you can craft/purchase more of this resource, and then in the very late game, where the map is huge, you can use very rare resources to either craft better armor, weapons, or get an unlimited fast travel, depending on which you value most