I Hate Fast Travel
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- Опубліковано 12 сер 2016
- Patreon: / razbuten
Twitter: / therazbuten
Chadunda: / @chadundashow
I have a lot of issues with open-world games, and (maybe unsurprisingly) my biggest has to do with how a lot of games implement fast travel. This video gets into what exactly I dislike about it and why.
Intro Animation by Strekks
Music-
Great Hair by Flamingosis
/ flamingosis
uknowymusic.bandcamp.com/album...
Thanks.
Casposaurus helped me immensely throughout the development and revision process. With his help, I was able to turn a bunch of half-baked ideas into mostly-baked ones. / thecasposaurus
Chadunda (for the fiftieth time) gave me feedback and footage like a champion.
/ @chadundashow
TentacleTouchy had a lot of conversations with me early in the development process which strongly shaped a lot of the opinions that ended up going in this video.
/ tentacletouchy
I also had a few friends help grab me some footage that I was not capable of getting myself.
Perrydactyl: / perrydactylshow
CrayTrey: / craytrey1310
ScribbleScrabble: / bokunoeruption
Thanks for a lot of moral support from theGame Boys and other friends. I bitched about this video for a long time, so I am glad that it is finally done. If you helped me at any point and I forgot to mention it, please know that I love you. - Ігри
Please watch the video before getting mad at me. Then when you are finished, feel free to be mad at me.
So this video has picked up over the last few weeks, which is weird and neat. Anyway, I try to respond to comments, but I feel like I keep responding with the same thing, so in order to save everyone some time, here are some thoughts/concessions about this video that you might want to read before leaving a comment:
1. This video could be framed better. I "marketed" it in a way that comes off as if fast travel is inherently bad, which in hindsight was probably a mistake because a lot of people seem to be hung up on the first few seconds (and based on some of the comments I have been getting, in a handful of cases, I don't really think they have actually watched more than the first 5 seconds). Ultimately, my issue with fast travel boils down to how it used as a band-aid to cover up boring worlds and movement mechanics. So if your initial instinct to seeing this video title is to comment something like, "then just don't use it. But do you really wanna walk everywhere and be bored for 2 hours?" my answer is, no, no I don't; I want worlds that are fun to move around in that don't make me get the itch to fast travel. I typically try not to use it, but when the world offers me nothing of interest, it feels like a waste not to. My point is that if an element of a game is uninteresting enough that a large player-base feels compelled to just skip over it, shouldn't developers rethink that element of a game to make it more engaging?
2. The game at 0:30 is Dragon's Dogma.
3. Play games however you want to play them; just realize that they way you approach a game is not always going to be the same as how someone else approaches a game.
Anyway, thanks for reading this if you did, and thanks for taking the time to click this video even if it wasn't your thing.
so what your really saying is you made this whole video to troll youtube to get views or am i missing the obvious by your statement above.
You should look at chronicles of Elyria!
Yea, it is a single player game. No problem with fast travel. Risk vs reward is more of an mmo aspect. I can see it be detrimental to mmo games, but single player man we just don't got time to hold our controllers forward for 2 hours.
Razbuten Personally, I see it as a tool to use. I use it, as I'm terrible at budgeting my time.
I'm mad >:(
“This world is five times bigger than the last one”
*everything is five times further away from each other
*the map from the last game was copied 5 times
@@triangulum8869
(But only the empty spaces)
666 likes, nice
CoD in a nutshell
What's worse is when it's like skyrim, there is plenty of locations but it's the exact same fights with the exact same rewards every time so why bother going out of your way? If the dungeon itself or the reward aren't good then why waste your time when you could just get on with whatever quest you are doing?
Or just stop making game worlds 100 miles wide with only 5 important locations
also this, a lot of devs are abusing the free roam/open world genre now since is so popular. Almost all new games try to do it. Thing is, not all games should be like that.
Yeah I also feel like open world games are actually getting TOO BIG now where travelling just becomes tedious with nothing but empty land to run around. So much country and desert, not enough buildings or neighborhoods to explore and walk around in.
@@NewOrderOfAlexandria Well the king of that was Daggerfall. That one was completely unplayable without fast travel (and you're explicitly told you're not supposed to ever actually walk through the forest)
Logic Prime because the in game world is bigger than the UK and it literally takes hours to go from one city to another
This is why you install mods that add more npc's and creatures.
I remember when Spider-Man on the PS4 made me fast travel that one time, like dude I can swing through New York why would I wanna take the subway
@@buffkangaroodog one thing instated doing in Spider-man ps4 is play music and try to swing to the beat as I travel. It really helps and seems like something dorky Peter himself would do
Same I finished spider man ps4 without fast traveling because web swinging is so fun
@@buffkangaroodog Okay, just a second. Did you just say you 100% Spider-Man twice, and completed all got all trophies and the hard west difficulty, and yet you feel it gets olds after a bit of playing? Wtf did you expect! You played the game twice, not every game has infinite replay ability and that’s fine. I feel you’ve gotten more than your money’s worth and describing it the way you did is kinda short sighted.
As long as you get something out of a game, it’s done it’s job, like now I’m playing Hollow Knight, and despite being absolutely head over heels for it, I’m sure once I beat it, despite saying I’ll lay it again on hard or 100% the game and trophies, I probably won’t. But that’s fine, because I know there only so much Hollow Knight I can play
@@picklenik9658 I only beat PS4 Spiderman one time(in one day btw) and I feel the same way. The webslinging improves on a lot of stuff but also holds ur hand way too much. Not mentioning my other problems with the game here.
You ever hit the trigger a meter above the ground in that game? Spiderman literally floats as he shoots the web so you can't hit the ground. After you learn how to swing there's nothing creative you can do with it besides exactly what the developers intended.
"As long as you get something out of a game, its done its job"
I guess I got some hours of out of the game but I dont have any interesting memories or an urge to go back to that game. It's good for younger gamers i think but if you're over 20 there's nothing in those games that hasn't been done to death in gaming already
For me, that makes it a weak game. And a dissapointing Spider-Man game.
Jesus, i said games like 30 fuckn times. Gaming!!!!!!
Even in games where I enjoy travelling, I tend to reach a point where I'm sick of it and just want to get where Im going
Ya. And if one doesn't like fast travel.
One can always simply choose not to use it.
This is like complaining about going to a friend's place in a car vs. walking.
We have the power to decide how the fuck to get there. No one is forcing us to use a car.
Fucking idiotic
Well in that case you don't really enjoy travelling after all. Logic is your friend
@@Tiotic_Destiny No, he likes travelling but too much is too much. Logic is your friend.
@@Tiotic_Destiny For real, they should add a button that just skips the game... "You win!" It's the journey, not the destination.
@@Smulpaap123 But when it's "too much" he doesn't like it anymore. :P So the statement "In this game I enjoy travelling" is not quite correct.
"Chillin' with locals".
Beats the crap out of them.
who actually is nice to villagers/NPCs in open world games?
Local: Do you want to buy.....
Me: Slashes character with sword.....stfu bitch.
@@xdsmile5359 worst part, in witcher 3 the NPCs beat up the player too
@@xdsmile5359 me, but after loading before a quicksave where I kill them all
for money
Title is clickbait; came to see a violent, emotion-fueled rant, instead I learned things
The title isn't clickbait, your interpretation is.
@@HaloWolf102 it a joke lol
@@Megaman-2407 My first comment was directed towards the people who takes the original comment seriously.
@@HaloWolf102 it still a joke comment dude i was trying to say that to you because no one commented this
@@Megaman-2407 Do you really need to repeat your comment a second time, you have added no argument of worth, if a person isn't being swayed by your comment, do you think repeating yourself a second time will work?
I highly doubt that. Absolutely no one was thinking that? Not a single person? There is always a percentage higher than 0% of any outcome to occur. Your joke is the exact thing that people were thinking. You have to much faith in the intelligence of humanity.
It is funny because of the dislike bar. Plenty of people were thinking this, and I am disappointed you failed to comprehend this. I am also disappointed you failed to see my point.
If in the unlikely event that you were serious, my comment would apply to you. But if you were joking, the comment would apply to the party that thinks similarly, only unironically.
Thanks for making me ruin the joke btw....makes me look like an ass.
Razbuten: "chillin' with locals"
*cuts to scene of some guy beating up civillians*
witcher in a boxing competition
I would argue that 3rd person games tend to have more engaging movement because you have more spacial awareness, allowing for more interesting platforming.
thats the whole point. imagine just cause, you have a grappling hook, parachute and in newer titles a wingsuit, now give it first person and you will ruin the whole experience due to how dumb it would feel
I'm so glad he mentioned inFAMOUS because that game's travel methods are so fun
@@Harsh-tf9he there are some really cool movement games in first person Titanfall 2's main campaign is super good and theres a grapple and wall running in that
@@BillSullivanosu but thats fps limited to that weird factory, the canyon like outdoors and arenas, im talking zipping around at mach 2, gunfire, cars (which are much faster than a titan), anti air fire, all while trying to destroy a massive military harbor which is super open, helicopters, wingsuits, exploding oil tanks, with first person view, your reactions would be much more fined tuned as you dont have that FOV boost that comes with third person, also how do you fast travel in titanfall? its a level based system not open world
@@Harsh-tf9he I was just talking about cool movement shit in games not the actual point in the video. There is definitely faster shit in other games but something about moving fast in first person just feels so nice
i think another big problem is the quests themselves. some man will ask you to travel from one side of the map to another just to pickup a sock and then travel back again. it's not worth the journey. that's why i feel like some developers make the quests with fast travel in mind and whenever some people (like me) try to play the game without fast travel, it feels pointless.
that's sort of what I do if a quest sounds cool or fun (or if I know it) I don't fast travel but if its another fetch quest its not worth the time and I just fast travel
Justas Griškevičius a settlement is under attack
A settlement needs our help, ill mark it on your map
Yes this, the main problem with fast travel (and the idea that "if you don't like it, don't use it") is that the game is generally built around it, the devs stop caring about making you travel to the other side of the world to make a stupid delivery instead of having a coherent quest design: 99% of the people should need help about something local, and a couple of longer questlines that are important to the area should end by giving you the option to travel to another location, giving you both a sense of the geography and a reason to travel (but only for rarer and more important reasons).
This way you'd travel less, reducing the need for fast travel too, and people wouldn't be forced to use it. On top of that, fast travel mess certain types of quest and reduce your game design possibilities.
I really like how Morrowind handled it with transportations and two spells being the only available methods of fast travel.
Guess What? ;-;
your point about traveling makes sense though. why does literally EVERY quest require you to go to the absolute furthest point on the map away from you right now?
Yeah!!!lol!!!!🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Because it lets you explore more of the world instead of being confined to a small area.
Like, imagine buying an Epic Fantasy Role Playing Game and being forced to journey in a small block. It's not really exciting
@@FraserSouris Still sounds like bad quest design. Local quests can give you the opportunity to explore the local village, their culture and their history. There can still be quests or rumors that bring you to a different part of the map, but it should make sense, like finding a map or a journal in a local tomb.
@@crowhaveninc.2103
Yeah, but after a certain point, it would feel mundane and limited, especially if the local area is small in size. Backtracking is typically boring enough as it is. It's not bad design to do what's more fun to more players instead of doing something that may bore more players and only impress a select few
Video Games aren't like DND where the player is able to interact with every NPC and every object as they would a main quest object
It's one thing to have the main quest lead you off,.or one single side character quest do that, but here travel clear across the map just to find me this one random item. Oh and here's a measly 25 (in game) money for that.
I never used fast travel in rdr2, I loved the travelling in the game since there was always something to see or do
I never knew fast travel was a thing in the story
@@horhaythebigmacguy3836 haha yeah same. It wasn't until I was halfway through that I realized I could! I'll use the train sometimes though
This is the key point. I love fast travel if the game has uninteresting or bland space filler. Skyrim for example should have been open world areas you travel between instead of fully open world.
Witcher 3 however I never fast traveled once in each map since it is such a well crafted world
And riding your horse just feels glorious in that game. Compare that with AC Odyssey and Origins, where riding a horse feels like riding a piece of moving plastic.
I never knew it was a thing until i finished the game lol
I'm all for smaller open worlds, the larger the world the emptier it is.
Also, your self control is amazing if you dont explore every location you come across in open worlds.
I’d say you have self control issues if you feel you need to explore every single thing you find.
@@GlazeonthewickeR ?
@@GlazeonthewickeR That's literally what the OC said.
Also yeah I still find myself looking through every nook and cranny of old abandoned buildings I've explored hundreds of times already in Fallout 4.
@@GlazeonthewickeR Why is it a negative to engage with the genre the way it was intended to be engaged with?
Tell that to skyrim
Breath of the Wild seems to avoid the travel issues by being primarily about exploration. Personally, I rarely feel like I’m travelling. If I am riding a horse, or walking somewhere, I may be traveling, but if I encounter something I’m going to have fun with said thing.
Botw is the kind of game where you get sidetracked from your being sidetracked, and nothing ever really feels urgent or mandatory. Sure, there’s a main quest, but... everything’s already gone. It’s been 100 years, they can wait a few more days.
Of course, when you do have something you want to do without getting sidetracked, you can warp to shrines via Sheikah slate, but traveling and exploring are still incredibly important, because of finding towns and stables and shrines and korok seeds along the way.
The_furf_of_July The problem is that exploring doesn't feel rewarding. The best you're gonna get is finding another shrine. You may find yourself in some mysterious area and you have to do something to get out like the thunderstorm area with the balls or the island, and the reward would be something really cool like a weapon or something connected to the story, but nah just another shrine. Speaking of shrine is it weird that there are 120 of them and you can fast travel to literally all of them? Isn't that a bit too much?
Sir Iceman II I personally enjoyed exploring, finding korok seeds and minibosses. You can save the fast travel for when you’re sure there’s nothing left to do between point A and point B.
Sir Iceman II shrines give u spirit orbs though which u use to get more hearts or stamina aswell as getting all 120 shrines get u the hero of the wild set
Sir Iceman II “exploring doesn’t feel rewarding”
then perhaps Breath of the Wild isn’t for you.
Plus, It's you can go pretty much anywere in less than 30mins with a horse in botw
I liked Morrowind's solution: instead of typical fast travel where you just point and click on a map, the game offered a number of traveling options, each with their own limited reach. It made most places easy enough to get to quickly, but also meant that you had to put in some effort to reach more remote areas. More importantly, it forced you to plan your travels, requiring a certain familiarity with the geography.
Cephalonimbus I miss the mark and teleport spells
I thought Morrowind was brilliant for this. The limited fast travel which made sense within the lore was great. It had interesting side effects, like making areas where the bug and boat transport system met up important.
Not only that, but the world was small enough that it never felt empty while you were travelling on foot. There were always animals about, or random caves and hideaways you could look into. Plus as you progressed you got a huge sense of power from some of the leap spells and the like which made travel much more convenient.
Plus the directions given were hardly ever marked by a pointer/marker and utilized describing landmarks and visual tips which makes the world so unique personable and challenging in a very appropriate way.
Cliff racers, though.
So... more or less exactly like the Witcher 3's fast travel? You need to go to a transport location in order to get into another transport location? I.e. a fast travel system pretty similar to one the video bitched about?
Also, don't force your player to travel back and forth across the entire map all the time. As long as they're in a city, try to keep them there with side quests that concern local matters. Don't immediately send them on a mission halfway across the map as soon as they arrive.
Wish i could give this comment a thousand likes.
The more backtracking you have to do, the more designers are tempted to make traversal more convenient and frictionless, which makes it boring and leads players to just want to skip it.
You are also the victim of TES IV: Oblivion's Fighters Guild questline, aren't you?
The first time I played Skyrim I didn’t even realize it had fast travel until I had put around 75 hours into the game and I loved every second of it honestly- I just let myself get absorbed into the world and would find myself jumping between all the different factions and groups quests as I would just do whatever quest or cave or temple or whatever interested me that was the closest
I occasionally used the carts outside the cities, because that way I could actually pretend it was something I was doing in-universe.
That’s what I loved about Skyrim, I would get side-tracked and just do whatever miscellaneous things that popped up before me and since time not being a factor I could just continue my original quest later on.
I knew of fast travel since the beginning but honestly didn’t use it much since there were so many cool & exciting things to do in every single city, town, and even just random settlements in the middle of nowhere
I knew it had almost right from the beginning. Yet I opted not to use it - partially because I had little experience in video games, but mostly because I enjoyed exploring the game world so much I didn't want to use it.
And that's why I love the survival mod in skyrim because it only let you fast travel with carts and boats and also making a consequence for skipping time (but I don't play with it bc I want to have enough outfit to always be rp and stylish and these are heavy)
I think Daggerfall had a good fast traveling system. You got to choose if you were traveling recklessly or cautiously, if you stayed at inns on the way or if you camped out, and if you walked, rode a horse, or took a ship. Traveling recklessly got you there faster, but you would be low on health and fatigue when you arrived, and cautiously got you there slower, but you had full health/stamina and you'd always arrive during the day. Selecting “Inns” would subtract from your travel time but make the journey more expensive, while “Camping Out” will do just the opposite. Using boats would get you there fastest but would cost more money. Your quests were timed in this game, so you really had to consider how long your journey would take.
Damnit now I wanna play this
That game is ancient af but still great!
ExcaliberDG11 Then you would have no reason to have such a big map...
Bryn Shadow its cause the map is 4000x bigger than skyrim
Bob Ross The Boss the only reason is - REALISM. In everything. I very dissapointed that bethesda desided to arcade all elements in the next elder scrolls series
I mean whenever i fast travel to dawnstar i get attacked by a dragon. every time
The fucking dawnstar dragon
I hate Dawnstar for that very reason. I avoid going there at All Costs.
Being high-level in skyrim is so ridiculous like you tp anywhere and 5 legendary dragons spawn
I'm like level 15 in skyrim and I kill most things with relative ease. Skyrim is very bland after awhile though and it's easy to become powerful fast if you know what to do.
Spartan V0 Maybe it truly is a bit bland for you but... lvl 15? Are you on novice? Change the difficulty or explore more. You can't have done many quest lines at 15.
I love fast travel because I work 8 hours a day, commute for 2ish hours, have 6 kids, and no time.
Fast travel is a life saver.
hope you have more time now
Dumb argument. Actually watch the vid. Games should be designed so that it isn't a tedious unfun thing to travel.
@@austinbyrd4164 what the fuck is wrong with you? the person has no time to mindlessly travel and do useless virtual things because they want to play the main objective and head straight into the action, let them be, ur argument is 200 times worse than their's
@@carlossaliba3478 "mindlessly travel and do useless virtual things."
Ok, so you can't read. Open world games shouldn't feel tedious, mindless, and useless when ising the open world. That's bad game design, and so is fast travel.
@@austinbyrd4164 how fucking stupid are you, like seriously, the person LITERALLY TOLD U THEY HAVE 6 KIDS AND WORKS FOR 8 HOURS A DAY, YOU THINK THEY HAVE TIME TO FUCKING WALK AROUND VIRTUAL TREES TO THEN START SHOOTING VIRTUAL ALIENS AFTER HALF AN HOUR?
I like the system used in Horizon: Zero Dawn, where you need gather resources to make an item that can only be used to fast travel once. There is a rare item that completely negates this, but you’re never specifically told about it.
And riding places with a mount like the horse or bull-ish robots is muuuuch better than walking too
Both the horizon games do a good job of putting interesting things in your path as well. They’re not perfect by any means but I think it’s a step in the right direction
yeah except the travel packs are next to free to craft, like you always have the materials required just from regular gameplay, especially if you've been hunting to upgrade pouches.
I never fast travel in HZD because the game is too beautiful. I'll always walk to my destination, gushing over the beautiful scenery every 2 minutes
@@wumbosaurus9121 Yeah fast travel needs to make contextual sense in a game for me to utilize it. HZD's fast travel literally just depletes your resource stores for the convenience of a loading screen with literally no explanation given for why this makes any sense.
What I almost always miss is the feeling of BEING IN A PLACE. The feeling of having arrived somewhere after a long journey and staying there for a while. That's why I liked the islands of Skellige so much in Witcher 3. Once you arrived on one of those islands, that was your entire world. I pretended to be unable to fast travel to savour this feeling of being stuck on this island, until I take upon me the next big journey across the ocean.
Games should support this by focussing on local quests. The long journeys should be limited to very few times for more realism.
@TheWeeaboo i only ever really like fast travel when it has an in game explanation, whether that is a wagon or an escape rope/wings.
Ben Grave - Good point. In a post-apoc MMO I used to play called Neocron, being out in the wilderness -- the wastelands, filled with mutants and abandoned ruins of old structures and such -- actually *felt* both threatening and lonely. When you see the giant entrance to the main city in the side of the mountain in the distance, you actually felt both relieved and accomplished that you made it back safely. This is all pointless if you're just clicking an icon on a map and instantly teleporting there for free.
Having said that, there _were_ teleporter devices in that MMO, but --
1.) They costed gold to use (well, this game was sci-fi so it was "credits")
2.) You would receive a roughly 5-minute reduction in ALL of your skills, which slowly wears off over time ... They explained it as like your synapses recovering after the teleportation process. You get the same penalty if you die, since your body is reconstructed at a transporter.
3.) If a region was controlled by an enemy faction, then the transporter is locked so you can't just warp in to enemy territory.
I immensely regretted buying the maps. Felt like it took away all the incentive to explore. Skillige became a chore to me. I still have so many points I haven’t done simply because there isn’t any incentive. Maybe it’s just me not wanting to sail for meager rewards for 3+hours
Solstheim for Skyrim kinda felt like that.
So Fable 2 and 3?
"Chilling with locals"
*Shows Geralt getting into a bloody fistfight*
He's playing the game wrong. We all know Geralt's real chill is Gwent
Kingdome Come: Deliverance makes a good approach on fast travelling! It's a really good game!
@Brice Manthei I don't know how long and how hard you've tried to master it, so I won't tell you to just stick with it, but... I personally will admit I absolutely _sucked_ at the combat in KC:D initially. It definitely has a learning curve and it definitely takes some getting used to. Once it clicks with you though, you really will start to feel like the trained fighting machine a medieval knight is supposed to be.
@Brice Manthei the combat system sucks, just train combat until you get master strike and just murder everything by pressing the block button fast enough when they attack. No need to ever attack yourself, actually attacking is actually worse because enemies can master strike themselves which has no counter. Apart from that and the stupid auto lock during combat everything else is top notch. I love the archery and hunting
very good game I was so sad the ending was meh. I never got to kill that guy
@Brice Manthei I really like the game for it's possibilities and storytelling! In terms of combat, the begining is awful, has someone said, you're a peasant... Then you start training and suddenly you are a freaking broken monster, murdering everything and everyone that tries to mess with you...
@@forkyougames Because you have telent.
“Chilling with locals” shows him beating up a random guy
Watching this 3 years later, all I can think of as the perfect open world game in terms of travel: Spider-Man PS4.
i just watched this, and I IMMEDIATELY thought of Spider-Man as well. And Arkham City. when just moving your character around is fun and rewarding, you win. I haven't played the PS4 Spider-Man, but in Spider-Man 2012, it was awesome, and I WANTED to collect all the flying comics around the city, and did. The ONLY collectible quest in a game that I ever considered good enough to be its own game, because just moving around to collect them felt awesome.
westingtyler uhhhhhhhhhh which ones Spider-Man 2012
@@tylermcqueen9684 the amazing Spiderman game based on the film
Exactly what I was thinking of
Honestly, the Spider Man games immediately game to mind as well, not to mention Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance
The amount of time I spent just swinging on that vine in Beach Bowl Galaxy is amazing
6:56 Fast travel to the end of the video.
zenzo kiyama its not fun. There aren't any events...
thanks a lot , that saved me a lot of his whining
:)
Cheesycurve 54 WAAAAAAAA I SAT AND WATCHED HIS WHOLE VIDEO THEN BITCHED ABOUT IT WAHHHHHHHH
"thanks a lot ,that saved me a lot of his whining"
WELL IM SORRY THAT YOU DONT SHARE OUR OPINION ON THE MATTER BUT THAT DOESNT MEAN HE IS WHINING.
Well in Botw it's main Gameplay is exploring and you only fast travel in Regions you discovered without (Atleast I do that ^^)
All games only let you fast travel to places you have already been
My problem with the fast travel in botw is it is quite unnesccary. The world is rich and fun to explore however with the ability to fast travel to all the shrines you have been to it acts to disencentivise exploration, causing the player to instead fast travel in order to save time, reaching their destination faster while missing out on much of the secrets hidden throughout the game.
samuel Roberts it’s nice to have post-Ganon.
I wish you could just fast travel to towers
Walter Huang You can. It tells you that literally in the first hour of the game
Unless I completely misunderstood this whole video, this seems more like a map management issue moreso than fast travel. I dont see how fast travel hurts anything honestly
The map/quest desiners get lazy because fast travel is an option. If they didn't have fast travel they'd be forced to actually think about how they design the world. Huge, sparse and repetitive worlds are almost always worse than small, dense and varied worlds.
Piranha Bytes has always been great at making incredible worlds (perhaps with the exception of Gothic 3 which is 10 times bigger than it needs to be). Fast travel in their games is usually unlocked a good while into the game, after you've already seen much of the map, and even then it's a physical entity in the game that allows you to do it, such as a teleportation rune. Gothic 1 and 2 are masterclasses in efficiency of space, progression, and in properly implementing even the sidequests into the main story and the very geography of the world.
@@ze_rubenator Darksouls 1 also gave you fast travel later in the game an was done in a way you felt you had earned the right to fast travel. But I agree for certain fetch quest or back an fourth mission it's agreeable fast travel would be preferred but like you said it shows lack of world design if the game is not built to be traveled enjoyably or in a timely manner. They heard open world. an thought open meant bigger for some rest. That's what I like about older games there was an unspoken spoken about the in-between from point a and b. By loading screen or a shorten path that we could Invision being a long journey but only took 20 seconds in games as to 5or10 minutes nowadays.
@@ze_rubenator that’s not fast travels fault tho. That’s the problem, if it’s that bad, blame the creators for choosing to be lazy and not care for their world.
@@connor2500 yes, exactly. Poor design is not the fault of a tool. It is almost always the result of poor design choices. However these choices are influenced by many things beyond design. Budget, time, pressure (from industry, investors, and GAMERS) to release shit fast and demand larger maps. These happen as a result of tryin to survive the game development pipeline. Not because fast travel exists.
If it didn't exist, you'd still have shitty maps.
I replayed Breath of the Wild with no fast travel, except where absolutely necessary. It was *way* better - it made the world feel more coherent, and it forced me to plan more about where I was going. I actually appreciated the cost of travelling.
Alex Fraser I didn’t even realize you could fast travel in breath of the wild??
@@samblake7170 isn't teleporting to shrines fast travel?
Alex Fraser yup
I'm doing the same! It's a WAY better game without fast travel. So much detail have gone into it... There are rewards in the most unexpected places. Some buried chests in the sand or snow or a grotto with an enemy camp... I am using the medallion of travel from the DLC, though. This makes planning my path (and the item) much more useful, without the annoyance of being forced to go back through exactly the same path more than once. It's another game completely, and it even makes me kinda sad of having played it with fast travel the first time. It really shouldn't exist in this game.
@@viniciusqueiroz2713 I agree, but I think some people would hate on it without fast travel. Maybe it should have had a cost associated with it to make it less attractive
I hate fast travel, especially when it happens in Game Of Thrones
I get that reference!
@Rad af D&D kinda forgot how Winter works.
@@floral1474 What do you mean something teased for seven seasons and several irl/in universe years straight can't be resolved in a single episode and then completely forgotten for the remaining time of the series? It's all about scenery and subverting expectations!
hehe
@@scorpixel1866 they subverted expectations by fucking up the ending.
Breath of the wild: I am gonna act like I didn't see that
I thought this was something the Witcher 3 did well, actually. Maybe I'm a bit of a completionist, but I thought the map being dotted with tons of little treasures and small adventures made moving from place to place quite fun. Whenever I needed to go somewhere, I would plot a course that usually involved two or three pitstops to question marks along the way.
Yeah, I agree. And even when all those question marks are resolved, you still sometimes run into a surprise bandit camp, or there's a pack of wolves or drowners to kill.
And I never mind travelling through the Witcher 3 world because it never gets repetitive, and locations are generally quite recognisable. It never feels to me like the same filler content repeated over and over again.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance also does it quite well, and has a much smaller world to begin with.
I would do all the big quests first and than string a route between all the question marks I missed and finish them up. :)
@@Bhoddisatva In Skyrim I would never fast travel. Since there were so many quests to do all the time, I would circle clockwise around the map to get to my quests, changing the direction every so often. Meant I was always a relatively small walk from my quest instead of crossing the entire map all the time
although i do like the witcher 3's world, i feel like the exploration is a bit underwhelming. the question mark map markers feel like a checklist and not just because i want to complete them all but because they are cookie cutter designed. not always but the majority of the time for me it just looks like an afterthought, like they just threw a chest or bandit camp in the middle of a forest. they are too predictable as well, in a game like skyrim there are some cookie cutter elements but majority of the time i see a building or camp i'm not sure what i will find there. it could be bandits, traders, a small settlement, or vacant and there is usually a reason why but in tw3 a bandit camp is just a bandit camp with the slightest change in scenery.
When you think about it Morrowinds "fast travel" was pretty ingenious way of giving players the ability to skip places while also immersing them and teaching them about the world. It forces you to learn the names of places, how they connect, their proximity to major hubs, etc... You eventually learn that to get to, say, Maar Gan you have to go to Ald'ruhn first, so you kinda have to learn where Ald'ruhn is first and it's proximity to whatever location you're in, because there's no Silt Strider in Sadrith Mora so you have to know how to get to the mages guild in Wolverine Hall who can send you to Ald'ruhn.
Once you're in the know, you can blink around the map pretty easy, but you have to figure out the map and important locations first before you have any hope of doing that.
The travelling is still boring though
...just to add, Morrowind also had the Mark/Recall spell.
Just having a single extra layer of immersion such as spells or a taxi makes fast travel much less gamified feeling.
@@dragonhold4 Also I fucking hate that mark and recall isnt in Skyrim. Not even the Divine or Almsivi interventions which many people seem to forget about. But having a siltstrider\cart instead of fast travel available is preferable. Fallout 4 doesnt even have it available.
Between Silt Striders, Mage Guild teleports, Almsivi and Divine Intervention, Mark and Recall, Boats, and those travel chambers in ruins, Morrowind really had good ways of getting almost anywhere relatively quickly. Also, levitation spells to bypass obstacles and those lovely Boots of Blinding Speed made travel on foot much more feasible. All those cost you something, and you needed to really plan out your round trips a bit, but once you were immersed enough in the game, it was not difficult to get from the north end of Vvardenfell to the south end - but still much more interesting, because you were usually taking trips that fulfilled multiple objectives:
Teleport to Mage's Guild in X, hand in quest there, get training in Fighter's Guild next door and pick up new FG quest, take Silt Strider to Y, run a bit to this or that grave cave and fight through it to fulfill another quest, Almsivi Intervention to Z mostly so you can take the Silt Strider again to where there's a Mage's Guild - but Z is also close to W where you haven't explored yet, so you go there instead. In W, you pick up a quest that's right around the corner, and now you're heavily burdened, so you Recall to your stash in Homebase. From there, it's a short Mage's Guild hop back to Z, so you walk to W to hand in that local quest. You realize there's a boat anchoring in W that can take you to V, and that just happens where your latest Fighter's Guild quest is... and so on and on and on. The travel mechanic brought a flow to that game that just felt great to me.
@@empirate100 I've not seen it done better than in Morrowind tbf
easy solution:
make world dense not big and empty, then w/o fast travel it will feel big and rich
That’s Majora’s Mask, though it was it did have fast travel.
Breath of the wild felt super dense, but the map isn't that big, it's big but it doesn't take that long to cross from one corner of the world, I've done it before, it took less than 30 minutes and it is rewarding because of shrines and towers, but I've gotten pretty much every non quest shrine and I have every tower, so it is better to just fast travel.
Spiderman PS4 did this well along with it's amazing movement system making fast travel seem like a joke.
GTA vice city
Obsidian's Avowed
A game that I think did a good job with fast travel is “Ori and the Will of the Wisps” (sequel to Ori and the Blind Forest, although that one doesn’t actually have fast travel.) how it works is that there are things called “spirit wells” around the map, and if you go to one of those, you could teleport to any other spirit well. There weren’t that many in the map, (about 15 in the whole map, which was pretty big.) so if you wanted to travel to a specific location quickly, you would have to manually go towards the nearest spirit well, then teleport to the spirit well closest to your destination, then keep travelling until you get there. Also, there were enough different controls so that just moving around was really fun. You could dash, dash off of enemies, double jump or triple jump depending on which perks you have unlocked, you could use grapple to certain plants or enemies, dash off of projectiles, and it was generally just really fun to see how long you could stay off the ground, so travelling was still really fun. (There is however an upgrade that allows you to travel to spirit wells from anywhere you are, although it is pretty expensive, and there is never an upgrade that allows you to travel from anywhere to anywhere.)
tl;dr Ori’s travelling is fun and interesting
Hollow Knight had a "fast travel" option of sorts. If you went exploring and found a stag beetle station (essentially a carriage station), you could pay a fee to unlock it, and then you can travel for free from that point to any other unlocked stag beetle station any time you want to. It made fast travel a real thing in the universe, gave you an NPC (your stag beetle) to interact with, and it was limited not only by where stag stations were located, but also by the investment of coin before the station was available.
Hollow Knight also combined that with a heavy exploration and backtracking theme that you'll see in every Metroidvania, meaning stag stations both helped you return to previous locations for exploration without a long trek, but also meant that using them could mean missing a secret tucked between two places you want to be that you didn't notice before.
I liked setting markers bought from iselda for places color coded personally lol
Like: “need exploring”, “come back with new ability”, “locked for now”
"chilling with locals"
*Proceeds to beat the shit out of said locals*
M e r c y my words.
M e r c y 😂😂😂😂
“Said locals”
Tyler ?
Exactly what I was about to comment, lol
Generally speaking, most locations in open world games cannot be fast traveled to unless you have already been there, meaning you have already experienced the journey there and don't have to do it all over again. That being said, I do understand what your point is, and I'd say it's valid in the sense that fast travel should not be infinitely usable and have no cost in most games.
If its a game with in game currency (like most do) maybe have it so it costs money to travel, and the more you do it the more it starts to cost. Or maybe it costs more to travel further distances
@@blingiman Honestly I can agree with the latter.
ARIES926 latter?
@@goose6291 Referring to the second or last option in a series.
The issue is not about traveling itself, but having things to do. If you always have interesting things to do in the way, you don't even notice the distance.
One thing I love about Terraria is its own Fast Travel system. There are actually two being Teleportation and Pylons. For Teleportation, you can buy a Teleporter from the Steampunker(unlocked about halfway through the main game)and some wires and a trigger like a Pressure Plate from the Mechanic(unlocked in the early game). You then can hook it up to another Teleporter then another and then another. How Pylons work is that when an NPC reaches a certain Happiness Level, they will start selling a type of Pylon respective to their biome. So for example, if an NPC was really happy in the desert, they would sell a desert pylon. However, a drawback of these is that they only work near multiple NPCs and disable themselves whenever a threat presents itself like an Event or Boss. You also can only have one type of Pylon per world, which makes players strategise not just about maintaining NPC happiness to get the pylons but also strategising about where to put the towns and thus the pylons. By the way, NPCs will get pretty pissed if you concentrate them into one area as of the 1.4 update. I digress. This system lets players choose their own Fast Travel points and if they even need them. They could very well use minecarts, air mounts and even their own speed(for those who don’t know, Endgame Terraria gives you stuff that can make you incredibly fast). But then there’s those that choose to use Fast Travel. And even if you don’t use fast travel, it’s always a blast finding ways to make your round-the-world rollercoaster interact with the environment as much as possible and if you’re using an Air Mount or your own speed, it’s quite fun just coming close to the ground once in a while and continuing from there.
The problem with most Open World games is that the worlds aren’t really that interesting and Fast Travel is kind of a must. However, Terraria always lets you marvel at how past you f*cked up the overworld and the player’s max speed scales with how much you’re able to easily traverse quite well. The Jungle and the Evil Biome are both dead ends in the early game but once you come back with better gear or even a way to easily dodge everything, you can easily rush through with barely any obstruction. And when Terraria’s overworld starts to get boring, it initiates Hardmode around the start of the early midgame. It changes in so many ways be it in the sky, on the ground or underground. The world becomes more of a hazard than it ever was. Your god-Tier armor is now sh*t-tier. Your SSS-Tier weapons are now F-Tier. And once you’ve bounced back, you’ve acquired so many ways to quickly and easily change the fundamental core of the overworld that you can make your own fun. And that’s what I love about Terraria and its fast-travel system. I don’t even think I was talking about the fast-travel system for most of this monologue. I was talking about what else you can do.
Breath of the Wild fixes most of these problems, and I’m still massively grateful for fast travel. Yeah, there’s stuff to do everywhere, but if I want to do something specific, I don’t want to sit around for 5 hours traversing across the entire map for just one thing.
I like how BOTW has fast travel, but you can just windbomb there.
pro strats
Windbomb is more cool than Fast Travel
-Don't change my mind
@Chansa Hobbs I literally do the same thing. And I also love bullet time bounces.
I don’t know how to do that
I don't like how in BotW there are around 140 fast travel spots (even more with dlc), it can prettt much ruin the feeling of open world
Morrowind offers four ways of fast travel:
Silt Striders;
Boats;
Teleportation;
FORTIFY SPEED 5000 PTS ON SELF.
Boots of Blinding Speed + Cuirass of the Savior's Hide (so you're not actually blind). Only way to travel.
You could also make a potion of resist mackiga 100% for one second, drink it, then switch to the boots of blinding speed. That way you get the speed and no blindness
Man Morrowind was the greatest. Still the best TES game in my opinion.
Mark and Recall.
player set speed 5000
Part of what makes traveling in an open world is when the actual travel part of it is incorporated into regular gameplay. A great example would be Sea of Thieves.
In Sea of Thieves, you get quests to anywhere from 1 to a dozen different islands and to get to each location, you and anyone you're playing with have to manage a ship. You need to adjust sails, steer, check your map and compass to make sure you know where you are and where you're going. There's also tons of leisure stuff from playing music, fishing, and cooking, which can be for fun or cook better healing items for your crew. You're also able and somewhat encouraged to consider stopping by every island between you and your destination, since there may be a few extra bits of treasure and supplies, maybe even another smaller quest to do on the way. The traveling to buried treasure is as important and engaging as the actual hunt across the island.
probably my favourite fast travel system is in enderal (technically a mod for skyrim, practically so, *so* much more):
next to myrad towers (just giand feathered flying things which, in its wild, untamed form, you can find in the open world) that let you quickly travel between those towers, certain vendors sell scrolls (which are quite espensive especially at the beginning) that let you teleport to a specific location, these include official outposts (including the towers), several districts of the main city and so on. just locations that would realistically be hubs people would need to go to often, so there's no way of teleporting to some random cave you visited at some point. they become more accessible as you progress and get more money but you still have to make sure you have some on you to be able to return to a town, village or something.
other than in skyrim you can use these scrolls anywhere, in caves, buildings, even mid combat if you can pull ot off (there's an animation that's even longer than the master spells from skyrim).
another one that I always loved was the way gothic 3 (a highly debated game, I know; I still love it to bits) went about doing it: every major town has one or two teleporter stones that can get you to this city from anywhere. you can't just buy them though, you have to explore the town and its surroundings, maybe do a certain quest to get it, and so on. some examples of hiding spots: in the boss' throne room, next to a path leading out of the city in the middle of a stone circle, in a chest in the cave some random asked you to clear out, in the inventory of a merchant you have to collect taxes from for the boss (who always resists paying and which you consequently will have to pound to the ground and loot -as you do everything in this game), on a table in some random house on the market square, the list goes on. it just encourages you to explore the area you want to be able to fast travel to extremely well in some cases, a bit less in others.
these two systems are likely the best ones I've played with so far, more freedom than in others since you can do it from anywhere and in any situation but more restrictive since you have to buy scrolls/find the bloody things first, they let you escape combat encounters if you are able to pull off the entire animation before being wanked on and most importantly: they make sense in universe.
lovely games in general, I can only recommend them! (in the case of gothic 3, you'll need an unofficial patch which is perfectly accessible on worldofgothic, the community is absolutely amazing)
Honestly, Skyrim’s wagons system would work really well for this. Remove the map fast travel options, set a marker somewhere, get a trip to the closest hold city, horse ride from there, bing bang boom.
Good point! That was especially the case once you have your Hearthfire manor and hire a personal wagon driver. The wagons could then take you to some many more locations besides just the capital cities.
David Alvarez Exactly! Also, I just recently got Red Dead Redemption 2 and it does a REALLY good job about its fast travel systems, at least as far as I’ve seen. There’s train stations you can use which take you to other stations, there’s carriages which can take you to some cities, but otherwise you gotta go on horseback. But with red dead, they don’t make the landscape filler. It seems like you can ALWAYS find something interesting in the landscape or a random encounter or whatever as you ride.
@@imtoolazytocomeupwithaclev2323 I haven't played RDR2 yet, but that sounds really good. The multiple in-game world fast travel options are such a better idea that just map based or menu based fast travel.
And what if I simply want to do normal fast travel and not waste time faffing about with wagons or walking. What if I don't have the time in the day to spend walking around aimlessly in the world and don't want to spend gold on it. What's wrong with the current system of fast travel? All it does is save time. It's not like the game becomes garbage because you are given the OPTION to skip a journey on foot to wherever. I certainly don't want this wagon thing to replace the current system, particularly in the case of high Hrothgar. I highly doubt this system would make sense if the wagon took you anywhere past the first step up to the place (although it would be quite amusing to imagine a wagon climbing the all those steps), and furthermore, I don't want to make that journey on foot because it's novelty doesn't last long after the first time.
@@boomertunes9924 if you watched the video he addresses every single thing you said.
It's one of the things that still makes GTA great. If you want to fast travel you have to call a taxi, be next to a main road, wait a minute, select a location and pay a small fee. It means that you'll only ever fast travel if absolutely necessary.
I didn't even know GTA V had fast travel until I've played GTA Online
at the end of the game though you can buy all the garages and never be farther away than 50 meters from a muscle car with machine guns on it
MoviesForLife The problem with GTA though is that the entire world is empty of anything to really do besides dick around. It's a false open world unfortunately.
You're right about most of that except that you can go inside a police station, its by Mission Row I believe.
But Most people in GTA singleplayer just have mods and mod menu and thats how you fast travel. By making you fast etc. Mods keep this series up because without it Singleplayer is mostly average, repetetive and boring. Sending you from one end to second end of the map. After 5hours where propably 3 was driving around this empty world I just fly with my car from one point to another
I remember I owned a DS Sonic Adventure game that had really interesting level traversal. In it, every world was a separate island, and you had limited fuel in your ship. In order to get from point A to B, you might have to stop at some other island, complete a level to get some fuel, and resume your journey. In addition, the voyage is usually a minute long to 3 minute survival mini game, where pirate vessels would appear, and you’d have to gun them down with various ammo types to protect your ship. Taking damage meant loosing coins (or fuel? I forget. It’s been years). In summary, it was a clever way to incentivize planning your journey’s as well as making a trip, one completely unnecessary given Sonic games have never really been open world, a slightly better sense of world, instead of just appearing at the next zone.
I played through Breath of The Wild with no fast travel after beating the game the first time. It was an amazing experience that works really really well for that game. You are never in a "Wrong" place, so the journey from area to area was full of things to explore that I completely missed the first time around. That said, this probably won't work well for all games, especially ones that aren't designed with a never in the wrong place mindset. One very helpful feature in BOTW is the ability to track where you had been before. This allowed me to take a brand new different path to and from my destination every time which kept the experience fresh when revisiting the same areas multiple times. This also meant that the content was more specific to each area I was in, although that game does suffer a lot from reused puzzles and concepts popping up everywhere.
I think a game needs to be designed so that the adventure is the journey and not just the activities that you do when you get to the destination in order to work well without fast travel. Without fast travel, nearly the whole game is the journey. Sadly I think there are very few games that even come close to achieving this.
Me, as a gamer: yes! That's a great idea!
Me, as programer: please don't
why is it harder for programer?
@@2002THEBOY because they'd have to fill out an entire world of stuff that the player would only experience once or twice
@@minecraftmadlad3593 hmm
But what about making fast travel a gameplay mechanic instead of a menu option? Would go a long way.
@@haole08067 it's like that in rdr2 it's slightly better
There was this Cartoon Network game called ,,Fusion Fall" where, if you decided to fast travel, you would be carried over the map and could look down at the terrain and your character in the meantime. i remember it being very satisfying to fast travel over areas recently uncovered.
Warcraft does this too in the early levels you travel on a griffion and overlook everything below you. I remember the first time flying over the Burning Steppes and thinking shit this place looks dangerous as fuck what if I suddenly fell down there right now. By the way Fusion Fall is coming back look up Fusion Fall Legacy and Retro
Yeah I loved those griffin fast travels when I played WoW many, many years ago. I remember feeling *really* immersed in that game, which imo is a feat considering it's an MMORPG.
Man, I miss fusion fall. That game was my shit in 2011.
It's back as fusionfall retro!
oh god i fucking loved that game
Conan Exiles implemented fast travel pretty closely to what you suggest. There are ancient towers that you have to synchronise to by touching them with your 'slave bracelet', and then you need to learn to construct a cartography table (which is a massive structure), which is only learned by fighting your way into one of the more dangerous mid-game areas of the map. You can then travel from the cartography table to an obelisk, if you have previously synced that obelisk. The obelisks give off corruption, a kind of magical radiation, that reduces your heath and stamina until you remove it. It limits fast travel to the mid to late game, and it takes time to unlock it, and it's expensive in resources to develop it. But that does meet your criteria - an in-game explanation for it, a cost, and a limitation for it in which you can only travel from a central point to a limited number of destinations. The game does also have mounts you can use to get around quicker, once you build a stable, find a foal, raise it to an adult, learn to craft saddles, then get used to the riding controls....
Hollow knight solves almost every problem in the video especially in the end
Bro you said what I felt in less than 15 words and I took a whole dang paragraph 😂 Thank you for paraphrasing my thoughts exactly dude
I think a good example is Zelda BOTW. Sometimes theres never directions just suggestions, multiple ways to get to a place, and tons and tons of random encounters and quick and rewarding side quests. It makes you want to actually travel manually. :)
I think BOTW does a pretty good job too, although teleporting from anywhere (even in combat) makes danger pointless. But the way pausing works in BOTW is broken in this sense too since damage means nothing unless it’s a one hit kill.
@@enduringidealist pause if def. Broken i 100% agree
@@enduringidealist the game is meant to be fun not hard
When leaving High Hrothgar, I can't remember the last time fast travel was as more appealing choice than jumping off the mountain. It's too bad the Nords haven't invented snowboarding yet. They have shields, but don't know how to use them yet.
Darnoc234 *toggles console, types in tgm, and presses enter.* you know the rest.
Michael McCarty in breath of the wild you can paraglide off a cliff and sheild surf
Enter...Breath of the Wild.
Michael McCarty the legend of zelda did that well
You can use the immortality shout and jump
I always liked dragons dogmas approach to this being that you had port crystals to teleport from place to place that you go frequently such as towns but had a few droppable ports wherever you felt like was a place you wanted to revisit later quickly giving you the option specifically where you wanted to skip travel and what's worth the travel and what's not. Unfortunately, I didn't really feel like exploring the same place more than one in that game and it wasn't too big of a map.
I kinda wish that system was made for skyrim where only really tedious to get to places that need to be revisited often have the portal already placed with you only needing to activate it once to forever teleport to again. The rest would be up to you what places are worth teleporting back to. To prevent it being abused such as dropping one in a city and one wherever you feel like you have too much stuff to tp, sell, and return back to where you were is to say that these portal crystals need to be in specific places full of potential energy or something being mainly cities with a lot of life but not places with sporadic energy such as caves or dungeons where there is mainly death or already dead things as an example.
The exact amount of portals given to the player is a bit tricky as not enough leads to overly tedious travel while too many leads back to skipping too much of the open world. It could be given through leveling up to limit the player from skipping too much in the beginning while making you see progress of transport or given through exploring the map giving incentive to exploring.
1:35
i REALLY didn't expect prototype to be mentioned! that's great!
I would argue that Kingdom Come: Deliverance (KCD) has a "half" fast travel system. Yes you can "Fast Travel" to get places quicker than real time, but at the same time you still suffer in game events and consequences. (ie encounters, sleep deprivation and starvation). Its a pretty decent balance I would say.
Dat feeling when you're starving and sleep deprived just trying to get to Sasau and you encounter an assassin in the woods in the dark
I thought Kingdom Come was a really good example of a fast travel system, it really hammered home the fact that while you might not physically be moving the character to the next place, you're still moving through the world and are influenced by its effects. It meant I didn't feel like I was breaking the immersion when I did it as I still had to pay attention for something going wrong.
It also has nice medieval graphics that makes me feel like one of the monks traveling in Monty Python cartoon form
Yeah, the fast travel was good, but KC:D also worked for me in hardcore without the option to fast travel. Having to navigate by cardinal directions and landmarks felt very rewarding. Sure, riding the same way from Sasau to Ledetschko to Rattay was boring at times, but like many unpleasant experiences in life, in retrospect I look fondly upon my rides through the night.
I liked how you still weren’t safe even while fast travelling
Well some of us have a job to do too... just kidding i am unemployed
You are unemployment? Never find me please.
The true embodiment of unemployment?
1:38 how I imagine myself running down the freeway when staring out the window during long road trips
I've noticed in certain games, especially Skyrim, a lot of quests are designed with fast travel in mind. Short quests will have you traveling across all of skyrim, then back again to get one small item for an NPC, and it just ends up being frustrating, especially of you are not using fast travel.
Counter Argument: Drive through texas
T G As a Texan, I concur.
well, Texas is just huge, period. it just is, no more to it. open world games are designed to give the illusion of size, but are actually relatively compact when it comes to content. so it should be possible to design an open world map that has just the right amount of content/encounters that makes travelling it exciting and unpredictable, without throwing too much in your face constantly.
if the perfect balance is found, then the majority of players (excluding those that purely play open world games for the story and rush through as fast as possible) should WANT to travel and see what will happen. it's just really difficult to hit that nail on its head. most recent example I feel came very close to it was spider-man, though.
Or anywhere with many rural areas. Think Texas is empty, try driving through Saskatchewan for 12 hours!
@@Kappacino It's not just the size of Texas, it's that there are really only like 5 distinct regions (of which you'll probably only pass through 2 or 3), so you have hours and hours and hours of the same empty, boring countryside.
Driving from San Diego to Oregon isn't the same slog, and California is easily as long as Texas is wide.
I agree.
Nobody:
People who didn’t watch the video: jUsT dOnT uSe It LmAo
I watched the video.
Just don't use it.
@@fleentstones117 Wrong.
@@fleentstones117 No because its boring if worlds are not meant to be explored or if movement is not fun. Thats two of the things he said, you did not watch de video.
@@Mati303s I did, in fact, watch the video.
Just don't use it. :)
@Danny SJ For real. People asking for realism make me smh. In real life, you drive 15 minutes at least to get to most places. You can walk the entirety of Skyrim from east to west in 15 minutes, or at the very least on horseback. Player-Character-to-land ratio suggests that whole map is the size of 1 real life city. You want realism? Scale the map up 10x and shrink the buildings. There. Now you take forever to get anywhere, just like real life.
When i played Dragons Dogma (without the DLC) i loved the fast travel mechanic, where you need to use some consumable stones called "ferrystones" that not only were rare but very expensive too, that made me think twice before using them and save them for more problematic encounters
Dark Souls 1
Thats all I have to say
Yes but there are occasions where the amount of time it takes to go back to firelink is ridiculous if you don’t have the lordvessel. For example the run back from the catacombs where you have to pass those annoying skeleton wheels or going back from demon ruins
@@Amoeba_Podre I'm sickly proud of myself for having managed that walk out of the Tomb of the Giants on foot without the Lord Vessel. I agree with you that you don't want to do it if you can avoid it but for me I had to. One I realized that my drake sword wasn't scaling I set about an epic quest to build the ultimate faith-powered balder side-sword and I had to sneak all the way down there for 1) the item that lets you make divine +6 and higher weapons and 2) white titanite chunks. I had to camp out in that pitch blackness until I'd grinded for enough shards then climb out of the hell hole with nothing but the clothes on my back and my wits. And, you know, a divine +5 balder side sword. And Greater Lightning Spear. My point is that it was hard and I'm proud of myself for doing it without fast travel and once I got the Lord Vessel I never did that ish again. Skeleton Wheels are THE hardest enemies in Dark Souls.
Nah. WoW my guy. the few forms of fast travel still feel immersive as they perfectly keep to the rheme of the game. Some of my favourite moments playing games has been travelling the world in WoW and meeting people along the way
@@beanie4882
Always loved the Zepplin and boat rides in WoW. Haven’t played the game in eons, but fast travel was fun in it for sure. Lots of fun meeting people like you said, and trolling people by attacking them on the ride etc lol. Lots of intense trips when traveling with people from the opposite faction. 😂
@@anti-ethniccleansing465 exactly this. Feel like ff14 has it a bit with chocobos aswell. I love travelling in those games
In retrospect, I feel like Death Stranding may have been an experiment in this concept of making open world travel more meaningful. That entire game is about micromanaging your travel, from maintaining your gear for toxic enviroments to perfectly balancing your payload in such a way you don't fall over in harsh terrain and damage your cargo or yourself, that game makes you think about every step you take next.
Problem with Death Stranding, that's essentially ALL it has, with very strange and often avant garde, artistic choices with the narrative that's hard to understand and a general lack of other essential mechanics, goals, and enemies, people find Death Stranding just "odd" or worse, "boring", and all the elements its creator might have been trying to solve is sadly muddied a bit by public opinion.
However, if you were to take a similar direction and attention to detail to world travel and apply it to another game and world that has more familiar and easier to grasp concepts and mechanics to the average gamer (Like Witcher, Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption, ect), it might give world travel itself much, much more weight and value as a journey/experience to be used over things like Fast Travel.
I actually don't think it's always necessary to "have things to do" when traveling in open world games, it really just depends on the actual setting. A game like Skyrim should have a decent amount of encounters as it needs to fill you with a sense of adventure and maybe even danger.
But in my experience playing Kingdom Come Deliverance, the games graphics, roads and environments leave me with this strange sort of calm as I slowly make my way across sprawling country side, and though to many this may seem boring, I feel as though it leaves me at peace, even with the minimalist amount of events or encounters, just passing by broken structures or small sheds or monuments makes you go, wonder what this was for... but that's just my experience.
@@spirosouls355 yeah, if the scenery itself is engaging to a player, then that's a good use of "empty" space.
Yeah, after just recently playing and beating Death Stranding, the game wasn't great for me but I did appreciate the way it experimented with movement mechanics. I think a cross between that game's burdensome, every-step-matters gameplay, the ability to place ladders and ropes, and something like BotW's climb anything go anywhere premise could really make more bog standard open worlds more engaging to travel in.
I was looking through the comments whether I would see Death Stranding.. since it has FT that is tied to lore and when player chooses to FT he is making a decision since he will probably miss out on reward and will need to craft new equipment, I personally quite enjoyed DS and while it might lack in the adrenaline inducing encounters it had one of the best world building I've ever seen...
@@cloudbroken I haven't played BotW but while trudging my way through Death Stranding (which I did finish but didn't enjoy) I kept thinking that despite not really being a game that is "about" travelling I still enjoyed going from A to B so much more in Genshin Impact, which is, of course, a shameless BoTW clone. That said, for me, the most intense traversal experiences I've ever had in a game are all from Rust - just getting from my hovel to the recycler and back in one piece often feels like an incredible adventure and one that requires care, caution, forward planning and intense awareness of the environment. There are of course some boring trips in Rust (holding forward and hoping you don't die after respawning on the "wrong" beach without a sleeping bag springs to mind) but once you get situated I really feel like that game provides journeys that feel dangerous & meaningful.
Mechanics fast travel: yes
Menu fast travel: Turn your game into a soulless husk
Why walk when you can ride?
in my game, you can , at your base, teleport characters out into the wilderness. to anywhere, if you calibrate the machine right. but once they are out there, you can switch to them if you want, but they can't teleport back. they have to walk, take a taxi, bus, train, or ride the back of a car with a skateboard. this might be the best of both worlds since it will encourage "region-based" characters, who stay in a certain area and explore from there.
In skyrim you can do a mechanic fast travel with the carts, if you use mods you can disable fast travel, there's even mods which make the carts not a fade to black but a great viewing trip that sometimes interrupted by enemy encounters you need to face off, have frostfall with it and you can ask the cart driver for a temporary stop, pitch a tent and pass the night (now would be good to have the cart driver also pitch his tent), tis much better imo, too bad players have to actually mod to obtain that tho
One example of mechanics for fast travel is the Nether in Minecraft. You still have to travel, but it's 8 times faster.
@@westingtyler2 what game?
Speaking of fast travel as a whole, games like RDR 2 you could choose to fast travel, but you also could choose to skip the ride or not. This usually kept me engaged with the world as seeing it through the lenses of a regular every day person in the world. I liked this because occasionally you’d pass through a town & hear the arguments or see the dogs chasing animals. It created more life to the world & gave me something to see without forcing me to take the time to see it.
Any feature you can just ignore should be left in the game so players can choose. I usually completely ignore potions and foods of all kinds in all games. ESPECIALLY crafting them.
I horde them and end up with a billion things lmao, crafting on the other hand I’ll dabble in and see if it’s worth before disregarding it completely.
An example would be enchanting vs alchemy in Skyrim. Enchanting was simple and fun, and messing around with the last perk of adding 2 to one thing was extremely fun for me. With alchemy where I’d have to taste and test every little thing which is something I wouldn’t have fun doing I strayed away from (except at one point I got bored and started doing it, and as it was “new” to me I enjoyed)
@@StripedJacket yeah, I'd like alchemy more if it weren't just for potions. I never really care about temporary consumables, it's just too much to pay attention to, except for strict no magic play throughs
That doesn't make sense because there's a potentially infinite number of set pieces you can conjure up that can be ignored. The best thing to do is to make each mechanic meaningful to the core experience of the game, rather than letting it subtract from it.
@@thatoneuser8600 nope. It can't subtract from the experience if it's optional. You don't like it? Don't use it.
I don't use potions or food. It doesn't subtract from the experience because I'm not forced to use them.
Occasionally, I make a character that doesn't use magic, so I do use potions. That option only adds to the experience in those rare occasions for me, or for people who use them regularly.
@@SnakeWasRight It certainly can and does throw off the experience of the game.
1. Depending on how cluttered your game is, having tons of optional things can impact the performance, memory space, and development speed of the game.
2. Depending on the type of optionality, it will just clutter the UI and make the game look messy and obtrusive.
3. It can throw off the game balancing if players didn't know that the game wasn't balanced around those optional items, thus leading to worse gaming experiences such as cheesing an otherwise difficult boss for a game centered around a particular theme that is now not able to be conveyed through the game.
4. They dilute the core experience by inherently being not very important to progress through the game, and so they might wrongly disenchant the player from exploring or killing enemies if they don't drop anything good or important, thus pushing them to skip content and believing they didn't miss much of anything.
Unless if there's parkour just like Dying Light.
Climbing over roof, using grappling hooks, etc...
Don't watch muh videos and don't scrubskribe and every climb or run or etc.. upgrading your level and thats very satisfied
Doing mission on night, The more you grind the more happy you are.
This was honestly a big deal for me in Dying Light. Traveling around felt dangerous... Yet rewarding. I did so at night time also, which made for a far more intense gameplay because I could get detected, and know I wasn't nearly fast enough to outrun the volatiles. The parkour feels so good. The climbing feels somewhat real, and if you play on higher difficulties from the get-go, no levels into anything, EVERY SINGLE POINT AND LEVEL feels like a godsend.
But hey, I got a soft spot for Dying Light
Don't watch muh videos and don't scrubskribe just cause 2 did it right cause you could spam grapple then parachute again and again and it was a ton of fun, and sometimes you could grapple between cars or even if you saw a helicopter flying low
Don't watch muh videos and don't scrubskribe yea dying light had some good and rewarding mechanics for traveling around
“Climb in back and we’ll be off”
Just cause 3 is a perfect example of a game where fast travel is the laborious task; even travelling manually from one side of the map to the complete other side is SO FUN! and I rarely make it too my destination, I usually get distracted by other tasks along the way and end up doing something more fun than the objective I was aiming for anyway.
I think the Spider-Man games(talking marvel Spider-Man and Spider-Man miles morales since I don’t have much experience with the others) have nailed movement, even tho the distance between your quests can be quite far, most people never use fast travel, some don’t even know it exists.
I think that is for one part, swinging and wall running while performing tricks in the air is just fun for hours.
The city also feels alive and if you come across a building there is gonna be a different group NPCs the next time you come by, plus the random crimes that you can stop are exiting beyond the amount of them you need to get a trophy. And then there were photo locations and other collectibles on the way, giving you a rewarding feeling as you travel.
It’s hard to make something like that in every game, especially because the map is often larger than just New York and the characters usually don’t have access to Spider-Man powers or an Iron man suit, grappling hook or stuff like that, yet the ways of travel feel underwhelming.
So underwhelming that I’d rather skip the way instead if having a only pressing forward and not having any mechanic that keeps being fun to travel with.
So yeah, I totally agree to your points and am really sad that apparently it’s soo hard to make traveling fun.
Correction: You hate how fast travel is virtually mandatory.
Mambodog 532 yeah, but that’s not a good title 😂
@@zaksolo8927 I hate how fast travel is used to excuse aspects of poor game design?
WesNohathas That would be a good title... you tryna start something? Chill out dude Issa joke
@Alannithas lmfao that Zak dude is tripping
@@wesnohathas1993 *you hate how fast travel is used to create a realistic amount of content by not requiring developers to create the ridiculous amount of content and mechanics that would be required for making every single second of travel in already complex and thorough games as dynamic as wannabe game critics expect them to be.
but...but...its so loooong
That's what she said!
Christopher Wineholt *9 months later* let's name him christopher
That escalated quickly
wtf just happened.
If the developers care about making an attractive world, you wouldn't feel it takes long to traverse, because the trip itself would be varied and interesting. However developing it takes time and companies nowadays wasted a lot of them already.
I feel like GTA did this perfectly, the map is big, but it's fun to traverse it in all the different vehicles and they have amazing driving mechanics. You can fast-travel, but you have to wait for the taxi and it costs money, so it has downsides. I found myself almost never doing it because it's just less fun.
yeah I just realised I think I've only used fast travel in GTA like twice. driving around is just too much fun
Also the random encounters are something I really love in the Rockstar Games(GTA/RDR), and you cam only really find them if you travel around on the map.
I accidently left Lydia at High Hrotgar when I got and was practicing Whirlwind sprint because she was getting in the way and had to find the path back up which took 20 minutes
Dark Souls 1 has the best fast-travel system ever. Because you only unlock it halfway through the game, it feels so much powerful. You feel like you earned it yourself, and now you deserve to use it as you want
GilCAnjos yeah for sure but Skyrim is a totally different kind of experience than dark souls. Dark souls is about the rewarding challenge and immersive world. Skyrim is also about immersion but it is also about creativity in building your character and doing all the quest and overall the fast travel system is really perfect for its type of gameplay style. You don’t have to use it if you don’t want to.
Then Dark Souls 3 is like BAP! There ya go, right off from the start.
But dark souls 1 has so many shortcuts and also its a very different world and game style
Yeah, and even then it's at like the main locations that'd take hours of fighting to get between (without shortcuts).
don't forget all the shortcut elevators and doors which sort of function for fast travel
I feel like breath of the wild manages the open world aspect so well. Just being able to go anywhere, climb anything. The game allows for a lot of player expression even in such basic things such as traversing through the world
also discovering things while traveling is always so cool
A feature i read about in a manhua might be interesting.
In a manhua called martial peak at the later points of the story appears gates that make a wormhole through 1 specific city to the other. The cities that don't have alliances don't have the gates that connect them. And makes it so if you need to go there you either go to where you need go on foot or you try to find a nearby city that has a gate which leads to or closer to your goal.
I really like how Kingdom Come Deliverance handles it's fast travel. You can have random encounters on the way and it has a few debuffs as well
Do "I hate Mars Bars".
I'm Very Angry It's Not Butter!! But uh I am indifferent about Mars Bars...
razbuten I can't have Mars Bars
the meme
Haha lol
Caleb Wright lmao
looking at your opinion, the fast travel in GTA travels by cabs is fking genius
i love to do it u see random shit all the time plus u can change it 1st 3rd or free roam view
yeah it's effectively a "go anywhere from anywhere" fast travel, except it doesn't break immersion. there's a mild compromise: you don't have the whole trip to find a good car to do the mission in, but it matters less in the late game when your equipment is better.
The assassin's creed games are my favorites precisely because travelling is so fun! jumping through buildings, doing parkour, finding new spots while exploring the cities, it's always amazing and makes the experience so much more realistic
Honestly I think a game that has fast travel but it's still perfectly fun to move around from different places in the overworld is Spider-Man PS4, not only is it simply fun to swing around a game version of New York that is nearly real-world accurate but the mechanics of how Spider-Man moves when traveling, running across walls, swinging, diving, and the ability to go through certain tunes and the building materials supporting water towers is fun, plus you kind of need to stay in the overworld for things like crimes to appear that help you 100% the game. What I'm saying is, Spider-Man is a game with fast travel but with how amazing it is to move around the world, ignoring fast travel altogether in the game still makes it an excellent journey. It's similar to that game you mentioned, Prototype, where instead of pressing forward and occasionally moving out of the way of an obstacle, you have to use many precise movements across buildings and such in order to properly swing around. You could simply swing across streets aimlessly without any cool acrobatics, or you could go through tubes, run up and around walls, and immideatly swing to a nearby ledge and make a sort of superhuman across the building
Let's make this simple so there is no need to right an essay.
Fast Travel = Not a Problem.
Lack of effort to make traversing in game enjoyable = Problem.
Make the game enjoyable to traverse AND add fast travel for the people who are not interested in traveling all the way from point A to B.
Gudrik Leiknirsson *rieeet
Gudrik Leiknirsson *wrong
*left
You ignore the problem that the reason devs don't bother to make traveling enjoyable is *because fast travel exists* . Why devote time and effort into content most people won't even realize exists because you gave them the ability to magically teleport around the map when that time could be invested in content more people will end up seeing?
Bane? Use your brain. If it's interesting to traverse an open world game, then people won't fast travel that much. It's not like you can fast travel whenever you want, wherever you want. Set up a couple fast travel stations around the map, put all of the interesting places, enemies, loot, away from the fast travel stations so the players are forced to either travel and have a higher chance to find rare/exclusive loot or let them fast travel to their mission and miss out on the loot they could've gotten by traversing. There are multiple ways this can be done. Fast travel is not a problem if you know how to implement it correctly, which honestly isn't hard at all.
Boring travel is the ultimate immersion...
you get it!
but this comment does make me wonder if you watched past the first minute, because I do explain that the problem actually comes from there not being an interesting alternative to boring-ass travel.
Maxwell Yang because you can crash and kill people and smash cars lmao, only reason driving is fun in that game
So is Taxes and having to relentlessly train to get good at your weapons. i am not sure you want to put in 200 to 500 hours just to good at shooting or swinging your sword.
Far cry 2
IMO, it's actually very immersion breaking. It's realistic, yes, but realism and immersion are not the same thing, and sometimes, the former can actually ruin the latter.
i like the idea of a game where youre sent off on a quest to some place, but you arent told exactly where it is, and the one who gave you the quest "doesnt have time" to explain that bit.
so you have to just talk to other people to find out where it is, and the first person you ask [the one physically closest to the guy who gave you the quest] will tell you the hardest route [because thats the one they know of]
but if you happen to talk to other people, they'll tell you 2 or 3 other ways to get there [and sure, one of those can be a side quest to protect some folks who are going there]
and you have to decide which route to take.
that sounds pretty interesting as a game mechanic.
i also think a suggestion someone else had of making the map more dense [as opposed to just really big/empty] is another good solution.
i think Zelda BotW handled the open-world really well [and it seems to me they made it dense af]
but some people apparently didnt like the aspects of it that i liked
lol go figure.
I used to love picking a random spot on the map in fallout and go there and just explore everything i pass by
2:08
> Mentions how running and jumping level up skills in Oblivion
> Travel acts as a "reward for not just *skipping* over everything"
HA!
I don't think I've ever fast traveled in Red Dead Redemption, horse back is really enjoyable and the randomness between towns is really fun and interesting, from side quest, to gather/hunting, to random events, to hidden loot, to challenges, to raids. Maybe for a blueprint, we should start here.
TheBlackYoshie Same here. That and JC2 are the only games I physically cannot fast travel in.
you can't fast travel in Red Dead Redemption only via a carriage
TheBlackYoshie I eventually started to fast travel because if I didnt, I always ended up lassoing some stranger to my horse, and then dying from the sherrifs.
Justin B lol nah I'm not and I forgot about the campsite lol good catch though I'm a veteran at rockstar and Ubisoft games lol
@Zwenk Wiel
I have to agree. The world was too big and WAAAAY to many missions started with lengthy horserides. Way too many. In Blackwater I was amazed when instead of being told to go outside and mount my horse I was asked to climb the ladder to the roof. A mission that takes place at the starting point? What a novel concept!
And in the end most of the talking during the "startup rides" doesn't amount to much. A lot of repetition and fluff. Other Rockstar games have the same issue.
I remember when my fast travel keybinds (on console) stop working and i had to manually go there it was soo much fun because of horses and special enemies that spawn in specific locations
Hirelings to stash your lily would be awesome. I also like the unique monster/random blockade idea. Maybe add in a request with a timer: "as long as your going to X, please look out for my wagons, they should be back and the guard are yoo busy" (although that may be hard to program.)
Just a few thoughts I had while watching
1. Often, the excuse with fast travel's in game excuse it exist is that it's just your character walking there during a time gap
2. Dragon Quest 3 perfectly uses what you said about fast travel needing n excuse and a consequence. It's a spell the player character learns that costs mp
3. Even if the worlds had plenty of distractions to attend to while you traveled, walking back and fourth for fetch quests or "Talk to this guy and come back" quests would get very annoying fast
Skyrim has so damn many of those quests, and without fast travel would become unbearable.
I think the main point of the video is that games should not be full of "talk to this guy and come back" quests.
Having fast travel is a gateway for devs to say "Yeah we can do this dumb time wasting mission, whithout even considering where to place it on the map, the player can just fast travel".
And about the first point. I mean, he is complaining about just that. Travelling in let's say fallout is supposed to be dangerous. There is no reason why your character would suddenly be able to become ethereal and just walk from point A to B whithout getting into any trouble.
I know the Xenoblade excuse is that the characters move there while for you it's just like, a second. It's even called Skip travel (cause you're skipping the traveling)
I dont understand the whole fast travel needs an excuse point. The excuse is that my character is walking his ass over to where i need them. I mean its obvious they can do this ive been walking for the past 5 days in the game
Yeah the problem isn't when a game *has* fast travel, but when it's made *around* it. It should always be an option, but not make it seem like the game is built on the idea of you fast travelling anywhere. Same goes for quest markers in games like Skyrim and Fallout 4, where you legitimately don't know what to do 95% of the time when you turn the markers off.
you have the quest journal, in there could be a useful way-description... but most of the time the quests don't have that and everyone is like "here i mark this on your map" and thats it... your buildin magica-gps points in a direction and then you press "W"... in those AC's i played you have those tunnelsystems but there was no need for it...
remember Morrowind? finding anything as a pain in the ass!
ARX 351 I loved Morrowind. Finding things felt like an accomplishment (especially the legendary weapons)
Sly Shooter Holy crap it’s sly
Reminds me of WoW. Old quests had like "Southeast from here is a manticore, go and kill it" and you'd be like. "K" running around southeast, looking for the manticore.
Now as it has its automated quest markers "Go and kill the manticore" "uhh where is it?" *looking at map* "Ahh in another zone on a hill"
I just found this channel and this game design issues playlist he made...I'm loving this and I think anyone interested in making games should definitely watch these videos..I sure wish the big dev studios would
It feels really crazy to To see video of Saint throw for in actual UA-cam video
Do "I hate toilet water splashing on my ass when i take a shit".
throw few toilet papers and save ur ass
Godplay Gamer this literally just happened while I read the comment omg
Godplay Gamer ya I do
NEPTUNES KISS
Do "I hate mars bars".
well fast-travel isn’t very fond of you either
x lιғү x underrated comment
Boom Roasted
x lιғү x facts
best comment
x lιғү x that's what i tell my younger sister to annoy her when she apparently "hates" something
I have always been interested in games, but early on in my life I had no money to play many and after I started working, I had no time. I just finally got a decent balance going on and came to UA-cam to get a grasp on how to make this long lasting interest of mine the best hobby I could. Your channel has been a hugely positive tool and I appreciate all the quality content you put out for us. Many many thanks!
Now back on track: I am currently playing several games and one of them is Assassin's Creed Unity. I found myself using Fast Travel and it bothered me that the thought of walking or parkouring across the city would make me not want to engage in side quests after only a few hours of gameplay. The quests are often too simple and silly and, clearly, the only reason for the subquests to be so far apart is to justify the "huge" map. The world too often feels boring as hell, the random encounters with criminals on the streets are fun for the first few round but I find them pretty repetitive after I've done over 150 of them. The collectibles also started to feel like a checklist I need to tick away more than anything else, making the hole "open world" idea feel pointless. It's still a good game, I like the story, characters and historical immersion and I have fun playing it, but you helped me understand that, at least for me, it's a good game and probably nothing more than that because of these open world issues and some other mechanical flaws the title has.