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I think in world fast travel points are the best way to do things. You wanna get to that city? Best take the strider. Wanna go to the town out in the middle of nowhere? Theres a bus that goes that direction. Makes it feel much better imo.
I appreciate how Kingdom Come Deliverance handles fast travel.
The further you travel the more likely shits gonna get fucky on the way
I like KCD for hardcore’s fast travel. There isn’t any. You have to learn the map and move your horse the old fashioned way with no compass and no map marker for Henry. It really immerses you and forces you to learn the map.
what does “getting fucky” mean in that game?
harassed by bandits or something
like fast travel is interrupted by an encounter?
yeah, there are assorted encounter types you can be interrupted by, not all are bad but many are. some start unique quests.
The encounter often times is related to where you are, so if there is a bandits hideout in the woods near a place you’re fast traveling past they might hop out and try to rob you.
Or you might run into a weird person near a village.
Or you might just run into some dudes that wanna wrestle.
These people are in the world otherwise and you could run into them while not fast traveling too, but when fast traveling you’re not like to avoid “bad” situations
that’s good mechanics, I like it. not lazy coding that just does a flat chance per travel event. it’s a good look for the devs
Big reason why I just rode the horse the old fashion way and avoided obstacles myself
What am I supposed to explore when I am going back the way I came? The simplest way of doing fast travel still generally requires you find POIs by actually going to their location before you can travel to them instantly.
I’ve done my exploring, now I want to sell all the shit I found and get back to finding more!
In open world games that are actually open world, going back is also something notable.
But nowadays games are open world just as a side thing, and there’s actually nothing to do in the so called open world, besides the quests…
Best way of handling this is to load the environment with random events that can occur on various return trips. Sea of Thieves and Red Read Redemption 2 do this, though it doesn’t work for every game.
The other good way to handle it is a fun movement system, eg Insomniac games.
And those get pretty repetitive and aren’t rewarding enough that I wanna go through that every time. Especially RDR2’s fucking habit of spawning some kind of big animal right the fuck on top of me giving me zero chance to react and making me lose all the animal pelts I’d been collecting right as I am walking up to the motherfucker who buys 'em. 🤬
(I’ve been playing that one recently and it’s reminding me why I stopped)
I’ve always tried to avoid fast travel as much as possible simply because exploring and random encounters are the best way to l ensure you’re levelling up as necessary.
If you just fast travel between story beats, you can find yourself underpowered and having to “level farm” to get back on track.
Besides… Exploring is often more fun than the actual game.
I never used the fast travel systems in Cyberpunk 2077, back before we could actually ride the tram. Used to walk everywhere and take in the sights.
Now I love to take the tram every now and then and relax watching Night City go by…
Two things:
One - At launch the fast travel kinda sucked. It was easier, imo, to just mindlessly drive to your destination.
Two - YOU CAN RIDE THE TRAMS NOW?
YOU CAN RIDE THE TRAMS NOW!
I’ve put 300 hours into this game, and not once did I know this was a thing. I beat it about the time the DLC came out. Is this a newer update, or did I just miss it on my last playthrough?
I think it came pretty late, yea, way after the DLC.
I think there’s even another update coming out for it, but I’m not sure.
The devs love the game afaik. And so many people play it that updates are worth it for them to make more sales.
It came with Phantom Liberty, if I recall correctly, or soon after, so you missed it.
Of all the things to get me back into the game…
This was me with Horizon Zero Dawn. I finished my first playthrough without ever fast traveling. Then after the credits rolled I spammed it.
No ragrets. Was fun.Same.
But that’s why good fast travel is important. Once you’ve seen the world, you can skip the stuff you’ve already done.
But even more important is a world you want to see so you don’t want to fast travel at first.
Looking at you, Starfield.
And if you do have a shitty world, make sure the fast travel is actually fast.
Looking at you, Starfield.
Morrowind was perfect without fast-travel. You had to come up with creative solutions. On the way to Balmora and don’t want to hike through the ash hills? Just use the spell Waterwalking and use the river as a convenient highway.
Use Divine Intervention to teleport to the next temple in a town, then use the siltstrider to travel to the next city or boats to go alongside the coast. Mage Guild offered teleport devices to other cities. The Spells Mark and Recall did the rest.
That’s the trick to Morrowind. It does have fast travel, it’s just integrated into the world building much better. Between Silt Striders, Boats, Mage Guild Teleportation, Mark and Recall, Intervention spells, and things like Levitation and the Boots of Blinding Speed, you can actually often get around the map faster than in later games (just watch a Morrowind speed run). But to do so you needed to build up both your character, and your own knowledge of the game world.
Fast Travel wasn’t some feature that broke immersion to add convenience, it instead added to both. It enhanced the feeling of exploration, and character progression, while teaching the player about the world.
Until I played Morrowind, I had no idea that planning your commute to work can actually be fun. “Wait, so if I take the StriderBus to there I can transfer onto the MageMetro and then it’s a straight shot over the hill to my destination? Amazing!”
I love it when tourists ask me a Metro question.
That being said, first mod that I made for Morrowind back in the day, was an extention of the transport network, with a bunch of teleportation points, and random silt strider stops all over. As much fun as it was to jump around, it gets old eventually
Meh, just put on the boots of blinding speed, maximise the map, and hope for the best…
Fast travel is a symptom of poor game design so don’t feel too bad
Bingo.
Fast travel remains a staple mechanic because game devs:
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Often can’t figure out a way to make travel itself into a gameplay mechanic or experience that is varied and interesting.
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Keep designing checklists of things for the player to do, with games built around them, as opposed to inverse of that… which trains players to just be checklist checker offers.
There’s no point to having an open world if it is not engaging or interesting, so… when your open world lacks depth, you end up in a nonsense situation where you have a poorly designed feature, with essentially a ‘skip’ mechanic for said feature.
… Why bother with the feature, at that point?
Hell, even the Rockstar games would give you interesting dialogue, in transit… not really gameplay per se, but it is generally engaging, can help with action intensity pacing, and of course, give you the story.
There are so many ways you could gameify or at least make travel itself more interesting.
Do that, and fast travel becomes near totally pointless.
Yeah but a realistic open world is boring as hell
Even in real life you have hours of a road trip to get anywhere and you stop and piss a few times until you finally get to your real destination
So games can’t do a lot when basing around that
At no point did I mention realism.
Yep.
You’re right.
Realistic open worlds are generally boring, to most players.
Thats why almost no popular open world games have realistic distance scaling.
Skyrim, for example, is a teeny tiny place, compared to how large the lore describes it as, everything is scaled in a kind of exaggerated way, same with all GTA games, even RDR and 2, they’re not even close to being realistically scaled, they’re scaled based… basically on an estimate of a player’s average attention span.
You want realistically scaled?
Go play an ARMA game, and just go on a hike, over a close to one to one scale replication of an actual island or penninsula, for a real world entire day.
Yeah that shit’s boring as fuck to most people.
… But I did not at any point say that a good open world is a realistic world, or anything like that, but thats what you appear to have read, out of what I wrote.
Fascinating.
Anyway, what you should do to make an open world that doesnt suck, is make it interesting, in an actual game mechanical sense, not merely ‘pretty’.
Maybe as you travel, enemies of one kind or another have a chance of spawning nearby and cresting over a hill or emerging from a forest.
RDR2 does shit like this very well, oh I’m just gonna relax, trot along, enjoy the scenery… and … my throat has been ripped out by a pack of wolves, goddamnit.
Or you go for the Bethesda approach and have 500, one time discoverable locations with basically some kind of a mini dungeon or staged scenario you can wander into.
Or you can do the Kenshi approach, no real questlines, just simulate the entire world as a kind of sandbox that tens of thousands of other npcs live in, do their own thing in… with actually closer to a realistic sense of distsnce scaling… and just give the player save states and the ability to fastforward or pause time, by default… and maybe they bumble in to some particularly interesting people, or maybe its oops all beakthings, or maybe you’ve now been enslaved by either cannibals or the Holy Nation, while you were afk for your literal 12 mile hike across the map.
Or you could just make some kind of game where fast travelling requires the player to engage in something on the order of a hacking/lockpicking minigame, to… keep the wheels from falling off or something, I dunno.
Maybe vehicles are simulated in some kind of way that… if you’re reckless and innatentive, you’ll break em, and now you’re fucked, in the middle of nowhere. State of Decay 2 comes to mind, sort of.
Point is… there are many ways you can make travelling itself into an engaging, alternate form of the game itself, or a kind of minigame, or a way to experience some kind of story or plot development, or reward the player for picking up on contextual cues during transit, punish them for missing them…
Hell, make a minigame out of trying to pick a song to listen to that your npc companion doesn’t hate, throw in guitar hero style karaoke minigame, why the hell not? maybe it can boost or demerit your relationship with that npc, land you on different paths of a branching storyline.
… Travel doesnt need to be realistic.
It just needs to be more interesting, rewarding, engaging, than skipping it.
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I’m currently playing The Outer Worlds on the hardest difficulty which, among other things, disallowes fast-travel. For the most part, the worlds have been small and it hadn’t been a problem, but yesterday I had to go back and forth to 3 locations several times in a row in different corners of the map. It only took a five minutes each time, but ugh. It got old.
I almost never fast traveled when I played Skyrim. To busy exploring every random cave and building along with climbing random mountains because why not.
I didn’t fast travel except all the treks to and from High Hrothgar. That got old quickly.
Pretty sure I went there once in all the time I played Skyrim.
Would be a great name for a dispensary
There is one in my area called Skooma.
From what I remember if you did all the Greybeard stuff you were up and down there many times.
First to meet the Greybeards
After the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller
The Civil War meeting
That’s just off the top of my head having not played Skyrim in yonks
The mountains I managed to clip my way up… I spent way too much time doing that. Climbed the “Throat of the World” before I got the shout that would clear the wind barriers—because why not lol
I tried that and gave up after being attacked by five bears within the same quarter mile stretch of road.
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Heh, I remember travelling to Proxima Centauri from Alpha Centauri in Elite Dangerous… around 80 light days, one of the longest in-system distances in the game (for inhabited systems), using in-system engines because that’s too close to jump through hyperspace… last time I looked the record was at around 26 minutes, most ships probably did it in around 30 to 45.
Good trip to just set the cruise speed, grab a book, and relax…
I’m practically allergic to fast travel, no matter the game. I don’t play games to “get through them”. If I’m playing something where I’m that bored with traveling in an alternate universe, I should probably just pick another game.
I take transit in Cyberpunk and it makes the world feel way more alive. Downtime is something some games are entirely built around so the moments of action have that much more impact. I admit some games do this poorly, but those are ones I typically just avoid in the first place.
I like when my games feel more like roleplay and less like an action movie.
Wait, does this mean they got the train working?! I haven’t played since early on.
Yes! There is so much they’ve added since launch. You should absolutely replay.
Ok, I really should. It was a major disappointment when I played at launch and looked everywhere for how to board the train and couldn’t find it.
I’ve been hooked on Dragon’s Dogma 2 for a bit now.
I haven’t even used a fast-travel item because world traversal and exploration is so much fun. It’s a game that actually uses it’s open world as something other than an overworld to move to the next quest.
Depends on the game, is travelling fun and/or the world interesting to look at? I never used fast travel in Spider-Man.
