Fast travel in games like Oblivion or the newer Fallouts

[Trolldor]

Sorry if the thread is lacking in discussion value, this is mostly a gameplay suggestion.

People often complain that the fast travel system of the aforementioned games removes the immersion and fun of exploring the map. What if players were only able to go to hubs like towns, and a set "camp" that the player can set up anywhere in the wilderness uninhabited by enemies? That way it would not be massively annoying to walk back to a town or the safehouse to pick up/drop off equipment, or to turn back just before arriving at the intended destination, while still encouraging the player to explore the world.

The camp would be a bedroll or campfire (similar to the one in RDR) but the player would have to move it by travelling to it and carrying it to a new location

Fast Travel is optional.

Whiners be whining about a feature they don't have to use.

I explore to find new areas, I use fast travel to get to old ones.
Don't like it? Tough luck, muck pants.

 

[veloper]

I've never seen the appeal of moving a character around for hours with nothing interesting happening, myself.
Let me skip to to the good bits and not waste most of my game time with worthless filler.

 

[Byere]

I would've loved to see instead of fast travel, some vehicles in Fallout 3. I was running through the wasteland once, and I just thought, "Man, how cool would it be to drive around on a motorcycle, Mad Max style." And it would help get you places faster.

They had a car in Fallout 2. Since there was no fast travel system, you'd spend hours/days going from one place to another, often encountering many different randoms along the way. Once you got the car, you cut the time it took at least in half (long as you kept it fueled) to get from place to place. I can't remember if it completed removed random encounters or just cut the chances of them happening...
Only problem when the game is you traveling along a landscape rather than just moving on a world map is that there's a lot of chance of your vehicle glitching along the way. This could be it getting stuck in the pixels, it falling upside-down and unable to use, etc. The amount of hills, steep paths and general debris, not to mention the many enemies shooting at you in the more recent Fallout games, it would make using a vehicle rather a painfully slow way to get around as you'd have to constantly get in/on and out/off of it before you can retaliate. Admitted, for small guns and melee weapons it's a bit easier to get around that problem when on a motorcycle, but otherwise...

 

[veloper]

I would've loved to see instead of fast travel, some vehicles in Fallout 3. I was running through the wasteland once, and I just thought, "Man, how cool would it be to drive around on a motorcycle, Mad Max style." And it would help get you places faster.

They had a car in Fallout 2. Since there was no fast travel system, you'd spend hours/days

Fallout 2 IS fast travel.

Days in game, pass in seconds when you travel on the map, which is the whole point of fast travel.

 

[Jekken6]

One of the best anti-tedium things in the game, to be honest. and, it's completely optional.

 

[Kaanyr Vhok]

The whole, its optional thing though, has a flaw. When fast travel is available, its encouraged. When its not, there are suppliments. I liked not having fast travel in Morrowind. it made you have to plan. Did you use boats? Silt Striders? Mark/Recall, and the Interventions? Oblivion has NONE of that though, so you are ultimatly forced to fast travel, or be bored.

I have so much more fun exploring in Morrowind than Oblivion by far.

Thats how I feel. The could at least use the Fallout 1-2 system so its risky.

 

[Rooster Cogburn]

In a perfect world, they would design the world and quests based on the assumption that the player would not have fast travel, but give players the option to turn it on or off. Now everybody wins.

How is this any different to what he's been saying...?

Because his proposal is to have a game like Oblivion. My proposal is to have a game very unlike Oblivion. Turning off fast travel will work MUCH better in the latter than in the former.

If what you're saying was actually true, then why was I constantly finding caverns, abandoned mines, keeps, and ruins to explore while playing Oblivion?

It's the landscape that is featureless. You can walk for miles and it's all the same rolling hills and random trees and rocks. By contrast, Morrowind and the new Fallouts have unique hand-crafted terrain.

Keep in mind that none of these places are accessible for fast travel until you find them. And, assuming I'm just trying to get from one area of the map to another, which I'll be keeping to the marked paths in order to expedite travel anyway, why NOT let me fast travel from one major city to another?

Because it's fun and immersive, or it would be in a game whose design was informed by the concept that the player would need to traverse terrain.

As far as your claim that the game was poorly designed BECAUSE of fast travel,

I didn't say that at all. Projecting much?

there's a phrase that's very popular to bring out on this site: "Correlation does not equal causation." Bioware has stated in multiple interviews that the world of Oblivion was intended very much to have a "High Fantasy" feel. The game was INTENDED to have a down-to-earth, almost mundane feel to it, especially compared to the likes of Morrowind.

[You mean Bethesda. Too many 'B's in this business.] So? I can't not like it? EDIT:Oh, I see what you are saying. But it's not that the quests are bad. It's that they are designed with fast travel in mind. You skip all over Cyrodiil all the time. You can't quest in one area for a while and then graduate to the next, gradually discovering the countryside as you go. You just run all over everything all the time, which makes fast travel a necessity. I want to stop myself from getting off topic here, but I'm not saying that fast travel is responsible for the feel of the game (not by itself, anyway). I'm conceding your point that fast travel fits into their original concept of what Oblivion should be like. I just don't really care.

What are you still complaining for? I said you could keep your fast travel, I'm just asking for the realistic and fun option to not use it. This option is not present in Oblivion. With mods, you can make playing that way doable, but not fun. Saying I don't have to use fast travel in Oblivion is like saying "I'm not touching you, nana-nana-boo-boo". It's technically true, but it's asinine.

 

[Rooster Cogburn]

Woops, sorry for the double post. Not sure what I did wrong.

 

[gideonkain]

In Oblivion, I didn't really like the fast travel (having just come off of Morrowind) but in Fallout I started to get it, I think about it like this:

If I've been to a place before than I can assume that I can get back there again.

Also keep in mind that fast travel is basically a requirement for open world games, otherwise the game would have to be MUCH MUCH smaller or have all the games missions take place in tiny clusters, or provide vehicles\mounts

I'm sure theres an easy to install Fallout mod that will remove Fast Travel if you really wanna challenge yourself or don't think you can avoid the temptation of simply...not using it.

 

[Hyper-space]

It's optional.

You keep saying that, but they completely designed the landscapes and quests and everything else around a feature and you seem somehow unaware of the difference. It's like you think playing Oblivion and just ignoring fast travel will somehow simulate the experience of playing, say, Morrowind. It won't- not even remotely close. You would spend tens if not hundreds of hours crossing the (featureless) landscape because the quests/world/spells/infrastructure/transportation services etc just weren't designed for it. Even the main quest, which takes you all over Cyrodiil, would take several times as long to complete because there are no travel services, no spells, and no consideration for geography in quest design.

Additionally, most people find it unsatisfying to erect personal artificial gameplay elements, especially when they are forced to. Having the option to turn it off would help, I suppose, but this isn't the real problem. The problem is that actually trying to play Oblivion without Fast Travel as you suggest would be insane. Not even the modding community can make it fun in Oblivion like it was in Morrowind. Trust me on that.

In a perfect world, they would design the world and quests based on the assumption that the player would not have fast travel, but give players the option to turn it on or off. Now everybody wins.

how would the option of turning fast-travel off be any different from not using it? arbitrary bull-shit IMHO.

Well, I guess for me I like the fact that there is some risk and some chance discovery in my RPG. I guess I don't want to dictate what type of experience you have. But if I were to make a game I would reward players with a little something if they put in the work of exploring a bit. But I wouldn't force you grind miles of travel for the whole game if you didn't want to. If you wanted to zip around the map, I would facilitate some means to do that. If the 'role' you would like to play is a jet-setter that gets around quick without plodding along then it would cost you more points in endurance, let's say. Sometimes players always ask for more than they should have sometimes and would get bored quickly if they had everything. But scarcity pushes you to be more clever and you ultimately have a better experience.

So, because fast-travel kills the immersion for you, no one should have it?

note: opinions are not fact.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

What about a Fable style fast travel, only a few points around the map, and the portals only allow you to travel to them once you've been there. It means that you still need to explore the world, and many places can't be fast-travelled straight to their doors.

 

[ultrachicken]

If they're going to make you hike everywhere, then the player character should run faster. The biggest problem I had with Morrowind was that the player character moved incredibly slow.

Fallout 3/NV had it right. No matter how important a location was, it must be discovered before you can fast travel, so exploration was necessary, at least at first.

 

[The Rascal King]

I think the fast travel system is pretty damn handy, especially in the Fallout games because of the goddamn Deathclaws that like to kill you in 3 or less hits (I like to play on hard difficulties). Bethesda did the best they could when they came up fast travel. Remember walking for a half an hour trying to find a town you didn't know the exact location of in Morrowind? Yeah, that was a *****. I'd rather have a little value sapped from authentic exploration of a game world rather than walking through barren wastelands that are commonplace (with the exception of Oblivion) in Bethesda's games with nothing to do.

 

[Rooster Cogburn]

Oh my God, my character never had to pee... IMMERSION BREAKING!

I'm not sure if that is a slippery slope issue or a generalization issue, but it smells bad.

No. That would be boring. Having to travel 99% of the whole time from place A to B is boring, since they never change.

What's boring? Oblivion? What never changes? Besides, I have never seen anyone ask for this.

The only times I liked this thing, if the game takes place in a smaller area, like how the Witcher was for the largest part in one city with a few districts, or Dragon Age2 in Kirkwall. The place gets familiar, sort of like how your home-town automatically feels different to you than any other place.

Fair enough.

But frickin' travelling? Jesus. IF you want to see the same stupid hill, tree, ruined Imperial castle, over and over again, be my guest.
There's a reason people use busses or trains to get to where they want to go, say work or school. Not only do you have to get there on time (as some quests ingame probably will have you do), you also don't get up 3 hours early to go to your school on foot because that would be BORING.

By this logic, we should probably get rid of exterior cells altogether. In fact, let's just skip the whole 'game' thing and just role credits. On the other hand, if we are going to put players out in the terrain, the questions of what they should be doing and exactly how much time they should spend there are more subjective.

Also, why should there be an off/on option for fast travelling? Seriously? Just don't use it if it bothers you. You need an off-button for that?

Like I said, most people don't like coming up with artificial limitations. It's comparable to deciding that a gun shoots too fast for game balance, and everyone saying "shooting that gun so fast is optional. Just pace your shots." You can just pretend the gun shoots slow, but it's a constant immersion breaking annoyance. Or, I could simulate 'Hard-Core' mode from New Vegas with the power of imagination. I could just pretend that my character needs to eat and sleep and give myself self-inflicted injuries for failing to do so. That's a silly example, but it blows to pretend the game is 'X' when it's 'Y'. Give me the off-button or I'll darn well mod it in. There are infinity-billion mods to turn off fast travel in Oblivion (although using them totally blows).

In a perfect world, they would design the world and quests based on the assumption that the player would not have fast travel, but give players the option to turn it on or off. Now everybody wins.

how would the option of turning fast-travel off be any different from not using it? arbitrary bull-shit IMHO.

For you, it might not be. For most people, it is, for reasons I explained above. And if you're going to call it "arbitrary bull-shit", I'll just say that I think you are being obtuse just because it's a feature you yourself don't want.

 

[Vern5]

You know what I've always wondered? If you've played the original fallouts then you will remember the little overworld map that you pick a destination on that charts your progress from one end of the map to the other. Nobody ever talks about how that form of fast travel broke immersion. So why the hell wasn't it present in the New Fallouts? Sure, it wouldn't be as free form as the original but I think what really breaks the immersion for people is that loading screen that pops up for a brief second before you're suddenly where you wanted to be.

Instead of that brief showing of loading screen, Bethesda should have replicated the overworld map transit animation to make it seem like getting to wherever you're going is actually an effort rather than an effortless leap through time.

 

[Madman123456]

The only problem I have with fast travel is that you can't fast travel indoors, I understand it's so you can't leave a dungeon in the middle of a fight or when things get tough, but really, do I have to walk all the way down a 3 story building going through different loading screens as I leave the house just so I can fast travel?

If you have the PC Version, i have made a little mod for that. It will enable fast travel from within the indoor cells.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=35279 for Oblivion

http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=15108 for Fallout 3

http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=37204 and one for Fallout: New Vegas. This last one will fuck with your Weapons since they just had to get fancy and implement all sorts of Stuff which didn't really work.
If you fast travel out of a Casino (which will put your weapons in a case when you enter) your weapons will be lost. So be careful with the new vegas mod, the others work fine.

 

[VaudevillianVeteran]

I like having the option to fast travel and explore. Sometimes you're out of ammo/health and it's just frustrating trying to get to the closest town. But when you're locked and loaded and just exploring the map, there's nothing better. Having the option is awesome.