On Fast-Travel in video games

I know this isn’t strictly related to patient gaming, but I think it fits the ethos of this community and I can’t think of a better choir to preach to.

The director of Dragon’s Dogma II made the following statement regarding limiting or removing fast travel

Just give it a try. Travel is boring? That’s not true. It’s only an issue because your game is boring. All you have to do is make travel fun

I think this is fairly compelling. Though I will say, I don’t think the answer is to limit fast travel. The real limitations developers should be placing should be on filler quests that have you traveling from point a to point b and then back with some slight pretext as to why you’re doing so. It’s not fast travel that’s the issue so much as mission design and the manners in which the player is compelled to cross the game world.

Metroidvanias are a great example of how to allow for fast travel while still making traveling around the game world compelling. The latest Metroid, Metroid Dread, was really fantastic in this aspect. You have this sense of progression and exploration even as you’re backtracking.

Would removing fast travel from Metroid Dread have made it any better? I don’t think so. The inclusion of fast travel feels thematic. You have to work for it so it feels like an achievement to unlock. It augments the game.

So in short, I agree with some of the sentiment expressed, with regards to lazy gameplay design being boring. I disagree with the opinion that fast travel necessarily is boring, or causes lazy desing.

shani66,

Dragon’s dogma 2 is shaping up to be an absolute masterpiece.

But on topic; i think the usual systems of fast travel undermine entire games and we all know humans are very bad at enjoying things (‘players will optimize the fun out of everything’), but people don’t usually bring up the impact it has on game design. A simple fast travel system allows for much worse and scattered design. Generally a good game would keep most quests in an area limited to that area, with a smaller number meant to introduce new areas. A fast travel system encourages Bethesda level shit where a quest can leave you going to the literal opposite side of the map and back.

MonkCanatella,

100% with your thoughts here and here and actually elucidated some of what I was trying to say. The player shouldn’t be corralled into one place but the quests they should for the most part explore that particular area unless the quest is of a journey type.

CleoTheWizard,
@CleoTheWizard@lemmy.world avatar

I think the fix to fast travel for me is just to have actual regular travel methods. I’ll talk about a few methods that I enjoyed and how I think they fit into the game.

Fallout 4: This game has a hellicopter and one of my favorite mods unlocks it early as an excuse to use it to travel. It’s an in-world way to get around quickly but not instantly. And there’s zero reason why any game with flying objects or animals can’t implement this. Games like Breath of the Wild could use this and just have you ride a giant bird as the world passes beneath you. Skyrim did this with dragons. It’s an amazing alternative.

The second type is another mod for skyrim: Immersive Carts in Cities (or something like that) which would actually have you ride the cart from city to city along the road. It was glitchy. But similar to the Witcher 3 and its auto-steering horses, it lets you put down the controller and enjoy the scenery for a bit and immerses you.

Lastly, a similar example to the last, but God if War did it great with the boats. Instead of fast traveling with a cart or horse or whatever, make it a ride where the focus is conversation. Rather than me sitting at the local tavern asking about rumors, let me do it on a train or a boat or a horse. RDR2 did it great with many missions transporting you via horse and talking.

So you don’t have to design the entirety of the systems of a game around fast travel, you can keep all the same design elements. Just add an immersive in-world method of doing it that adds to the game. Super simple and it sucks because Bethesda got 75% of the way there and then made them all end-game options with limited utility. The dragons in Skyrim just teleport but a mod unlocks a hidden dev option to just have them fly everywhere. Most of the way there, yet they didn’t do it fully and that sucks.

MonkCanatella,

These are excellent examples and I definitely agree with them. I didn’t know that you could dragons in Skyrim. I never got that far

emax_gomax,

I recently played momodora 4. Fantastic game. But you need to finish about 50% of the game before unlocking fast travel and it… is… a… pain. Doesn’t help since its a metroidvania it can lock you off from certain areas and you just kinda need to explore until you find a path through. I ended up going back and forth the entire map 4 times before I just used a walk-through to get where I needed to. Fast travel should be available much sooner for this one. In the other games it varies but really it depends on how much value there is in backtracking.

ZombiFrancis,

Game vs world discussions aside, travel in a game world is just another mechanic available to the developer to deliver the gaming experience.

If there is a geographic or virtual hub where game levels or areas are generally accessed fast travel to that spot is likely a necessary quality of life.

But other kinds of checkpoints, waypoints, or shortcuts are just as much of a factor to game ‘travel’. They should all be weighed carefully for balacing the flow and feel of a game.

Cowbee,
@Cowbee@lemmy.ml avatar

There’s a careful balance. The player should not be drawn to fast travel as its the most efficient way, but because it makes more sense to given some great drawback.

BakedGoods,

I really liked how it was handled in WoW before flying and non-spell teleportation. Gryphon/bat travel and asking mages for favours. The world felt a lot bigger when you actually got to see it.

caut_R,

Always offer options. Make travel interesting to incentivize people to travel, offer fast travel for those who don‘t want to or don‘t have the time to travel the same route for the seventh time.

Although I do think that if in an RPG I had the choice between absolutely stuffed and detailed event hubs or everything spread thinner across hubs and travel routes (they do take a lot of ressources to make, after all), I‘d probably choose the former.

Contramuffin,

The guy’s got a point, but I don’t think it can be fully generalized as that “you don’t need fast travel, otherwise your game is boring.” I think there are legitimate instances where you just need to get to places quickly. I think the problem is less that fast travel exists, and more that a lot of games nowadays put so many fast travel points that you can go through the entire game without having stepped foot in 99% of the map.

I like the concept of “limited fast travel.” Witcher 3 is a good one, where you can fast travel, but only if you’re at a signpost and you can only travel to other signposts. Hollow Knight does this as well. I’m also pretty partial to how Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom does it, where you can fast travel to any shrine at any time, but shrines are never perfectly where you want to go - you’ll still need to make a 1 minute jog to get to the town/point of interest that you’re trying to get to.

MonkCanatella,

Nice observation with regard to Zelda! I noticed it but I never put into words why I liked it. It is really nice that fast travel doesn’t just plop you down in the middle of the village.

BruceTwarzen,

To me it really depends. I didn't really like read dead 2 vecause it was so slow. But i played online with a friend and we never fast travelled, because there was always something happening and we rather saved the cash.
We played valheim with 4 people and we all have jobs and a life, so 4 adults finding time at the same time was pretty rare, and not being able to teleport materials for reasons was just making the game longer without adding anything. At the end we picked up material, went to a second server deposit it there, teleport and pick it up again. Now i play palworld and i like it, you have a choice, roaming around is fun enough and you find things, vut you can also just use a teleporter, because who cares.

dumpsterlid,

I think fast travel is fine. I play games to wander so I don’t get the point but whatever.

My favorite result of purposefully not having fast travel/teleporting is on the nerd.nu Minecraft server. Most Minecraft servers just have teleports set up to get get everywhere, but this Minecraft server has none so people build huge minecart subways and nether highways to connect cities and towns into an organic transit network. It is a joy to just grab a minecart and just punch random city names in to go for a ride and see where it takes you.

None of it would have happened if the server had fast travel and it just makes the world so much more interesting.

smeg,

In a game like Minecraft where the whole point is to build cool things it seems strange to even think about implementing fast travel

MonkCanatella,

Yes! That’s really rad. I think this is similar to the Spiderman travel system where if it’s a joy to traverse the game world, even given the option to fast travel, traversal is more fun. And of course it’s fast enough that the time you do spend traversing isn’t a burden. Great example

Sphks,
@Sphks@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Also, when the story is great and not too long, I like not to run. Two examples are Firewatch and Portal 2. I take my time because I don’t want them to finish them fast. It’s like keeping a lotery ticket without checking if you won.

theskyisfalling,

One really memorable gaming experience for me was taking acid and then playing Black Desert Online. I went out questing for around 7 hours, visiting different towns and generally progressing the MSQ, no fast travel just me my friend and our horses to get us across the land.

Upon finally returning to what was my home city at that time I had a genuine feeling of delight for being back ‘home’. Not only had we put in work on the quests but we had travelled to far flung unknown places with the journey’s being interesting as well as time consuming. We had to plan where to go so as to not waste our time with unnecessary travelling and overall it just gave a sense of adventure that I don’t think I have had before or since that day.

I fucking love that game but it was also a life consuming addiction that I don’t wish to return to any time soon but I will still always fondly remember that sense of wonder and adventure that was nurtured by having to travel everywhere for our selves rather than just fast travelling around the map in seconds.

Flamingflowerz,

I couldnt get past the grind to enjoy bdo.

theskyisfalling,

I don’t mind a bit of grind personally, particularly with BDO the combat is so much fun that it made the grinding more fun as well.

There were a few things that killed it for me;

Having my PC on 24/7 running the client just so that my workers would continue to work to make me money.

The upgrade system, whilst I don’t mind something that increases the difficulty of obtaining gear and thus making it more of an achievement this was just pure RNG hell. Things like failstacks where by failing you then increase your chance to make subsequent upgrades so you are farming failed upgrades to build these stacks to then try and use on the actual item you want. Or jewelry straight breaking if you fail. It is a system that not only encourages the cash shop use but is quite honestly unfair as fuck.

The final nail in the coffin for me was spending around 16 hours across a couple of weeks digging in the same spot in the desert trying to find an item to advance the MSQ and never getting it. I wanted to continue with the main quests and that just entirely halted my progress to the point I finally just said fuck this shit.

Like a good addict I often get pangs of wanting to return to it because at the core of it the game looks and plays amazingly with so many great systems but they are just over shadowed by intentionally being made to funnel more people towards a cash shop.

BDO, I weep for you.

BleakBluets,
@BleakBluets@lemmy.world avatar

I would rarely choose to fast travel if I had engaging and interesting means of travel like bunny hopping and strafe jumping in Quake, or wall-riding like Lucio in Overwatch. This assumes the world was built to facilitate this kind of movement and there were challenging obsticles, enemies, treasures, secrets, and other points of interest scattered among a variety of paths for the player to choose. Obviously much easier said than done; Super Mario Oddessy and Sonic Frontiers tried to do something like this on a smaller scale (relative to the large open worlds of other games) with varying levels of success.

Exploration was fun in the BotW and TotK Zelda games, but I found myself relying on fast travel by the midpoint of each of those entries because the enemy camps and treasures just weren’t worth the time nor effort. Dashing on horses wasn’t mechanically deep enough and Ultra Handing vehicles was either too inconvient or resulted in “path of least resistance” designs that led me to hoverbike to new locations very cheaply and easily.

MonkCanatella,

oh yeah, that’s a great point as well. Spiderman for example. I only ended up fast traveling right near the end when they start piling on the side quests. Up until then I spent the whole time swinging across the city.

Also agree with the Zelda games. They’re so huge in scope that fast traveling becomes pretty much a necessity. That’s something I was trying to elucidate but didn’t really do a good job of. You can have this great huge game world, but if it’s a chore to cross it, what’s it worth? Ideally the story and missions would be what move you to travel across the game world, creating an engaging reason to not just open up the menu and fast travel as close as you can to the next objective.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Re: Zelda, I think that was my problem with BotW. I finished it, but the game felt tedious more often than not. Finding anything new was a chore, and the reward was a simple puzzle I’d usually solve in 5 min or so. In older Zelda games, a dungeon would take 30 min minimum, usually an hour or more, and there was a good lore/story reason to do it.

As Bilbo said:

I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.

That’s how I feel about BotW puzzles and dungeons. The payoff just wasn’t there most of the time, esp for the repetitive battle challenges.

There’s a lot of content there, partway the world felt empty because everything is so spread out.

BotW is my least favorite Zelda game, and that’s unfortunate because there’s a lot of great stuff there.

MonkCanatella,

Wow… yeah I can definitely see that. I skipped any enemy camps because your reward was usually a bunch of bananas and it felt repetitive as hell. That’s a really valid critique. I regardless think it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played, but now that you mention it, there’s definitely room for improvement

sugar_in_your_tea,

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the game, otherwise I wouldn’t have finished it. It’s just my least favorite Zelda game.

Instead of buying Tears of the Kingdom, I played Skyward Sword and Link’s Awakening and enjoyed both more than BotW; the first reminds me of Ocarina of Time, and the second reminds me of a mix of The Legend of Zelda and A Link to the Past, which are my three all-time favorites.

I’ll probably get TotK eventually, I’m just not champing at the bit. Then again, I’m not a fan of open world, “make your own fun” type games in general, I prefer structured challenges and games with strong narratives.

dumpsterlid,

Quake movement mechanics need to be brought out of obscurity and applied to some different genres. Imagine a Minecraft-like where you could work up crazy speed strafe jumping across endless procedurally generated landscapes?

BleakBluets,
@BleakBluets@lemmy.world avatar

I remember someone porting Mario 64 movement to Minecraft a few years ago. The original is outdated, but here are a few mods I just found for version 1.20.1. Note that I haven’t tested these yet.

Obviously vanilla Minecraft wasn’t balanced around these movement techniques, but they certainly can’t be any more overpowered than elytra+rockets.

Super Mario 64 movement in Minecraft

Quake movement in Minecraft

fckreddit,

At the very least, the world has to interesting enough that travel from point A to point B is not boring. Good examples are RDR2, where the world has enough activity that it was fun to just travel. Another one is Cyberpunk 2077. Night City is so beautifully realized that I cannot help but not use fast travel and instead drive everywhere.

Also as others have pointed out. Spider-man’s traversal is so much fun that it is almost criminal to use fast travel.

andrew_bidlaw,

I grew to dislike it in the later Bethesda games (and open world games themselves as a genre), although in their third TES game they made it right. There were multiple paid or magical systems like teleports, transportation and spells, all not ideal, but when you go from A to B you start to chain them like you do while commuting to the other side of a city IRL. Not only that doesn’t harm immersion, it makes the world feel more connected and makes you obey the rules of that world. Some of them are accessible right from the start, some are unlockable by buying a scroll\spell or finding an item. Sometimes it feels even rewarding when you find an efficient way to cross these ash deserts. Not to say that gamedevs can add to worldbuilding by adding this or that traveling hub on the map and repeatedly put you in places they want you to stay in more and notice quests, shops, factions to join.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Exactly. I think Morrowind does fast travel absolutely fantastically.

There’s an incentive to walk between cities, and there’s an option to fast travel between them, so I tend to do a bit of both. I’ll often travel between cities multiple times, so walking between them isn’t going to be much fun after the first time. But I’ll almost always do it the first time.

Fast travel is also incredibly important for replays. I’ve probably already seen the interesting stuff between areas, and repeating that experience probably isn’t what I’m interested in. Morrowind is designed to be played multiple times with different builds and whatnot, and repeating content isn’t very fun.

In short, a game should include fast travel and do its best to convince me to not use it. But give me the option anyway.

andrew_bidlaw,

is designed to be played multiple times with different builds

Jokes on you, I’m several years into my Fargoth impersonation playthrough.

pic related: imgur.com/t3GvB

Toribor, (edited )
@Toribor@corndog.social avatar

Fast travel is useful when a player needs to get to a specific location to progress and the alternative is a route that doesn’t pose any challenges or offer any opportunities for something interesting or unexpected to happen.

Conversely, you can remove fast travel (and potentially improve your game) if you can meet some of that criteria to make travel interesting. Is it just taking time to get there, or is there some sort of encounter along the way? Red Dead Redemption does a good job of this where a stranger on the road might strike up a conversation or some bandits might ambush you. Sure you could fast travel, but there are tons of events like that so even going back through the same areas will usually yield some sort of unique experience.

Alternatively, traversal itself should be interesting. The Insomniac Spider-Man games allow you to fast travel to various subway points on the map but swinging around the city is such a joy that I rarely ever fast travel. Death Stranding is built entirely around traversal, and at least in the early parts of the game you need to plot a route, pick appropriate gear and balance your load carefully. If anything the game gets less interesting when traversal is trivialized by zip lines or vehicles you can just drive between deliveries.

Valheim is a good example of a game that limits fast travel in an intelligent way that enhances the game. You can build point-to-point teleporters that allow for instant travel but there are certain resources that can’t be teleported. This allows for a lot of freedom of movement across a very large map but also ensures that you must still periodically load up your ship with valuable ore and make the long and dangerous journey back home to process it.

MonkCanatella,

The Valheim implementation sounds clever!

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