Machinima @machinima Why you shouldn't keep using fast travel in video games ❌ (Turn sound on 🔊)
Mike LeBlanc @sith_Hunter I can say with 100% honesty that the traversal mechanics in @anthemgame make me avoid using any sort of Fast Travel as often as possible! Once all of you hop into a Javelin for the first time, I bet you'll all understand exactly what I mean
These tweets align with my thinking.
Wherever possible I avoid fast travel. I've played some games of a couple of hundred hours without ever having fast traveled *
Anyone else?
Sometimes it's good to walk/ride/drive/swing rather than 'magically arrive'...
* except when I've relied on it to get me unstuck from inbetween two rocks, or the like...
Last Edit: Sept 30, 2018 21:22:00 GMT by SofaJockey
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An exception would be Watchdogs. I liked the city, the driving and the music so much that I'd purposefully go do missions at the other side of the map just so I could chill and have a nice drive.
Post by Blast Processor on Sept 30, 2018 21:33:30 GMT
I guess I generally avoid fast travel early on in games, to experience the world and better understand the map. But once I've seen most of what there is to see its fast travel time!
Its never too late. LOL.
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Post by Andrew Waples on Sept 30, 2018 21:38:08 GMT
I'd rather not waste time.
"The thing you have to remember is that just because your voice carries halfway around the world, you are no wiser than when it carried only to the end of the bar."- Edward R. Murrow
I've been thinking about this as well after that article went up. I agree that cool traversal helps, but not always, and may only be a piece of the puzzle.
There are some games, Skyrim for example, where I rarely use fast travel. It manages to hit on just the right combination of map size, wide variety of environments, great soundtrack, day/night cycles to change things up, and it just feels good to wander around in this game. Especially after you mod-it-up. It doesn't even have any special traversal options and yet somehow... it just works.
Contrast this to say, Assassin's Creed: Origins. It definitely has more interesting traversal options (ziplines, funky mounts, really good boating, swimming, etc.) but I used fast travel all the time in that game after my initial exploration of a particular region. It was so large that I just didn't have the patience to criss-cross the map "on foot". Also, while they made the desert regions about as interesting as you could make them visually, in the end it all feels kinda same-y.
Also, the more linear the game, the more inclined I am to use fast travel. The Tomb Raider reboot is a good example of this. I use fast travel a lot, even for relatively short distances.
Games that fall somewhere between open world & linear, like DA:I, tend to fall somewhere in-between. Go figure... DA:I's gorgeous environments are great to wander around in, but it doesn't quite have the same magical ambiance that Skyrim has. ME:A's worlds were (for me) largely boring (with a couple of exceptions), so there I wound up using FT all the time. That said, there is an Iron Man mod for this game which makes it much, much more fun to get around.
Post by DragonKingReborn on Oct 1, 2018 3:07:40 GMT
It depends why I'm travelling.
If I am 'on a quest' - I'll walk. Banter in DAI, encounters and random loot in TW3 etc
If I am 'running back to get something I missed' - Fast Travel - every time.
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You cannot really explore in Skyrim, Fallout or any open world game with magic travel. Finding interesting locations and/or situations paired with a survival mode or something similar makes it even better.
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Good question, but the video talks mainly about the travel mechanic and exploration. I think there’s other things to consider in whether it’s fun in a particular game to avoid fast travel.
Personally, I prefer games that gradually open up as you play, reveling new areas. If they let you “go anywhere and do anything (tm)” from the beginning, I still prefer to concentrate on an area at a time. But that can be undone if too many quests you pick up send you all over the map.
If also depends on whether there are hubs/settlements/traders relatively easily available if you don’t use fast travel.
Some kind of transport system helps as well for big worlds. Skyrim had the very simple cart to take you to the main towns, and that was actually enough to make it viable most of the time. Without that, I probably wouldn’t have lasted long playing without fast travel.
So for me it depends on a lot things about how the game is structured.
Fallout 3 was the first of this type of open world game I played. Think I got through the whole campaign and onto DLC before I even noticed I could click on a location to fast travel, and I didn’t know you could get a house. The result was ditching most of the loot I found, rarely having enough money to buy more than a bit of ammo and rarely going far out of my way for side missions. It made it all very focused on just surviving the wasteland. All because I didn’t understand the game. But it was great.
Depends on how far I have to travel, but in games like Fallout 4 and Skyrim, I'm much more likely to just walk. Heck, most of the time when I boot up Skyrim anymore its just to walk around from city to city and town to town. Its great for letting the mind wander free.
Post by flyingsquirrel on Oct 1, 2018 15:04:20 GMT
I think it serves a purpose in games that have a lot of random respawning mooks popping up in areas between where the missions actually take place (MOAR SHOOTING wears out quickly) and/or where you end up backtracking through the same areas repeatedly. As much as I love Novigrad in TW3, for example, I don't need to walk down the same alley three dozen times just for the sake of atmosphere.
Fallout 3 was the first of this type of open world game I played. Think I got through the whole campaign and onto DLC before I even noticed I could click on a location to fast travel, and I didn’t know you could get a house. The result was ditching most of the loot I found, rarely having enough money to buy more than a bit of ammo and rarely going far out of my way for side missions. It made it all very focused on just surviving the wasteland. All because I didn’t understand the game. But it was great.
I only played FO3 recently and maybe that's why I don't like it nearly as much as people did back then but... I didn't even bother to unlock all location. I think I didn't reach 50%. By far the lowest percentage of all Bethesda games I've played. I just found the world to be rather ugly, deserted and extremely boring to traverse. So I used fast travel as much as I could. I'd hop to the closest location to where I needed to go for a quest. Whenever I decided to unlock all locations in an area and actually go into buildings, it felt like a waste of time. Nothing to see there 90% of the time. So I finished the main story and all major quests and just quit the game...
In Skyrim I loved just walking around waiting for hilarious things to happen. Enjoying the modded forest, watching the snow blow over the cliffs, watching the sun rise... Spent a lot of time trying to hunt down missing locations in FO4. There was ALWAYS something interesting to find. When the world is interesting I'm fine taking my time getting somewhere.
Fast travel is unimmersive, yes. But like others have said, I don't have time for all the backtracking on foot that many quests require. I actually like it when games force you to first uncover a place to fast travel to it. This means that whenever I CAN fast travel, I have no reason NOT to because I've already seen that area. The survival aspect can be fun. But I'm not going to waste an hour of my precious evening just getting to where I've been before unless I'm on a loot run. It's bad enough that I have to travel to my hideout constantly to dump loot. If I were to go there on foot I'd never make any progress.
I get angry when a game with a huge map doesn't offer fast travel and wastes my time on purpose. *I* want to be the one who decides when to waste their time smelling the flowers for the nth time.