Patient Gamers

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.

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.

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.

I always think back to the original two Fallout games vs the ones that came later.

Scenes were set pieces, and travel was something that occurred on a map, with random encounters that occurred along the way as you moved from one location to another. It wasn't fast travel, but nor was it "experience every mile of your journey in real time". And depending on the path you took, you could still stumble across secrets, unique locations etc.

That remains my favourite travel method in games, and though it's rare, it is still done well in some more recent games. Owlcat is particularly good at it, and their Pathfinder games did it really well, and as does Rogue Trader (though it isn't a game for this sub yet). Solasta: Crown of the Magister also does it well

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.

I didn't learn that Red Dead Redemption 2 had a fast travel system until after my first playthrough. I completed a second playthrough shortly after and still didn't use it. Im glad the game had the feature still because I know not everyone has 5-10 minutes to ride everywhere or are not as interested in that aspect of the game. The world was plenty compelling for me, personally, to not use it. I liberally use fast travel in other games. Sometimes I want immersion, sometimes I want to progress the story. I don't think it's indictive of lazy design. I really appreciate the option when I have it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Red Dead Redemption 2 has fast travel, but simply riding your horse, whom has a legit unique personality that you can bond to on a personal real-life level based on how you tame it, and enjoying the enormous beautiful wild scenery and having random encounters with various NPCs that can be optionally ignored, is all encapsulated in the penultimate experience that most players miss by clicking some buttons on the world map because you don't like immersion or waiting.

Edit: even the act of fast traveling, itself, within the game is immersive and requires you to locate a carriage service and pay the NPC money to skip traveling manually.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.