My thoughts on Fast-Travel, Why the system is flawed and where the ignorance comes from. Options

[Thomas Kaira]

I really need to get this off my chest after today's activities, but I want to give it a more private screening before I consider posting it on the BGS board where it will get trolled to Oblivion and back. Since I know everyone here is pretty mature, I'll start here:


This is a debate that has been going on since Oblivion’s release, and continues strong with the impending release of Skyrim. Here is what we know:

-When you first begin, no travel markers will be available.
-Skyrim will feature a carriage service that will allow you to quickly travel to all of the major cities.
-Once you have discovered a location, you can immediately Fast-Travel back whenever you wish.

Essentially, apart from the carriage service, it’s the same system as in Oblivion, with all of the flaws, and believe me, there are a lot (so many, in fact, that I have come to refer to Fast-Travel as Presto-Click Travel Services). Let’s go through them one at a time

To start from the very top, Presto-Click Travel Services defeats the purpose of the carriage system entirely. You just need to use the carriages once, and then you can just Presto-Click your way back. Why even bother providing them if you’re just going to kill off one of your own game mechanics within five minutes of actually starting?

Considering what we saw in Oblivion, Fast-Travel was so easy to exploit that many people (including myself) have come to see it as a cheat. Now, for anyone who may argue “but Bethesda put it in the game, so that means we should use it!” that argument is fatally flawed. By the same logic, I should be able to just go into the command console, type in “TGM,” and play the game permanently invincible because “Bethesda put the command console in the game, so we should use it!” Just because it has been implemented does NOT make it any less of a cheat. But why is it a cheat, to be precise?

Fast-Travel can be used to lug huge amounts of loot far further than you could hope while on foot. All you needed was a few high-strength, low-duration (5 seconds would be enough) Feather spells, a looted dungeon, and Presto-Click travel services. You bring all of the loot outside in waves, then pick up every last bit of it, cast your 5 second Feather spells, Fast-Travel to wherever you want to go, and Presto! You’ve just completely circumvented the encumbrance system! This system is in place to make you THINK about looting dungeons and DECIDE what you want to keep and what you should leave behind. But that is a very clear exploit, so let us instead go to the other, less clear one: Presto-Clicking back and forth multiple times between dungeon and city/home and offloading loot in waves. This is also a circumnavigation of the Encumbrance system. As stated before, the purpose of Encumbrance is to make you think a bit about the loot you recover from dungeons. Essentially, it is there to make you ask two questions: ‘what do I really want’ and ‘what is the most valuable for the least weight’. With Fast-Travel, those questions become irrelevant, because you can just beam back and forth between the dungeon and the cities, collecting anything and everything with a value attached to it, and selling it off. This exploits the Fast-Travel system, and it also exploits the game’s economy. The ONLY reason people do this is because of how incredibly easy and risk-free it is to Fast-Travel. It is a prime example of how people can substitute Fast-Travel for brains, and use Presto-Click Travel Services to remove challenge from the game.

Speaking of removing challenge, Fast travel was very good at that right from the start. Why? It is completely 100% cost-free and risk-free. You click your map, and bingo! There you are, safe and sound, despite the fact that if I made the same trip on foot, I would probably have had a nasty encounter with a troll or two, maybe an ogre. And let’s not forget that Oblivion Gate, either! How is this fair? Why is it that the people who take the longer approach get shafted? This is completely backwards and blatantly out of balance. Not only can you skip the trip, but you can skip EVERY hazard, as well. Now, there will come the argument “I already made the trip on foot once, so why should I have to go through all that again?” To these people, I really have to say go back to playing Call of Duty and Halo Reach. Such linear thinking is in direct conflict to the sandbox approach and dynamic world Bethesda is creating for you here. The world isn’t static, and Fast-Travel, unfortunately, makes the opposite assumption. Stuff happens out on the road that you cannot hope to predict. So why should Fast-Travel allow you to skip past all that? In this case, it is detracting from the overall experience of the game. Why even bother to make a dynamic world if you’re just going to let the player skip past everything after they’ve seen it just one time?

In fact, why bother making such a huge world at all if you’re just going to let the player skip the whole thing? There comes a time in the late game where the player will have explored a large portion of the map and revealed a lot of POIs for him to Presto-Click between. And this is when the idea of the large world really starts to fall over. When you got to that point in Oblivion, it placed such a heavy reliance on the Fast-Travel for its quests that I failed to see the point of why the world was even made so large anymore. All you do is Presto-Click to this place, speak to this guy, Presto-Click to the other side of the friggin map to talk to this guy, then Presto-Click AGAIN to the other side of the map to kill some other dude, and finally you beam yourself back to the other side of the map to finish things off. That’s it; a quest that might have taken an hour (real-time) without Fast-Travel has been completed in five minutes. Why even bother with the huge map if you’re going to push the player so hard to avoid it?

What I am trying to communicate here is that Bethesda placed such a heavy reliance on limitless, instantaneous, risk-free instant-travel in Oblivion that it seriously hurt the experience. I kid you not, the game got SO much better when I stopped using fast-travel altogether.

*Record-scratching*

Wait, what is that I hear? “Don’t like it, don’t use it?” Sorry, but there’s a pretty major flaw in the logic behind this argument: ignoring an issue does not change the fact that it exists. Did Bethesda’s ignoring the Abomb bug change the fact that it was there, and that it destroys people’s profiles to this day? No, so ignoring the fast travel system does not change the fact that it is massively flawed.

What needs to happen is Fast Travel needs to be rebalanced, because in Oblivion, it was essentially a cheat re-classified as a feature. First, let’s look back at previous travel systems, starting with Daggerfall:

Daggerfall: You could fast-travel from anywhere to anywhere, but there was both risk AND cost involved, as well as the need to plan ahead due to time constraints. You had three factors that would determine travel speed, the risk factor (where you would get cut short by being injured), and the amount of gold you paid. The more gold you paid, the less risky the travel, but the more time it would take you to reach your destination.

Morrowind: Fast Travel was restricted to paid services with limited locations. There were many points in the game where you would need to enter the wilderness, where travel services were not offered, and thus you would be forced to walk.

Oblivion: Fast-travel from anywhere to anywhere you’ve previously discovered, with no cost and no risk. For those of you who would argue this same system (minus the need to discover new locations yourself) was in Daggerfall, Daggerfall’s world map was almost twice the size of Great Britain; Oblivion was 16 square miles (4 miles from end-to-end). You decide where such a travel system fits better.

Skyrim needs to change things up with the fast-travel, because as it is, it removes a huge amount of challenge from the game (and please don’t argue against this, if you don’t want to be challenged, just turn your system off and go read a book) and detracts from the overall experience by linear-ifying a game that was not meant to played in a linear style. As such, it is only natural that the travel system has an air of unpredictability about it this time ‘round. For this, we need not look far: there are random encounters that could occasionally interrupt a player’s fast travel, for instance. Then there are the dragons, why not give them the ability to interrupt fast-travel, considering how important they are to the game? Perhaps weather and environmental hazards that would not halt a fast-travel, but simply make it take more game-time (delays, they tend to happen). Or just take the carriage and pay for a nice, safe trip between two cities. And if all else fails, impose hard limits (you can only fast-travel three times per day, or something along those lines). You built the big world, Bethesda now encourage your audience to experience it. Don’t throw it all away like you did with Oblivion and just do the huge world for bragging rights, make your audience experience it to its fullest extent. Isn’t that why you want us to buy the game, after all?

[Helena]

I'm torn on this one. On the one hand, I agree that the fast travel in Oblivion discouraged exploration and made the game too easy; on the other hand, there were times when I found the constant trudging back-and-forth in Morrowind immensely frustrating (especially with the game's slow default walking speed). What I'd personally like to see is a compromise:

- As proposed for Skyrim, FT should be disabled until you've already travelled to a location. This makes sense.

- FT should have obvious gameplay disadvantages compared to the alternatives, such as carriages. It should be slower (MUCH slower) and riskier, with a high chance of being interrupted by random attacks - bandits, wild animals, dragons, whatever.

- Like resting, FT should be disabled in combat or when enemies are nearby.

- There should be teleportation spells as in Morrowind, providing a safe, quick alternative to FT (presuming you have the skill to cast them).

- To solve the encumbrance problem, perhaps FT could be disabled above a certain encumbrance level (unless you're using a horse, in which case you could offload some of your gear). In fact, encumbrance should probably have a much bigger effect on gameplay in general - e.g. high encumbrance should slow down your walking/running speed and drain your fatigue more quickly.

None of this is going to happen, of course. But it's what I'd like to see in future ES games.

[Thomas Kaira]

<snipped>

1. This was sorta how Oblivion handled things at the beginning save all of the cities being available for Fast-Travel right from the start. Unfortunately, this kinda ruined the point of Fast-Travel needing to be an unlockable feature, since you could beam yourself across the map at leisure the second you exit the sewers. Skyrim will change that up a bit by not allowing Fast-Travel to the major cities right from the start, which will help balance things out a bit here (thoguh not by much).

2. Exactly what I am trying to propose (why does everyone assume that when someone complains about fast-travel, they want to see it thrown away?). Random encounters, dragons, and perhaps just a randomly generated bandit attack or something, should be capable of interrupting fast-travel, forcing the player to deal with it before he could move on. Though to keep this from getting too annoying, if a fast-travel attempt got interrupted, the next attempt (so long as it occurs within five to ten minutes real-time) will always succeed. Personally, I would go even further and only allow Fast-Travel for unlimited distances on horseback, and even then, only to stables, inns, and player homes (gives the player a reason to buy one). Whereas fast-travel on foot would be limited to a certain distance, and only allowed once per day (so the player can't multi-beam and completely ignore the distance check).

3. Fast-Travel already does this.

4. Should be easy enough, just compare the character's current encumbrance with their current base encumbrance (constant effect feather spells would be treated as a base encumbrance modification for their purposes here, but limited duration spells would not), and if the former is higher, you can't fast-travel. This was one of those areas where Oblivion's FT system was very easy to exploit, so it really does need to be fixed.

mALX: I use Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul in my game, which removes the ability to fast-travel to all the major cities from the start, with the notable exception of the Imperial City (you were in jail there, so you've obviously already visited).

However, I must disagree that giving the player immediate FT access to every city was a good idea. This gives the player ten locations on a not-actually-all-that-big map that he can beam to right from the start, and that hurts the exploration aspect of the game quite badly. Why even bother building such a large world if you're going to let the player skip the whole thing at no cost at the very beginning of the game? Thankfully, Bethesda did see reason with this one, and starting with Fallout 3, you had to discover fast-travel locations on your own.

Todd stated the reason he removed teleportation spells was because they were "too easy to exploit," but you know what, I think he needs a reality check here. Just don't let the player teleport while in combat, how hard is that?! Lazy lazy lazy.

[mALX]

mALX: I use Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul in my game, which removes the ability to fast-travel to all the major cities from the start, with the notable exception of the Imperial City (you were in jail there, so you've obviously already visited).

However, I must disagree that giving the player immediate FT access to every city was a good idea. This gives the player ten locations on a not-actually-all-that-big map that he can beam to right from the start, and that hurts the exploration aspect of the game quite badly.

It actually only gives seven, as you pointed out the player begins in the IC (so has obviously already found it), and there are only seven other cities. As far as it "hurting the exploration aspect of the game quite badly" - it can't hurt that if you don't use it. That is in place for those people who are goal oriented and have no desire to explore.

I personally prefer to explore - so I do. How am I hurt by the ability being there if I don't avail myself of it? It is no skin off my nose if another person wants to play the game differently than me, I am not being forced to use the fast travel as soon as I leave the sewers just because it is there - it is a choice that is there if I wish to use it, I just don't wish to so I don't.

You can't custom design a game so it suits just your way of gameplay except via mods. If Bethesda geared their games toward just one segment of player they would be out of business. You can mod out what you don't like, mod in what you want - so why the extended dialogue because they OFFER alternatives to a different segment than yourself - who also buys this game.

There is an attitude of trying to control how others should play the game, and overall intolerence of anything that doesn't exactly meet one's personal viewpoint that is rampant in these debates over "whether it should be in the game or not" because it assumes "your way" is the only correct way. (*not saying you personally, but the griper whoever they may be)

It may be the only way you or I want to do it, but we are not the only consumers buying the product. I have no problem with it being in the game, I just don't choose to use it. I can see no reason to insist it be removed because there are just as many players who find the back and forth trekking to be a detriment to their enjoyment.

As it stands, you can already fast travel on horseback. I don't do it, because I personally think that would eliminate the whole reason for riding the horse. The option is there for players who don't get enjoyment seeing their character riding across the countryside on horseback. I don't insist Bethesda remove the function just because I don't like it, I just don't use the function.

Just because something is there does not mean one has to use it, that is what is so great about these games is that we are given a world of options and can pick and choose which suit us best and avail ourselves of these - and just not use the ones that don't suit our own vision of what we want in a game.

This post has been edited by mALX: Jul 16 2011, 05:33 PM