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?

[Destri Melarg]

If I owned a game where one of the features was clearly broken, but the only response I got from the developer was "you don't have to use it if you don't want to," that would make me rather mad.

Allow me to add my two cents:

If we are talking about psychic guards, level scaling, or the bandits/marauders in glass/daedric armor etc. then I am right there with you. Clearly those were mistakes that we all hope Bethesda doesn’t repeat. But the FT system doesn’t belong in that category because it isn’t broken. It may be flawed, but it works exactly as the developers intended.

There are those who simply don’t want to walk (or ride) back and forth across the landscape. They don’t want to engage in a meaningless fight with the aforementioned glass-encased bandit or the stupid wolf that doesn’t know better than to leave the rider with the scary daedric warhammer alone. They want to get a quest, zap somewhere, kill some fools, zap back, get rewarded, and move on. Bethesda gave those players the fast travel system so that they could play the game (and their role within the game) the way that they wanted to. They also made sure to leave the use of this feature to player choice to appease all those whose immersion comes from living in their world rather than just playing their game. If you don’t like that players can also use the system to exploit encumbrance issues or to skip battles has more to do with you not liking how some choose to play than any systemic problem.

A person creating a five second maximum Feather spell in order to carry all of his/her loot back to Anvil in one trip is exactly the same as a person creating a 1-2 second Fortify Personality/Mercantile/Speechcraft spell to get better deals with a merchant . . . which is exactly the same as creating a 1-2 second Fortify Security spell to open any lock that you want without breaking any lockpicks . . . which is exactly the same as creating a 1-2 second Fortify Endurance/Armorer spell so that you never break a hammer (all of which I have done BTW ). All of these things ‘exploit’ the system. By your own logic we now need to change the system of magic because it is too easy for someone to exploit the system without having to train the necessary skills. We need to change the enchantment system because it’s too easy for a person with a blade skill of 5 to kill an ogre with a sword enchanted with damage health. You can’t reasonably call for restrictions in one system while turning a blind eye to exploits rampant in the other systems. If we are going to restrict fast travel, then why not restrict magic/enchantment as well?

Which is why the 'don't like it, don't use it' argument is valid. If you don't want to exploit the spellcrafting system then don't create the above spells. If you don't want to exploit the fast travel system then don't use it. None of these things are forced upon the player. If they were then your argument would have merit, but they aren't. They are there for players who want to use them but not forced upon those who don't.

That is a compromise that I can live with.

This post has been edited by Destri Melarg: Jul 26 2011, 10:39 AM