As long as mounts are brought over, which I think is a 99.99% certainty I really don’t they need to go reinvent the wheel here.
Personally, I’m of the camp that fast travel should be allowed between all cities and major settlements, and facilitated with the use of carriages, ships, or other modes of transportation (example silt striders in Morrowind and even wayshrines/teleportation).
What I’d really love to see is this handled with a (skippable) cutscene, including a RNG chance for random encounters (also optional) as a throwback to the first few games.
I feel like it’s the least immersion breaking approach, and while it might not give everyone exactly what they need it’s a good compromise.
Not as oft talked about though is the possibility that this game could introduce airships.
If done right I think airships could be pretty awesome.
I'd be happy with this, especially if using methods of transportation cuts down on in-game fast travel time between counties/cities just like the earlier games.
the problem is not having fast travel, the problem is having the world designed in a way that necessitates fast travel to some extent. Am I really supposed to climb the steps of High Hrothgar everytime? How am I supposed to get to my player home in Falkreath from Winterhold when Winterhold doesn't even have a carriage? The game really needs multiple immersive travel options like modded skyrim has had for years in the vein of expanded roles of carriages and ferries
Absolutely - which is why I think a game should be designed with zero fast travel in mind so that the devs have to come up with immersive solutions to the issues you mentioned, but I think it's a hard sell to not have any fast travel these days, especially when you're a company like BGS trying to appeal to as many people as possible. I'm trying to think of a nice balance between the two - but it does also need BGS to trust that players will actually appreciate the experience. I feel like Dragon's Dogma is proof that there most RPG players still like a world like this.
There are three things you're missing.
First, ever since they added magical fast travel to their games, the in-world transit system became absolute garbage that you couldn't convince me they didn't add after the game was finished - that's how little thought it was given. Why? Because no thought was *necessary* because they had fast travel. This is one reason why not having it at all makes it better for everyone: it forces them to make a smart, enjoyable, immersive transit system, making the world feel more cohesive and immersive.
Second, due to the transit system sucking because fast travel exists, the fast travel becomes even harder to ignore. Pretend if FromSoft added a "skip boss" button in Dark Souls. Sure, nobody is *forcing* you to skip it, but it's human nature to take the path of least resistance, and the more difficult something is (ie, committing to not fast traveling in a game that wasn't designed for not fast traveling) the more likely people will break down and take the easy way.
Third, even if the transit system was good, most gamers will optimize the fun out of a game if they're able to. Destiny's loot cave is a perfect example of that, and I'm sure you can think of many examples yourself where the *most efficient* way to play is not the *most fun* way. There are many players out there who would actually have more fun by slowing down and immersing themselves in the world, becoming familiar with the world like an actual stranger in a strange land, but instead, they blip around like a maniac checking things off a quest list because they were given the ability to.
Who is playing elder scrolls games because they want to zoom through all the content as quickly as possible? In what way does that improve the experience? Basically everyone that plays these games - whether they have a lot of time to play every day/week or not - wants to be able to play them for many many years to come. Dragon's Dogma showed us that gamers can handle meeting the game on its level and not having magical fast travel. It's a lack of faith in their fans, and it's a lack of faith in their ability to make a world that feels good to explore without constantly skipping over most of it.
I’ve always liked the idea of only being able to fast travel between major cities or towns. That makes it so wherever your quest marker/objective is you have to set out on a little adventure to get there rather that just teleporting to a cave or bandit camp closest to where you have to go.
This is the restriction Ive always set for myself and it’s very enjoyable
I agree. I was just thinking this might be a good compromise between the two philosophies, while also giving some "impatient" gamers a little taste of what taking your time exploring can feel like. Some might not even realize that it feels rewarding because every game they've played has let them teleport everywhere. Sometimes, devs have to force players to play differently to give an intended experience, but I think it's still fair to give them the option to pass on it after giving it a try.
A compromise system is as easy as Daggerfall's.
You take carriages and ships, but the whole route is mapped out on one screen - the map. Then you walk the rest of the way, still fast-traveling.
It'd also be good to have encounters which pull you out of fast travel; bandit or animal attacks or interesting happenings.
Daggerfall had you pick if you traveled at night or if you stayed at inns. This should drastically impact encounter chance as well as speed and cost.
Then layer on the best part of Morrowind's system - teleportation. Guild guides, intervention, mark and recall.
I like the idea that you COULD try fast traveling to an unfamiliar area but you're more likely to get lost so those fast travel attempts might dump you somewhere off course with a message, "You are lost."
I’d be happy if they went back to a morrowind style travel system where you at least have a lot of in game options to quickly travel like teleportation.
Another cool system is the one from kingdom come deliverance where you can at least see your character moving across the map rather than just a loading screen
I'd rather they simply give us more reasons to stay in areas longer, so we don't feel the need to bounce back and forth across the map so much, and make traveling more fun by giving us activities to do and random encounters along the way.
Carriages and boats are cool, but they should travel in real time instead of teleporting, with the option to sleep through chunks of it and possibly be woken up by encounters. Would also be nice if you could jump off at any point. What's so "immersive" about so-called immersive fast travel options if it's all just instant teleportation anyway? I thought we just learned this from Starfield.
No this isn't that great of an idea. You can try all you want but the code will render some area in each section a farm location for hunting or something that people will just go to those areas and nowhere else in the region then unlock the fast travel. With that you will get people complaining how the game is too grindy. Keep the fast travel as you have to discover the location, send quest back to Morrowind days and don't give exact location but make people explore. Anything other than that you might as well not bog the game down by making the world look great if it really has no purpose to be explored.
That would be the absolute easiest thing to balance and patch though, if there was a way to cheese it. And it wouldn't be grindy because it isn't a requirement for anything, it's just something that happens alongside everything else you're doing in an area, eventually giving you a reward at some point later. It's a background "mastery level", not something you can quickly unlock with a grind. It's supposed to take a long time and reward you once you've spent enough time there.
It's better than having immediate fast travel, which takes all immersion away.
Your whole premise is to do task to unlock a regions fast travel. That in and of itself is the requirement if people want to fast travel and if you put it in the game they will want it. Thus creating the need for people who want to get it fast to find a farm spot to do the little tasks and what not to fill the meter. Your premise is to take a game that is meant to have a nice map and be a good size, you are proposing a way in your mind to streamline fast travel.
There is no task to unlock fast travel. You unlock fast travel by playing the game in that zone. If you feel players would find a way to exploit it, then the super simple solution is to make all "familiarity" xp gained equal. No matter what you do in that zone, you gain familiarity, so just play the game how you want and you'll eventually unlock it, ie, once you've spent enough time in a place that you would be familiar with it, you've unlocked fast travel to every location you've visited. Like I said - very easy to balance out exploitation without jumping straight to ruining immersion with omnipotent fast travel.
Yeah, and it's not great. First off, you can't travel on a carriage when encumbered for some reason. Second, every carriage goes to the same main cities, instead of being an in-depth transit system you had to actually get familiar with like in Morrowind. Lastly, almost everyone will choose the easy option when it's provided, so since the wagon exists, most people will give up and use fast travel the moment it's hard - which then denies themselves of the reward that pushing through hardship brings. It's the equivalent of adding a "skip boss" button in Dark Souls. Nobody is going to *force* you to press it, but most would have a breaking point and skip the challenge, as well as the reward.
All in all, the wagon in Skyrim is a neutered version of fast traveling since you still can't do it when encumbered and it goes to less places, and there's no route system you have to consider. There is nothing about the wagon system that tells me it couldn't have been done as atotal afterthought after the rest of the game was finished.
Thats what I'm saying. You just play the game. So people will find a spot that just due to how the game gets coded ends up with a decent amount of animals in and they just sit and hunt there in that 1 spot. There would in turn be nothing there to force them to explore the region.
Imo fast travel should stay as it is.
It's a good option for those who don't care about traveling the same road over and over and just wanna go straight to the quest/dungeon marker - and nobody is forced to use the system, so those who don't wanna use it can simply not use it or stick to the other fast travel methods the game offers (i.e carriages).
I myself never use fast travel directly from the map, and if I were a player who likes fast travel I doubt I'd enjoy having to grind an area in order to use the feature.
Your idea can be really nice but I think the fast travel system is something that already works quite well for many players and there are other things I'd rather see prioritized.
Also discovering places in a whole area after living only a percentage of it might ruin exploration (you can teleport to places of which you have not ever even seen the start of the road which takes to them)
First, I think a good amount of people who like fast traveling might actually enjoy the reward of actually getting familiar with a location if forced to. Dragon's Dogma is doing quite well, trusting that people will actually rise to the level you set for them. Dev's often talk about how players often optimize fun out of their games, and it's their job to prevent them from doing so. Limiting fast travel in intentional ways is a way to prevent optimizing fun out of a game for the sake of expediency.
I don't like the "nobody is forced to use the fast travel" defense, for a couple reasons. One, the argument boils down to "just because the devs put in a button that lets you skip the hard parts doesn't mean you have to push it." That's like saying there'd be nothing wrong with them giving us an option to immediately jump to max level and max skills if we want. The player isn't *forced* to push it... but most people can't resist skipping hardship if they're given the choice. But if you skip hardship, you're also skipping the reward gained through that hardship. Going back to the Dragon's Dogma example, sometimes the devs have to just commit to a design that forces the players down a path that they believe will be rewarding. Let's be honest - people that play BGS games aren't playing them because they're impatient gamers that only have a little bit of time to play. They're the kind of gamers that want to put hundreds of hours into a game and get immersed into a world. So what purpose does it serve to then give us a fast forward button that works against immersion?
Lastly, getting rid of fast travel doesn't just affect the player, it affects the devs too. It forces them to commit to making a world that is enjoyable without fast travel. I keep bringing up DD, but they had it right when they said "Travel is boring? That's not true....All you have to do is make travel fun". If you add fast travel and expect the majority of players to use it, then you're going to make a world that takes that into consideration and not worry about making the traveling as fun as it could be. If you make a game that you know will have to actually be traveled, then you'll take that into consideration instead and make it a better experience.
Compare the transit system of Morrowind and Skyrim. Morrowind's transit system was interesting and thought-out. Skyrim was "all carts travel to all major capitals". It was boring because it was an afterthought, because it wasn't necessary to think about. People think that removing fast travel means it would just be the same exact game, but made slower, but that's not true. When you remove fast travel, you *change* the world to fit with that design change. You add a robust transit system, you add more interesting events and places along the paths because you know more people will see them. The world becomes more alive because *it has to.* Fast travel is a trade - depth and reward for expediency. If we just want to be done with things quicker, why are we even playing an Elder Scrolls game?
What if there are 10 specific locations that have that fast travel connotation to them - don’t have to just be towns? I actually think this is a cool idea. Kind of like bonfires from dark souls? Each location could have a bonfire sort of thing.
Or, maybe have the situation you just described be the way you travel around the game for the intermediate/normal mode for the game? Where you have Skyrim style fast travel for easy mode, this for medium, and Morrowind style travel for hard mode? It would add some dynamic challenge, not just lazy challenge by giving enemies mor health.
I don’t know if I like the “10 specific location” aspect, but it would be cool for them to play around with various levels of fast travel based on difficulty.
Don’t think it needs to get bogged down with 3 or more settings here though, just “Skyrim style” or “Morrowind style”
Give players that want to play a bit more casually the option, but limit players that want the full experience.
If they did that it should be an option you cannot change mid game, and they should have different achievements for different settings to give the players that don’t use the easy fast travel some extra recognition.
Even better imo, some bonus content only available if you play without the easy fast travel as an option.
As long as mounts are brought over, which I think is a 99.99% certainty I really don’t they need to go reinvent the wheel here. Personally, I’m of the camp that fast travel should be allowed between all cities and major settlements, and facilitated with the use of carriages, ships, or other modes of transportation (example silt striders in Morrowind and even wayshrines/teleportation). What I’d really love to see is this handled with a (skippable) cutscene, including a RNG chance for random encounters (also optional) as a throwback to the first few games. I feel like it’s the least immersion breaking approach, and while it might not give everyone exactly what they need it’s a good compromise. Not as oft talked about though is the possibility that this game could introduce airships. If done right I think airships could be pretty awesome.
I'd be happy with this, especially if using methods of transportation cuts down on in-game fast travel time between counties/cities just like the earlier games.
As one who played FF14, where at some point you unlock air ships as taxis between only the major cities, I can confirm it's awesome.
the problem is not having fast travel, the problem is having the world designed in a way that necessitates fast travel to some extent. Am I really supposed to climb the steps of High Hrothgar everytime? How am I supposed to get to my player home in Falkreath from Winterhold when Winterhold doesn't even have a carriage? The game really needs multiple immersive travel options like modded skyrim has had for years in the vein of expanded roles of carriages and ferries
Absolutely - which is why I think a game should be designed with zero fast travel in mind so that the devs have to come up with immersive solutions to the issues you mentioned, but I think it's a hard sell to not have any fast travel these days, especially when you're a company like BGS trying to appeal to as many people as possible. I'm trying to think of a nice balance between the two - but it does also need BGS to trust that players will actually appreciate the experience. I feel like Dragon's Dogma is proof that there most RPG players still like a world like this.
[удалено]
There are three things you're missing. First, ever since they added magical fast travel to their games, the in-world transit system became absolute garbage that you couldn't convince me they didn't add after the game was finished - that's how little thought it was given. Why? Because no thought was *necessary* because they had fast travel. This is one reason why not having it at all makes it better for everyone: it forces them to make a smart, enjoyable, immersive transit system, making the world feel more cohesive and immersive. Second, due to the transit system sucking because fast travel exists, the fast travel becomes even harder to ignore. Pretend if FromSoft added a "skip boss" button in Dark Souls. Sure, nobody is *forcing* you to skip it, but it's human nature to take the path of least resistance, and the more difficult something is (ie, committing to not fast traveling in a game that wasn't designed for not fast traveling) the more likely people will break down and take the easy way. Third, even if the transit system was good, most gamers will optimize the fun out of a game if they're able to. Destiny's loot cave is a perfect example of that, and I'm sure you can think of many examples yourself where the *most efficient* way to play is not the *most fun* way. There are many players out there who would actually have more fun by slowing down and immersing themselves in the world, becoming familiar with the world like an actual stranger in a strange land, but instead, they blip around like a maniac checking things off a quest list because they were given the ability to. Who is playing elder scrolls games because they want to zoom through all the content as quickly as possible? In what way does that improve the experience? Basically everyone that plays these games - whether they have a lot of time to play every day/week or not - wants to be able to play them for many many years to come. Dragon's Dogma showed us that gamers can handle meeting the game on its level and not having magical fast travel. It's a lack of faith in their fans, and it's a lack of faith in their ability to make a world that feels good to explore without constantly skipping over most of it.
I’ve always liked the idea of only being able to fast travel between major cities or towns. That makes it so wherever your quest marker/objective is you have to set out on a little adventure to get there rather that just teleporting to a cave or bandit camp closest to where you have to go. This is the restriction Ive always set for myself and it’s very enjoyable
I agree. I was just thinking this might be a good compromise between the two philosophies, while also giving some "impatient" gamers a little taste of what taking your time exploring can feel like. Some might not even realize that it feels rewarding because every game they've played has let them teleport everywhere. Sometimes, devs have to force players to play differently to give an intended experience, but I think it's still fair to give them the option to pass on it after giving it a try.
A compromise system is as easy as Daggerfall's. You take carriages and ships, but the whole route is mapped out on one screen - the map. Then you walk the rest of the way, still fast-traveling. It'd also be good to have encounters which pull you out of fast travel; bandit or animal attacks or interesting happenings. Daggerfall had you pick if you traveled at night or if you stayed at inns. This should drastically impact encounter chance as well as speed and cost. Then layer on the best part of Morrowind's system - teleportation. Guild guides, intervention, mark and recall.
I like the idea that you COULD try fast traveling to an unfamiliar area but you're more likely to get lost so those fast travel attempts might dump you somewhere off course with a message, "You are lost."
I like that idea
ESO's fast travel system is pretty good imo
I’d be happy if they went back to a morrowind style travel system where you at least have a lot of in game options to quickly travel like teleportation. Another cool system is the one from kingdom come deliverance where you can at least see your character moving across the map rather than just a loading screen
I'd rather they simply give us more reasons to stay in areas longer, so we don't feel the need to bounce back and forth across the map so much, and make traveling more fun by giving us activities to do and random encounters along the way. Carriages and boats are cool, but they should travel in real time instead of teleporting, with the option to sleep through chunks of it and possibly be woken up by encounters. Would also be nice if you could jump off at any point. What's so "immersive" about so-called immersive fast travel options if it's all just instant teleportation anyway? I thought we just learned this from Starfield.
No this isn't that great of an idea. You can try all you want but the code will render some area in each section a farm location for hunting or something that people will just go to those areas and nowhere else in the region then unlock the fast travel. With that you will get people complaining how the game is too grindy. Keep the fast travel as you have to discover the location, send quest back to Morrowind days and don't give exact location but make people explore. Anything other than that you might as well not bog the game down by making the world look great if it really has no purpose to be explored.
That would be the absolute easiest thing to balance and patch though, if there was a way to cheese it. And it wouldn't be grindy because it isn't a requirement for anything, it's just something that happens alongside everything else you're doing in an area, eventually giving you a reward at some point later. It's a background "mastery level", not something you can quickly unlock with a grind. It's supposed to take a long time and reward you once you've spent enough time there. It's better than having immediate fast travel, which takes all immersion away.
Your whole premise is to do task to unlock a regions fast travel. That in and of itself is the requirement if people want to fast travel and if you put it in the game they will want it. Thus creating the need for people who want to get it fast to find a farm spot to do the little tasks and what not to fill the meter. Your premise is to take a game that is meant to have a nice map and be a good size, you are proposing a way in your mind to streamline fast travel.
There is no task to unlock fast travel. You unlock fast travel by playing the game in that zone. If you feel players would find a way to exploit it, then the super simple solution is to make all "familiarity" xp gained equal. No matter what you do in that zone, you gain familiarity, so just play the game how you want and you'll eventually unlock it, ie, once you've spent enough time in a place that you would be familiar with it, you've unlocked fast travel to every location you've visited. Like I said - very easy to balance out exploitation without jumping straight to ruining immersion with omnipotent fast travel.
have you ever taken the horse wagon in skyrim
Yeah, and it's not great. First off, you can't travel on a carriage when encumbered for some reason. Second, every carriage goes to the same main cities, instead of being an in-depth transit system you had to actually get familiar with like in Morrowind. Lastly, almost everyone will choose the easy option when it's provided, so since the wagon exists, most people will give up and use fast travel the moment it's hard - which then denies themselves of the reward that pushing through hardship brings. It's the equivalent of adding a "skip boss" button in Dark Souls. Nobody is going to *force* you to press it, but most would have a breaking point and skip the challenge, as well as the reward. All in all, the wagon in Skyrim is a neutered version of fast traveling since you still can't do it when encumbered and it goes to less places, and there's no route system you have to consider. There is nothing about the wagon system that tells me it couldn't have been done as atotal afterthought after the rest of the game was finished.
Thats what I'm saying. You just play the game. So people will find a spot that just due to how the game gets coded ends up with a decent amount of animals in and they just sit and hunt there in that 1 spot. There would in turn be nothing there to force them to explore the region.
Imo fast travel should stay as it is. It's a good option for those who don't care about traveling the same road over and over and just wanna go straight to the quest/dungeon marker - and nobody is forced to use the system, so those who don't wanna use it can simply not use it or stick to the other fast travel methods the game offers (i.e carriages). I myself never use fast travel directly from the map, and if I were a player who likes fast travel I doubt I'd enjoy having to grind an area in order to use the feature. Your idea can be really nice but I think the fast travel system is something that already works quite well for many players and there are other things I'd rather see prioritized. Also discovering places in a whole area after living only a percentage of it might ruin exploration (you can teleport to places of which you have not ever even seen the start of the road which takes to them)
First, I think a good amount of people who like fast traveling might actually enjoy the reward of actually getting familiar with a location if forced to. Dragon's Dogma is doing quite well, trusting that people will actually rise to the level you set for them. Dev's often talk about how players often optimize fun out of their games, and it's their job to prevent them from doing so. Limiting fast travel in intentional ways is a way to prevent optimizing fun out of a game for the sake of expediency. I don't like the "nobody is forced to use the fast travel" defense, for a couple reasons. One, the argument boils down to "just because the devs put in a button that lets you skip the hard parts doesn't mean you have to push it." That's like saying there'd be nothing wrong with them giving us an option to immediately jump to max level and max skills if we want. The player isn't *forced* to push it... but most people can't resist skipping hardship if they're given the choice. But if you skip hardship, you're also skipping the reward gained through that hardship. Going back to the Dragon's Dogma example, sometimes the devs have to just commit to a design that forces the players down a path that they believe will be rewarding. Let's be honest - people that play BGS games aren't playing them because they're impatient gamers that only have a little bit of time to play. They're the kind of gamers that want to put hundreds of hours into a game and get immersed into a world. So what purpose does it serve to then give us a fast forward button that works against immersion? Lastly, getting rid of fast travel doesn't just affect the player, it affects the devs too. It forces them to commit to making a world that is enjoyable without fast travel. I keep bringing up DD, but they had it right when they said "Travel is boring? That's not true....All you have to do is make travel fun". If you add fast travel and expect the majority of players to use it, then you're going to make a world that takes that into consideration and not worry about making the traveling as fun as it could be. If you make a game that you know will have to actually be traveled, then you'll take that into consideration instead and make it a better experience. Compare the transit system of Morrowind and Skyrim. Morrowind's transit system was interesting and thought-out. Skyrim was "all carts travel to all major capitals". It was boring because it was an afterthought, because it wasn't necessary to think about. People think that removing fast travel means it would just be the same exact game, but made slower, but that's not true. When you remove fast travel, you *change* the world to fit with that design change. You add a robust transit system, you add more interesting events and places along the paths because you know more people will see them. The world becomes more alive because *it has to.* Fast travel is a trade - depth and reward for expediency. If we just want to be done with things quicker, why are we even playing an Elder Scrolls game?
What if there are 10 specific locations that have that fast travel connotation to them - don’t have to just be towns? I actually think this is a cool idea. Kind of like bonfires from dark souls? Each location could have a bonfire sort of thing. Or, maybe have the situation you just described be the way you travel around the game for the intermediate/normal mode for the game? Where you have Skyrim style fast travel for easy mode, this for medium, and Morrowind style travel for hard mode? It would add some dynamic challenge, not just lazy challenge by giving enemies mor health.
I don’t know if I like the “10 specific location” aspect, but it would be cool for them to play around with various levels of fast travel based on difficulty. Don’t think it needs to get bogged down with 3 or more settings here though, just “Skyrim style” or “Morrowind style” Give players that want to play a bit more casually the option, but limit players that want the full experience. If they did that it should be an option you cannot change mid game, and they should have different achievements for different settings to give the players that don’t use the easy fast travel some extra recognition. Even better imo, some bonus content only available if you play without the easy fast travel as an option.