I hate fast travel.
It certainly serves a useful function, but it’s a feature that's power is easy to overlook
and abuse.
Fast travel has practically become a given in open-world games, which seems a little
backwards because companies market their titles on massive worlds that they then let players
move across in an instant with little to no cost or consequence.
At its worst, it disconnects players from everything between point A and point B, shrinking
worlds down to menu interaction and distracting players from the vision that developers most
likely intended.
It takes an expansive, non-linear experience and squeezes it into a tiny hallway where
players are no longer on a journey, but rather a quick path to being “done” with a game.
The obvious counter to everything I just said is to not use it, but that
actually leads me to what I hate most about fast travelling: in too many titles, it feels
unavoidable.
And that’s mostly because the act of manually travelling to a specific location is pretty
boring.
The way I see it, there are two major factors that play into this; The first is that a lot
of open-world games have dull movement mechanics, and the second is that there isn’t enough
to do when travelling to a specific location.
Starting with movement, it’s often very basic, and while some games try to throw in
free-running or vehicles, heading to a destination often just feels like pressing forward and
sometimes watching a stamina bar deplete and then replenish.
It’s mindless.
Hell, the Witcher 3 even went as far as making movement partially automated.
There should be more to it than that.
In my experience, third-person titles typically handle movement in more interesting ways than
first-person ones.
This is most likely because they tend to be less focused on realism, allowing for more
possibilities.
For example, Prototype, while lacking in many other areas, excelled in having free and fluid
movement when travelling around the city.
Stringing together different powers to avoid touching the ground was satisfying, and it
took a hell of a lot more effort than just pressing forward.
Movement in this and other games like Infamous, Arkham City, and Sunset Overdrive, become
challenges in seeing how long one can go without touching the ground, which adds an entire
new layer to traversal.
Giving characters more things around a map to interact with and more ways to interact
with them is important in making movement less tedious.
I also really like when games give players a reason to manually travel.
A great example of this can be found in Oblivion, where running and jumping are both tied to
skills that level up the more they are used.
This makes travel feel like it progresses a character by acting as a reward for not
just skipping over everything.
In general, it seems pointless to have giant worlds if moving across them is both joyless
and unrewarding.
And this brings me to my second point: there isn’t enough to do when moving toward a
specific destination.
I wanna be clear.
I’m not saying that there aren’t a lot of things to do in most open-world games,
because there certainly are.
However, I have two very different mindsets for when I am exploring versus when I am travelling.
When I’m exploring, things like checking out caves, chilling with the locals, and battling
forts of enemies are all great times, but when I am traveling to complete a quest, I
have very little interest in doing things that aren’t directly going to help me complete
that quest.
So, for players like me, all of those cool things become non-factors.
In open-world games, the conventional wisdom in making heading to an objective be interesting
is to have quick interactions that keep players entertained without slowing them down too
much, which plenty of games try to do but often struggle to pull off.
Mad Max does a decent job with this by having different outposts that players can take out
from their car, along with random events like dust storms that they need to avoid.
The same idea can be seen in pretty much every JRPG ever in the form of random encounters.
What winds up being the issue with these examples is, like anything else, they start to feel
very samey over time.
Having a mercenary say, “pay a toll or die,” might be interesting when it first happens,
but experiencing it for a second and third time lessens its effectiveness.
To avoid players burning out, these events need to be frequent and diverse.
This is extremely important to do in games that consistently have players travel back
and forth to the same locations.
Some quests intentionally have players go to out-of-the-way or difficult-to-reach places
that they have to revisit multiple times.
In Skyrim, the main quest has players travel to High Hrothgar on more than one occasion,
which stops being fun after the first trip.
Places that need to be returned to frequently should be centralized and easy to get to.
In theory, Fallout 4 does a pretty good job with this by having Diamond City be located
in the center of the map, but in practice, I found myself returning to my homebase far
more often, which was in the starting location at the top-left of the map.
It all really comes down to improving how games approach world and quest design.
With open-worlds often being so huge, players spend a lot of time travelling from quest
marker to quest marker.
In a lot of cases, the act of travelling to one doesn’t have anything to do with the
quest itself.
I would like to see quests put a bigger focus on how to get somewhere rather than simply
just getting there.
The Witcher 3 does some interesting things with its implementation of the Witcher sense,
which is used for tracking in various quests.
In the end, it is just another thing that pops on screen to follow, but it’s contextual
and focuses on a smaller scale, making the moment to moment travel more interesting than
chasing a dot in the distance.
But this isn’t something that can be solved solely by character abilities; worlds would
need to change as well.
Although it would slightly impede on players’ freedom, a good way to do this would be by
making certain areas only accessible by various travel-based quests.
Instead of being told to “Talk to this person in this place,” I’d find it more interesting
if quest descriptions were closer to: “Figure out how to get to this place.
Here are some reliable options.”
Maybe there is a ferry that leads to a town, and the player would be given a free ride
on it if they help protect it.
Or maybe there is a cave that is the most direct path to the same town, but it is the
home of a big old monster.
For this to work and still give the player agency, there would need to be multiple paths
like this to every location, and, ideally, new options would replace old ones.
This would break up travel so it isn’t just one long, boring trek and make worlds feel
more than just cities surrounded by big, open empty spaces that reuse the same assets over
and over.
In the end, there isn’t a fixed solution for making travel less boring in open-world
titles.
It depends heavily on the type of game, so certain ideas I’ve suggested might work
great in one, but make little to no sense in another.
I really don’t think that fast travelling should be completely eliminated from games,
because it gives players the option to play how they want to.
With that said, I do think it needs to have stricter limitations.
First and foremost, there should really be an in-game reason that explains why fast travel
is possible.
It could be magic, it could be a train—just anything other than it being a spot that has
been visited already.
Secondly, there needs to be a consequence.
A lot of games will have time pass, but players don’t actually lose anything.
It needs to either cost money or have the player miss out on an opportunity or put the
player in a potentially dangerous situation.
If there is no reason to not use it, why would players waste their time trudging along the
slow way?
Lastly, there need to be set spots that a player can fast travel to and from.
Being able to fast travel from anywhere to anywhere is a bit ridiculous and it also can
render other systems, like encumbrance, nearly useless.
Fast travel is not inherently bad, and in theory, it lets players approach a game at
their own pace and in their own way.
It makes games accessible to more types of players; which is a good thing.
I just wish that it didn’t come at the cost of making other parts of the game tedious
and trivial.