Fast travel is a plague. Now, before completely dismissing this idea, hear me out. I’m actually not talking about all fast travel, just a specific and unfortunately very common kind of fast travel.

We all know the kind. The “once you’ve been somewhere you can teleport there and back basically at will”  kind. You may be familiar with it from such small indie titles as Fallout 4, Skyrim, Dark Souls 2, Dragon Age Inquisition and Fable 3. What’s the problem? It cripples world design. It’s actually a piece of a larger problem related to convenience at the cost of game design but that argument is for another time and venue. Still, it’s a big and deceptively complex statement, so let me unpack it.

The Worldbuilding Problem

The first thing it does, is free the developer from having to consider how people (both NPCs and the player) actually get around in their world. If you’re just going to teleport everywhere after being there once, all that effort worldbuilding is basically wasted. Some developers will do it anyways (Obsidian for example) but in my experience most won’t, or won’t do as well. It reduces the world from a living and mostly coherent thing to a big themepark.

Take for example, Skyrim. Ask yourself, how does Falkreath transport lumber as they say they do, and who in the towns they apparently ship to receives it? Only a couple of the major towns have nearby mills to get that lumber to a usable state, and nobody in the towns appears to be running the a construction company that would be buying it. Considering the civil war, why are all the trade routes not well guarded but instead infested with bandits? Trade routes are literally the most important aspect of maintaining an army. Why the nitpicking? Because Skyrim presents itself as a living breathing world, but can’t be bothered to commit to asking what should be some pretty serious questions. What it is, is a series of important landmarks that have something to do in them that have been hotglued to a map will only the thinnest possible interest in establishing how the world actually works. Why? I’d argue that it’s in large part because the player isn’t required to interact with the world in the same way a person living in that would would be.

Now let’s look at Morrowind. You don’t get to teleport anywhere you want at a whim. You have to take the same buses and boats everybody else has to. Unless you like being mauled to death by daedra or bandits, you also have to take the same major trade routes that people actually living in the world would have to (for the same reasons.) This forces the devs to actually think about how people and supplies get from place to place. After all, if they want to ask the player to behave in a way that would be rational for someone living in the world, they have to know what is a rational way for people in that world. Obviously there is still plenty of room for lazy shortcuts, but it’s still a fundamentally different mindset. Bandits don’t just live along major trade routes where guards would quickly catch on and eradicate them, they live on more minor roads or a good ways off the major road, because if they want you to use the main roads like a real person they can’t throw hoards of bandits at you for doing so. As a result of the different mindset, I know how the netch leather gets from Vivec to Balmora. I know who makes it and who buys it, because after bothering to figure out where the major trade routes are in order to inform the world layout and encourage the player to use them it’s very little effort for them to throw in a couple NPCs who’s jobs it is to make and buy that leather.

An Unexamined Life

Second, and related but different enough to be worth mentioning, it undermines attempts to encourage exploration or take the world seriously. In Dragons Dogma, I know where every lich, ogre, cyclops, chimera, hydra, drake, golem, and bandit camp is. I know if they can be avoided and how they can be avoided safely if so. I know the shortest route to every rest stop from anywhere on the map and I know the shortest route between every rest stop. Why do I know all this? Limited fast travel. The world is dangerous, and I have to walk everywhere. Perhaps counter intuitively, this encourages exploration. Oh, you might die if you go exploring, but secrets like shortcuts that you could find if you don’t die are suddenly extremely valuable, as any Dark Souls fan is probably well aware.

Out of Sight Out of Mind

Third, it reduces the knowledge of the world the devs can expect you to have. Again, this is related to the point above. When you can fast travel to and from anywhere that’s going to be what people tend to do, which makes things like shortcuts mostly pointless. In discouraging exploration by making things so convenient, they limit the exploration challenges they can present to the player. They haven’t made the player get the knowledge necessary to solve them, so it’s the very definition of unfair to suddenly ask the player to use a skill that the game has never asked them to use before. I can only find like 1 of the treasure maps in Skyrim where I have an actual picture to go by, but I can find hidden items in Morrowind based entirely on written descriptions. Why? Because Morrowind trains the player to be good at navigating that way by insisting it be done constantly, Skyrim highlights everything with glowing arrows that encourage doing exactly the opposite, mindlessly sprinting (or outright teleporting) from place to place with  no regard for what you’re passing, and it highlights almost everything on the minimap so you never need to actually look for anything.

When you combine all these aspects of the any time you want brand of fast travel, you end up with comparatively shallow and poorly thought out worlds that devalue and discourage exploration and lasting familiarity with ones environment. The reason I say it’s a curse? Because when the game is built with it in mind this is almost always what happens. As a person who thinks world building is one of the most important parts of games that present worlds and level design is the one of the most important parts of most games, it single handedly ruins a lot of games I might otherwise enjoy. It keeps springing up in games I’d argue it has no place in, complete with all of the problems I’ve mentioned.

This isn’t to say it’s automatically bad and always ruins games. Fallout New Vegas has a painfully detailed world and either makes the map marker an area to search or uses misleading markers often enough to help make up for where it falls short, and it uses the lure of finding a vault and promise of treasure to help as well. In games like Borderlands it doesn’t really matter, they aren’t asking you to take the world seriously as a place, it’s a playground for interactive gunporn.

What I am saying is that it should not be built into the game as an alternative to actual world or level design. I honestly wouldn’t mind a remake of Morrowind or something that had the whenever and wherever you want fast travel, provided it did not come at the cost of the rest of the experience and the properly integrated ways of travel and navigation that are already there. I wouldn’t use it, and I’d go so far as to mod it out so I wouldn’t be tempted to use it, but it wouldn’t hurt me. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of a single game that is built so fast travel (or those damn compass markers that have similar problems) never feels necessary because there are well considered ways to navigate the world without them. Even New Vegas falls short in that area. You can actually see where the level design takes a hit in the first Dark Souls once you have the ability to fast travel.

Seeing as I’m apparently forced to make a choice between 2 extremes, I’ll go with no or extremely limited fast travel and properly built games every time.

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