What's the Deal with Fast Travel?

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Fast travel is a bedrock of game design, but what's the point of fast travel anyway? Yeah, haha, it's so you can travel fast. But... why is it around to begin with? How does it make parts of a game more fun? Why are we using it to skip parts of a game? When can it all go wrong? Let's talk about the different shapes a fast travel system can take.
Featuring:
Skyrim
Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Elden Ring
Final Fantasy XIV
Ocarina of Time
Metroid Prime
Spelunky
Spiderman
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet
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[@DesignDoc]

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[@Fae_helmet]

this is legit the first time I’ve been interested in a video sponsorship and didn’t skip it

[@syrelian]

Another reason that Vesper Bay doesn't have an Aetheryte is that at the time of release, they wanted to avoid Vesper Bay becoming clogged with players for various reasons, so by not having a warp-point, it becomes unlikely to become a social hub You can actually follow this logic in subsequent expansions, most of the places where you go to get At-The-Time Current gear during the post-release patch cycle were just a little bit out of the way, rather than major cities, so you'd trek over there rather than having it be clogged with all the people socializing at all times

[@thomastoscano3152]

@@Fae_helmet Me too! I've used it and it's really really cool. I have the free plan for a small project. Once the project starts to grow, I plan to buy the subscription, but for now even the free plan have a lot of features!

[@TheExileFox]

I like how Trails of Cold Steel by Falcom deals with travel. You have classic fast travel with some restrictions for story reasons, leaving you sometimes with the choice of just walking to your destination or use a horse to get there

[@vierco1005]

In my game I am working on fast travel costs a save slot as the main character is just recalling that location witch exists in her data.

[@vulasaur6799]

i tried playing BOTW without fast travel and i was surprised by how much hyrule started to feel like home, a trip from kakariko to death mountain is like a walk to the kitchen. i also became very attached to my horse and i appreciated the pain from having to travel on foot to the horse shrine if it died

[@daizbid]

BotW is one of the rare open world games that actually works very well without fast travel. It's the first game I played where I felt like I'd actually miss out on something if I fast traveled.

[@mobster503]

BoTW is one of the very few games where Fast Travel has felt more like a convenience than a necessity The DLC even has an item that is just a manually placable fast travel checkpoint, but you aren’t just given it and still have to go actually look for it You can also only place it on your current location, so it’s not like you can just put it anywhere and go anywhere

[@Just_Shaun]

Your comment inspired me; I played botw about 2 years after it released; feels just like yesterday, nowhere near almost 5 years ago. I didn’t get the whole fresh game experience that everyone who played it at launch or blind did, because the game had been milked dry on social media and KZbin, I knew the arching story and the locals were pretty familiar from all the videos I had watched. But the game was still obviously fantastic. I’ve played it three times in that span and each time was better than the last. Anyway, I don’t plan playing it anytime soon, but with tears of the kingdom on the horizon, I’ll steal that mindset for then. Sounds really cool; Zelda is one of the few franchises that can make you feel like a child again; can’t wait!

[@twin-hit9405]

Quick question. Did you use the glider, revali's gail and wind bombing? Or did you really walk and climb all that.

[@vulasaur6799]

@@twin-hit9405 I used the glider sometimes but other than that it was horse or walk. The horse can mostly walk on its own though so I would sometimes multitask while traveling

[@pippastrelle]

Latias/Latios in ORAS is still my favourite. Instead of teleporting, you could fly over the minimap on its back and land wherever there was a notable location. It gave you greater control and greater immersion in the region while being quick and convenient.

[@pigeongod3450]

Not to mention the music that would play was always just so nice

[@Tyrranis]

Reminds me of the flying vehicles in the Wild ARMs series. They're more-or-less like the Final Fantasy Airships the video mentions.

[@FireallyXTheories]

It was so convinient and calming / liberating. I genuinely felt like I could fly for hours even though there was no point to and the mirages and events always kept it fresh!

[@rafaelbordoni516]

Was thinking the same thing. Lots of old JRPGs had these boats and airships that were pretty much the same thing. I don't know why it's not a thing anymore, last game I remember doing something similar was ORAS indeed.

[@richmanifesto1090]

Soaring needs to come back

[@arenkai]

The most fun I had in Skyrim was doing a "no fast travel except at carts" playthrough. There's so much you miss by fast travelling, it's insane !

[@appelofdoom8211]

The survival mode they added in the skyrim anniversary edition had that restriction built in except you also got to fast travel if you went through the dlc area and unlocked the abillity to use bend will on dragons which also let you fast travel. Honestly that really does turn the game on its head and I kind off love it

[@ripopol]

True story: I just straight up didnt realise that fast travel and sleeping in beds to manipulate the in-game clock were both a thing in Skyrim. So when i finally got back around to doing the main quest after "failing to unlock" the thieves guild (killing grelod, getting the note and then just never getting follow up) i went to the inn and was told they didnt have an attic room. walked over to my appointed room and realised "hey, theres a bed" and was forcibly kidnapped all the way to the north-most part of the map by the Brotherhood. It was an odd experience having to walk all the way back to the inn.

[@darkhobo]

I played Breath of the Wild in a similar way. First I did no fast travel. Then after I did the divine beasts I decided I could only fast travel from Sheika shrines. I still prefer playing that way. It's far more immersive.

[@GiordanDiodato]

oh so you like wandering for hours on end

[@darkhobo]

@@GiordanDiodato its literally an open world game so you can do that...

[@EyeOfKings]

In the world of Yakuza the district of Kamurocho was small enough to not really need fast travel, since you could cross the entire map in about 2 minutes or so. Although, fast travel is offered via taxis, the taxis only take you to the edges of the map so it there only used for crossing the entire city; saving you a minute of time.

[@lavenzavantas]

the taxis are also convenient because they get you from place to place without the risk of running into random encounters, which can happen frequently if you go to your destination by foot. and in older games, characters weren't able to sprint until Ishin, and infinite sprint was only introduced in Judgment. you also have to pay cash for taxis but they cost so little that it's like they were free

[@EyeOfKings]

@@lavenzavantas yeah that's true I forgot about those, sometimes avoiding random encounters was a big reason to use them. Plus the quality of life updates like sprint and such.

[@Artista_Frustrado]

also the Taxis allow for the devs to cheat & let you have story beats outside Kamurocho

[@lavenzavantas]

@@Artista_Frustrado that's also true. it allows fast travel between different cities as well, for games with multiple areas to explore such as Yakuza 5 or Yakuza Like a Dragon

[@Manavine]

It *specifically* annoys me when a quest wants me to go to a very specific spot in Kamurocho, where I know it'll take 2-3 minutes by foot... and 1-2 minutes by taxi in Yakuza 4. I probably would be less miffed if there was a taxi there, and I think they did in later games.

[@FacePomagranate]

People always complain about fast travelling in terms of immersion, but I think in terms of story-telling it makes a lot of sense. When you tell a story, you don't tell about every little detail the characters encounter; just the important events. We had games jump you from level to level long before Will Wright thought we wanted games where we watch our characters wash their hands after they use the toilet.

[@One.Zero.One101]

I don't understand why it's so cool to hate on fast travel. I've seen dozens of videos hating on fast travel but I haven't seen one defending it. Sometimes I think am I the only one who loves fast travel? There has to be people like me out there.

[@FacePomagranate]

@@One.Zero.One101 I think there's probably a silent majority supporting it. You're going to hear more people complaining about something rather than people talking about features they like. If games got rid of fast travel, you'd probably hear a lot of people complaining that the games are too boring and repetitive.

[@MagicGonads]

it's also good for replay, maybe those moment to moment interactions were interesting the first time around- but now you've already seen that and you've got some other goal in mind that travel hinders.

[@franciscocolorado3028]

Fast travel is good, specially considering maps just become bigger and bigger, the problem comes, as it's said in the video, when the player spents more time in the menu than playing and you stop exploring or using other mechanics because it's not worthy when you can tp wherever you want

[@seanG0318]

Fast travel is good, especially if the mechanic is connected to the world and lore. One of my favourite examples are the stag stations from Hollow Knight, because they actually were used during Hallownest's days of glory.

[@ApsuP]

When talking about fast travel I always want to bring up Morrowind. It mixes up several different forms of fast travel. There is boat that takes you between coastal cities, a big monster bug that acts as bus between certain towns and cities, mages' guild has teleportation network and several different spells for fast travel. The different forms of fast travel make for immersive experience, and learning a best route from place A to place B feels rewarding.

[@theydonothing1]

I generally liked travel in Morrowind, but running from the temple in Vivec to the mages's guild in Vivec got tedious pretty fast

[@buffettboy2003]

I was really hoping someone would bring up Morrowind. I use it as a small case study of immersion when comparing it to Skyrim because you learned to take the various routes. The mark and recall spells were there to give you a good option when you could finally use them. There was a teleportation between mage guilds. But it encouraged talking to people to get things on your map so you knew where you could try and find things. It felt like part of the game design was that it wanted you to explore. I've not felt that Skyrim wants me to explore, but rather says, you sure could if you want.

[@kricku]

So a bunch of different hubs?

[@SerDerpish]

@@theydonothing1that’s where Mark & Recall come in clutch 😉

[@SerpongeDash]

Reminds me of wynncraft

[@EvilCoffeeInc]

Fast travel is one of those features I've always been iffy on. I often feel disconnected from a game's setting and story when teleporting everywhere. I really enjoyed walking around the maps of Skyrim and FFXIV when I first started playing them. At the same time, travel is less of a "thing to do" and more of a space between action, and it can get boring between those actions. But I worry that this sense of boredom is not because travelling is uninteresting, but because I've been trained to do chores in an exceedingly optimal way. I can't help but feel as though the result of fast travel is not convenience, but instead feeding a Skinner box style obsession with efficiency.

[@chinesesparrows]

makes sense to have fast travel as at least an option and everyone's cup of tea differs.

[@Tohlemiach]

This is why Death Stranding is so brilliant, imo. Make a world where fast travel exists but is pointless, then make traversal itself the fun gameplay. Genius idea.

[@glint6070]

@@chinesesparrows Idk, I feel like committing (either to full-on fast travel, or limited/no fast-travel) allows devs to better design the game to their target audience The "option" to turn off fast-travel in a bunch of games is really a false option; those sorts of games often feel too empty to make it worthwhile

[@oddysay]

Yeah facts ! FFXV has an underrated travel system.

[@chinesesparrows]

@glint just like how walkthrough of an densely packed quality game like the first last of us has millions of views including many many comments saying theyve never played the game, people can want to relax and enjoy the story or just some parts. fast travel helps meet this want more than zero fast travel

[@jearn11]

You should do an episode on change states in the world when backtracking. Like a peaceful tutorial village is later filled with demons, or a location was destroyed or frozen over. Examples: the main town square in Ocarina of Time, the Ashina Outskirts in Sekiro, or Leyndell in Elden Ring.

[@Ageman20XX]

Oh that's a great suggestion! I love this kind of stuff! I haven't seen it for a while, but I guess it's because I'm playing the wrong games. Would love to see a video focused on this mechanic / idea.

[@erzaine6545]

Hollow knight ooo

[@thefrub]

Also "Two Betrayals" from Halo CE, and in my personal opinion the best one is "Anticitizen One" from HL2. You teleport back to the starting area and the city is at war

[@Mesowav]

@@erzaine6545 exactly what I was thinking

[@erzaine6545]

@@Mesowav great minds think alike

[@agentmoon7876]

One of the reasons I think the interconnected world in Dark Souls 1 works so well is because fast travel is unlocked partway through the game and is limited to only certain bonfires. It forces the player to learn to traverse the world. In every other Souls game you can teleport to any bonfire (or equivalent) right from the beginning, and the series got more linear up until Elden Ring. If the player can just warp anywhere, there's less reason to make interesting paths through the world. And the connections that do exist feel pointless.

[@ikagura]

I feel like it's superior to Eldern Ring.

[@robertfernandez3746]

@@ikagura definitely

[@PositronCannon]

On the other hand, while it works well for a first playthrough, it turns replays into kind of a slog at times, especially for completionist runs. I use a "warp to any bonfire from the start" mod on PC for this reason as it cuts down on a lot of backtracking. Doesn't help that the sprinting speed in DS1 feels pretty slow too.

[@Mordalon]

While that is what makes DS1 so cool and unique, I do think the other games still retain that sense of intricate level design, specifically in DS3. DS3 basically took the principles of the Painted World from DS1 and applied it to every level, where the zones have one entry and exit point but within that zone you are constantly unlocking shortcuts and opening up the level. Sens Fortress in DS1 is also like this and it's partly why it's one of my favorite areas.

[@lugbzurg8987]

That's similar to what happened in Doom. They mostly dropped the key system and made it so that all your resources can be extracted from enemies, and the level design ended up getting homogenized into chains of arenas as a result. There's a reason so many people keep pointing to Foundry as their favorite level from Doom (2016). In fact, it's actually a leftover from a cancelled Doom reboot that was meant for 2015.

[@mrfipp]

Gravity Rush comes to mind when I think about fast travel. In Gravity Rush, your main method of transportation is manipulating your own gravity to fall in any direction you want. It honestly pretty fun, flying across the game's giant sky city, finding all the places you can explore with your gravity-based abilities, I liked it so much that I never bothered with the game's fast travel, which was using man holes to get from place to place.

[@DrGandW]

I beat that game and straight up forgot about the manholes They’re more useful in 2 though because of the district system iirc

[@haroeneissa790]

Flying between cities was almost impossible at the start of the game because you didn't have enough gravity to make it all the way.

[@lumia2258]

I really like the dream nail in hollow knight, you can set up a gate wherever you want and teleport to it later. Since you only get to teleport to one place it doesnt let you skip regular travel and exploration. However it let you skip the section between a bench and a boss when youre tryharding and you get it late enough to really appreciate it

[@N12015]

And well, it can be used to cut through travel to return, aka the boring part of the adventure.

[@tomas_iss7469]

Oh that’s a good way to use it, shame I just pinned it to dirthmouth and never moved it

[@5001Fergies]

That reminds me of skate 3’s return mechanic, which is essentially the same thing, you can set up a return point at the top of a hill or location you want to attempt a trick at, then when you inevitably fail you can return to the top with the click of a button to try again, as opposed to the walk of shame you have to do in real life which is soul crushing

[@salk9943]

YOU CAN DO WHAT?!?!?

[@dolpin4539]

The most unique form of fast travel i have seen in a game was probably all the forms of fast travel in the mmo fusionfall. In that game, theres (almost?) No traditional teleport tavel system, instead, the game had sky bus stops and flying mojo jojo monkeys, which actively carry you to whatever area on their route you want to get to. No teleport, no loading screen, just you actively being carried throughout the game world, allowing you to also get a birds eye view of the map as you go, showing you further points of interest as you go. I loved this system, felt so natural and watching the horizon/skyline slowly change as you go from area to area was great. Honestly sad that more games have not done fast travel like this, though I understand it probably wouldn't work for most games.

[@Epzilon12]

Reminds me of Flightmasters in WoW

[@beytullahberk3632]

man, fusionfall was the shit

[@melephs_cap]

I never thought about that but you're absolutely right-FusionFall was fantastic about this. I'd love to see a similar system in a denser, more complex sort of adventure game where fast travel could give you an idea of some things you wanted to explore.

[@superbro6413]

Major kudos for bringing up Fusionfall. Absolutely banging online game back in the day.

[@stevethepocket]

I think a big part of the reason most games don't do this is that it's a performance nightmare. You're seeing the world from a high enough vantage point to see way further in any direction than you would on foot, all the usual optimization tricks like hiding stuff behind other stuff don't work, AND you're probably going at a way faster clip than even the fastest ground-based mounts so it all has to load in way faster too.

[@gustav95037]

I really enjoyed FFXV where a form of fast travel is just take the car and let Ignis just drive you to where you are going, you can listen to music, everyone is just enjoying the ride. It had world immersion, story context, character development moments and you can see the world design

[@Uskotopo]

Yes! Chilling to some classic FF themes while the pretty landscape goes by, it's feels like meditation in some way

[@SuspiciousScout]

I thought XV's fast travel was a little convoluted at first since you can sometimes teleport to quest areas and sometimes you needed to go to the nearest gas station, but it felt rewarding to be able to see the sights and simultaniously find new fast travel points for later use. I do wish you gained the ability to drive off-road much sooner than you did, though.

[@RoninXDarknight]

FFXV certainly had a lot of issues but the mechanics surrounding the use of the car were fantastic.

[@syrelian]

@@SuspiciousScout iirc thats entirely because Off-road was a post-release addition(yes, Flying was base game but some proper tires were not)

[@SuspiciousScout]

@@syrelian Really? That's something. I always thought it felt so awkward the way you couldn't manually steer the car on your own and it was like 90% automatic.

[@xenofes2]

Morrowind had amazing fast travel. There's like six different in-universe fast travel systems that start off obtuse but are really easy to use once you understand them.

[@dazcarrr]

if you think about it, the lost woods in ocarina of time is kind of a fast travel system. if you know the way around you can use it to access several important areas, but only after reaching it first. if the area got expanded on a bit more you probably wouldn't have needed the warp songs

[@Triforce_of_Doom]

Oh yeah as both a completionist & someone who plays the randomizer, the LW end up being my most visited location in Ocarina. Especially in the randomizer where odds are I won't have the songs for a good portion

[@VBall1295]

For me, the horses never felt like a nerf or an inconvenience. Like all other forms of travel in the game, they have strengths and weaknesses. Horses are fast on long stretches of terrain, they give a sense of companionship to increase your emotional attachment, and they can travel automatically on paths which allows the player to look around and either take in the scenery or look for points of interest. When I got to a river it a cliff to steep to climb, that just meant I had to now figure out a new course of action and kept traveling fresh and exciting. I never got bored with the horse because I constantly switched between using the horse, climbing, paragliding, and shield surfing.

[@dazcarrr]

horses are meant for roads - which can reach most important areas in the game - not mountains or rivers. walking along a road isn't very fun so the horse solves that.

[@SilverDreamweaver]

And they feel so fun to use due to their animations and the camera when riding them.

[@RoninXDarknight]

The car from FFXV. "Fast travel" was just you handing off the wheel to one of your buddies. Riding around the map taking in the sites and listening to the banter of the four friends was one of the best parts of that game.

[@Triforce_of_Doom]

all while listening to classic FF songs on the radio

[@levib5168]

No offense but this sounds so incredibly boring why not just drive yourself why would you want to just sit there

[@tennynya]

Sometimes you just want to not drive, and just enjoy the sights. But when you want to have more eventful fun, you drive by yourself.

[@lifefindsaway7875]

@@levib5168 the GTA games do this to, you can give the wheel to a friend. You listen to whatever dialogue was prepared for the ride. And you can ‘take a nap’ and skip to the end.

[@samchillington4749]

My personal favourite was sadly only in the late game, this was the latios/latias flute available in pokemon oras. It acted as a fly but also allowed you to be more engaged into the process and find hidden areas and pokemon

[@Castersvarog]

Man soaring was great, super fun to just fly around the world without needing the HM

[@zjzr08]

I think being late game was purposeful as it acted like Fly which is also late game; also most of its unique features like Mirage Spots are post-game content.

[@hithere2631]

Whats oras

[@samchillington4749]

@@hithere2631 pokemon omega ruby and alpha sapphire , its an abbreviation commonly used as too long of a name lol

[@GGrimmmm]

Rain World does something really interesting: fast travel is called passages, and they are unlocked through achievements. You are limited by only being able to use the passages you’ve unlocked once per play through, and each passage shows a unique scene based on the achievement when you use it

[@loaf1712]

Rain world, Drain world, drain city, Bladee city, Bladee radio.

[@Bolt505]

When I played Rain world, I was so terrified of wasting them that i ended up beating the game after only using 2

[@TempoKong]

I once beat BOTW without using fast travel, I even got to 114 shrines without guide. It was one of the best experience, hyped to do that again in TOTK!

[@mitsuki1388]

It took me 80h to use my first fast travel in my first playthrough of BoTW and it wasn't a challenge or anything conscious, I just didn't find the need. That said, I did use the automated horse tracking for backtracking

[@remem95]

Playing BoTW with minimal teleport also makes the horses alot more useful. The way they follow the roads makes it still effortless to go between important locations.

[@TempoKong]

@@remem95 and it makes the motorcycle an incredibly good reward

[@sociallysatanic]

someday i really wanna do this, sounds like it'd make it feel more like an actual journey adventure

[@27ricky04]

Once I discovered btbs and boomy zoomies I never looked back, I know it's not intended but it's so fun

[@PragmaticAntithesis]

One interesting possibility is areas that can only be accessed by fast travel, such as Paper Mario's shiver city or Hollow Knight's stag nest. This can be a reward area for unlocking all the other fast travel points or a way of gating story progress and late game areas behind unlocking a postgame fast travel system.

[@maromania7]

When I think of that I think of Banjo Tooie. Grunty actively locks you out of her factory level. To get in, you have to find the button to unlock the fast travel point (open the train station). Then you can go to another level and sneak into the factory using the train. You can unlock the door from the inside, but it's a clever little trick.

[@Drekromancer]

Excellent take. That adds an additional incentive to seek out and engage with the fast travel network, even if you don't actually like using it consistently. Which is pretty cool. 🙂

[@ThomasstevenSlater]

In Avernum 4 there a whole region of the map you can't get to because the fort that blocks the narrow stone bridge to it has been taken and the door locked. When you have to go there for the plot you have to teleport to hub you haven't activated yet, which is apparently very dangerous.

[@BingFox]

To this day, Morrowind's is my favorite. It's all in-world travel. Boats, Mages, and stilt-striders. Some of it is even customizable with the Mark and Recall spells. There's also the levitation and jump spells, with some spells making you run faster.

[@commandoepsilon4664]

Ah yes, the mark/recall spells: Adventure walks into shop casts spell, refuses to elaborate. Some time late suddenly appears in front of the counter with their pockets so loaded down with every random object imaginable they literally can't move. Good times

[@huntert7650]

I really liked fast travel in Dragon's Dogma. It requires a consumable item (you later get an unlimited one) and you may only travel to a very small handful of places by default. However, there was a second consumable item that allowed you to make your own travel points! They were quite limited, and you could pick them back up so they weren't a permanent investment.

[@sarahblack1938]

This is the game I thought of right away. I didnt even know I had fast travel items on me for awhile tho, I walked everywhere for good chunk of the game

[@iambecomegameend2972]

That was such a good system. Not sure if I’ve played another game that lets you set your own fast travel spots

[@nanaaddae4790]

I was waiting for someone to bring this up. It was limiting for me personally, but it really kept a sense of immersion.

[@TheAsj97]

That's the one thing I hate about that game, the world is too empty and big for there not to be better fast travel. They could have at least added a mount or something to increase travel speed outside of combat.

[@Qladstone]

Except by the time you place down all those portcrystals you're already L70-100, in new game plus, and everything in Gransys is trivial and boring. I don't know man, I love Dragon's Dogma and played a lot of it, but the travel in the game and the tedium of wasting time doing things for the sake of doing things in that game bugs me to no end.

[@TwilightWolf032]

Xenoblade lets you fast travel to any points you've been to before at any time, but during story heavy segments where you're supposed to be trapped or wouldn't make sense for your character to leave a place until the story progresses, it prevents you from doing so. There's even an entire city that becomes unavailable for fast travel until the game is over after a point in the story, and it's the saddest one...

[@providence1517]

Yeah, though oddly enough, this doesn't happen in Xenoblade 2. When you're supposed to be searching a sunken ship for a treasure, you can skip right back to the starting area with no explanation as to how you got back. Later on, you get marooned in Uraya (after getting eaten), but you are able to return to previous areas like no problem. Furthermore, at the end of that area, you progress the story by taking a boat back to a previous area... even though you can just skip back there no problem. And in Tantal, when you're supposed to be getting to this area or else the Titan will sink, but you can take as long as you want (in fact, someone proved that you can't get there in time even if there was a time limit).

[@SethalaTheGamer]

@@providence1517 My personal headcanon for the game is that the actual gameplay I'm doing isn't happening in chronological order. No, I didn't warp off the sinking Titan to go pick up supplies, I'm just having a flashback to when I went to get supplies sometime before the Titan started to sink.

[@friendlyelites]

​@@providence1517 except near the end of the game with Indol where the entire location becomes unavailable due to the story progression

[@cebo494]

I think BOTW horses specifically fill the niche of traveling to a place that you don't have fast travel points to. The roads in the game are actually fairly well laid out and horses will even steer themselves while riding on a road. If you are too underpowered or uninterested to go far off the main trail, horses make for a really convenient way to get to each of the towns or towers in the early game, giving you those fast travel points to jump start the rest of the games exploration.

[@high_stakes_ikea7087]

I mean that’s fair? My botw play style meant almost never using any of the roads though so the horses were nearly useless for me. I’m too easily distractible- I see a weird lookin landmark? I’m going there. If climbing straight up a mountain seems more direct to a goal? Full send er bud. They were a little Too niche in botw to be fun for me personally. One thing botw did so well was making tools and abilities so versatile and giving players so much freedom and the horses just… were the opposite I felt. If they let me summon the horse anywhere, or just increased call range I would’ve gotten way more use and enjoyment out of them. Probably would have had more patience exploring the massive world too and finding all the more subtle/hidden shrines and koroks if I had a faster way to travel (without getting DLC)

[@voltron77]

Yeah but you can just use the motorcycle

[@cebo494]

@@voltron77 I mean sure Motorcycle works fine if you want to spend 20$ for DLC in a game that you are presumably still towards the beginning of playing if you would otherwise be using horses to travel to places without warp points. You should basically treat the motorcycle like it doesn't exist from a game design perspective. It's a 'for-fun' paid add-on, not a part of the real game.

[@voltron77]

@@cebo494 I wound up using the motorcycle more than the horses to travel around even in the early game even though I had epona and Zelda’s horse. The motor cycle is just more convenient

[@cebo494]

@@voltron77 It doesn't matter what you did. The motorcycle isn't a meaningful replacement for horses because most people *CAN'T* use the motorcycle. Most people either didn't buy the expansion at all or probably didn't buy it until they'd actually played through most of the game. It just isn't useful to talk about the motorcycle in a discussion about if horses are useful. The motorcycle doesn't exist for a substantial number of players.

[@TheCrazyhairdude67]

Old School Runescape has some of the most fascinating fast travel mechanics I've ever seen; it has pretty much everything you just listed, to varying degrees. The Agility skill, in addition to allowing you to run for longer without getting tired, also opens up many useful shortcuts around the map. The Magic skill lets you cast teleport spells to various key locations, but your choices are limited by which spellbook you currently have selected. If you want to use a spell from a different spellbook, you need to buy or make teleport tablets from that spellbook or return to the correct altar to change out your spells. Many quests and achievement packs (called "diaries") give you items with infinite teleports to one very specific location. Enchanted jewelry allows you to teleport to a handful of locations, but must be recharged or recreated after a set number of uses. There are also like, 5 separate hub-to-hub transportation networks, most of which link nicely into each other and/or have global teleports nearby one of their hubs. It's complex and takes awhile to wrap your head around, but once you're in the midgame and have all the travel options unlocked, it is incredibly rewarding to zip from place to place using skills and items you worked for instead of waypoints you only need to visit.

[@yodal_]

The insane amount of travel options in Runescape is always a favorite for me. What's crazy is that it never feels like any one option completely invalidates another. Sure, the more late-game travel methods have more options or are more convenient to use, but even as a super late-game player with every single option at my finger tips I sometimes think about how to get to a location and decide the fastest way is to take the route I would have when I was a new player.

[@Luanmm]

In RuneScape (not old School), there is aditionally a magnetite network, a Teleport web to most cities, on top of all the old School options (the One small favour Quest gets much easier on RS3 with the magnetites activated, trust me lol)

[@Drekromancer]

I was waiting for someone to mention Old School Runescape. It pretty much encompasses every form of fast travel: Automatic, uninterrupted movement on the map (Magic Carpets), resource-based teleports (Enchanted jewelry/Minigame teleports, Teleport spells, Teletabs), progress-based infinite teleports (Achievement Diary reward teleports and quest teleports like the Ectophial), and several distinct-yet-full-fleshed-out travel networks (Spirit Trees, Gnome Gliders, Eagles, Canoes, Charter Ships, Fairy Rings). The older I get, the more impressed I become with how well-crafted the interlocking travel systems in RuneScape are. They always manage to make you feel clever for figuring out a good way to get where you need to go.

[@VioletCatastrophe]

@@Luanmm I'd argue the lodestone network of RS3 is a bit too easy, and a bit too encompassing, to the point where it makes the other teleportation options available a little underwhelming. It's super convenient though for sure. I think it's interesting how the seemingly small addition of the network can drastically change the overall travel dynamics of the game.

[@71jmonkey]

Ah, yes. It was satisfying to me when I figured out fairly early on to use a ring of dueling to reach the gnome glider and take it to a nearby fairy ring. It was also satisfying to add a Salve Graveyard portal to my house as my primary method of reaching fairy rings.

[@aidensandbakken6648]

Soaring on Latias/Latios in Pokemon Alpha Saphire/Omega Ruby was a blast. Instead of the usual fly-based teleportation (which the game also had) you could play a flute, and fly through the skies of Hoenn in a controlled manner. It was pretty entertaining, and lets you reach some areas that you can't get to on foot, and have some wild pokemon encounters if you're careless enough to crash into a flock.

[@nihilisticinquisition7150]

I like how in Axiom Verge the Fast Travel is basically one big-ass head in the middle of the map which physically gets you to your destination and if you happen to fall off the head you're stranded somewhere in the hub and have to walk to the next destination.

[@cabbitha5054]

I love that big head! Assumed it would try to kill me, and was very pleasantly surprised

[@3eve0n]

I really like the fast travel options in Terraria. From the super convenient "instant go home" option of magic mirror/recall potions, to the cooperation encouraging wormhole potions, and even silliness of teleportation potions (which teleport you to a random location anywhere in the world). There's even 1 or 2 ways of setting up your own teleportation hub system, where the player can pick what the points of interest are for themselves and set up their own teleportation there, blending perfectly with the base building aspect of the game while still being s super useful QoL feature.

[@Lemony123]

Oh yeah, and pylon.

[@SuperPaperPokemon]

I love the way Metroid Dread structures itself. Like any good Metroidvania, you get more and more skip options while you go through the story thanks to gaining more abilities. But only at the very end of the game, right before the final boss, it open up a true teleportation style fast travel, using the previously two way only teleporters to let you get to ANY teleporter. It makes you explore the entire game just using what you got, but still opens up a useful thing for completion clean up purposes.

[@melephs_cap]

Towers are kind of infamous as fast travel and map discovery points, so I want to draw attention to the similar-but-different FN Sites in Xenoblade Chronicles X. They are marked by tall beacons of light which are visible from a moderate distance, but you can only be sure of their horizontal position. A good few are actually hidden or located surprisingly high or low, and sometimes it takes scanning your surroundings to figure out how to get to one, install a probe there, and unlock it as a fast travel destination. FN Sites are marked on the map, but instead of getting exact icons, they're indicated as being somewhere in a given "hex": one of dozens of bite-size sections of the regional map. Installing a probe at a site also reveals all of the adjacent map hexes (up to 6), which is much less powerful than unlocking the map for a whole area at once.

[@alfredoguzman6269]

Not to mention, these probes/fast travel markers also had a an additional function in that they generate resources for you as well, depending on what kind of probe you place.

[@QwixLF]

This is also supplanted by the fact that driving across the various environments in a tank/bike mech as well as flying around in a seamless world made fast travel not really necessary, as doing an uninterrupted ride from the top of Caldera to the edges of both Bolivia and Noctilum ending in NLA just kinda fun to do for it's own sake. Also the on foot run speed and jump, with the lack of fall damage, auto run, and strong verticality in the world made it just fun to jump off cliffs. Never fast traveled unless it was clear across the map.

[@caliburnabsolute8517]

​@@QwixLF I know you meant to say Oblivia, but... Bolivia...

[@QwixLF]

@@caliburnabsolute8517 Oops, AC.

[@indecision6326]

The leyline founts of Shin Megami Tensei V are a pretty interesting form of fast travel in that they're essentially miniature towns. In addition to being your fast travel hubs, they're also where you go for everything from shopping to demon fusion, all in ways that tie into the fast travel mechanic.

[@Triforce_of_Doom]

Oh yeah having an in-universe magic transport system where some of your "travel points" are also your shops is genius for a game set in the demon apocalypse because there's no way anyone would try to actually run a shop in the dilapidated buildings of V's setting.

[@Stephen-Fox]

My favourite form of fast travel is probably Hub to Hub - There's a fast travel network you can access and slowly unlock, but you can only use it from it's stations and only ride it to it's stations. As for Breath of the Wild... My biggest issue with the horses weren't their inconveniences, but... I have a glider. Why would I use a horse rather than my glider? Not suited for some games, sure, but quite often I find teleportation from anywhere feels like it's an excuse for boring traversal. (I _do_ like the ability to set a fast travel point yourself and then either teleport to it at any point, or add that point to the network for hub to hub, mind)

[@leetri]

Counterpoint, you can ride bears in BotW. Why would you use a glider when you can ride a bear?

[@xenoemblem7]

@@leetri You can ride the lord of the mountain in BotW. Why would you ride a bear when you can ride the lord of the mountain?

[@N12015]

Indeed, the most optimal way of traversal is oftentimes just go high and then glide to a point of interest. BotW in general has a problem of too many shrines in 2 ways. 1°: It makes mini-dungeons very dull and one-noted. 2°: It makes travelling to other zones less interesting. Sometimes less can be more.

[@One.Zero.One101]

Am I the only one who loves fast travel? Skyrim's fast travel anytime anywhere is just so convenient and time saving.

[@TheKarishi]

The relationship between fast travel and overworld map presentation is also an interesting one to explore. A really great way to keep players from feeling overwhelmed by the scope of the game or confused by your map is to have the size of the default overworld map view scale with how far apart the farthest two discovered landmarks are. This gives the player a sense that the world is almost expanding along with their own knowledge, which is a really cool feeling. Generally if you do this and players ask, "Wait, how big IS this game?" it's in awe and appreciation, not fear or overwhelm. This doesn't necessarily work for every game; The smaller the scope of your game, the less interesting this is as an option. But it's a subtle trick you can use to make the story feel digestible - at least, until they take a break for a year and then try to come back to it. There's nothing for that.

[@michaelcheng9987]

Reading this made me think of something like a pop quiz. So: going away for a long time activates a short pop quiz about what you remember about the game. Maybe things like complex mechanics, but for this context let's say it's how many names of places you remember or how many distinct environments there are. That helps the game scale down the map to a manageable size so as to not overwhelm the returning player. Or maybe it's a small "combat arena" that checks if you used any of the advanced techniques you've unlocked, and at the end reminds you of any. It's a rough draft of the concept, but basically the game gives you the stuff you know and tries to remind you of some stuff you may have forgot, at which point the training wheels come off far faster than the first time as you recall more and more.

[@Officialencode]

The horse in Botw also follows the paved path if you just start on it. That is to say, if you begin a trot on the path and put the controller down, the horse will keep on it no problem. it's not exactly fast, but it is certainly scenic

[@thedapperdolphin1590]

The segment on BotW’s horses made me appreciate Torrent in Elden Ring even more. You can summon it from anywhere, and it can double jump to get over rough terrain. These simple additions made Torrent way more useful and practical than horses in most games.

[@NuiYabuko]

Perhaps because those other horses are based more on actual horses?

[@Crispierbug]

Torrent can also be brought back to life easily so you don't have to worry too much about him dying, meanwhile in botw if your horse dies you need to a specific point on the map and pay the horse god to revive it.

[@Player-re9mo]

@@NuiYabuko The idea is that Elden Ring could have also given us a regular horse, but they went the extra mile and gave us something more useful than the original.

[@BasketOfPuppies642]

Yoku's Island Express has a great fast travel system, one of my favorites. They're called the Beelines, a series of bee hives that shoot you from one to the other. There are 3 lines, each of which starts at the center hub city and needs to be bought at the other end. The cool thing is that you can hop out at any of the hives, giving you a very granular way to decide where you want to end up. Some places even require you to fall there from the Beeline.

[@ikagura]

And the map wasn't too big to make it too long.

[@louis559]

Love the beeline for that reason and because its the only fast travel I've encountered that is actually fun to use. It doesn't just take you from one place to another automatically. You have to actively rotate each cannon hive and either fire yourself to the next one or drop where you are. The animation of the rotation whipping you around and then firing you as your character flails around looks and feels great.

[@Zaroni_]

I think a really cool Fast Travel System you missed was in GTA 5. If you lost or destroyed your car, you can just call a cab, which has both a fast travel, which is an extra cost, or you can speed up the driver and they will go a lot faster while still driving around the beautiful Los Santos. I personally loved this because the city is so amazing at night that I love watching it, and those in a rush can just pay extra.

[@FalconFetus8]

Another use for fast travel that you didn't mention: navigation. If you're lost, then fast travelling can reset you to a known location where you can get your bearings again. The "Lumbridge home teleport" option in old school RuneScape is a perfect example of this. It's also useful if you just don't remember how to get somewhere, particularly if the world is a labyrinth. Hogwarts Legacy comes to mind, where the castle is basically a maze.

[@kylestillwell7031]

I know you showed visuals of it in the video, but the rails in Sonic Frontiers really are a genius way to add faster travel as you progress

[@pmnt_]

Tunic did it almost perfectly. Hubs, unlockable shortcuts, and the weird shortcuts that are there from the beginning, but are much easier to find from the "later" areas. I have a love-hate relationship with the last ones. It feels great discovering them, it's always mindblowing to think that these shortcuts were there from the beginning. They are everywhere. The problem is that the "early" entrances are so obscurely hidden in the isometric view that they are easy to miss even after you discovered them. Some of the unlockable shortcuts are hard to find even after unlocking (ropes are the worst offenders) I was really annoyed in the late game, which includes lots of backtracking. Movement always felt like unnecessary detours, because i knew that the world is full of shortcuts, I just couldn't find them again. If only the shortcuts were made a bit more visible after you discovered or unlocked them...

[@TheFireMouseYT]

Terraria Pylons are a good example of fast travel. You have to build NPC houses in the correct biomes with the correct NPC's, but in return, you can teleport to a pylon from another pylon. There is a pylon that ignores these requirements, but good luck trying to get it. (I am talking about you, Universal Pylon.)

[@rmsgrey]

That's in addition to the magic mirror (and upgrades) that lets you return to your spawn point from anywhere.

[@TheFireMouseYT]

@@rmsgrey Yes. And the new Shellphone

[@rmsgrey]

@@TheFireMouseYT The Shellphone is a Magic Mirror upgrade - but the Magic Conch and Demon Conch are additional warp options.

[@TheFireMouseYT]

@@rmsgrey gotta include all of them

[@ArakDBlade]

That was an extra neat addition since it encouraged expansive building across the map as opposed to the Soviet apartments folks tended to build before pylons were added

[@urlauber2884]

I feel like you should have talked about the fast travel system in Morrowind. That was so good. It has 3 modes of transportation with few overlapping "stations", so you always have to think a little to get to where you want to be.

[@SkyworldStream]

In Saints Row 1 and 2, there is a phone-number system. You can actually call up a taxi company and travel to any place on the map, this is interesting though because the game never mentions this once. The only way to naturally discover it is by dialing the numbers on the taxis throughout the map. Honestly though, the map is so small that you really dont need to fast travel.

[@kenkune55]

I always felt like WoWs fast travel to very immersive. Much faster than walking by foot, but also make the world feel much more connected. Made it much more memorable too. Even all these years later I still remember the layout of WoWs map fairly well

[@Mordalon]

while it was immersive, it was annoying to run to a zeppelin/boat to go to the other continent only to just barely miss it and have to sit there and wait.

[@SonicMaster519]

I don’t know why but I’ve always loved Bug Fables’ fast travel system. Not only is there a canon reason for it existing but I love how it only gives you a limited set of areas to go to. As you get farther of course you unlock new areas but it always will place you at the entrance or maybe even a little farther back. It is traveling rather quickly, yes, but it’s not so powerful that you can travel from the start of the game to the end within five seconds.

[@Xman34washere]

I think a major component of not needing to use fast travel is good map design. For example, in Pokemon Violet, I tried to rematch the gyms without fast travel. I really enjoyed the challenge, because there were so many detours I could make. Granted, I'm still not done with it, as i have 4 or 5 more gyms to go. However, I can't wait to continue it.

[@Drekromancer]

Good thinking. I've always thought of Spiderman PS4 as a good example of this. My roommate would play it in our living room all the time, but I almost never caught him fast traveling because traversal was so effective and fun. They made the basic traversal so rewarding that you never wanna miss it. And I think that strategy doesn't get enough attention.

[@fourplenty]

I always like when games iterate fast travel is multiple ways like having a boat for islands, a spell to teleport, portals to different temples, busses that have different stops, trains, basically everything that can bring you from A to B, but like multiple options to get around the world.

[@gonzosimaginaryfriend8013]

Weirdest fast travel was OG Legend of Zelda. It’s a whistle you find in a dungeon, that summons a tornado that scoops up Link and takes him to a random dungeon you’ve visited before. So I could spend 5 minutes using the whistle to get to dungeons I don’t want to go to, or 10 minutes to just walk there.

[@ikagura]

Glad ALTTP and Minish Cap had a better whistle.

[@zenebean]

A weird game I enjoyed traveling around was Far Cry Primal. You started out having to walk around everywhere or teleport to outposts you had cleared, but you got more options overtime. As you advanced, you could tame more and larger creatures and could eventually ride some of them. They would teleport to you, were pretty easy to revive, and were very useful in combat. Most importantly, you could pet them all

[@zapzapfishes5878]

In a weird way, the tornado god in Wind Waker is the one fast travel system that comes to mind that I remember fondly. I think it has to do with how well integrated it is in the world, where so many fast travel systems feel disconnected. The first half of the game the tornado has a somewhat intimidating presence, nonetheless that it might completely derail your progress by throwing you somewhere random on the map. The sea is so vast, that at the time you get to fight the tornado god and aquire his power, you already has a very good feeling of the great sea's scope and sense of distance, so that you never take the fast travel for granted. It feels awesome to gain the power of this giant thing that has been a threat looming out near the horizon so far and yet I like how it still only lets you travel to key areas, so that all the smaller islands never stop feeling like these remote places you have to go out of your way to get to explore. It's something I don't feel BOTW captured quite as well, where there are towers and shrines everywhere and you have the fast travel from near the start via the tablet. The whole way Wind Waker's mode of fast travel is structured just fuel my imagination. Oh, and it also lets you fly into the realm of that creepy fairy queen, which is so very memorable! I haven't played the hd remake so can't say how the fast sail affects these experiences.

[@Triforce_of_Doom]

I also like how they make sure you get the fast travel in WW since the fairy queen you mentioned is how you get the elemental arrows which you need to get the items for the sage dungeons. Also to follow up on the last sentence of your comment as someone who's played both versions, the Swift Sail is helpful in that it feels fast but not too fast, you have to earn it via the auction house minigame, & it HEAVILY cuts down on those "oh goddammit" moments by making you not have to micromanage the wind whenever you want to turn. I still use the warp song a lot in HD but the "I need to go two islands over" travel is MUCH nicer

[@phineas81707]

Both parts are somewhat hurt by the Swift Sail. You can careen around through the overworld pretty quickly with the Swift Sail, and some distances are too short to bother with the Ballad anymore. They extended the time limit on the Forest Water sidequest by an extra 10 minutes, but with the Swift Sail, you can easily beat the old time limit *without even using the Ballad*.

[@VikingSchism]

I really like the teleportation prisms from Divinity Original Sin. Using one of the two prisms will teleport the character to the other prism - if it's held in the inventory then it will be teleported with them, but it can also be left on the ground and will not be teleported with the character. This allows you a lot of versatility in how you use them. Perhaps you give one to one character, and the other to another, and use it to bring them back together after splitting up for some reason. Or maybe you leave one in town and use it to teleport back to town quickly to do some shopping or something and then teleport back to where you were in a dungeon. But sometimes the prisms are required for solving a puzzle, effectively taking away your safety net of having one back in town because you need it there with you

[@Drekromancer]

Damn, that's genius. I have to check that game out now.

[@WhiteFangofWar]

The N64 Zeldas had the unique idea of playing songs to warp to different locations, but also had the spell Farore's Wind, which let you create your own checkpoint in a dungeon. The player will know better than anyone else where they want to be able to teleport to for the best convenience, right? An expanded version of this would give you a limited number of portable teleporters you can drop anywhere and retrieve at any time, with additional ones being items to seek out.

[@JM-dq7xn]

Fast travel from map to already discovered locations, like in Skyrim, has such a huge pitfall - the player might never approach (or depart from) location from any other angle than their first. It was legit common for me to unlock two locations next to another and never actually know what's between them...

[@simpsonsfanatic777]

In that case, the problem isn’t the fast travel system, it’s that the world isn’t interesting enough for the player to want to explore.

[@accelleratiiincredibus446]

@@simpsonsfanatic777 Skyrim Survival Mode limited fast travel to carriages only and it immediately solved that problem. Since in Survival Mode you have to eat and sleep and carriages are only at major holds while the more frequent minor holds and towns still have inns, that makes it so the player will want to plan out a route to get to where they need to go, often forcing them into encounters and other interesting situations along the way. Skyrim's world IS fairly interesting, but humans tend to optimize the fun out of games.

[@josefarias5216]

There's a couple out there methods of fast travel, for example in Minecraft you have several ways to just move faster, with the Nether being a whole other dimension that doubles as a pseudo fast travel. In Terraria you almost from the start have access to teleportation back to spawn or a placed bed, but if you want to have a robust teleport network you have to build it first, incentivicing the player to explore and build towns.

[@CodeREDACTED]

One of my favorite forms of fast travel was soaring in pokemon omega ruby/alpha sapphire. Pokemon has always had fly, which is obviously normal teleport fast travel locked behind a move and badge. Soaring let you see the map of hoenn as you fly over it, and you could see individual buildings like poke pokecenters as well as fly to routes. It was technically slower than just using fly, but I used it every time because it felt so much better.

[@torokami1109]

It might be inconvenient to some, but I love dragging my horse around everywhere in BotW. I build a relationship with it, watching it's antics or begging it to carry me out of trouble.

[@strawberrana]

I like how in Slime Rancher, there's both teleporters around the range to take you to other parts of the map, you can also get around a fair bit using the jetpack, which opens up a lot of shortcuts and lets you get into areas before you formally unlock them.

[@moonflowerpalace3872]

Skies of Arcadia is interesting where you're in the airship from start to finish, where fast travel doesn't exist because Traveling is part of the game itself. But it's like Metroid where you have to find upgrades during the story to access more areas. It's basically if you took the Airship from FF7 overworld but made that the game with map size to scale, it's not boring to explore because of all the interesting POI you can find which add more lore to the game. It's honestly the closest thing we have to Laputa: Castle in the Sky and took the intro where you see all the islands into a video game.

[@reneecoppock4404]

I can't remember if its L or ZL, but that button feature really helps w/ horses in BOTW. I was really annoyed by the seemingly Constant stopping and rearing of my horses when there was the slightest dip in terrain, but when you start to spend more time you can get the rhythm of it more- some terrain will be fine at walk and trot, but not canter, while other terrain will be impassable without cantering and/or jumping. L/ZL helps with getting them down any slope and helps with a decent few uphill slopes too. I also find that they're nice for keeping things immersed- fast travelling everywhere, though convenient in the short term, actually lessened my enjoyment of the game and I got really impatient and bored with anything that didn't have a shrine or tower right next to it. When I took the time to go the long way, not only did I almost always find chests or Koroks or minibosses, but I also found myself enjoying the game and the world so much more. It eventually led me to create a personal rule where I'm only allowed to fast travel from existing fast travel locations and safe places (like towns or Goddess statues). All of that said, I also just. Like horses irl. lol so thats probably part of it

[@Tohlemiach]

This is one of my favorite game design topics because I feel like so few games ever get it just right. Off the top of my head, the two games that do it the absolute best are Dark Souls and Death Stranding, yet even then they both have issues. Before you get to Anor Londo, Dark Souls has utterly perfect traversal. The entire map is interconnected to adjacent areas through the use of shortcuts and there is NO option to fast travel. Most of the map feels accessible at any time by just catching a ride on an elevator or ladder like you pointed out, but there are certain points at which the shortcuts start to be less effective. This is actually a good thing though. Take Blighttown: Once you've gone off the beaten path, down into the depths, and you finally arrive at this monstrosity of a neighborhood, it starts to dawn on you that there's no easy way back up to the surface. What this creates is a distinct sense of these "domains" that branch off of the connected hub network where the further you get into one of these areas the harder it is to retreat, and eventually you get to a point where you're experiencing constant dread due to having no way out other than to just keep pushing forwards to try to find a way through. Except then, at the very end, you find that it actually somehow loops back into the wider network. So the cadence of the game is that you delve into a dungeon with no way out, get whatever resources you can find along the way, blast through the other end and find yourself back where you started, only now you're stronger and have new ways to upgrade your equipment. You do these constant excursions that keep looping back in on themselves until you take the final journey: the ascension. I'll admit, I hated the fact that after Sen's Fortress a bunch of goons just grab you and fly you over the wall on to the top of the city. That was the first "break" for me. Anor Londo itself is fucking awesome, but this was the first time you traveled between distinct areas (other than the very start but that was fine) through a teleport basically, so I felt robbed of making that final step of the journey. I really wanted to bust through those doors somehow, or at least scale the walls in some capacity. Either way, most of that experience is fantastic. After you get the Lord Vessel and have to teleport around everywhere, things become a lot less interesting. A lot of those later levels are still cool, but they're just too disconnected from everything else. Either way, the first half of Dark Souls is a perfect experience of feeling completely and utterly IN the world in a real sense yet without the hassles of backtracking, despite not having any teleportation system. Death Stranding is the other example and I think it makes a different mistake from Dark Souls. First of all, the 3rd area is just a boss fight, so it's not even a real area, but second of all, I really wish the first region wasn't separated from the main region of the game by a fast travel mechanic. I never revisited the first region even once after I left. However, all that aside, the gameplay loop of slowly expanding the road system, then the zipline system, getting better vehicles, etc, was extraordinary. The system of making deliveries made it always feel worth it to keep going back and forth between new and old areas, and the travel between those areas slowly gets faster and faster and safer and safer as you progress through the region. Then, and I found this really fun, but the snowy mountains make vehicle travel all but impossible, so it feels kind of like one of those Dark Souls "domains" where you have to really get in there and get lost with the only option being to make it through to the other side. Eventually you get the mountaintops connected to your wider zipline system, and that first moment of zipping through fresh skies with your hood down after so many hours of drowning in snow is just euphoric. Every other game other than those that have fantastic open worlds, mainly Breath of the Wild, Ghost of Tsushima, and Elden Ring, very rarely got me to feel the "stress" of being somewhere with no way out (Though Elden Ring does this quite often with many of its dungeons and indoor zones). The world is great and it's fun, but after the very first time traveling somewhere it instantly loses its charm because I'm just teleporting around willy-nilly. It made me feel like I wasn't really "there" in the same way. Now, one important counter example I want to bring up is the God of War games, specifically Ragnarok. Ho boy. This game has genuinely the worst of both worlds I think. First of all, I like hub-to-hub travel because it gives you more of a sense of being invested in the world since you can't just uproot yourself and teleport around whenever and wherever you want. You gotta make it to safety first, and that increases the tension and the feeling of actually *being* somewhere. However, an *extremely* important factor in having hub-to-hub travel is that the basic traversal itself has to be amazing. Ragnarok's traversal is, unfortunately, horrendous. There was a time when I was deep in the swamps of Vanaheim trying to find a chest I had missed and suddenly, right after finishing a long rock-climbing section, I realized I had already gone that way and that it was a dead end, so I turned around and saw the long rock-climbing trip in front of me and almost turned off my PS5 right then and there. I actually considered not even finishing the game, because what lay before me was about 5 minutes of holding the control stick, pressing x every few seconds, getting in a boat, holding control stick for a few more minutes, and then FINALLY I would get to actually go where I want. If it takes 5 minutes of being bored out of my mind just so that I can get back to actually playing the game, then something has gone terribly wrong on the design side. Traversal itself has to be fun, and it needs to be somewhat fast, especially if you're going to do hub-to-hub fast travel only. So all of that being said, I think developers need to get more creative with the way they keep players invested and immersed in the world. Dark Souls and Death Stranding mostly do a fantastic job and it's what makes them some of my favorite games of all time, but as a result they've left a bit of a hole in my heart any time I play a new game and they just give you free reign over the map. I understand how difficult it is to get this balance right, though, as so many games get it wrong. Just wish we could see some innovation on this front that other games would start to follow.

[@Drekromancer]

Excellent take. Thank you for sharing.

[@jarlbalgruuf2415]

Yeah man running back up from Blighttown was sooo rewarding and necessary. Was such a pain that in subsequent playthroughs I wouldn't rest at any bonfires down there because it's such an utter chore getting back to the surface. Don't even get me started on one-way paths like the tomb of the giants or the lake of ash or any time you tried exploring without a key item you didn't know you were supposed to have. You find a shut door and think oh wow what cool enemies are waiting for me on the other side what awesome items and areas are beyond just waiting to be explored and nah it's just a shortcut you're back where you started and have made zero progress. The "interconnected world" felt like a gimmick at best and was a hindrance on the gameplay the game is known for since players are inclined to just run past enemies at that point.

[@prabh4489]

​@@jarlbalgruuf2415Just take the back exit dude. It takes like a minute with that path

[@jarlbalgruuf2415]

@@prabh4489 lmao it takes more than that if you're literally already on the elevator let alone running from quelaag's

[@prabh4489]

@@jarlbalgruuf2415 whatever you say. Good for you ig

[@ArcticAlpaca275]

I was thinking about the boat system in Pillars of Eternity 2, which I've been playing recently. You pick where you want to go on the map, and your ship will steer itself there. You can run into various events and things on the way so its not so boring just watching your ship go from one place to another, but its nice not having to actually captain the ship like in Black Flag, though that is fun sometimes too!

[@TasmanianTigerGrrr]

I liked that game but the insane load times stopped me from playing it. There are just too many compared to the first game.

[@vanirie434]

My favourite fast-travel system is in Darksiders. It's just a teleport, but the way the world is built without loading screens means you gotta walk through a separate dimension to get from place to another.

[@GameGod77]

I feel the exact same way about Insomniac's spider man games. They could pretty much remove the fast travel system and it wouldn't make the game worse because simply moving around is so fun!

[@info-overload]

I always wonder why that is in so many triple A games. I feel in many games it is used sometimes just cause most other games have them

[@HellaDelta42069]

While there is typically objects of interest inbetween key locations, once all the minor dungeons/collectables are done/collected, the empty space might bore some people. And a few players just don’t care about the scenery and minor points of interest, so it’s better for them if they can just fast travel. for example, in Fallout 4, you can’t just fast travel to Diamond City (an important location in the region) from the beginning, you have to run your way there. In my experience, the environment gets boring after the first bout of running around, and I’d rather not spend an hour running between my distant home settlement and the main plot points for equipment, so fast traveling saves me the time.

[@Nikolai0169]

AAA companies have to cater to the lowest common denominator, and in the case of fast travel that means compensating for some players having either no attention span, or just flat out not having the time to walk that much due to for example having work and being a parent.

[@info-overload]

@@HellaDelta42069 I feel like having to walk everywhere in breath of the wild for example, makes the game so much more immersive and truly makes you feel like you are in a world

[@HellaDelta42069]

@@info-overload Man, i’d love to play BoTW, but i don’t have a Switch :(

[@tophatninja6929]

One game I think of when it comes to shortcuts is “Pandora’s Tower.” That game let you discover different shortcuts in and out of the towers when needed since you were on a time limit when it came to making sure your loved one didn’t die from her curse.

[@DarkThespian]

The sewer system in Paper Mario: TTYD is a neat example of a fast travel hub. As you continue along the game's progression and unlock new moves, you're able to navigate to new areas in the sewer that, lo and behold, bring you to warp pipes that connect to earlier stages. A neat Mario spin on this concept

[@hansdieter8801]

I love it when the fast travel is done by magic. Like in early Elder Scrolls games. It not only makes it immersive to use, but also balances it, by making you earn it

[@degiguess]

In my modded skyrim setup I have traditional fast travel disabled. Instead you have to use carriages to get around or make a travel pack at a cooking pot which serves as a consumable item that can enable standard fast travel (though I make the conscious decision to limit myself to only traveling to settlements with the travel pack). The travel pack is also about 10 lbs which, for my requiem playthrough where weight matters much more, means that it's only really practical to carry 1 or 2 at a time. The result of this is a gameplay loop where I can travel between settlements quickly and easily as long as I have gold and if I'm planning to go do a dungeon or something I can make a travel pack to bring with me so that I still have to walk out to the dungeon on foot but once I'm finished with it I can use the pack to get back to a city and sell off of my loot instead of having to backtrack. In general I think this is a really good system because it rewards the player for planning out their journey in advance.

[@Danodan94]

I haven't seen this in any game, but playing MMOs gave me a bit of a fast travel item concept. Imagine an item that holds only one teleport location, but every time you use it, the teleport location changes to the place you just teleported from. I call it the switch idol. Imagine you reach the trading hub area or equivalent area, auction house, etc. An NPC there is selling a switch idol, but you can only buy one and you can never lose it. When you buy it, it reads "Teleports you to [NPC you bought it from]" so you go to the next town and you use it and it does just that, except now it reads "Teleports you to [town you just teleported from]"

[@callofgears91]

Agreed a ton on Spider-man's fast travel, it’s so fun to just swing around that it’s not even necessary, and on the “there’s something to do on every corner” side, I remembered Ghost of Tsushima and how I barely fast traveled there for the same reason, there were a lot of collectibles and stuff to do along the way, I didn’t mind just running around finding them

[@platycorn5301]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt frustrated by botw's horse system. When I was introduced to it I could appreciate how it contributed to a sense of realism but in practice I was always anxious about it because I was constantly leaving my horse around to explore. I was constantly taken out of the joy of exploration from my mind fretting over leaving my horse behind and I felt stupid not using it just because of this because of how much faster it makes travelling

[@TheWriterOnFire]

Only thing I disagree with is that horses in botw are too realistic. Because... They're actually super unrealistic. Horses irl can be insanely surefooted, able to cross large rocks, go up terrifyingly steep hills, etc. There are literally horses bred specifically for crossing deserts! And horses can swim! People ride horses in water all the time. If they made horses in botw able to swim and realistically cross terrain, I'd probably never fast travel again

[@Stirdix]

As rudimentary as Xenoblade's fast travel is, one of the things I like about it is how it ties extra fast travel points to bonus boss completion (in 2/3, don't think in 1 IIRC). In addition to teleporting to waypoints, you can teleport to the grave of any "Unique Monster" that you've killed, which gives you (extra) incentive to hunt them down.

[@phineas81707]

@@TARDISES An important downside I found out the hard way is that they don't actually *count* as skip travel points. If you die and get reset to your last skip travel location, it'll use your last *actual* skip travel location.

[@Blutzen]

I put _thousands_ of hours into RuneScape as a teenager, and learning how to blend together all of its different fast-travel systems to traverse the enormous MMO world was something that I personally found _very_ satisfying way back when. There were teleport spells, but they only let you travel to major cities, and the cost of runes to cast those spells added up very quickly (especially before the game added the skill that lets you make them) and if you wanted to travel to a less-major city or a dungeon those teleport spells were just one step of the journey and you had to use the other options. Like the unlockable hub that lets you take air gliders to different, more remote specific points, or the unlockable hub that lets you teleport to specific magical teleportation trees, or the ships that you could ride between port cities, or the rickshaw cart that let you skip running through the jungle, or the very expensive but rechargeable amulet that gave you other specific teleportation points. As the game went on they added more and more travel options, first adding the ability to run instead of walk at the cost of an energy meter, which refilled _very_ slowly at first, but they added buskers around cities that you could sit and listen to their music to get a big boost of energy, and a "Home" teleport spell that could take you to the respawn point for free but only if you could sit down and cast it for 5 uninterrupted seconds, and then they changed the Home teleport into a Waypoint teleport that could take you to the entrance of major cities for free (which meant casting the spell that cost runes only gave a very minor convenience), or the network of Fairy Rings that you could use to travel between more remote areas. And they added more amulets, rings and necklaces that had _other_ specific teleport locations, and adding a myriad of quest rewards that had anywhere from 1-6 teleport locations. For a while it was pretty fun trying to keep track of _all_ the fast travel options so that you could plot more-direct routes to places, but eventually there were just too many and you could get anywhere in the world that has a reason to be there from anywhere in the world and it really made the game feel a lot smaller.

[@ThePC007]

I remember there being a way to travel on tree logs that were supposedly floating down rivers, but it was only available on member's worlds, lol.

[@gabebatista4129]

sometimes fast travels feels like cheating against the immersion, but faster is better most of the cases

[@ikagura]

I don't know if being bored is immersive Desert Bus is the most immersive game ever made then hahah

[@nonames3119]

Islets fast travel uses both portals and short cuts also as you progress you connect different islands to which creates new paths on preexisting islands

[@RavenFilms]

10:09 You mention paying for the short cut. This is done in Bug Fables, but doubled. You pay for the tunnel system to open at each region, and then later on, there’s a guy in the tunnel you can pay each time to teleport you a few screens forward on the main area.

[@DragonKingZero]

One idea I thought of was something inspired by the spell description for Teleportation Circle in D&D (relevant parts bolded for emphasis). _As you cast the spell, you draw a 10-foot-diameter circle on the ground _*_inscribed with sigils that link your location to a permanent teleportation circle of your choice whose sigil sequence you know_*_ and that is on the same plane of existence as you. A shimmering portal opens within the circle you drew and remains open until the end of your next turn. Any creature that enters the portal instantly appears within 5 feet of the destination circle or in the nearest unoccupied space if that space is occupied._ *_Many major temples, guilds, and other important places have permanent teleportation circles inscribed somewhere within their confines. Each such circle includes a unique sigil sequence - a string of magical runes arranged in a particular pattern._*_ When you first gain the ability to cast this spell, you learn the sigil sequences for two destinations on the Material Plane, determined by the DM. _*_You can learn additional sigil sequences during your adventures._*_ You can commit a new sigil sequence to memory after studying it for 1 minute._ _You can create a permanent teleportation circle by casting this spell in the same location every day for one year. You need not use the circle to teleport when you cast the spell in this way._ Basically, it would be a fast travel system that involves finding and memorizing in-game teleportation circles that you can then replicate anywhere via a sequence of button inputs (ala the ocarina songs in Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask).

[@deeps6979]

Something I've noticed in the MMO space because of the prevalence of flight (especially unrestricted flight), designers have been more willing to push things underground, where ceiling caverns provide a hard limit on flight, if the player is allowed flight inside at all. Not a bad strategy overall, but it suuucks when the in-game map tools don't keep up with recording explorable areas.

[@sub-zero7061]

I love your videos and the video processing, it's obvious you spend lot of time making them and I think many people appreciate that.

[@joshuaneiswinter253]

I like the recall spell.. cast once to mark the location, cast again to return. If you have a second use of it, you could mark your current quest hub and then the other for right at what you are doing.

[@Nulono]

One fast-travel method I didn't see you bring up is the paraglider, which turns pretty much any tall structure in the map into a transport hub to access the rest of the map in a straight line, often faster than walking speed.

[@jameskingsbery3644]

Valheim has an interesting fast travel system. In the second biome, you get access to materials for making portals that you can put anywhere. However, you initially have limited resources, so you have to be strategic in where you place them at first. Also, you can't bring certain items, mostly different metals used to make and upgrade armor, forcing you to bring these back to base by boat or handcart.

[@antiskill2012]

A fond memory of my first Fallout 3 playthrough was doing the Galaxy News Radio quest near the beginning, not knowing there was a fast travel system, and backtracking all the way to Three Dog. It felt like a slog at the time, but ever since then I've wanted to try a "no shortcuts" playthrough someday. The pressure to plan your routes and supplies more carefully can be surprisingly immersive.

[@xn85d2]

To me the funniest fast travel is the one that happened IRL. One minute Philip was south of Jerusalem talking to the Ethiopian official in charge of the treasury of Candace, queen of Ethiopia, and the next he suddenly appears at Azotus (Tel Ashdod). Man must have been so confused 😂🤣

[@generalbutterscotch4887]

Honestly, I think the ideal form of fast travel is just giving you the ability to fly at insane speeds on some kind of vehicle or winged creature that you can call upon at certain locations. The limiter would be that areas you haven't visited on foot yet have some kind of barrier/environmental hazard surrounding them that makes just landing there impossible. Kind of like how the Thunderhead worked in Skyward Sword.

[@elliel.5915]

I'm currently playing Breath of the Wild without fast travelling. It's such a better experience than the first time I played it, and I'm appreciating horses a lot more too. I'm also getting more familiar with the map, so Hyrule now feels like a place I actually know. The long running quests feels better too. I still haven't finished building Tarrey Town. I'm sure I could have, but now it actually feels like I'm helping build a place over time instead of zipping around the map looking for specific NPCs. I definitely recommend playing the game with no minimap and no fast travel. My sense of direction is a little too lacking to play the game with no map at all, but I'm sure other people could have fun with that as well.

[@Salsmachev]

I think this is an area where tabletop games excel. Taking a ship to a city that's months away by foot can be as simple as the DM saying "okay that's 50gp per passenger and it will take 2d6+7 days at sea" or it can be a complicated skill and roleplay challenge where the players have to negotiate fare with the ship's captain (or even stow away) and then face various skill, roleplay, and combat challenges when the ship is inevitably attacked by a kraken. There's so much flexibility in deciding how fast or how granular you want travel to be.

[@DavisGSee]

I love the progression of travel in Xenoblade Chronicles X. There is fast travel, but just walking around is fast and fun, and there's lots to see, so I rarely would in the early game. By the time you start to want to go a little faster, you get your Skell, which transforms into a car. Then, around the time you've probably seen roughly everything you can reach via car, you unlock flying on your Skell, which is not only way faster, but also gets you to floating islands and other previously unreachable locations. Combine this with the collectopedia which is filled in with items you passively collect while travelling, and you get a game where moving around is so incentivized that I almost never fast travel.

[@sleepinbelle9627]

Yoku's Island Express does fast travel through a network of cannons that fire you around the map. It's a metroidvania so exploration is important and there are some items you can only access by dropping out of the cannon in the middle of a journey. Also it's very fun to be fired around the map in a cannon.

[@gustav2281]

I like how Chrono Trigger handles that. At the End of Time, the teleport hub, you got more stuff to do there than just teleporting. It's a place where you NEED to go in order to complete the game, but you can also learn magic moves, farm some items and get access to your airship (faster movement than walking).

[@thegreatpufferfish9638]

Best example from recent releases I can think of, that made fast travel basically obsolete or a fallback option was probably Dragonriding in World of Warcraft. In every other expansion I would use hearthstones, portals and flightpaths to move around and in this one I am not even sure I bound my hearthstone to any location.

[@JezElectro13]

I like when there's a fast travel location. Sky, Space, Cyberspace, different Dimension, just a Location for fast travel in which you need to open doors to another place by key from that place or something like that.

[@leoking3235]

I'm really surprised you didn't talk more about the times when fast travel isn't explicitly teleportation, but "the characters are moving to this location and we're just not going to show it to you". This to me is a staple of the Xenoblade Chronicles games, and it gets really weird with 2. You can travel across titans somehow with no ships or aircraft, just by virtue of going to a menu and telling your characters to go to that titan, and they'll figure out all of the logistics off-screen. That always sounded weird to me.

[@ppowersteef]

Fittingly how they also calls it "Skip Travel" instead of "Fast Travel" "Alright, remind me why we are here again?"

[@fourstones1860]

rain world, my favourite game, has a really weird fast travel system. to get fast travel you have to complete a passage achievement, such as eat only meat for five days or dont hurt anything for five days, then you unlock a passage which is a one time use fast travel to any checkpoint that you've been to, you also lose any item you have on you. since there is only 14 passage achievements, you can only fast travel 14 times in a run of the game

[@eggchucker1]

One of the oddest forms of fast travel I've seen was the hot air balloons in black desert online. They let you trave somewhere that's hours away and you probably can survive in but it takes like 4 to 10 of sitting in a hot air balloon doing nothing.

[@kingofredleopards]

I actually figured out the Limsa > Vesper bay trick pretty early on, helped even more that I started in Limsa and have Lower Decks as my home crystal for free returns

[@ShrankTheFirst]

I liked walking along Yggdrasil's branches in 2018's God of War, allowing for some light conversation and character development with Atreus, or lore dumping with Mimir, while your destination loads.