I don’t think I entirely understood what the hell was going on in Control but I really enjoyed playing it. The way they integrated Alan Wake into the story was brilliant.
Hopefully, this will be just as much fun to play and maybe even understand… 🤣
Morrowind was perfect without fast-travel. You had to come up with creative solutions. On the way to Balmora and don’t want to hike through the ash hills? Just use the spell Waterwalking and use the river as a convenient highway.
Use Divine Intervention to teleport to the next temple in a town, then use the siltstrider to travel to the next city or boats to go alongside the coast. Mage Guild offered teleport devices to other cities. The Spells Mark and Recall did the rest.
That being said, first mod that I made for Morrowind back in the day, was an extention of the transport network, with a bunch of teleportation points, and random silt strider stops all over. As much fun as it was to jump around, it gets old eventually
That’s the trick to Morrowind. It does have fast travel, it’s just integrated into the world building much better. Between Silt Striders, Boats, Mage Guild Teleportation, Mark and Recall, Intervention spells, and things like Levitation and the Boots of Blinding Speed, you can actually often get around the map faster than in later games (just watch a Morrowind speed run). But to do so you needed to build up both your character, and your own knowledge of the game world.
Fast Travel wasn’t some feature that broke immersion to add convenience, it instead added to both. It enhanced the feeling of exploration, and character progression, while teaching the player about the world.
Until I played Morrowind, I had no idea that planning your commute to work can actually be fun. “Wait, so if I take the StriderBus to there I can transfer onto the MageMetro and then it’s a straight shot over the hill to my destination? Amazing!”
Interesting, I would love a service that periodically checks my wishlist in Steam to see which of them is available on GOG, but could not find anything, do you perhaps now something like that?
Not an Epic exclusive on PC, yay! I'm sad that the masterpiece Alan Wake 2 was fucked over so much by not releasing on Steam, glad they aren't repeating that
Fast travel remains a staple mechanic because game devs:
Often can’t figure out a way to make travel itself into a gameplay mechanic or experience that is varied and interesting.
Keep designing checklists of things for the player to do, with games built around them, as opposed to inverse of that… which trains players to just be checklist checker offers.
There’s no point to having an open world if it is not engaging or interesting, so… when your open world lacks depth, you end up in a nonsense situation where you have a poorly designed feature, with essentially a ‘skip’ mechanic for said feature.
… Why bother with the feature, at that point?
Hell, even the Rockstar games would give you interesting dialogue, in transit… not really gameplay per se, but it is generally engaging, can help with action intensity pacing, and of course, give you the story.
There are so many ways you could gameify or at least make travel itself more interesting.
Do that, and fast travel becomes near totally pointless.
I don’t get hyped for games anymore. I’m too old, I’ve seen too much and been disappointed too often. But did you just fucking seen that sheeeeeeeeeeeet!!!
I almost never fast traveled when I played Skyrim. To busy exploring every random cave and building along with climbing random mountains because why not.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne