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.
Realistic open worlds are generally boring, to most players.
Thats why almost no popular open world games have realistic distance scaling.
Skyrim, for example, is a teeny tiny place, compared to how large the lore describes it as, everything is scaled in a kind of exaggerated way, same with all GTA games, even RDR and 2, they’re not even close to being realistically scaled, they’re scaled based… basically on an estimate of a player’s average attention span.
You want realistically scaled?
Go play an ARMA game, and just go on a hike, over a close to one to one scale replication of an actual island or penninsula, for a real world entire day.
Yeah that shit’s boring as fuck to most people.
… But I did not at any point say that a good open world is a realistic world, or anything like that, but thats what you appear to have read, out of what I wrote.
Fascinating.
Anyway, what you should do to make an open world that doesnt suck, is make it interesting, in an actual game mechanical sense, not merely ‘pretty’.
Maybe as you travel, enemies of one kind or another have a chance of spawning nearby and cresting over a hill or emerging from a forest.
RDR2 does shit like this very well, oh I’m just gonna relax, trot along, enjoy the scenery… and … my throat has been ripped out by a pack of wolves, goddamnit.
Or you go for the Bethesda approach and have 500, one time discoverable locations with basically some kind of a mini dungeon or staged scenario you can wander into.
Or you can do the Kenshi approach, no real questlines, just simulate the entire world as a kind of sandbox that tens of thousands of other npcs live in, do their own thing in… with actually closer to a realistic sense of distsnce scaling… and just give the player save states and the ability to fastforward or pause time, by default… and maybe they bumble in to some particularly interesting people, or maybe its oops all beakthings, or maybe you’ve now been enslaved by either cannibals or the Holy Nation, while you were afk for your literal 12 mile hike across the map.
Or you could just make some kind of game where fast travelling requires the player to engage in something on the order of a hacking/lockpicking minigame, to… keep the wheels from falling off or something, I dunno.
Maybe vehicles are simulated in some kind of way that… if you’re reckless and innatentive, you’ll break em, and now you’re fucked, in the middle of nowhere. State of Decay 2 comes to mind, sort of.
Point is… there are many ways you can make travelling itself into an engaging, alternate form of the game itself, or a kind of minigame, or a way to experience some kind of story or plot development, or reward the player for picking up on contextual cues during transit, punish them for missing them…
Hell, make a minigame out of trying to pick a song to listen to that your npc companion doesn’t hate, throw in guitar hero style karaoke minigame, why the hell not? maybe it can boost or demerit your relationship with that npc, land you on different paths of a branching storyline.
… Travel doesnt need to be realistic.
It just needs to be more interesting, rewarding, engaging, than skipping it.
I played Fantasy Life I: The Girl Who Steals Time when I was sick. It’s a very chill game where you can run around and do different “jobs” like fishing, woodcutting, mining, various crafting, and combat.
Along with Hello Kitty Island Adventure which is similar to Animal Crossing in some ways but heavier on quests and befriending the characters. There’s a lot of reading though but I skim through most of it.
I’m practically allergic to fast travel, no matter the game. I don’t play games to “get through them”. If I’m playing something where I’m that bored with traveling in an alternate universe, I should probably just pick another game.
I take transit in Cyberpunk and it makes the world feel way more alive. Downtime is something some games are entirely built around so the moments of action have that much more impact. I admit some games do this poorly, but those are ones I typically just avoid in the first place.
I like when my games feel more like roleplay and less like an action movie.
I’d recommend emulating some nostalgic games from your childhood, ones you’ve played to death and wouldn’t mind any sudden interruptions of since you’ve seen everything a hundred times.
Basically, the video game equivalent of putting on old sitcoms.
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!”
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.
The mountains I managed to clip my way up… I spent way too much time doing that. Climbed the “Throat of the World” before I got the shout that would clear the wind barriers—because why not lol
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