EXCITED. Even Update 3 was completely fun and enjoyable to play. I've been putting off playing again because there were so many breaking changes in the later updates.
I think even the more compelling games I've played used fast travel...Not as an excuse to reduce exposure to a tedious world, but to respect a gamer's time! I prefer fast travel to hubs and allowing me to make a short journey to wherever my next objective is. No Man's Sky has my favorite system for fast travel: Teleportation Portals which you can use to create a network of fast travel spots. It makes exploring previously settled planets a lot easier but still encourages the player to explore their unique universe. It's limited, but in an elegant way which I find to be pleasing.
I can only think of one game that made travel boring: Skyrim. The main reason is that once you've experienced one random event...You've seen them all as there's no flavor to those random on the road events. Fast Travel to any point on the map was designed to hide the blandness of Skyrim.
Even Hideaki must realize that travelling the same road repeatedly will become dull because one can only pack so many random events in a game...I hope that he makes for an option to even avoid that level of tedium in the extremely late/post-game. Else his game will become the very thing he's critiquing.
It's a fair point. I completely forgot fast travel was a thing when I played Spider-man because I enjoyed swinging around. I think teleportation is often used as a crutch to get around the fact that travel does tend to be boring (hello Bethesda).
Open world games need two types of fast travel. The first is your standard type, which is pretty much a teleportation ability. That should be greatly limited. At most, just for cases where you need to travel across the entire map, and should be hidden behind some kind of in-game explanation like "you're taking a boat/plane/subway" or whatever.
The other one should be some way of moving really fast across the map so previously explored areas aren't a chore to move across. Literally fast travel, and not teleportation. And no, conventional solutions like horses or cars is still not fast enough. It's still minutes of mindlessly moving from point A to B in most cases. It needs to be truly fast. Spiderman 2 actually did explore this concept pretty well, with ideas like catapulting yourself or using a wingsuit to glide long distances. Other games need to come up with someway of allow players to cross huge distances in in a few seconds.
100% agree, lots of open world games these days make the only reason to explore so that you can find the fast travel beacon so you never have to explore the “open world” again.
It hides shitty and half assed world building though so I guess devs got that going for them.
I think it is more of a gameplay issue than a world building issue.
Fast travel solves a problem the developers create, needing to be in specific locations regularly to accomplish specific tasks. If you don't need to be anywhere in particular to offload collected items or to craft stuff, or return to someone to turn in quests to level, then you can just spend the time exploring at whatever pace you want.
Game design that makes repetitive travel necessary is when fast travel becomes necessary to avoid tedium.
I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Dredge. I was expecting a fishing game with a Lovecraft coat of paint but the fishing elements and the Lovecraftian elements worked together better than I expected. Glad to see the DLC is keeping things weird.
Around the beginning of the 00s I used to play coop NHL with a friend of mine. We used to play hours on hours over night together as one team trying for the Stanley Cup. I still remember it every time I hear “Heroes” because it was the intro song for one of the NHL games at that time.
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