Hi Pat,
Thanks for the article. I think that like with most things in game design what you say is sometimes true. I think that for many designers, particularly when taken as a requisite trope, fast travel is indeed a crutch.
But…
I don’t think that it’s never the right answer. You have a shot of Tomb Raider in there. The reboot is the first game that I have finished 100% in recent memory. I spent hours going over the levels looking for each collectable, and I don’t particularly like collectibles. But I loved the world and the challenge of exploration. I think the level design was wonderful and traversing the world was fun and engaging. However, I know I would not have taken the time to go back if I had to move over all of the levels that I had finished just to go back for one geocache. The fast travel let me select a area that was incomplete, go there and hunt a specific thing when I had a limited amount of time to play. It made the game better for me.
If the game had started with a filled in map I could go anywhere on, yes, that would have been terrible. But unlocking the ability to jump back and re-engage with content I had unlocked was both good for my experience and for the developer as I spent more time with the content that they had carefully crafted.
I too had great early MMO experiences in UO, and EverQuest and Asheron’s Call too… but I think about the kind of time that took and I think I would just have missed out if present me tried to play those games. That’s not to say that I don’t think that they have value or that games should not be designed to create those kinds of experience, just that there are different kinds of players looking for different experiences with different amounts of time to devote and to say that designing for one type is wrong and lazy and for another is beautiful and noble seems wrong.
I think the trick is to design exploration and traversal in your game to be rewarding and to insure the player in the act of travel, while allowing them to access the parts of your game that aren’t about travel without having to ‘pay their due’ by sinking an hour into even getting to the entrance to the dungeon.
