You’ve nailed it.
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.
I agree; travel should be engaging and effective. Worlds should be worth traversing or they shouldn’t bother being traversable.
Making a player pay their due is certainly ridiculous. Games are long. Indeed, for us adults who play them, session time is a growing concern. We ought to reduce player time spent doing pointless tasks, wherever possible.
To me, calling for the death of Fast Travel isn’t to make games more “pure” (read: onerous). It’s to encourage developers to make better games, ones that don’t need Fast Travel to be decent. To design consciously, rather than lean on old crutches.
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.
When I called Fast Travel “lazy design” it’s because I reject this notion that we must have worlds which require it.
Are games like the Tomb Raider reboot better for having Fast Travel? Yes.
But I think that ignores the issue: Fast Travel is a band-aid to deeper problems. It creates dissonance where we could have engagement. It hides movement mechanics that are, frankly, boring. And it prevents us from approaching level design with the serious craftsmanship that it deserves.
You said it yourself (emphasis mine):
I spent hours going over the levels looking for each collectible, 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.
