Please Let Your Players Fast-Travel
Let me start by saying that exploration is important. I’ve put hundreds of hours into open-world RPGs in my lifetime, and there’s a special kind of glee reserved for that moment when you’re making your way through a gloomy forest, roots as thick as a man’s arm snaking along the ground beneath your feet, sunlight barely penetrating through the heavy canopy overhead when suddenly… you spot a cave entrance, overhung with glistening cobwebs. Or the dilapidated ruin of a strange shrine, illuminated by a soft white light. Or a dying warrior, propped up against a tree as he draws his final breaths. Your senses prickle with delight at the mere hint of a new quest, a new mystery to solve, a new path to follow that you only found because you were sidetracked anyway. The beauty of a good RPG is that you’re never truly lost; adventure waits for you in every corner of the world.
That being said, I have never reached the end of one of these adventures and thought “do you know what would be good? Trudging twenty miles back to the nearest town to collect my reward.” When I finish exploring an ancient tomb in Skyrim, for example, I get topside as quickly as possible, open my map, and fast-travel to the nearest town to turn in whatever trinkets I’ve found and cash in my chips. Boom. Done. Quick, easy adventuring for the Dragonborn on-the-go.
However, I’ve noticed a trend in nearly all open-world games of the past five years to just kind of… wilfully restrict a player’s ability to get anywhere quickly. Take The Witcher 3, for example; its insistence that the player must first approach a signpost in order to fast-travel anywhere — as opposed to simply opening the map and selecting a destination — is completely arbitrary. As a result, I feel like I spend 2/3 of my time with the game just trying to chart the most direct route from Point A to Point B, which generally means wrestling with the uncooperative Roach to try and make the bastard actually run in the direction I’m pointing him, all the while dodging the random enemies attacking me from the underbrush. Not exactly the picture of an experienced, dignified witcher.
To be clear, I’m not saying you shouldn’t have to earn fast-travel. By all means, restrict fast-travel until I’ve been to an area first, until I’ve touched a signpost, climbed a tower, hacked a signal box, whatever. I know how these things go. I’m fine with it. I’m just asking that, once I’ve gone to the trouble of unlocking a fast-travel point, don’t then make it a pain to use it. The problem with fast-travel use being tied to a specific location (e.g. the signposts in The Witcher) is that, by the time you’ve made your way to that signpost, you’ve generally wasted five minutes of your time already and it would be less interesting and take more time to go through a loading screen now than it would to just walk the rest of the way to your objective.
Another fast-travel offender is Jedi: Fallen Order, the most recent AAA addition to the Star Wars canon. This game, despite featuring no less than five sprawling open-world locales for the player to explore, has no fast-travel system to speak of. What’s that? You missed one collectible all the way at the top of the Origin Tree? Hope you’re willing to trek through the entirety of Kashyyk to retrieve it on your second visit. Did you die in a tricky platforming section without resting at a nearby meditation spot first? Whoops, you’re back at the start of the planet. Play the whole thing again.
The justification behind omitting fast-travel from Fallen Order was apparently that the developers wanted you to learn and internalise the layout of each planet so that when you started discovering shortcuts it would feel like genuine exploration, tying your experience more closely to that of your fresh-faced protagonist. Unfortunately, if you’re as directionally-challenged as I am, no amount of exploring these planets is actually going to give you a good sense of where you’re going next. The multi-level map is confusing, that tree looks pretty much the same as every other tree I’ve already seen, and if I slide down that muddy slope I have a *bad feeling* that it’s gonna be the wrong way and I’m going to be stuck down there. I knew I should have asked that Jotaz for directions.
The tightrope between what a developer intends and what a player will actually experience is a razor-thin line to walk, and I’m not disparaging the hard work of the people who make these beautiful worlds for us to explore because when it’s my choice? It’s a real, honest joy to delve into them. But let it be my choice. Don’t force me to get lost in the world when all I’m actually trying to do is turn in a quest. Don’t make me wend along the same well-worn path just because it’s the only one I can actually remember. Don’t make me trudge from pillar to post and back again with arbitrary “fast-travel points”, because then I’m not going to be excited by any mysteries I stumble across on the way — they’re just going to be unwanted distractions.
Please. Let your players fast-travel.
