Red Dead Redemption 2 has fast travel, but simply riding your horse, whom has a legit unique personality that you can bond to on a personal real-life level based on how you tame it, and enjoying the enormous beautiful wild scenery and having random encounters with various NPCs that can be optionally ignored, is all encapsulated in the penultimate experience that most players miss by clicking some buttons on the world map because you don’t like immersion or waiting.

Edit: even the act of fast traveling, itself, within the game is immersive and requires you to locate a carriage service and pay the NPC money to skip traveling manually.

I think fast travel is fine. I play games to wander so I don’t get the point but whatever.

My favorite result of purposefully not having fast travel/teleporting is on the nerd.nu Minecraft server. Most Minecraft servers just have teleports set up to get get everywhere, but this Minecraft server has none so people build huge minecart subways and nether highways to connect cities and towns into an organic transit network. It is a joy to just grab a minecart and just punch random city names in to go for a ride and see where it takes you.

None of it would have happened if the server had fast travel and it just makes the world so much more interesting.

I always think back to the original two Fallout games vs the ones that came later.

Scenes were set pieces, and travel was something that occurred on a map, with random encounters that occurred along the way as you moved from one location to another. It wasn’t fast travel, but nor was it “experience every mile of your journey in real time”. And depending on the path you took, you could still stumble across secrets, unique locations etc.

That remains my favourite travel method in games, and though it’s rare, it is still done well in some more recent games. Owlcat is particularly good at it, and their Pathfinder games did it really well, and as does Rogue Trader (though it isn’t a game for this sub yet). Solasta: Crown of the Magister also does it well

I grew to dislike it in the later Bethesda games (and open world games themselves as a genre), although in their third TES game they made it right. There were multiple paid or magical systems like teleports, transportation and spells, all not ideal, but when you go from A to B you start to chain them like you do while commuting to the other side of a city IRL. Not only that doesn’t harm immersion, it makes the world feel more connected and makes you obey the rules of that world. Some of them are accessible right from the start, some are unlockable by buying a scroll\spell or finding an item. Sometimes it feels even rewarding when you find an efficient way to cross these ash deserts. Not to say that gamedevs can add to worldbuilding by adding this or that traveling hub on the map and repeatedly put you in places they want you to stay in more and notice quests, shops, factions to join.

I think the fix to fast travel for me is just to have actual regular travel methods. I’ll talk about a few methods that I enjoyed and how I think they fit into the game.

Fallout 4: This game has a hellicopter and one of my favorite mods unlocks it early as an excuse to use it to travel. It’s an in-world way to get around quickly but not instantly. And there’s zero reason why any game with flying objects or animals can’t implement this. Games like Breath of the Wild could use this and just have you ride a giant bird as the world passes beneath you. Skyrim did this with dragons. It’s an amazing alternative.

The second type is another mod for skyrim: Immersive Carts in Cities (or something like that) which would actually have you ride the cart from city to city along the road. It was glitchy. But similar to the Witcher 3 and its auto-steering horses, it lets you put down the controller and enjoy the scenery for a bit and immerses you.

Lastly, a similar example to the last, but God if War did it great with the boats. Instead of fast traveling with a cart or horse or whatever, make it a ride where the focus is conversation. Rather than me sitting at the local tavern asking about rumors, let me do it on a train or a boat or a horse. RDR2 did it great with many missions transporting you via horse and talking.

So you don’t have to design the entirety of the systems of a game around fast travel, you can keep all the same design elements. Just add an immersive in-world method of doing it that adds to the game. Super simple and it sucks because Bethesda got 75% of the way there and then made them all end-game options with limited utility. The dragons in Skyrim just teleport but a mod unlocks a hidden dev option to just have them fly everywhere. Most of the way there, yet they didn’t do it fully and that sucks.

Dragon’s dogma 2 is shaping up to be an absolute masterpiece.

But on topic; i think the usual systems of fast travel undermine entire games and we all know humans are very bad at enjoying things (‘players will optimize the fun out of everything’), but people don’t usually bring up the impact it has on game design. A simple fast travel system allows for much worse and scattered design. Generally a good game would keep most quests in an area limited to that area, with a smaller number meant to introduce new areas. A fast travel system encourages Bethesda level shit where a quest can leave you going to the literal opposite side of the map and back.

I would rarely choose to fast travel if I had engaging and interesting means of travel like bunny hopping and strafe jumping in Quake, or wall-riding like Lucio in Overwatch. This assumes the world was built to facilitate this kind of movement and there were challenging obsticles, enemies, treasures, secrets, and other points of interest scattered among a variety of paths for the player to choose. Obviously much easier said than done; Super Mario Oddessy and Sonic Frontiers tried to do something like this on a smaller scale (relative to the large open worlds of other games) with varying levels of success.

Exploration was fun in the BotW and TotK Zelda games, but I found myself relying on fast travel by the midpoint of each of those entries because the enemy camps and treasures just weren’t worth the time nor effort. Dashing on horses wasn’t mechanically deep enough and Ultra Handing vehicles was either too inconvient or resulted in “path of least resistance” designs that led me to hoverbike to new locations very cheaply and easily.

There’s a careful balance. The player should not be drawn to fast travel as its the most efficient way, but because it makes more sense to given some great drawback.