Fast travel has been a staple mechanic for open-world video games for years now, and I don’t think it’s going away any time soon. Because why would it?
Fast travel has made gaming that much more bearable, especially since developers still believe that bigger is better. But instead of going on about why fast travel is so great for gamers, I’m going to offer a more balanced perspective, because it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows when it comes to travelling at the blink of an eye, and understanding that is key to making a good fast travel system.
Not that there’s ever been a bad fast travel system in a game before, but we always strive for perfection here.
The Great Time Saver
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is famous for two things: The first being that it’s an Elder Scrolls game, probably one of the biggest medieval RPG franchises out there. The second, and more important reason, is for its massive map. This is a map that makes Los Santos look like a DLC expansion, and this is no exaggeration. The Daggerfall map measures up to about the size of Great Britain, and walking from one end to the other takes players roughly 62 hours. Thankfully, fast travel was already a thing back then, so players didn’t have to spend hours upon hours of walking just to finish a quest.
So therein lies the greatest advantage of a fast travel system: it saves time. I’ve written at length about how video games take a heavier time investment in adulthood than they do in childhood, and that remains true. In fact, it’s the only reason I got to finish Insomniac’s Spider-Man. Sure, web-swinging and gliding are fun movement mechanics added to the game that make traversal feel less like a chore, but the few minutes I spent swinging from one end of the city to the other could have been used to progress the story.
Missing Out
There are two sides to every coin, and while fast travel does save you a lot of time, it also effectively cuts the experience down in half. Sure, fast travel can get you from point A to point B, but what about everything in between? In open-world video games, I am often caught in this weird position of FOMO where I feel like I’m missing out on all the possible random encounters and unmarked locations I could have had if it weren’t for my decision to fast-travel. For Insomniac’s Spider-Man, this meant missing out on all the crimes that I could’ve stopped within the city, and looking back, I do not regret stopping by for any of them.
I remember having the same experience as a wee lad playing through the likes of Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Fallout is an amazing series with tons of interesting locations, but as a kid, all those locations seemed so bland and uninteresting. New Vegas had me walking through the vast expanse of the Mojave Desert after all! So instead of making the long trek to my quest location, I look for the nearest fast travel point, and I book it. Which is why, years later, after my initial playthrough, I find out that there is an entire chunk of gameplay and quests that I missed out on. Call it a blessing or a curse, but it definitely is the con of fast-travelling.
Finding the Balance
I believe that there is still a way to make fast-travelling feel a bit more balanced between the good and the bad. To figure that out, we have to first acknowledge that fast-travel only exists because the players would find it tedious to get from point A to point B in an open-world, and that can be solved with a few things. I mentioned Grand Theft Auto V earlier in the article because this was a game that I believe got fast-travel right. The first step is, obviously, making a map smaller than the likes of Daggerfall.
Making a smaller map for an open-world game condenses the experience so that the player is constantly seeing points of interest. Alternatively, making traversal itself a part of the gameplay makes the time spent moving from point A to point B naturally feel less of a chore and more meaningful. Rockstar Games’ fast-travel also takes a more diegetic approach, implementing fast-travel realistically instead of the player blacking out and spawning at their chosen location. Grand Theft Auto has taxis, and Red Dead Redemption has carriages you can hop on.
But, ultimately, I feel that the developers will have a better feel for this. Not every game has the privilege of having taxis or carriages; they have portals or web-swinging. At the end of the day, the player is still in control of the buttons they press. So the next time you set foot in any open world, maybe be less like me and take to the road.
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