The problem of Fast Travel.

Must be nice to give player ability to fast travel after:
   (1) : reaching enough locations on the map (~25)
   (2) : reaching (and first using) corresponding transport services (almost all).
   (3) : reaching enough locations in some region - then player can fast travel IN THIS REGION.

Another, most plausible variant : you can fast travel from transport services VIA DIALOG with additional cost.
So boatman from Vivec can move you to some island of Ascadian Islands.
As corr. mage of guild can move you to any propylon after quest - it can be made smth alike.
 

You want fast travel? Grab the Boots of Blinding speed. :P

Really no problem if you have levitation, but some inferior barbarian can use fast travel.
This can be complement : you can use Almsivi Intervention to go city,
and fast travel via dialog with mages|boatmen|driver to go in wilderness.
 

Why even bother making complex systems? The way Morrowind handled exploration was pretty good, and most of the annoyances were due to small vision radius (player often couldn't see far enough to follow directions properly). I'd just leave it at how Morrowind handled it, but if some unpatient grinder wants to use fast travel, it's still in there :P

Whatever systems we impliment, one rule to live by: give the player the choice. If you're hardcore, you roleplay and either walk or use silts/cloudstriders/carts etc.
If you want to see the world, but you're impatient, jump on a guar.
If you're more casual, and u're finishing off side quests, fast travel.

No level limitations. For some players, that is restricting, and they will get irritated and stop playing.
Any limitations should be an addon for only those who want it.

I completely agree but i would be fine if it didn't even have fast travel at all. Morrowind has a relatively small map compared to Skyrim and has more of an adventure factor than the other games.

Yeah, I fail to see the issue. Disable, it like in vanilla Morrowind, with an option to enable it like Oblivion. Maybe add a couple of additional Slit Strider and boar routes.

@LoneWolfEburg, Yeah Sounds great, but who wants to write the script to get it in game? That's the real issue. :P

If anyone seriously wants this menu option in-game I'd suggest petitioning someone with experience in this area to see if they want to spend the time doing it. Otherwise it won't get touched.

Fast travel? Traveling fast? that must take some real magic to perform, no dumb impatient Nord will figure it out! -Maiq

As I recall the player had a whole armada of spells and scrolls to teleport around the island, which was really immersive, since you had to learn to fast travel. You could also jump across the entire island or sprint if you took enough potions or made enough enchantments, so in actual fact, "fast travel" was one of the most fun things imaginable, if very time consuming... but thats what a real RPG is all about riiight? :P

Even so, skywind is going to be a modern game, so as long as all the original fun things hardcore players like myself love are included, I have no problems with any of the systems proposed here :D

I think golden mean would be in combination of unreachable for fast travel island's deep core (Ashlands and Red Mountain itself)
 and reachable, but only from certain cities and by boatmen service islands and coastline.
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Vvardenfell has great coast line and have (and will more) good places to research, with most quest-related (include problem with side-quest) places in its core. Off course boat travel to wilderness must be costy for player.

I really see no need to make complex a non cannon game mechanic, just make an option in the installer that changes the .ini to allow fast travel and quest markers or disable them. This allows people to play how they feel like playing and not lessen the preferences because a small minority deems it unsightly. Plus the whole you can fast travel at level X and or so many locations discovered could be a mod worked on post release, why put it on the workload now?
On first playthroughs I don't use fast travel (or not at all on older games) but on second or third ones I use it to save time and allow it to be convenient when I have little time to play due to work, family, or other real world related problems. So it's just my two sense, but your free to limit how people play as it's your time spent developing a game.

I agree that it should just be an on or off sort of thing, but depending on how difficult it is to code it, it would be nice to have an option in the launcher or options menu.

It's not that hard to do an on/off thing, it is available in the .ini's.
[GamePlay]

bShowFloatingQuestMarkers=1

bShowQuestMarkers=1

Simply change these to 0 in the Skyrimpref.ini

And isn't there an option to disable map markers in the in-game options? OR you can still do quests without marking them and not using fast travel
 

P.S enablefasttravel 0 in console.

 

Yeah I'm fine with it being completely optional either way. I however personally don't want "vanilla" Skywind to have it in, (I'm referencing the Lvl.X/X locations needed idea) It's not a bad idea at all but it should be optional. Vanilla Skywind should contain Fast travel and map markers and if people wish to play without it tick a box in the installer to turn them off. Also the Lvl.X/X locations should be a add-on only available in the installer like Morroblivion's addon's (tree replacer, map changer, and transport mods).

I don't think there is any need to modify Skyrim's fast travel system. If you don't want to fast travel, don't fast travel.

Forcing players out of the fast travel option seems too extreme.

Same thing I said Comfy, I hope that is the way it is left as an option.

[External image]the logic of fast travel or not

1 if u want every 1 to not fast travel but its there standard the wil fast travel because lazy/ignorance

2 if u got fast travel optional  the wil not  go true the options to put it on because lazy/ignorance

 

also i am lazy but cant play whit out map marker so that would 1 not 2 

I think people are over thinking this. put the toggelable option in the settings menu, with the initial status as being off. that way it is there is you want it, and not mandatory for those who do not. 

I'm not sure if it's possible, but I think an interesting alternative could be an advanced Mark and Recall spell. If you could, say, mark 5 locations and then recall to each of them, then the player would have enough places to travel to without it becoming tedious to move around the island. 

If I used this spell, I'd probably mark locations like Balmora, Vivec, Ald-ruhn, Sadrith Mora and the Urshilaku Camp. This would allow me to travel pretty much all around the island in a lore-friendly way, without using the lazy Skyrim fast travel system. Also, the spell could possibly even be a power so that it could only be used once a day, if balancing issues were a problem.  

Yes, this is nice idea for magic mechanic thread, but looks like this topic is more about what thief, trader or barbarian would do.

I think a thief or trader could buy scrolls of mark and recall (maybe slightly more expensive than Silt Strider travel, boat travel, etc.) and use those. Or maybe the Scrolls of Mark do not disappear after use, so you only need to buy one, but Scrolls of Recall do disappear, and you have to buy many. 

As for a barbarian... I'm not sure. They'd probably be better suited to hiking or riding guars than teleportation. I know that if I was playing as a warrior, I'd still use the scrolls to get around. 

My suggestions:

1. Make fast travel more expensive than transporting services.

2. Make fast travel into a perk so that the player can earn it.

I think we should not bother with complicated solutions to this. It will take up a lot of work and be complicated to balance and there is nothing to gain from it.

I think we should default fast travel to be disallowed and enabling the player to turn it on again as he wishes while giving him a warning that that is not how Morrowind - and therefore Skywind - is designed to be played and it might ruin the experience.
Anyone who still turns it on can not be helped and I hope he enjoys it either way, but thinking about these people too much when designing the game should be secondary to making the default experience to be as good as possible.

Adding perks or unlocking fast travel through game mechanics makes it feel like the player is supposed to be using it now, which is not how the world and the quests were designed to work with best, so this doesn' seem like a good solution to me.

maxnosense

I think we should not bother with complicated solutions to this. It will take up a lot of work and be complicated to balance and there is nothing to gain from it.

I think we should default fast travel to be disallowed and enabling the player to turn it on again as he wishes while giving him a warning that that is not how Morrowind - and therefore Skywind - is designed to be played and it might ruin the experience.
Anyone who still turns it on can not be helped and I hope he enjoys it either way, but thinking about these people too much when designing the game should be secondary to making the default experience to be as good as possible.

Adding perks or unlocking fast travel through game mechanics makes it feel like the player is supposed to be using it now, which is not how the world and the quests were designed to work with best, so this doesn' seem like a good solution to me.

This. A complicated system will just confuse and frustrate players for little gain.

Yes, I like Max's idea.

Still, it would be nice to have more points of boat-transport to unload.

I haven't read through all of this thread, but I really don't see the problem. We WILL have a configuration menu in game, you can just select whether you want fast travel to be enabled or not. Theres always silt striders and the mage's guild. And Morrowind isn't that big anyway, you can just run anywhere without much issues.

lukkar

Honestly both solutions are so poor in my opinion. If so many ppl like unrestricted fast-travel or old Morrowind transport system (on begging is fun but later in game it is really annoying) so be it. I just found out that this solution works reallly reallly well during game and it doesn't sound too hard to implement even as secondary option. It consist of only (marker, icon (which I can even make my own), and added one or two lamps to sign).

Honestly, I don't see the big difference between this solution and the Morrowind travel system, besides the fact that it doesn't cost ingame currency to travel (which is a downside for me, since a good fast travel system should have some incentive to go exploring) and that it's sign-posts instead of silt-striders / guild guides etc. so I wouldn't consider it worth implementing. I still believe the original system works well enough and is the best solution of integrating a fast-travel solution into a game experience I have seen so far.

The Witcher 3 is different from the morrowind system, since you have to actually first visit the sign post to travel to it. Morrowind however, you have to pay, but you can go basically anywhere you want.

>#witcher >#transportation >#morrowind
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*dreams about whistle-called silt-strider :)

Just my two cents as a game developer:

What we're looking at here is a feature.

An optional, Morrowind-like system with silt striders and boats and limited fast travel between fixed locations would be great, but unnecessary.
-But, a certain group of players will be mildly upset if it's not included, but will most likely play anyways.

Skyrim-like fast travel between pre-discovered locations is essentially already there in the game code, and would require little or not additional work from the team to implement.-But, a certain group of players will be mildly upset if it's not included, but will most likely play anyways.

Doing away with fast travel entirely will force exploration and require little input from the development team to implement. -But, a certain group of players will be mildly upset if it's  included, but will most likely play anyways.

Notice a trend here?
First off, it's going to be impossible to please everyone. No plan survives contact with the enemy, or the players, as it were.

Secondly, doing anything but Skyrim-default is going to be extra work. I'd suggest that focus should be placed entirely on getting the thing playable. Once we have successfully ressurected TESIII within TESV, then we can worry about going about adding neat features like Morrowind-like travel systems, but until that time I think it should be considered low priority.

 

Even in the risk of repeating myself:
Implementing a Morrowind-like fast travel system requires almost 0 work. These scripts are terribly easy to write and even they weren't, they are already included with Skyrim.

Making it "optional" is not unnecessary. It much rather allows any player to choose between experiencing the game as it was designed, or experiencing it in a more comfortable way which may disrupt the flow of the game. I would recommend you to read through the entire thread if there's any question about it, I detailed my impression of what I think the final design should be.

In my opinion, this system is actually a central part of what made the original Morrowind experience which is why I consider it anything but a minor issue. I always think options are great, but we should give the player a clear direction of how the game should be experienced, so we should stick to the original as default.

Indeed. And that brings me to another point I wanted to bring up for quite a while now - map markers as a whole.

Morrowind had only a hand full of those for main cities and settlements. Currently, Skywind has one for every dungeon, cave, ruin and tomb. Thats over 200 markers, and after a point, it starts getting annoying seeing the name of the location pop up on your screen. Is it really necessary? I think another part of the mystery of Morrowind, apart from the annoying fog, was the lack of any map markers. Sure, in Skyrim/ Skywind you have to first go over and 'discover' the place first, but even so, it takes out a bit of mystery out of it. Half of the time I saw an entrance to a cave in Morrowind, I didnt know if it was going to be a bandit hideout, egg or ebony mine. With all of these unique map markers for every type of cave and ruin, it takes out another part of mystery out of the game. 

/Start rant/ 

I could say the same thing about the actual map of the game, in which you can basically explore the whole province if you set your fov to a low enough number. It spoils a lot of things like the landscapes, cities etc. 

I think why it was designed the way it was is because Todd Howard thought 'Huh, what would be cool to show in our e3 demo... How about a map that is rendered in real time that shows the actual landscape?'. And it does sound cool, and indeed, looks cool, but it spoils the mystery of the landscape.

At the risk of sounding like a broken phone, I'll say the same about the compass - it spoils what is ahead. You have a magic gps device that is always (not with the iHUD mod though) on your hud that scans every location around you in real time and displays it to you. It really ruins the spontaneity of discovering something.

/End rant/

Eh, its not like we are going to change the way the compass and world map works (possibly change the map markers though?) for Skywind, but I just had to take that off my chest.

Eh, its not like we are going to change the way the compass and world map works (possibly change the map markers though?) for Skywind, but I just had to take that off my chest.

I agree on a lot of those things and some of those shouldn't be a problem actually. It should be possible to change the way the map is displayed, at least the textures. Giving different map versions with or without map markers for locations other than cities shouldn't be a problem either, which would partly solve your compass problems.

I don't have any issues with that. When I play Morrowind, I don't even use the in game map anymore, I have a huge Vvardenfell map poster on my wall and I use that for reference. 

I tried doing the same with Skyrim, but the quest descriptions were not descriptive enough to play without map markers. Then I found this mod, which disables the player marker on the map, so I could still see what place I need to go, but not where I am. But that had an issue that when you open the map, while you couldn't see the player icon, the camera would still point towards you.

But playing without a map is just my own little thing that I do to make playing open world games more enjoyable. We could always do something like this mod did, and then disable most of the map markers, and I think that would be enough for a fairly true Morrowind experience.

Tl;dr

I just really don't want the player's first look into the crater of Red Mountain to be through a god damn satellite above Tamriel...

Crestycomb

We could always do something like this mod did, and then disable most of the map markers, and I think that would be enough for a fairly true Morrowind experience.

That's what I had in mind

<Disclaimer: I may need to eat - feeling a bit grumpy>
Morrowind listed quite a few locations of the map - So I don't know if disabling them all makes sense but there is a really simple solution here for everyone's individual desires. Just leave it as is. For anyone who wants something more akin to the original game like limited fast travel, or limited map markers, just create an .esp that does this that can be toggled on as an optional feature. Do not post if you want something. go do it and then come back here and post a link to the .esp for others to use. These are really simple things to do.

limited map markers - delete any map markers you don't want. the records in the .esp will remove them from the game. This should have no negative effect on quests, but be aware you won't receive a "discovered" text and music upon your initial arrival. If you want this feature, just do it. It's probably the easiest thing you can do in the CK. For people that don't want any at all. Here you go

limited fast travel - disable fast travel for the worldspace should do it. Oh, look I got off my soapbox and did it in 10 mins. I guess this is what happens when I get sick of seeing dead threads revived with no end in sight.: Here you go

I don't think any feature should be off by default. It's fine to give players the option of turning off fast travel or limiting map markers, but it shouldn't launch that way.

I don't know why these discussions keep popping up again all the time. Everyone who has some idea of scripting knows that this is not a question of technical possibilities, it has been mentioned quite a few times.

As for the design decisions, this is something we will have to set an idea of what it should be like, playtest it and go with what works best.

Disabling fast-travel by default - as I said earlier - is NOT stripping the game of a feature, but rather giving the players a clear recommendation about what we - as the developers - think is the best way for this game to be played. Giving them the option to turn it on again is a feature we should add because some people might not want to follow that recommendation, but "everything that's possible should be enabled by default" is not a sensible rationale for a design decision imho.

And I think we should end this thread here. Different concepts have been proposed and most of them will be easy to implement, try out and evaluate, so when everything is ready for testing we'll just do exactly that, and ultimately go with what we think gives the players the best experience and include everything else as an option.

I still don't see why this is a discussion at all.  Rather than wasting time and memory on code to disable/re-enable it, why not just allow people to decide for themselves.  Anyone can do a no fast travel run without changing a single setting, by simply not utilizing fast travel.  I've done it myself several times, other people have done it, why complicate things?

I totally agree, I just went on a small tangent.

JorgenGorgen

I've done it myself several times, other people have done it, why complicate things?

 

As I said again, this does not complicate anything more than putting the game in full screen mode by default complicates it for people who want to play in windowed mode. I don't know who of you have any experience with design or have ever read a paper about it, but let me tell you one thing:

The majority of the people will not make their own design decision when enjoying a user experience but instead stick with the default one. This is the reason why only about 10% of the Skyrim players ever download mods, even though it's so easy. It's also part of the reason why Apple is so successful with their policy of taking options away from their users and instead focus their resources on optimizing the default experience. This may sound weird to us tech-savvy / experimental type of people who like to customize their experience with the aim of getting the best out of it, but it's just what it is.

If the user does not have any prior information about what setting would be optimal for a given option, he will stick to the default one and may later come back to change it, should it turn out they might prefer another setting. And that is exactly the reason why I vote for defaulting "no-Skyrim-style-fast-travel", because a) it's the experience the original game was designed for and we aim for keeping it that way (we have the same quests, the same focus on interesting environments and the original writing for the most part) and b) it gives users an incentive to try out this way, and all users who will be frustrated by that setting will come back to change it, so they get their experience anyway.

Now, if we do it the other way, most people will just use fast-travel and be done with it. It's the option they know from Skyrim and it's comfortable, so why should they switch it off.

tl;dr: There are reasonable arguments for why the game is more enjoyable without fast travel. There are reasonable arguments why enabling (Skyrim style) fast travel by default would make a lot of people miss out on that experience. Disabling it by default gives everyone a reason to see if they can enjoy this experience, while those who don't like it can still enable fast travel again.

@maxnosense, I personally will play with fast travel turned off and would be in support as having it be the default and just include the optional "turn fast travel on" .esp on the page download page as the main file. That way the default is the intended experience, while the normal skyrim mechanic is available by downloading the less than 2kb in size .esp sitting on the same page. Would anyone in the dev community be overtly opposed to this situation? If so, I'm okay with the other way around, but my vote would be for it to be off. Having it off will help make the world seems larger which was a big part of some morrowind quests (and also means spells like mark/recall, almsivi and divine intervention mean something)

Please no fast travel!!!