Before we dive into
this month’s column,
allow me to give you
a very brief history of
videogames. When
I was born, in the
time before time, as
a being of pure light jettisoned from
the universe’s loins with the force of
a hundred supernovae, games were
way more primitive than they are now.
The first videogame, whose name was
known only to the elders of the village,
involved hitting a rock with a stick until
the stick broke and everybody cheered.
The second videogame was Pong, which
wasn’t quite as much fun as the one
with the stick and the cheering, and
then the third game was Wonder Boy III:
The Dragon’s Trap for the Sega Master
System, a prehistoric console that was
the size of a Nissan Micra and ran on
used cooking oil.
But shortly after that, games finally
became capable of rendering vast
worlds filled with villages and mountains
and rivers and lakes and shopkeepers
who would say, “Fair morrow, brave
adventurer, I beseech thee to gaze upon
my discount marrows.” These new and
enlarged worlds would take countless
real hours to walk across, time that could
just as easily spent on other important
activities such as hang-gliding, panning
for gold, launching a restaurant or
cleaning an oven.
Released in 1996, The Elder Scrolls II:
Daggerfall was the most audacious
of this new wave of supersized maps,
representing an area the size of Great
Britain, though only because it cheated
by repeating the same few hills over and
over again between points of interest,
much like the real Great Britain does.
Role-playing games that followed,
however, had large worlds packed
with hand-authored landscapes, fully
scripted NPCs and intricate detail. And
it was these massive worlds – coupled
with the busy schedules and fast-pacedusually only after those locations have
been previously reached on foot. It’s
a fourth-wall breaking workaround
to address the seemingly intractable
problem of backtracking in open-world
games. Fast travel saves precious
minutes at the expense of realism,
depth, and the chance to stumble across
a cave full of diamonds.
The benefits are obvious. Instead of
some objective or quest forcing you
to tromp through a section of the map
you’ve already cleared of treasure and
goats, the protagonist can simply close
their eyes, click their heels together
and wake up wherever they need to
be, whether that’s a wizard’s guild, a
dragon’s lair or a haunted cabin.
The downsides are less obvious, but
just as real. Fast travel makes a big world
feel much, much smaller, and devalues
those in-between parts of the map that
are being regularly bypassed.The solution
Nothing in game design says that a
fully explored location can’t continue
providing entertainment and adventure.
Rather than falling back on fast travel,
open-world RPGs should strive to make
the player want to retread old ground, by
continually introducing new events and
characters to familiar areas.
Failing that – and to be fair that
solution sounds like a lot of hard work –
open-world RPGs can at least make their
fast travel feature make sense in the
context of the world. Morrowind had giant
rideable fleas, and Grand Theft Auto has
you hopping into a nearby taxi cab to get
around the city.
And if that doesn’t work, simply set
your game in a world with a high degree
of tectonic activity such that the map
completely rearranges itself once every
45 minutes, ensuring that you’re never
more than a short stroll away from
wherever it is you need to be. QSteve also writes for City A.M.lifestyles of cool, mid-’90s gamers
with their loud shirts and pagers – that
necessitated the advent of fast travel.The problem
In games, fast travel instantly teleports
the player between two locations,INSIDER OPINION
Steve teleports in to address a trope of open-world games
The Fixer
Steve Hogarty is...
“Fast travel
makes a big
world feel much,
much smaller”
018 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE