What's the Deal with Fast Travel?

Fast travel is a bedrock of game design, but what's the point of fast travel anyway? Yeah, haha, it's so you can travel fast. But... why is it around to begin with? How does it make parts of a game more fun? Why are we using it to skip parts of a game? When can it all go wrong? Let's talk about the different shapes a fast travel system can take.

Featuring:
Skyrim
Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Elden Ring
Final Fantasy XIV
Ocarina of Time
Metroid Prime
Spelunky
Spiderman
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet

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[pippastrelle]

Latias/Latios in ORAS is still my favourite. Instead of teleporting, you could fly over the minimap on its back and land wherever there was a notable location. It gave you greater control and greater immersion in the region while being quick and convenient.

[vulasaur]

i tried playing BOTW without fast travel and i was surprised by how much hyrule started to feel like home, a trip from kakariko to death mountain is like a walk to the kitchen. i also became very attached to my horse and i appreciated the pain from having to travel on foot to the horse shrine if it died

[arenkai]

The most fun I had in Skyrim was doing a "no fast travel except at carts" playthrough.
There's so much you miss by fast travelling, it's insane !

[ApsuP]

When talking about fast travel I always want to bring up Morrowind. It mixes up several different forms of fast travel. There is boat that takes you between coastal cities, a big monster bug that acts as bus between certain towns and cities, mages' guild has teleportation network and several different spells for fast travel. The different forms of fast travel make for immersive experience, and learning a best route from place A to place B feels rewarding.

[EyeOfKings]

In the world of Yakuza the district of Kamurocho was small enough to not really need fast travel, since you could cross the entire map in about 2 minutes or so. Although, fast travel is offered via taxis, the taxis only take you to the edges of the map so it there only used for crossing the entire city; saving you a minute of time.

[FacePomagranate]

People always complain about fast travelling in terms of immersion, but I think in terms of story-telling it makes a lot of sense. When you tell a story, you don't tell about every little detail the characters encounter; just the important events. We had games jump you from level to level long before Will Wright thought we wanted games where we watch our characters wash their hands after they use the toilet.

[dolpin]

The most unique form of fast travel i have seen in a game was probably all the forms of fast travel in the mmo fusionfall. In that game, theres (almost?) No traditional teleport tavel system, instead, the game had sky bus stops and flying mojo jojo monkeys, which actively carry you to whatever area on their route you want to get to. No teleport, no loading screen, just you actively being carried throughout the game world, allowing you to also get a birds eye view of the map as you go, showing you further points of interest as you go.

I loved this system, felt so natural and watching the horizon/skyline slowly change as you go from area to area was great. Honestly sad that more games have not done fast travel like this, though I understand it probably wouldn't work for most games.

[lumia]

I really like the dream nail in hollow knight, you can set up a gate wherever you want and teleport to it later. Since you only get to teleport to one place it doesnt let you skip regular travel and exploration. However it let you skip the section between a bench and a boss when youre tryharding and you get it late enough to really appreciate it

[EvilCoffeeInc]

Fast travel is one of those features I've always been iffy on. I often feel disconnected from a game's setting and story when teleporting everywhere. I really enjoyed walking around the maps of Skyrim and FFXIV when I first started playing them. At the same time, travel is less of a "thing to do" and more of a space between action, and it can get boring between those actions. But I worry that this sense of boredom is not because travelling is uninteresting, but because I've been trained to do chores in an exceedingly optimal way. I can't help but feel as though the result of fast travel is not convenience, but instead feeding a Skinner box style obsession with efficiency.

[jearn]

You should do an episode on change states in the world when backtracking. Like a peaceful tutorial village is later filled with demons, or a location was destroyed or frozen over. Examples: the main town square in Ocarina of Time, the Ashina Outskirts in Sekiro, or Leyndell in Elden Ring.

[agentmoon]

One of the reasons I think the interconnected world in Dark Souls 1 works so well is because fast travel is unlocked partway through the game and is limited to only certain bonfires. It forces the player to learn to traverse the world. In every other Souls game you can teleport to any bonfire (or equivalent) right from the beginning, and the series got more linear up until Elden Ring. If the player can just warp anywhere, there's less reason to make interesting paths through the world. And the connections that do exist feel pointless.

[gustav]

I really enjoyed FFXV where a form of fast travel is just take the car and let Ignis just drive you to where you are going, you can listen to music, everyone is just enjoying the ride. It had world immersion, story context, character development moments and you can see the world design

[mrfipp]

Gravity Rush comes to mind when I think about fast travel. In Gravity Rush, your main method of transportation is manipulating your own gravity to fall in any direction you want. It honestly pretty fun, flying across the game's giant sky city, finding all the places you can explore with your gravity-based abilities, I liked it so much that I never bothered with the game's fast travel, which was using man holes to get from place to place.

[xenofes]

Morrowind had amazing fast travel. There's like six different in-universe fast travel systems that start off obtuse but are really easy to use once you understand them.

[dazcarrr]

if you think about it, the lost woods in ocarina of time is kind of a fast travel system. if you know the way around you can use it to access several important areas, but only after reaching it first. if the area got expanded on a bit more you probably wouldn't have needed the warp songs

[RoninXDarknight]

The car from FFXV. "Fast travel" was just you handing off the wheel to one of your buddies. Riding around the map taking in the sites and listening to the banter of the four friends was one of the best parts of that game.

[PragmaticAntithesis]

One interesting possibility is areas that can only be accessed by fast travel, such as Paper Mario's shiver city or Hollow Knight's stag nest. This can be a reward area for unlocking all the other fast travel points or a way of gating story progress and late game areas behind unlocking a postgame fast travel system.

[GGrimmmm]

Rain World does something really interesting: fast travel is called passages, and they are unlocked through achievements. You are limited by only being able to use the passages you’ve unlocked once per play through, and each passage shows a unique scene based on the achievement when you use it

[samchillington]

My personal favourite was sadly only in the late game, this was the latios/latias flute available in pokemon oras. It acted as a fly but also allowed you to be more engaged into the process and find hidden areas and pokemon

[TempoKong]

I once beat BOTW without using fast travel, I even got to 114 shrines without guide. It was one of the best experience, hyped to do that again in TOTK!