Open world games need two types of fast travel. The first is your standard type, which is pretty much a teleportation ability. That should be greatly limited. At most, just for cases where you need to travel across the entire map, and should be hidden behind some kind of in-game explanation like "you're taking a boat/plane/subway" or whatever.
The other one should be some way of moving really fast across the map so previously explored areas aren't a chore to move across. Literally fast travel, and not teleportation. And no, conventional solutions like horses or cars is still not fast enough. It's still minutes of mindlessly moving from point A to B in most cases. It needs to be truly fast. Spiderman 2 actually did explore this concept pretty well, with ideas like catapulting yourself or using a wingsuit to glide long distances. Other games need to come up with someway of allow players to cross huge distances in in a few seconds.
I’d be incredibly happy if that were true, but it isn’t. We’ve had proper Pokemon alternatives since before Pokemon even existed and they haven’t slowed that shitty franchise one bit. Megaten is still niche, Digimon is still niche, cassette beasts (the actual goty) has an even smaller audience than those games, if this was major discontent with Pokemon cassette beasts at least would be in a much better place (since it literally released last year, perfect to take advantage of Pokemon’s unending failures). Gotta nip that unwarranted optimism in the bud, gamefreak sucks and will never improve, their fans suck and will never improve.
100% agree, lots of open world games these days make the only reason to explore so that you can find the fast travel beacon so you never have to explore the “open world” again.
It hides shitty and half assed world building though so I guess devs got that going for them.
I think it is more of a gameplay issue than a world building issue.
Fast travel solves a problem the developers create, needing to be in specific locations regularly to accomplish specific tasks. If you don't need to be anywhere in particular to offload collected items or to craft stuff, or return to someone to turn in quests to level, then you can just spend the time exploring at whatever pace you want.
Game design that makes repetitive travel necessary is when fast travel becomes necessary to avoid tedium.
I don’t NEED fast travel, but I would prefer if games still had an in-universe method of traversing from, say, the Easternmost region and the Westernmost region (i.e. a train, boat, horse carriage, etc.). I just don’t like spending significant amounts of time running back and forth through areas I’ve already discovered all the content in.
I appreciate fast travel in games like Kingdom Come Deliverance, where the fast travel still accounts for the time and resources spent.
I remember back when they scrapped the multiplayer promises they made for Cyberpunk 2077 there was also word about them preparing some separate standalone multiplayer game for the future instead. To me this "considering" is more of an indication that the new game won't be multiplayer focused (if it has multiplayer at all), rather than a promise of anything.
I'm so tired of the AAA hype machine. Who cares, since this game is years away from a release and probably 3-4 years of post-release patches from being decent.
I thought CD Projekt would have learned from Cyberpunk's incredibly prolonged marketing campaign and it's remarkably shoddy release but I guess not.
I'm glad to not have invested into the Capcom games. The article talks about Steam Deck only, but I assume its broken on Linux as well ("Linux" as a word isn't found on the article).
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