Actually, those 4 hours were just following a guide I have written for myself at one point so I don't forget which plugins did I use to make Oblivion perfect :-P

Every single Elder Scrolls game I've played has had something profoundly wrong with it that prevents me from considering any of them as classics. With Morrowing, it was cliffracers, those stupid birds that would hover in the air and constantly harass you as you traveled from point A to B. In Oblivion, it was the myriad of bugs and things that would make the game crash and the cookie cutter design of numerous locations. In Skyrim, it was the overall dumbing down of every aspect of the game and some sketchy design choices. Fast travel was something else that I felt ruined the series.

Bethesda has always seemed satisfied with releasing a halfassed product and letting the community fix things up to standard, with varying degrees of success. And I'm not a fan of mods.

I have absolutely no intention of ever buying another Elder Scrolls game. My expectations were so high for Skyrim and I was ultimately let down.

You might say that with the scope of these games, there's always going to be certain blemishes that need to be worked out, but what I'm complaining about most of all are poor design choices that by now should have been worked out and improved upon.

I hear this objection a lot, and I, quite frankly, don't get it. I mean, if you object to fast travel, just don't do it. There is no rule that you must use this feature, is there? That is actually how I play these games; I just ignore fast travel completely.

Cliff racer protip:
Never choose "dispose of corpse." This option wasn't present in the original game and was only added later... and selecting it causes some weird stuff to happen. Namely, it completely removes that creature from existence. Thus, when you change zones, there's a very good chance it will respawn, and it may respawn as any of the possible creatures in that area. So if you kill a kagouti outside a cave and dispose of it, when you emerge from the cave it may be a cliff racer or nix hound or whatever and it will immediately attack you. So don't do that unless you really need creature parts for alchemy.

On my most recent playthrough I didn't dispose of anything, and I found the cliff racers to be quite manageable. Plus, it's like one the Ashlander hunters say... "nothing in the world like dropping a cliff racer from afar with a single arrow."

It's funny, but I never had much problem with cliff racers when I played Morrowind. Perhaps it was because I didn't often dispose of corpses, with the exception of human(oid) ones.

Later on, of course, I could just outrun them if I wanted to.

I wouldn't have a problem with fast travel if it wasn't handled so clumsily. As it is, one can simply fast travel willy-nilly and completely bypass most of the game. Why the in hell would they allow this if they're not admitting that their world is mostly boring and better off ignored? Instead, they should have spiced things up and made things more interesting while traveling around. Also, what exactly are the stage coaches for? One of the poorest design choices in my opinion, because as it stands, they're just another out of the way option to fast travel. Doesn't make sense! Maybe using the stagecoach should be the only way to fast travel, and between towns only. And perhaps, if they really wanted to get creative and go the extra mile, the coaches delivered you between towns in real time and you would have to fight off bandits and such along the way.

There are just too many problems to mention with these games! It really is as if they put all of this time and effort into modeling a nice looking, sprawling environment and then they get burned out and call it a day, half-assing all other aspects of the game. Just really lazy designs for games that should be excellent. Bethesda ALWAYS fails to deliver and I will never buy another one of their games.

I will quote a comment to one of the mods for Skyrim here: But yes, I would have liked if a similar functionality of that mod (ScenicCarriages) were implemented in the games by default (the mod has the dialogue option to tell the driver to wake the player up at the destination, bypassing the journey completely like the game does normally). As is, the mod may be a tad unstable.

Short version: Freedom of choice / roleplaying.
Longer version: some may find it tedious to walk / are just interested in the story / gameplay - option: fast travel. Some want to explore more thoroughly / roleplay a more living world but still don't want to walk for the xx time between two towns or walk across the complete map (Riften to Solitude / Markarth) - option: walking + stage coaches. Some want nothing of that and just walk always - option: just do so.

You have several options to choose from where other games (about 98% of them) give you 1 way or bust. More options = lazy design and clumsily? Khajiit has no words for you....

Right! Usually, I like it when developers restrict and enforce certain elements of game design. Fast travel seems like a shortcut that's just slapped in haphazardly for lazy people.

You should be forced to work your way from one corner of the world to the other and like it!

Maybe a nice design choice would have been rare creatures that you could encounter along your travels, and you could turn in their pelts in towns for unique items?

Fast travel is a lazy design, period. :)

No fast travel in such a VAST gameworld ? I think fast travel was a good idea tbh and I generally hate "streamlining", if fast travel might be includable under that heading ? In FNV I keep virtually all my stuff in my room at Novac. If I didn't have the option to fast travel there I'm pretty sure I would have given up playing the game a long time ago :)

Well there was no fast travel option in Morrowind and going back to the original thread subject, fast travel definitely breaks the immersion.

... and why is that a problem for you? Does it force you to play lazy? Why does it matter how other people play their singleplayer game?

Elder scrolls are and have always been as much freedom of choice as possible. Now they should force you down a specific road? Hell no - that's stupid design choice.

.... I'm glad you're not involved with design at Bethesda.... or story writing....

No. Lazy would be to add fast travel to cover up how boring (or non-existent) your world is in between. As is done time and time again and then even more covered up with random encounters.... and I bet you don't have a problem with those games. :p

And? Once again, you don't have to do it. If it breaks your immersion - just... don't... do... it.
Why is that so hard to understand?

Edit: oh and Morrowind had his own version of stage coaches. Called Silt Strider. So just with ignoring fast travel, you can have that original Morrowind feeling. But how did you called stage coaches? "One of the poorest design choices in my opinion"....

2. edit: I apologize for picking everything apart - looks rather.... disturbing. But that's because I see your approach as so fundamentally flawed :)

Forced fast travel is, actually. I have played Oblivion for ages and used FT on veeery rare occasions (which makes inclusion of FT good as I still got the option)
Which poor design choices, exactly? I'm genuinely curious, I've been a fan of TES games for ages, and I dabble into game design quite a bit. I was trying to come up with ways to improve TES games from their current state, but just couldn't find any way to improve them without reducing their functionality. So do tell me, which poor design choices?

- Reduction in armor slots.
- Removal of attribute system and replacement with a simplistic health/magicka/stamina system.
- Removal of equipment maintenance.
- Plot important NPC's are unkillable.
- Complete reduction of all NPC dialogue and journal text. NPC's and your quest journal will never give you enough information to find and complete a quest, forcing the player to follow the quest marker then entire game. There's no need to ever read your journal or listen to NPC's in Oblivion/Skyrim because your quest marker will always tell you where to go.
- Removing Athletics and Acrobatics.
- Massive simplification/streamlining of the Alchemy system.
- Automatic scaling of enemies make exploration meaningless because all enemies (and their equipment) will always scale to your character's level and be the same stats except for their appearance.
- Gutting of skill system, removal of majority of skills present in Daggerfall/Morrowind.
- The off-the-shelf magic system.
- Inability to fail quests, you can die but then you can just load up a previous save-game. A quest can never be "failed" and you can never get it again.
- Removal of most magic spells.
- Removal of class system.
- The prices of items, especially magic items and other "rare" and powerful items have been reduced to cheap prices so it doesn't take long for players to get the most powerful items in the game.
- Removal of skill-based dialogue.
- The linearly-progressed perk system.
- No consequences for faction membership, being a member of a faction does not restrict you membership to any other faction based on who that faction is opposed to. Becoming the grand master of mages in Skyrim for example never requires that you once cast a magic spell.

I could go on if you like. If you are denying that the TES series hasn't been massively streamlined/dumbed-down, you are either very naive or lying.

Fast travel was important in the early days of the series. While you could walk, I believe it'd take you several days (real time) of getting from one end of the map to the other, it was that large (and boring, as randomly generated terrain generally is, but hey, it let them have a damned huge game world on less HDD space). I'd bet people complained that there was no fast travel in Morrowind as they'd gotten used to it earlier, so Bethesda added it back.