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A simple solution that would make Bethesda games inherently better

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Jan 4, 2014
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795
Yes, it does make one wonder how Bethesda can be so fucking stupid they don't do fast travel like the original Fallout games; especially after getting the rights to the series and making something called Fallout. The biggest problem with their fast travel system is the lack of random encounter, which makes fast travel completely consequence free. It's the safest way of getting around in their games. But then their games are full of stupid shit like that. Like why would you even want a way of getting around that skips combat when your whole game is built around getting into combat encounters while going from one place to the other? Sure it's shit combat, but if you've bought the game it's at least a tiny bit likely you don't think that. Same with the horses. Nice idea, but they're total shit as you can't fight while on one, and the simple act of walking and jumping rise your stats. So horses mean you can't do the thing they want you to do while walking about, and your character isn't getting better while going place like they do on foot.

Although there's a whole lot of shit they need to do, like make their combat system and encounters not be total garbage.
This was not true in Daggerfall. There were a variety of things could cause you trouble when fast travelling on the world map. You could die from a poison. You could run out of money. You could encounter beasties. You could fail to complete a quest in time. Teh game simuulated passage of time.

It wasn't thoughtless. And you couldn't do it in dungeons. A couple times I got a disease in a dungeon and when I got outside I travelled to nearest town. But I never arrived. I died from the disease.

This says weather could affect travel times:
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Traveling
One modifier on travel time that is not readily apparent is the weather (rain, snow, etc.), which can actually delay travel times.
You could however enter your ship immediately anywhere in the world, but you couldn't use this to circumvent the world fast travel.It just gave you access to your ship. I admit this is non-immersive. I'm the type of person who would support a ship being at a port city and you having to travel to the port city to enter it.
 
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Jan 4, 2014
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Daggerfall was big, yes there was fast travel, but you just traveled instantly which brakes the immersion.
Why they just didn't have map travel like in Fallout? Have the possibility of 'fast travel' by traveling on overland map and you would be brought back to the world on combat encounter....... and if someone would want he still can travel all the way by foot (mount makes a lot more sense for traveling big distances)
It's been over 20 years and I can't believe no one from Bethesda has thought of this (maybe they just didn't want it as the worlds later built were nothing like the size of Daggerfall)

It's a way better system of fast travel, because you just don't magicaly appear in other place, but you see your characters moving across the world, which helps the immersion, it just worked so well in Fallout, I can't believe no other games apart from jrpgs does it.

I think it's more of a case that they want to do smaller, more hand-built worlds rather than the proc gen stuff in Daggerfall.
He does have a point in Daggerfall's case. Fast travel was simulated in Daggerfall, so it wasn't really instant because of consequences. However, they could have further simulated it by showing you travel on the map and possibly showing other details in case you wanted to stop. That might have been more immersive.

I'll grant the OP that.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

Dungeon Master
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Daggerfall included fast travel out of necessity. The overworld was created on a 1:1 scale, meaning that the land area covered by the game was roughly the size of England, and it would have been unplayable if destinations could only be reached by traveling for hours, days, or weeks of real-time. Despite the vastness of the overworld, players never experience it and instead spend all of their time in either towns or dungeons, for this very reason that the time required to travel through the overworld, rather than using the fast travel option, was prohibitive.

For Morrowind, the gameworld was scaled down greatly relative to what it represents, true to a lesser extent for the settlements and to a larger extent for the overworld. The cities, towns, and villages represent a much larger number of people than is found within them, and the overworld represents much larger distances between locations than exist in the game. However, the benefit of scaling the size of the gameworld is that it makes overland exploration feasible. Morrowind's gameworld is large enough that overland expeditions can be a formidable and time-consuming experience, but short enough to actually be playable, unlike Daggerfall.
 
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MI.Tex

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espite the vastness of the overworld, players never experience it and instead spend all of their time in either towns or dungeons, for this very reason that the time required to travel through the overworld, rather than using the fast travel option, was prohibitive.

That's why the fallout 1 style map would work good. If Fallout 1 was on a 1:1 scale it would be the same there.
Fast travel is just instant teleportation that brakes the feeling of any kind of travel, while in Fallout 1 and other jrpgs that do the overworld map travel, make you feel that the player character is actualy traversing those long distances.
Daggerfall with fallout 1 travel would be so much better to play, because you could travel across the huge distances.


For Morrowind, the gameworld was scaled down greatly relative to what it represents, true to a lesser extent for the settlements and to a larger extent for the overworld

Yea because it's just meant to be a Theme Park.
Bethesda went the stupid route, instead of making travel over huge distances viable, they went the theme park route.
 
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MI.Tex

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i wouldn't call bethesda brilliant. I'd go so far as to say that they lucked into their success.

Maybe they are brilliant, brilliant in making money, they know that first person for an RPG is not that great, so they constantly strip and strip the rpg elements.

The next Elder Scrolls will be mostly a super graphicaly pretty action games without rpg elements.
 
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MI.Tex

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FF XV is now the biggest game ever

FFXV_Map_04.png
 

Deleted Member 16721

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I wish a "modern Daggerfall" would be attempted. Handcraft enough content but spread it out and add modern proc gen algorithms, etc., and give it a shot. It would/could make for a different, unique and really interesting RPG experience, just like Daggerfall was, if done well.

Morrowind is still the best Elder Scrolls game to me. People are talking about attributes, fast travel, etc., but to me it was all made interesting because the game world was essentially run by a pen-and-paper RPG system. So just like pen and paper you could get very creative and you had a lot of ways to play around with the countless systems and stats in the game, and it also had enough restrictions in place to make everything worthwhile and character development impacting.

Someone mentioned gameplay choice & consequence. You had to make decisions in Morrowind that may not seem all that interesting on the surface level, but add great depth and immersion to the overall game. Since fast travel was limited (but still feasible), you were discouraged from doing things like clearing out a cave, taking 20 sets of armor instantly back to town, traveling back and forth 3 times in a ridiculous fashion, etc.. It could be done, but it wasn't fun and it was discouraged, so it should be avoided. This meant that simple "travel planning" was a factor. Do you want to carry that enchanted axe that is heavy and slowing you down? Maybe you could just drink a strength potion to carry it for awhile. Oh! You picked up those 3 scrolls of Greater Feather so you can carry it back to town! It was like a real adventure, rather than just a silly grind, Skinner Box or overly game-y thing. It was an actual adventure, and you rewarded much like early era D&D games for being prepared for your adventure.

I say take the Morrowind design, scale the world up a few factors (200-300% or so), add more open-world elements like ELEX has (more dangerous enemies around, but lore-fitting of course), add the high levels of immersion and world design attention to detail (certain mushrooms growing in certain regions, animal mating seasons causing aggressive Kagouti in some areas, etc. etc.) and generally scale up the difficulty much in the way ELEX did. Make it longer to get to Godlike status, ditch level-scaling and add challenging areas, ruins and more in certain spots on the map (Morrowind's design ramped up to ELEX levels), and add more secrets, more dialogue text and more rewards for exploration (talking to a certain town NPC, while not at all necessary may yield a unique, unscripted rumor that you could follow. Reward curiosity and don't handhold or point to it all, or even have it all as scripted quests, etc..)

What a hell of a game that would be. It would be the best open-world RPG ever made.

Who wants to fund it? I'll help design it. And trust me, it wouldn't be balanced at all (in a good way.):dance::smug:
 

Dustin542

Liturgist
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Dec 29, 2011
Messages
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FF XV is now the biggest game ever
How when Daggerfall is around 65k square miles and takes about 2 irl days to go from one end to the other? The article that is from says FFXV is about 780 square miles. Biggest console game maybe.
 
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MI.Tex

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FF XV is now the biggest game ever
How when Daggerfall is around 65k square miles and takes about 2 irl days to go from one end to the other? The article that is from says FFXV is about 780 square miles. Biggest console game maybe.

Daggerfall is proceduraly generated isn't it? FF XV got everything hand placed, so in 'hand placed' category, it is the biggest.
 

Dustin542

Liturgist
Joined
Dec 29, 2011
Messages
116
FF XV is now the biggest game ever
How when Daggerfall is around 65k square miles and takes about 2 irl days to go from one end to the other? The article that is from says FFXV is about 780 square miles. Biggest console game maybe.

Daggerfall is proceduraly generated isn't it? FF XV got everything hand placed, so in 'hand placed' category, it is the biggest.
Generated once then saved (not generated once at the start of the game, the devs generated it once, saved it, and now we all have the same overworld), though the dungeons are random aside from some main quest ones which are always the same.
 
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MI.Tex

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Is Vavra watching this thread? Because Kingdom Come will have exactly this fast travel, you can get pulled into the main world with a random encounter and your character gets hungry and tired.


wDJt50M.gif
 

GarfunkeL

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It's funny because I've argued for this sort of fast-travel, or actually one even more in-depth, happening from the POV of the character, like in the old Seal Team game - and few posters argued back that it would be impossible technically to make.
 

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