One of the worst things about Morrowind is having to travel all the way to some cavern or fortress or what have you then do the quest in there then you have to travel all the way back or go to some city then see if you can travel to where you need to go. What a load of crap that was, one of the worst quests in Morrowind was having to drag some lady all over the map playing dress up it was annoying and tedious and I hated it. I quit playing that game because of that quest. Fast travel solves a lot of tedium

You quit playing a game with over a hundred hours of gameplay because one quest annoyed you?

Fast travel can be good I suppose, but Morrowind felt so big because you had to actually travel places (or use the silt strider things). Skyrim feels small because I just magically teleport everywhere..

I am dissapointed their quest design now forces you to either use it or be bored out of your brain. (Skyrim was actually pretty good at letting you not use fast travel though)

Hey buddy wrong forum. Anyways, did you ever used the Almsivi(whatever that was call)scroll? You can fast travel anywhere with that. Having said that MW is the only TES game in which I didn't mind getting lost in. There was always a new discovery over the hills and far away.

Not to mention that, frankly, there was less to do and the side-questlines were far less deep than in previous games...

Only to the nearest Dunmer temple. DIvine intervention took you to the nearest Imperial Chapel.

With effective use of mark and recall you could fast travel anywhere

Yeah, I have mixed feelings about it. Not having it in Morrowind definitely made the game world feel bigger. I also thought that there really should have been (the potential for) random encounters when fast-traveling in Fallout 3 and Fallout NV...it was weird that you could travel all the way across the map with no health and no supplies without needing to worry about your safety. If you fast-travel through a dangerous area there should be at least a chance of being attacked by something IMO.

It was one of the reasons, there was a lot of things I didn't like about Morrowind like how the dialog is handled, how the combat was handled I didn't like the stuff with following vague instructions how to get some place, you mean some guy wants me to go to some cavern but he won't tell me where this place is so I can do his quest? no he just tells me it's out west. Also spending an hour trying to find the opening to a cave or castle isn't fun I remember getting bored trying to find the door to save fortress because I couldn't just seem to find the entrance.

A wild mutant appears ?

You dont have too fast travel.

Actually, the worst quest would have to be this one temple quest.

You get it in Vivec. It ends in the Sheogorad region. You CANNOT speak to anyone, including travel people, so unless you went there and set up a mark before getting the quest...

Of note, Morrowind is the only Elder Scrolls game (that's numbered) that lacks pure Fast-Travel aside from paying someone else. Arena, Daggerfall, Oblivion, and Skyrim all have it. Kinda funny in hindsight about how everyone complained about the Fast Travel feature in Oblivion...

Yeah but it's there and I'm a busy man

I haven't played the first two didn't realize that the first two had it

Ah yes! The Mark and Call spell was the one that teleported you anywhere. You're right, the Almsivi scroll sent you to the nearest temple. MW was amazing. Still my favorite TES game hands down.

I know that in Morrowind the Silent Pilgrimage quest pissed me off because unless you prepared for it (setting a mark at the shrine, etc), it took FOREVER to complete.

I don't know, for me half of the fun playing Morrowind (or watching someone else play it) was figuring out how to get somewhere. This is only half-related, but it seems that in hand with fast travel we also get the compass pointer that points directly to where you need to go. Quests in Morrowind were made without that in mind, so characters actually gave you pointers - like landmark references - explaining how to get to where you need to go. Then trying to find a tree or a rock or whatever they mentioned and getting lost then feeling joy when you finally find what they were talking about was incredibly fun for me. But since both Oblivion and Skyrim were made with the compass pointers in mind, quest-givers usually don't do that so it's near impossible to play the game without the compass pointer on.

But back to fast travel, I think it really depends on the player. Some prefer it, some don't. The problem with simply not using fast travel if you don't like it though is if the game's world was made with fast travel in mind, so the landscape is incredibly boring and tedious to get through if you just walk/run/ride to where you want to go. Oblivion is a perfect example of this. Sure, there are a lot of interesting things to see in Oblivion's landscape, but most of it is just same and walking through it gets boring pretty fast. Skyrim is a bit better in that regard.

Are you honestly telling me that the quest in Oblivion where you have to go to Cheydinhal from Leyawiin (i think) and then straight back again wasn't made with the assumption that you would use fast travel?

Morrowind actually had fast travel, they just made it integrated. I bet there wouldn't be as many complaints if they just made it a 12 mana cost spell and explained it as the PC learning guild guide magic.

Yes, that's pretty much what I'm talking about. If the game's mechanics force you to use fast travel, well not force you per se but the game is made so it would be even more tedious than it should be if you didn't use fast travel, then that's a problem.

I don't see fast travel as being instant either because the game calculates the amount of time it takes to get there

Eh, I use it, but there for a while in Skyrim I wasn't using it at all. In fact, Skyrim would do just fine without fast-travel, simply because they had sprinting and horseback riding. Morrowind had neither, and Oblivion only had horses. If they remastered Morrowind with horses and sprinting, but left almost everything else the same? There would be no need for fast-travel at all.

As it stands, it can get a little tedious to walk across Vvardenfell.

Yup. That's why they have those spells, not to mention the silt striders and boat service. It still gives you fast travel, but with some limits so that you're not just teleporting everywhere.

Arena and Daggerfall have huge flat worlds that no sane person would want to explore anyway. And as far as I remember you don't just teleport places in Daggerfall, but you have to consider your traveling speed (for the timed quests), so those games are still a bit limited in the amount of fast travel you can do.

Fast travel from anywhere to anywhere with no trade-off or explained mechanism is just dumb. In Morrowind, it made sense that you could get from one city to another without having to deal with monsters when you were paying money to ride on giant silt striders. It made sense to be able to get on a board and end up in another coastal city without getting killed by slaughterfish. But in Oblivion and Skyrim, it is utterly stupid to be able to autopilot your character from anywhere, to anywhere, without any risk of encountering enemies. Fast travel + random encounters aren't so bad. Having to do some kind of quest to clear roads so that you can fast travel along them also isn't so bad. But you really shouldn't be able to teleport (even if time passes) from one isolated area in the wilderness to another.

I've flip-flopped on this issue quite a bit, but recently I've come to a better understanding of what makes Bethesda games fun. The problem with fast travel in Oblivion/Fallout 3/Skyrim is that it trivializes the challenge of adventure. It gives the player the ability to voluntarily make the game much easier without a penalty. It would be like playing poker and being given the option to see one card in every other players hand. That idea seems awesome when you think about how much more often you would win, but then it would make playing poker boring by removing the challenge of the game. It's plenty easy enough to get where you need to go in Morrowind if you have enough coin, are high enough in level, and know where you're going. If you don't have one or two or any of those three things then it will be hard and challenging, like a TES game should be.

It's never ruined my enjoyment of the games just made them more fun to play when I don't want to wander around and to get to where I want to go quickly without hassle