A thought on fast travel.

Would it be more interesting if there were a chance that you could be attacked/ambushed by enemies such as bandts or forsworn while fast traveling? As it stands now, fast travel is a free teleporation spell, but if it somewhat mimicked real time travel, where you could run into any number of enemies in transit, would that take some of the "blah" out of fast travel?

Same for carriages. They could be ambushed by bandits, or stumble into a giant's camp, and the player has to fight or flee.

Thoughts?

I mostly fast travel when I don't want to be slowed down, by enemies or anything else.

So no, this wouldn't be something I'd be interested in.

This.

Fast Travel is for making things go quick and when I don't want to fight stuff. So no. Good idea, but the thing it's applied upon isn't very good.

No.

Interuptions like that are fine for games where fast-travel is essentially the only way to travel - see, Dragon Age, for instance.

But if I want the option to be interupted while traveling, I can just walk, and chance the ambushes. If I'm fast travelling, it's because I don't want to walk from Riften to Markarth.

And it's not like random encounters add anything to the game. I mean, running into a sabre cat is hardly relevant to the story.

Fast travel is far from "safe". You can get a dragon to spawn at your entry, even if your destination is in a city. You can lose quite a few NPCs traveling to a city cell. Always stop just outside if you want to avoid this.

Optional interruption would be alright. Like it asks you yes or no. Would it be realistic? Not necessarily, but it is convenient.

Option would be nice. Mandatory would not. I prefer to fast travel, even though I feel guilty when doing it. I always justify it saying that the game just doesn't show me walking to the city and I really am, it's just fast forwarding. This would be more like what I imagine but still, considering even when I can't fast travel and I ride to my destination, I just outrun anything that tries to fight me, yeah...

Totally read this in the voice from Baldur's Gate

Haha. The title of this thread told me exactly what the subject was about and I totally agree. If FT had these incidental monster encounters, even I might use it. This is why I refuse to use F\T- It`s actually stupid: There`s no cost, no incident, no nothing except some time goes by. Even the cart F\T at least expects you to pay something and isn`t everywhere. Every long journey, even by cart should have the Player wondering if his trip will be easy or hard as it would be in reality.

F\T is a crutch that should not be as free as it is.

I love the title, good old Baldur's Gate!

Well i fast travel when i don't feel like walking .

I wouldn't mind that at all. Might be interesting. And if it got the "fast travel is cheating/teleporting/wrong" crowd off our backs, all the better.

Carriages: Sure. Fast Travel: Nope

Yes, this should happen should also happen when you wait outside of a city too.

I think this is a great idea if you're using a carriage, but I think fast travel is supposed to be like a free teleportation spell. If you feel like that's unrealistic, then don't use it.

And it also seems to me like it would be much more likely for a carriage to be ambushed/robbed than a lone traveller.

Not just that, I think fast travel should require packed provisions and incur fatigue bonuses unless you shell out for inns. Like in Daggerfall.

Pointless, since health auto-regenerates, whatever I am facing I will face with full health and my entire combat capacity at my disposal, at most it will be a minor nuissance. It was entirely different in BG or Daggerfall where you were at risk of being interrupted by something without your health and magic at full capacity.

It's definitely a good concept in the right direction. Fast travel needs some sort of consequence. As of now, it feels too simple, cheap and too much of a crutch.

Pretty much, maybe if it was only by carriage.

An encounter which only slows me down by the 30 seconds it takes me to dispose of the threat is not a consequence, afterwards I am back at full health, full magicka and have maybe a few more trinkets to sell...how is this supposed to limit or restrict my use of fast travel?

The consequence is already there, you miss out on interesting NPC's and locations that you might miss, this is a REAL consequence, something which actually affect my game and story. If you would include those random NPC's and events as possible during fast travel then you aren't adding a consequence to the system, you are removing it.

The problem I have is where do these encounters take place? Makes sense in a game with separate areas, doesn't matter if you add an extra encounter area, as in DA:O and the like, but in an open world, where are you stopped? Suppose you start the game, head to Markarth, get a carriage to Winterhold, and fast travel back. Where exactly should you be waylaid?

A small issue. It could depend on day\night, level of Player, wildest areas from any civilised city plus distance travelled. So on an early level 1 character you would make most trips and probably have a random encounter 1 out of every 10 trips (if you didn`t travel by night, doubling if you do) with this progressing until you get something like 2-3 encounters of various type of enemy every long trip by day and they shouldn`t usually happen near inhabited cities, but if they did, fair enough.

And this is just off the top of my head!

These do not all need to be just violent encounters either, they could be random innocent incidents you get from normal wandering.

If Bethesda Devs really used their brains and didn`t pander to making it stupidly wan, they could`ve had a sensible Fast travel that everyone would see an immersive gameplay logic to.

Well, it's not really teleportation, because it uses game time. It's more like jumping in the carriage, except it's free. Town portal in Diablo would be more like a teleportation device.

It`s a slow teleportation.