The Detriment of Fast Travel: How Systems Like Dark Souls Remastered’s Can Harm World Design
Fast travel is often seen as a convenience, but the prevalent “teleport anywhere at will” model can be a significant detriment to game design, particularly impacting the intricate world design seen in titles like Dark Souls Remastered Fast Travel and others. This isn’t an indictment of all fast travel, but rather the ubiquitous kind found in many modern games. Examples include titles like Fallout 4, Skyrim, Dark Souls 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, and Fable 3. The core issue is that this level of convenience often comes at the cost of deeper game design principles, especially regarding world exploration and player engagement with the environment. This is a complex claim, so let’s explore the problems it creates.
The Worldbuilding Problem
One primary consequence of easy fast travel is that it liberates developers from the necessity of considering how inhabitants (both NPCs and the player) navigate their world organically. If players can simply teleport after visiting a location once, significant efforts poured into worldbuilding – details like trade routes, natural barriers, and logistical considerations – are often rendered moot. While some developers meticulously craft these details regardless, many won’t, or at least not to the same extent. This transforms the world from a dynamic, coherent place into a series of disconnected points of interest, essentially a large theme park map.
Consider Skyrim, for instance. How does the lumber produced in Falkreath realistically reach the towns it purportedly supplies? Which businesses in those towns are buying it? Given the civil war, why aren’t the vital trade routes heavily guarded instead of being overrun by bandits? Trade routes are fundamentally crucial for sustaining any military force. These might seem like minor points, but they highlight a disconnect: Skyrim presents itself as a vibrant, living world, yet it avoids grappling with these fundamental questions of internal logic. Its world feels more like a collection of significant landmarks connected by roads, with minimal effort invested in establishing the practical realities of daily life and travel within that world. This, arguably, stems partly from the fact that the player isn’t compelled to interact with the world as a real inhabitant would – they can simply bypass the journey via teleportation.
Screenshot showing the open world map of Skyrim, illustrating a game with prevalent fast travel.
Contrast this with Morrowind, where effortless teleportation is not an option. Players must utilize the same modes of transport available to NPCs, such as silt striders and boats. To travel safely and avoid hostile creatures or bandits, players are encouraged to stick to the major trade routes, just as the world’s inhabitants would. This constraint forces the development team to genuinely think about the logistics of movement and supply within their game world. To reasonably expect players to travel like someone living in that world, developers must first understand and implement what constitutes rational movement within it. While shortcuts and conveniences still exist, the fundamental mindset is different. Bandits aren’t just arbitrarily placed on major, well-patrolled roads; they’re logically located on minor paths or off the beaten track, reflecting a world where main routes are safer. This design approach means the player learns why things are where they are. I know how netch leather gets from Vivec to Balmora; I know the producers and buyers because the developers had to establish plausible trade routes for player travel, making it a small step to add NPCs involved in that trade.
Screenshot of the Morrowind landscape and UI, contrasting with games that have easy fast travel.
Undermining Exploration and Seriousness
Secondly, while related, the presence of pervasive fast travel undermines the incentive for genuine exploration and diminishes the player’s sense of taking the world seriously. In a game like Dragon’s Dogma, I learned the location of every major enemy type – liches, ogres, cyclops, chimeras, hydras, drakes, golems, and bandit camps. I knew if they could be avoided and the safest ways to bypass them. I knew the shortest routes to every rest stop and between them. Why? Because fast travel is severely limited. The world is dangerous, and every journey involves traversing it physically. This limited travel, paradoxically, encourages exploration. While exploring carries risks, discovering secrets like valuable shortcuts becomes incredibly rewarding, a concept familiar to any Dark Souls fan early in that game before its own fast travel system is unlocked.
Combat scene with a Wyrm in Dragons Dogma, a game known for limited fast travel encouraging exploration.
The Knowledge Gap
Thirdly, unlimited fast travel reduces the depth of world knowledge developers can reasonably expect the player to acquire. When players can teleport anywhere, that’s the primary mode of transport they will use, making things like environmental shortcuts or subtle navigational cues largely irrelevant. By prioritizing convenience and thereby discouraging organic exploration, developers limit the types of exploration-based challenges they can present. They haven’t trained the player in observation and navigation, so sudden demands on these skills feel unfair. I can find only one of Skyrim’s treasure maps based on a visual clue, yet I can locate hidden items in Morrowind using only written descriptions. This difference arises because Morrowind consistently requires and rewards navigational skills, while Skyrim’s ubiquitous map markers and glowing arrows encourage mindless movement or teleportation, eliminating the need to truly observe or understand the environment.
Detailed map of Skyrim with markers, contrasting with navigation methods in games like Dark Souls Remastered before fast travel is unlocked.
When these factors converge – the detrimental impact on worldbuilding, the erosion of exploration incentives, and the reduced need for player knowledge of the environment – the result is often comparatively shallow and less thoughtfully constructed game worlds that undervalue player engagement and familiarity. The reason this type of fast travel feels like a curse is that games built around it almost invariably suffer these consequences. For someone who values worldbuilding and level design as crucial components of immersive games, this mechanic frequently diminishes titles I might otherwise enjoy. It keeps appearing in games where, arguably, it has no place, bringing all the associated problems with it.
This isn’t to say fast travel is inherently bad in every game. Fallout New Vegas, despite having fast travel, boasts a meticulously detailed world and often uses map markers that require searching or are deliberately misleading, mitigating some downsides. The promise of discovering vaults and treasure also helps. In games like Borderlands, it matters less because the world isn’t presented as a place to be taken seriously in a logistical sense; it’s a stage for gameplay.
Screenshot from Borderlands, an example of a game where fast travel has less impact on its core design.
What I am arguing is that fast travel should not be integrated into a game as a substitute for robust world or level design. I wouldn’t necessarily object to a remake of Morrowind including an optional “teleport anywhere” fast travel system, provided it didn’t compromise the core experience and the well-designed integrated travel and navigation methods already present. I personally wouldn’t use it and might even mod it out to avoid temptation, but its presence wouldn’t inherently harm the game for me. However, I haven’t encountered a single game built such that fast travel (or similar navigational aids like pervasive compass markers) never feels like the necessary or easiest option because non-fast travel methods are equally well-considered and rewarding. Even New Vegas falls slightly short in this regard. You can even observe where the level design becomes less interconnected and intricate in the original Dark Souls after the player gains the ability to fast travel via the Lordvessel, impacting the seamlessness that defined the game’s early areas.
Given that it often feels like a choice between two extremes, I will consistently favor games with no or severely limited fast travel coupled with thoughtful world design over those that rely on pervasive fast travel at the expense of environmental depth and player engagement.
