Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous vs BG3

One of the very reasons people ask for no fast travel (or to better say it: "not OVERLY convenient fast travel that works at any given moment") is that taking it into account in the design phase helps precisely creating a game where you are NOT assumed to be zipping back and forth at any given second.

I'd rather get a game where I'm assumed to be moving through the game world at natural pace (and when the context required it, even being stranded in enemy territory with no easy way out) rather than a game that assumes (and so after a while implicitly REQUIRES) that I'll be zapping all over the place every two seconds.
Aside for being an erratic design focus, it also has the not negligible side effect of destroying ANY sense of scale in the fictional world.

A notable example of this is the first Dark Souls, before the shitty idea of giving to the player the "lordvessel" (bonfire warp) from the get go: your first descent in Blight Town or your first climb up to Anor Londo were memorable experiences ESPECIALLY because of that feeling of "Well, there's no convenient way back now". Something that the sequels failed to capitalize on.

It's like the good old argument against quest markers: give designers license to have unlimited and convenient access to a quest marker at any given time and you'll suddenly get a game where almost every quest is designed under the assumption that the player doesn't need much in terms of explanations and context because the marker will always be there to guide them.

Which is how you typically get some of the dullest quest design in existence. Something that plagued the modern era of triple A games. The difference between the average quest in Gothic 2, Fallout 2 or Ultima VII or in Oblivion/Skyrim can be downright baffling.
Even The Witcher 3 suffered significantly from this issue. Disabling on-screen helps and markers often left a player with hardly any context to go by and to proceed in a questline.