I agree, ppl always ask for no fast travel, or more immersive fast travel until they have to spend half of the game just walking around a huge map and the same places over and over again. So, you're right, Fast travel should never be removed from any game with a big map.
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.
I fully agree with all of that! Besides, the opposite of having non-immersive fast travel is not removing fast travel altogether. The game design could also make fast travel more immersive. And yes, that will probably mean having less access to it. But that could still fit in with a fun and immersive game. As an example of the point Tuco made, perhaps the game developers could make the gaming areas more lively and dynamic if players spend more time walking through them. Additionally, players could be encouraged to spend more time thinking about which routes to follow and the order of tackling quests (as you would do if the game were real). So I think anti-immersion fast travel could be countered by adding more immersion elsewhere.
