Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback A Note on Waypoints

Regardless of the fact that you have to "walk there" at least one time to find the way point (so it didn't completely circumvent traveling and making the world feel smaller) and the fact that teleporting in rpgs has been a staple for years, the earliest I can remember is the Ultima series in the the 80s and 90s with the moonstones.

Hell in Ultima 6 you get the moonstone at the start of the game and if you knew how to use it, you could teleport to every major city without having to travel there ever.

What made that game more believable to me was that it was mysterious, it didn't explain itself in game or it's functions, and you had to map out where it would teleport you on your own (hell this game made 2 different written languages and made you learn it to read road signs and parts of the game manual and map).

Back to BG3, it is added to the lore that there are magical runes place in specified areas which allows teleportation. You have to discover it at least once.

There are times I don't use fast travel in games because the area I need to go to is between hubs, or I want to interact with a npc on the road somewhere, or if I am doing an escort quest and the game does not allow fast travel for the NPC because it would break the story/quest.

Other times I use fast travel excessively, because the game is meant to be played. I am over long loading times, and empty travel, or filler experiences. Gaming has become objective based for me, while previously it was discovery based. Every first run through of a game is still discovery based, but as I learn what I want to do, I just want to get it done without a bunch of buffers in the way.

So the question is: Are you playing the game to wander around aimlessly? Or are you playing the game to complete an objective?
One of those two will like fast travel and the other will not.

There is actually a flee mechanic in Dos2 that let's you fast travel mid combat. You have to be a certain distance from an enemy, unless you took the Escapist talent which let's you flee from anywhere. It's not something I would use, but it's there.

It's done nicely in Solasta.

Fast travel animates party moving at high speed on the map and if walking to a marker would not be possible (e.g. blocked path), it just doesn't allow you. Also when walking through dangerous areas, it interrupts fast travel.

Again the elitist idea that fast travel is for "new age" "kids" "not real gamers" is flawed, as fast travel has been in games since the 80s and 90s. This sense of "us" vs "them" needs to go away.

You are not a better/more knowledgeable gamer because your games took longer to play.

Complexity from obscurity was mostly how older games played due to bad flow and poor feedback mechanisms. Additionally the advent of readily available information on the internet and "crowd sourced" wiki faqs to explore mechanics and game logic has helped better inform gamers today. Just because we were confused and clueless does not mean our games of old were more complex...they were actually really simple but often tedious for the sake of lengthening content. Data limits made the "actual" game very short, but random encounters and travel restrictions help lengthen a play time.

These are often in place so that there is something to do in a game that has very little content because it was on a couple of floppy disks or maybe a CD ROM. The idea has carried over to inhibit the player in tedium instead of actual content to play to this day. Sometimes that tedium is engaging and "fun"...other times it is not and just exactly that, tedious.

Today, however, we have drastically more space on a hard drive to make these huge games with hours of dialog, plot branches, 3d rendered/textured models, fully immersive worlds, online interaction hooks, full scale musical scores....or just a pixel art game but with more bells and whistles that an old cartridge or floppy disk game couldn't handle.

So again, we have "more content" so we need "less filler", is generally the idea that we as gamers should be asking for in games today.

I acknowledge that sometimes people like filler though...so to each their own.

Way to miss the point...