Fast Travel

tim-cain system-design fast-travel random-encounters world-design rpg player-convenience game-difficulty

Abstract

Problem: Fast travel has become an expected feature in RPGs, but what does it cost the player experience, and how should designers handle it?

Approach: Tim Cain draws on his experience designing Fallout, Arcanum, and Temple of Elemental Evil — all games that deliberately excluded fast travel — and contrasts them with modern RPGs where fast travel is standard.

Findings: Fast travel makes games easier, makes worlds feel smaller and safer, and eliminates random encounters, discovery, and the meaningful passage of time. However, players now expect it, and omitting it draws complaints. Designers can mitigate the downsides through thoughtful restrictions.

Key insight: Fast travel is fundamentally an easy-mode feature that trades world immersion for convenience — designers should treat it as such and use restrictions to preserve the gameplay elements it would otherwise eliminate.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyj6X7EaBsY

Tim Cain's Games Did Not Have Fast Travel

Tim Cain's isometric RPGs — Fallout, Arcanum, and Temple of Elemental Evil — deliberately excluded fast travel. Instead, players used a world map where clicking a destination showed a travel line with visible passage of time.

This approach provided several advantages:

  • Travel time was visible — players could see it would take a day and a half to reach a destination
  • Status effects could expire naturally during travel
  • New points of interest could appear on the world map during transit
  • Random encounters could interrupt the journey, dropping players into encounter maps

What Fast Travel Eliminates

Tim identifies three major things fast travel removes from the experience:

Random Encounters

Encounters during travel make the world feel dangerous and large. These could be hostile (bandits), beneficial (traveling merchants), or mysterious (distant landmarks worth investigating). Fallout had special one-time encounters you'd miss forever if you kept moving.

Discovery

Even games that prevent fast travel to unvisited locations still break discovery. If you walk from Town A to Town B, then B to Town C, you can fast travel from C back to A — skipping everything between A and C that you've never seen. Cain's games deliberately placed discoverable content along walking routes between locations because they knew players would traverse them.

Passage of Time

Fast travel creates awkward questions about time-dependent mechanics: Do status effects wear off? Do consumable charges deplete? Does your flashlight burn through batteries during a day-long trip? If time doesn't pass, fast travel becomes teleportation. If it does, the game needs to communicate all the consequences clearly.

The Expectation Problem

Fast travel, like voice-over, local maps, quest markers, and aim assist, has become a feature players expect. Games that omit it receive complaints — and those complaints spread through reviews (including from people who never played the game). This creates pressure to include it regardless of design philosophy.

Tim notes a frustrating pattern: games that offer the option to disable fast travel still get complaints from players who leave it enabled. Sometimes these complaints are valid (the game was designed around fast travel, so turning it off breaks navigation), but sometimes players simply refuse to use the harder option and complain anyway.

A Middle-Ground Solution

Tim proposes one possible compromise: allow fast travel only to settled locations (towns, cities, villages) — never to dungeons, caves, or adventure sites.

This could be narratively supported (wagon networks, transporters) and combined with standard restrictions:

  • Can't fast travel during combat or near enemies
  • Can't fast travel while encumbered
  • Must be outdoors

The result: players still walk to adventure sites (preserving discovery and encounters) but can conveniently return to town to sell loot or end a session. The journeying to content is preserved; the tedious backtracking is removed.

Fast Travel as Easy Mode

Tim's overall position: fast travel makes games objectively easier. It's an easy-mode feature dressed up as a convenience feature. Players who use it should understand they've chosen a less challenging experience.

But like other modern conveniences, it's now expected — especially in RPGs. The designer's job is to include it while using restrictions to preserve discoverability, time passage, and random encounters as much as possible. And no matter what you decide, some players will love it and some will hate it.

References