Opinions on Fast Travel?

[Sneakimus]

Hey, having played some Survival Mode lately, I have been thinking about the effects of Fast Travel in the game, and I'd like to start a discussion about if possible.

In Survival Mode, there were a lot of things I enjoyed. Such as the combat system, which was was in general an improvement over vanilla and actually felt exciting, even if enemies became a bit more bullet-spongy at the later levels.

One of the things that I never quite came over was the removal of Fast Travel.

While it was interesting the first few trips, the lack of fast travel became very quickly a chore, especially as the game itself seems to revolve around you setting up a settlement and sticking to it, rather than being more of an independent character who can roam from place to place, keeping most of their important stuff in a bag.

Given the high component requirement, crafting typically required you to set up a home base in order to craft effectively.
This meant a lot of backtracking. A lot. Which in term limited the roaming element as well.

Long story short, I was very happy I had queued up a load of audio-books for those long, protracted trips!

This lead me to conclude however that Fast Travel is sort of required if the game features heavy base and settlement building, though is less necessary if the game is more exploratory and does not require returning to old grounds(repeatedly).


I managed to fix what I didn't like with mods, but I think it's still interesting in terms of game design.

What are you guys' opinion on Fast Travel in general?

[Neutralize]

I used to play without it enabled on Survival. Now on my current playthrough, I have it on.

My thoughts?
Well, it definitely is less immersive and doesn't lend to promoting exploration. It takes a bit of the danger out of running around. Even moreso if you also enable and use quicksaves and manual saves (I do, but mainly to avoid glitches and crashes, not to abuse to avoid deaths).

But then it's also a big time saver. And unfortunately, the vanilla spawning system for Survival means you're going to be running around with not a whole Hell of a lot going on once you clear areas. Sure you might encounter the random patrol, but even then it's not too common. You'll spend a lot of time using auto-run and sprinting through empty, barren, boring space. It inflates playtime but really is it time you're spending having fun? I guess if you like taking the scenic route, maybe. Me personally, I've pretty much seen it and done it after a thousand hours, so I don't feel the need to run all the way from Diamond City to Sanctuary and eat up fifteen minutes every damn time.

So I figure it's nice to use to kind of accelerate your gameplay and get to points where you can do what you want to do. It makes building up and defending settlements much less of a hassle. I think also with personal needs added in, it also balances well enough in most regards, since it will cost you food, water, exhaustion, and potentially medicine to be constantly warping around. So I tend not to use it for things like being a total loot ♥♥♥♥♥ and emptying out places (kind of diminishes the point of reduced weights and loot value in Survival, imo).

In the end it's a single player game, and while it does change the dynamic of the game balance in Survival to a degree, that's really your call and choice as to if or how you want to use it. The purists may becry it, but I'd wager a lot of them also use stuff like sleeping bag mods, imbalanced tac-cool modern weapon mods, backpacks, other rebalances, etc. So, ya know, "It's your thing, do what you wanna do."

[H.Honor]

pretty sure you can still fast travel with factions vertibird or institute teleporter

[s.turner3030]

I never had any problems with fast travel, it takes game time to do so which is fair enough, I simply consider it as the player traveling from point a to point b by the safest, road route actively avoiding encounters, see a bunch of wild dog then you go around them, if I was traveling myself then I would go out of my way to kill them, loot is loot afterall and I tend to take it all.

[Neutralize]

Originally posted by H.honor:

pretty sure you can still fast travel with factions vertibird or institute teleporter

To an extent, yeah. Though it's not really the same thing, and is limited by your progress/faction choices/limited usage resources (flares for Vertibirds).

I tried using a cool mod one time that added teleportation devices to settlement building. I thought it was balanced kind of nicely and implemented well, overall, but was unfortunately just a bit buggy so I 86'ed it for my current playthrough. Shame there isn't anything like that in the vanilla game's workshop system.
Maybe CC someday? Bethesda? Or are we going to get another Power Armor skin instead?

[White Knight]

There are three methods of "fast travel", as I understand it:

Using the Pip-Boy to navigate.
BOS Vertibird (or Air Taxi service).
Institute's Molecular Relay (teleporter).

The first is not actually "fast travel" at all. It just resolves the long journey quickly for the player's benefit - the character still has to take the time to walk. Time passes while you "fast travel" in this way. This is also the only method that is disabled in survival mode.

The Air Taxi is the next best thing. This allows you to travel without effort in much less time by flying over the terrain. Door to door service...mostly.

The Institute's teleportation is the only true "fast travel" available. Point to point, instantaneous travel. You just have to use the Institute as a hub en route to your destination.

None of them is mandatory and relying on mods or cheats to bypass the restrictions of survival mode sounds pretty weenie to me.

...since you asked, and all.

[Nemund]

Hangmans alley.
If you want to make survival without fast travel more interesting get a mod that increases respawn rate. The problem with survival is that respawn is very slow so that once you kill a cell, it stays dead for about a fortnight in game, and if you re-enter it during that time, it resets the timer again as well.
So you end up with a very dead feeling wasteland.

[Mringasa]

I like Fast Travel for an initial playthrough, maybe a 2nd. Once those are out of the way though, and I have a feel for the game world, I walk or use local transport that's available. You can experience more of the world that way, and Beth's worlds are always huge and full of things to discover. Well worth the time invested into it without using Fast Travel.