Why Fast Travel Kills the Thing You Liked

Soren Johnson, lead designer on Civilization IV, once wrote the sentence that explains most of what has gone wrong with open worlds: given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of a game. It’s the most useful thing anyone in this industry has said about player behaviour, because it forgives the player entirely and puts the whole weight on the designer. Nobody chooses the slow scenic route when the menu offers the fast one. That’s the machine working as built.

Fast travel is the purest case. It is a feature players ask for, reviewers praise, and playtests demand — and it removes, permanently, the only part of an open world that made it a world rather than a list.

What the menu is actually treating

Watch how fast travel enters a project. Late in development, playtesters report that getting from the quest giver to the quest is boring. This is true. The fix that would work is expensive: put something in the space between, and make the space legible enough that crossing it is a skill. The fix that ships is a map click.

And it works. Complaint resolved, metric improved, everyone moves on. What nobody measures is the thing the click deleted, because the deleted thing never existed to be measured. The empty middle is now permanently invisible — no playtester will ever complain about it again, because no playtester will ever see it. The feedback loop that might have forced the world to be worth crossing has been severed by the feature that was meant to fix it. The next game in the series therefore ships with a bigger empty middle and a better fast travel menu, and the one after that ships with a map covered in towers whose entire job is to populate that menu faster.

That is the mechanism. Fast travel is an anaesthetic that also blocks the nerve you needed to find the injury.

Morrowind made travel a network, and the network was the map

The reason Morrowind keeps coming up twenty years on is that Bethesda solved this once and then declined to do it again. Nostalgia gets blamed; the design record is the actual culprit.

Morrowind in 2002 has no map-click travel at all. What it has is a transport system: silt striders running fixed routes between specific towns, boats covering the coast, Mages Guild guild-guides teleporting between the guild halls in the major settlements, Propylon Indices linking the Dunmer strongholds, and the intervention scrolls and Mark/Recall spells for the gaps. Every one of those is partial. The silt strider goes where the strider goes. The boat serves ports. Almsivi Intervention drops you at the nearest Tribunal temple, which is useful precisely to the degree that you know where the temples are.

The consequence is that getting from Balmora to Ald’ruhn requires a plan, and the plan requires a mental model of Vvardenfell — which strider connects to which, where the network’s holes are, which walk you’ll have to do on foot regardless. Within a few hours you have built a topology of the island in your head, for free, as a side effect of wanting to be somewhere else. That is a map that lives in the player rather than on a screen the player checks instead.

Oblivion arrived in 2006 with click-anywhere travel and every major city unlocked from the first minute. Cyrodiil is a prettier place than Vvardenfell by every technical measure, and almost nobody has a mental model of it, because nobody ever needed one. The land became a texture between menu entries.

Dark Souls withheld it for half a game, and that half is the game

FromSoftware’s original Dark Souls gives you no warping until Anor Londo, roughly the midpoint, when Gwynevere hands over the Lordvessel — and even then it’s a limited set of bonfires, one-directional in practice for a long stretch.

Everything people love about Lordran is downstream of that restriction. Because you cannot skip the walk, the walk has to be survivable, which means the world has to be understood; because you’ll walk it repeatedly, Miyazaki’s team could build shortcuts as rewards — the lift from the parish that drops you at Firelink, the ladder that folds Blighttown back onto itself. Each one lands like a discovery precisely because the alternative was a real cost you had been paying. The level design that folds back on itself is only possible in a game that cares where you are.

Then Dark Souls II gave bonfire warping from the start, and the world’s connective tissue visibly loosened — the areas read as a menu of destinations because that’s what the traversal system made them. The team hadn’t got worse at building levels. The constraint that forced the levels to interlock had been lifted, and the levels stopped interlocking.

Elden Ring is the interesting rebuttal, and worth being fair about: it warps freely from the first hour and is still one of the great designed spaces. But look at what pays for it — Torrent, a horse with a double jump, turns crossing the Lands Between into an actual verb with actual skill, and the map is withheld as a collectible so the land has to be read before it can be summarised. The open world FromSoftware earned bought its convenience by making the journey a thing you’d choose anyway. That’s the expensive fix, shipped.

Elite charged fuel for it, and that was the whole trick

The oldest solution on my shelf is still among the best. Elite has fast travel — hyperspace, instant, across interstellar distances. It also has a jump range capped at seven light years and a fuel tank that empties, and refuelling costs money you would rather spend on cargo. So every jump is a decision with a price, and the galaxy’s shape becomes strategic: which systems chain together, which routes strand you, which detour through a dangerous economy pays for itself.

That’s fast travel done properly, in 1984, in 32K. The convenience exists and it is priced. Frontier: Elite II pushed it further by modelling the time cost too — jumps take days, cargo contracts have deadlines, and the universe that fit on a floppy made scheduling into a genuine layer of play. Neither game asks you to enjoy the travel. Both make you think about it, which is the part that actually matters.

Modern fast travel is almost always free. Free is the entire problem. A cost of any kind — currency, time, risk, a consumable, a limited network — converts a skip button into a choice, and choices are what the medium is made of.

When the road is the game

The clearest proof runs the other way. Death Stranding is a game where fast travel would delete the product, so Kojima Productions built the traversal into the mechanics until it couldn’t be skipped: load balance, terrain, the weight of what you’re carrying, and a zip-line network that players construct and share asynchronously through the Chiral Network. The infrastructure is the reward. The route you took last week is the route someone else finds, and a ladder left over a river is a message.

Shadow of the Colossus made the same wager two console generations earlier with nothing but a horse and an empty country. The rides between colossi are the whole emotional architecture — long, quiet, uninterrupted, and structurally the reason the boss rush lands as an elegy. Team Ico put nothing in the space between the fights on purpose, and the emptiness works because it’s authored. A fast travel option would have been a mercy, and it would have taken the film out of the game.

Breath of the Wild deserves credit for threading it. Nintendo lets you warp to any shrine or tower you’ve found, which is generous, and then spends the entire design budget making sure you don’t want to. The paraglider, the climb meter, the shield surf and the physics of a slope in the rain turn crossing Hyrule into a performance with its own skill ceiling — and the map you get from a tower is bare topography with no icons on it, so the interesting things stay hidden in the middle where only walking finds them. The warp is available. The land keeps winning anyway, because the land was built to.

Outer Wilds is the strictest case: a solar system on a twenty-two-minute clock, no shortcuts, everything reachable by flying there yourself. The travel time is a design constraint the entire game is built to justify, because knowing where things are — and when they’ll be there — is the actual progression system.

The honest fixes

None of this is an argument for making players walk. Walking is not a virtue and tedium is not depth. Morrowind’s real answer was to make travel a system with holes in it. Dark Souls’ was to make the walk a skill and the shortcut a reward. Death Stranding’s was to make the road the content. Elden Ring’s was to make the journey fast, expressive and worth doing under its own steam.

Every one of those costs design work. The map click costs an afternoon. That’s the entire story of why we have so many maps full of icons and so few worlds anyone can draw from memory.

So when a game offers me a fast travel menu, I read it as a note from the designer, written in the only language a feature can write in: we know. We ran out of time, or budget, or nerve, and this is the apology. Accept the apology by all means. Just notice what you were owed.