When I’m walking around IRL, I often think how great it would be if you could skitch, jump on a horse, a bike, a motorbike, a moped, a scooter, a skateboard, rollerblades, ice skates, a passing dragon, a helicopter, a power boat, a kayak, on top of a car, the back of a moving bus / train, climb up a building, jump between buildings, hang-glide or parachute off a building, take a lift instantly to the top of a building, sprint infinitely, run on water, teleport anywhere in the world, or otherwise sprout wings and fly. All of these things are available to you in one video game or another. But no video game contains them all.
OK, so it would be odd to have rollerskates in the same game as dragons, and some of these transport options do overlap – you don’t need to be able to skitch and jump on the back of a bus. All you need basically is:
1) A way to travel long distances more or less instantly
2) A way to travel short distances quite quickly
3) A way to travel a scenic route at a decent pace
4) An autopilot travel option that follows the logic and satisfies the impatience of a human player
5) A way to spontaneously generate or easily access all of these options.
The problem with video games is they make transportation more difficult than it needs to be, under the justification that we can all have tremendous fun unlocking new ways of transporting ourselves by progressing through the game. You wouldn’t appreciate being able to walk on water if you could do it whenever you wanted, they say. The hell I wouldn’t! I can’t believe I practically had to complete Saints Row IV including all this finicky collecting malarkey before I could skip across the sea constantly like Jesus showing off to his entourage. That would have been a lot more useful to me while I was still working through the game, as opposed to after I had completed all the quests and stopped playing it.
Travelling in video games is rarely fun in and of itself, unfortunately. It can be when the game is given over to travel with no particular destination in mind, like flight simulations or driving games. These are usually specifically designed to be forgiving of mistakes you might make and are devoid of distractions en route. Sandbox games on the other hand are entirely defined by distractions and butterfly-gameplay. See a mini-game, play. See a car, take. See a man, slap. In this case, travelling is only fun for what you might see on the journey, such as a woman in a hat flying into a lamppost.
While potentially fun, you might not want to travel this way in a sandbox game, for the reason that it becomes difficult to complete any task. If you want to get from the House of Funky Chicken to the airport runway on the other side of the map, from which you intend to divebomb the men in the cat suits, you might find that the distractions are a pain that stop you from acting on your passing fancy. Attacking that armoured truck might take you off route or get you killed by law enforcement and send you to the hospital miles west of where you wanted to go. In this case, some travel options are required that serve the same purpose as in real life; to get you from point A to B as quickly and directly as possible. Happily, games invented something inaccessible to real life for this very purpose: quick-travel.
Having unveiled this great gift to gaming, developers seem surprisingly loathed to use it. You should be able to skip travelling to and from destinations of interest at any time, including when on missions, but even the most recent of sandbox box games often don’t bother putting this in. In Red Dead Redemption, you could skip to your destination while on a mission, provided it was quite a long journey. LA Noire had no distance limit, you could skip every journey that wasn’t going to become a plot point or car chase. Yet GTA IV and subsequent Rockstar games left this option out, only allowing quick travel when you weren’t playing a mission. And wherever you can quick travel, you still have to hail or phone for a cab, then pay handsomely for it.
I can’t understand what is supposed to be so interesting about driving all the way to the start of the mission, only to have the start of the mission involve driving all the way back across the map again. If I want to drive, I’ll go for a drive. I don’t need the game to lead me by the nose and give me an excuse to do it. Besides which, if I did choose to drive for the heck of it, I wouldn’t be taking along a pack of foul-mouthed ninnies that nag me every time I show up without a four-seat vehicle.
I have a friend who is anti quick travel in exploration, survival, open world and sandbox games, because he says that half the game is in the exploration. I get it, but he was specifically talking about Skyrim, which has no specific places you might want to return to just for fun; the towns may look different, but have much the same functions. GTA V on the other hand only has one golf course. That said, in the interests of reducing quick travel with its absurd loading times, I have another suggestion that would make manual travel more interesting.
Given that there is a certain inevitability to gamer diversion, reorinetation might be a good idea. For example, if you are en route and see something that takes you off-route that you want to check out, you could one-button mark the place you’re in, go off course, and teleport back to the route. This would take less time, because depending on how far you go, you won’t be skipping large chunks of the map, requiring long loading times. Alternatively, if you keep getting distracted and slightly frustrated with yourself for never being able to reach your destination, you could transfer your distance travelled to the appropriate direction.
For example, if you went two in-game miles out of your way up a backstreet, you could plop yourself two miles further along the waypoint to your destination. That way, you miss out chunks of road, which less face it are some of the less interesting aspects of an urban sandbox like GTA V. What you’ve done there is effectively picked your route from a blank slate – you’ve travelled two miles in any direction in order to get to the same location. Such is the beauty of games, you can do that. Imagine if you could travel through the Costwolds to get to London, your commute wouldn’t be so grey.
If you are against skipping about completely and avoid it if you can help it, you might sometimes like taking slow transport, like trains, or taxis without skipping the ride. These can be good for discovering new routes and places. However, first, you have to track down a station or a taxi, which takes the whim out of it a bit. I stress for the umpteenth time, sandboxes in particular are about immediate gratification. What you want is the ability to turn a common car into a cab, using an auto-pilot driving scheme. Then whenever you get sick of driving, or if you need the bathroom / to make tea, you can just leave your character in his car and come back to find yourself at the destination.
Better yet, you should be able to indicate to the game that you want it to take you on a various routes – there are always many ways to get to a place IRL, yet the gaming GPS systems tend to only take you on the most direct. Google maps has a list of routes that are progressively more “scenic”. There’s no reason why a game with a varied map shouldn’t have this ability in order to make the process of travelling to a familiar destination more interesting. It’s surprising how often in a game with gigantic scope how often you find yourself driving past the same landmarks. This is a way to avoid that.
This portion of realism is one of the few which would actually be welcome in a game. For the most part, realism is the enemy of play. It’s fun when you can move fast, crash, end up in funny positions or unexpected places, or do anything that you wouldn’t be able to do in real life. What isn’t so fun is a travail up a tall mountain at snails’ pace. I love being on top of mountains. I just don’t like the effort of walking up them, which is by all accounts rather unpleasant. It’s not an experience I wish to simulate in a video game, where the only thing slowing me down is the developer’s decision to make me slower on X terrain and faster on Y terrain. There is some idea that the game feels More Realistic Therefore Better when your character slows down and starts panting for breath while walking uphill. I’m here to tell you now: that is wrong. Most deeply, deeply wrong.
Games that are designed to incorporate fun travel – such as superhero games where the character can jump between buildings – usually incorporate puzzles, stealth play etc. into the journey so that it remains interesting. They also usually negate fall damage, recognising that it would be downright unreasonable to expect players to jump from rooftop to rooftop when a misstep means certain death. It’s a shame that games with considerably worse movement engines don’t feel the same way about it, and are instead perfectly happy to let your character hurl themselves off a cliff to their inevitable doom thanks to a random spasm that happens because of design flaws in their game.
Parkour games additionally remove the need for stamina or magic ability to perform these simple actions, instead saving that for more specialist powers. There is also a lack of items that allow you to go significantly faster, particularly ones which are easily available. A rarity among Rockstar games, Bully had a skateboard that you could carry anywhere, use anywhere, access painlessly, couldn’t run out of power, get broken or lost, had its own permanent slot so didn’t take up any pesky generalised inventory space. This was accessible from practically the beginning of the game. For impatient people, things like this are important.
In a game about cars, like GTA V, being able to hijack bicycles is more of a joke than a legitimate option. Needing to use up limited garage space for a sweet little push bike looks absurd. But, given the walking engine of a typical Rockstar game, a quick-select collapsible bicycle that was always there and never failed you would be a blessed relief for quickly navigating a small to medium sized section of the map. Too many times I found myself pitched out of a car in a blazing crash and had to jog laboriously up the mountain. A bike that can travel up hills at a decent pace with no stamina depletion (and no infernal button tapping) would have been the perfect antidote to the slightly bitter aftertaste of what was otherwise an amusing moment.
GTA V introduced the concept of having multiple characters in your control who will be controlled by the CPU when you’re controlling one of the others. In theory, this would allow you to switch between characters to swap to other sides of the map. This could have been a good thing, especially if each one had access to all the same items and money as the others. You could have had them travel independently to marked destinations while you switch away to another character, so you don’t have to be privy to that fascinating car journey.
It might have worked if the damn CPU stayed put unless otherwise instructed. But unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. They have minds of their own and somehow magically appear on the other side of the map if you switch away from them for one second. They won’t go where the waypoint is set. They lurk around inside buildings which you never wanted to go inside and have to find your way out of, accidentally walking into several closets and children’s bedrooms along the way.
Items for doubling the default running speed are incredibly useful but usually must be unlocked and come with certain drawbacks. Some games give you tools for alternative travel that are actually slower than running. Taxi cabs in GTA games will insist in playing by the rules of the road and aren’t good at getting out of tight spots, nor do they ever use their top speed, even though in theory the computer ought to be excellent at driving top speed around tight corners – a CPU within a constructed 2D world has much better spacial awareness of that environment than a human. Horses in Skyrim went so slowly they were more of a hindrance than a help – they got attacked and could be accidentally killed, and you couldn’t fight while sitting on them. What, no lancing in a classical fantasy game? No archery from horseback? No gallop-and-slash, mediaeval knight style? Scandal!
I did use Shadowmere for getting up steep mountains you can’t walk up, but often I would ambitiously take her up to the precipice of a high mountain only to fall off and kill myself. The option might as well have not been there. If you think about it, climbing mountains didn’t have to be hard at all. “Here is a Contrived Difficulty,” said Bethesda. “Now, here is a remedy for the Contrived Difficulty.” Thanks, Bethesda. Any way in which I could just, say, not have the contrived difficulty and instead use teleportation, flying or boosted jump to get up the mountain, since this is a game with magic in it? Not to mention a game with large winged beasts two metres in every direction. No?
The Red Dead Redemption horses were better but had a tendency to meander off the path or slow down whenever you were busy with something else. I don’t know why vehicles and horses can’t automatically move along an established waypoint without needing your constant supervision. I would love to not have to worry about driving while frantically shooting at some bugger trying to pop my tires with a pistol, but instead I have to juggle everything. I also wouldn’t mind being able to meander out of the room and refill the teacup, knowing that the computer has driven me slowly and safely to my destination, when I would probably have attracted the attention of the SWAT.
What about these arses who hitch a ride with you from time to time – can’t they do the driving for a change? LA Noir gave you the option of having your partner drive. Unfortunately, that’s mainly because you’d want to skip to the destination, since despite ostensibly being an open world, LA Noir wasn’t all that much to look at, beyond the novelty of being set in the time of hats and tank tops.
Sometimes I think games developers haven’t quite cracked this “Video games are supposed to be fun,” thing. “You like pretending to walk slowly up a mountain, we can tell!” they declare. “Here, have a mountain. No endorphins released here, no nasty fresh air. Just watch this man traverse slowly up a small patch of fake mountain. Forever.”
You Must Insult The Ones You Love 