Quick Travel
Ways for players to move between different places in a game world without visiting the intermittent places.
Many games make players move through their game worlds. While this makes it easy to structure the gameplay in relation to challenges and surprises, moving back and forth can become tedious. Quick Travel solves this by providing various ways of letting players instantaneously move from one part of the game world to another.
Contents
Examples
Game masters of tabletop roleplaying games such as Paranoia and Hârnmaster often invoke Quick Travel to skip having to play through uninteresting section with the players. Players may also be able to do this as various forms of teleportation actions.
Super Mario Bros. contains hidden warp pipes that players can use to skip ahead to levels several steps ahead.
Torchlight provides Portal scrolls that allow players to open short cuts to the safety of the town where loot can be sold and new supplies can be bought. All games in the Elder Scrolls series but Morrowind have Quick Travel options to already visited areas through the map of the game world (Morrowind has it through hired transport and magical devices).
The Nether world in Minecraft provides a form of Quick Travel in that each step taken there represents several in the main game world and players can take shortcuts by entering and exiting it.
Using the pattern
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Quick Returns are a special case of Quick Travel to avoid the Grinding of having to travel linearly through already explored areas of Game Worlds.
Games divided into Levels which are not immediately adjacent to each other automatically make use of Quick Travel.
Diegetic Aspects
Cut Scenes are often used, even if they only present static images (as for example Oblivion does), to provide a rationale for the travelling that can be used to maintain Diegetic Consistency.
Interface Aspects
Optional Interfaces of Game World maps can be used as a way of masking the transition between the different places linked by Quick Travel. This is done for most games in the Elder Scrolls series as well as for Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas.
Narrative Aspects
Consequences
Quick Travel changes Game Worlds by letting players travel in them without visiting a continuously series of places between them. For games where such travel is possible, Quick Travel offers a Freedom of Choice to avoid what easily can be a form of Grinding.
Relations
Can Instantiate
with ...
Can Modulate
Can Be Instantiated By
Can Be Modulated By
Cut Scenes, Optional Interfaces
Possible Closure Effects
Potentially Conflicting With
History
New pattern created in this wiki.
References
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Acknowledgements
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