"Welcome to the V.S.S. Seaskipper, from Seasail Enterprises! There's nothin' better than Seasail if you're lookin' to travel! Just hop on the boat and buy a pass so you can get goin' to almost anywhere on the ocean!"
— The Seaskipper Captain, Wynncraft
Many games are designed so that in order to advance the plot, you have to trek to some godforsaken place miles from where you started. Then, inevitably, you have to head back to the starting point. And then to some other place and back, etc, until the game has reached the 40+ hours promised on the box.
Kind game designers will mitigate this headache by adding gameplay elements to shorten travel times. These usually revolve around getting the character onscreen to the next visible area in a quicker manner, by speeding up their movement animation or skipping the transition entirely. This would be unfair in any game where speed is important, of course, but it can be convenient in Role-Playing Games, Adventure games, or in neutral areas of more action-based games, such as shops. The most common form is probably what's known as Dash Mode, usually a button which is held down to make the character run. This may require a special item, and may have a limit, though.
This is always Gameplay and Story Segregation. The teleportation here has no bearing on the plot; its only purpose is to reduce player fatigue. It can become a problem, however, if the player becomes overreliant on it and constantly skips over an area where something plot-critical has changed, or overlooks some detail of a particular room because they never spend any time there.
Sub-trope of Reduced-Downtime Features. Compare Door to Before, a shortcut to a previous location, Global Airship, a vehicle that can get you to any part of the world map quickly, Warp Whistle, an in-game teleportation device between fixed areas, Sprint Shoes, an item required to make Dash Mode work and Fast-Forward Mechanic, used to skip through In-Universe Game Clock. See also Run, Don't Walk, a tendency in later games for characters to just run everywhere.
Examples:
- Dark Chronicle allowed transportation to key areas from the pause menu.
- A facet of Friday the 13th that the game doesn't really advertise is that, by entering a small cabin, you can hit Start to return to the character selection screen, as each counselor occupies a random cabin in real time. This can be useful for when Jason is attacking someone all the way across the map from you, letting you reach the victim faster, or even allowing the victim to fight Jason off him/herself.
- Whether traveling the vast expanse of the overworld or exploring its many dungeons, backtracking is a given in The Legend of Zelda. Thankfully, many games in the series afford Link faster means of travel; such as on horseback, or the Goron roll or Bunny Hood in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. There are also numerous Warp Whistles.
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has the Pegasus Boots. With them, holding a button causes Link to charge forward at considerable speed, pushing aside or destroying enemies and obstacles and continuing until he leaves the screen, hits a wall, or is damaged mid-sprint.
- The series even has these in multiple tiers. First something that lets you go between a few specific locations (like, A Link To The Past has whirlpools that lead to specific other whirlpools, accessible once you get the Zora Scale) followed some time later by something that's an express flight to every major area (such as the original Warp Whistle, the bird in A Link to the Past, and the warp songs in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. )
- The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword substitutes rolling for an actual dash button. However, it's not infinite and drains the stamina meter. Certain locations have Stamina Fruit that refill the stamina meter, allowing Link to run along certain routes continuously.
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: You can use the Sheikah Slate to instantly teleport to any Towers and Shrines you’ve found and registered, as well as the Shrine of Resurrection. The Master Trails DLC adds the obtainable Travel Medallion, which allows you to place a travel point anywhere in the overworld, but only one at a time.
- Fast travel was introduced in Assassin's Creed II as a response to the really open but also really empty field the first Assassins Creed took place in. The game tries to justify this as "carriage services" or "secret tunnels".
- In the Diablo expansion Hellfire, the character's walk speed is doubled while in town. In the sequel, you can run in towns without depleting the Run meter.
- In the Metroid series, most of Samus' acquired items/weapons can destroy giant clusters of blocks that compose some areas one would normally have to take a long path around. The most notable are the Speed Booster, the Screw Attack and the Power Bombs.
- Done almost literally in Tomb Raider (2013), where one of the many doors to before is a zipline.
- Muramasa: The Demon Blade allows you to warp to shrines scattered throughout the world map upon beating the game with a character. There's also an item called the bronze mirror that is a free warp to any shrine, but can only be used once before it breaks.
- Tales of Symphonia often lets you "quick jump" through a dungeon you have already traversed when you have to go back to its final room for plot reasons. One time you aren't given the option Lloyd gets amusingly frustrated about it in a rare moment of Breaking the Fourth Wall (the actual reason is that you have to trigger a cutscene on your way out of a dungeon).
- In Warframe, opening the menu while in friendly areas (your orbiter, clan dojo or relays for example) allows for quick travel to local points of interest.
- Alida The Enigmatic Giant, inspired by Riven, has a similar "Rocket Mode".
- Cragne Manor: Reading a book you can get early in the game and solving the cipher gives you access to a command you can use to open up a fast travel system. It makes use of the train stations; you have a schedule where colors correspond to different locations, and from anywhere, you can type "wait for [color] station" to instantly go there.
- In The Curse of Monkey Island, double-clicking an exit would take Guybrush there instantly, which is considerate because he walks very slowly. Later games switched to a 3D format and a corresponding change in controls, replacing the teleportation with a Dash Mode (but in Escape from Monkey Island you can leave the room you're in immediately by pressing O).
- The Longest Journey would allow you to skip a few frames of April's walking animation every time you pressed escape. Thus, entering a screen, clicking the place you want to go and mashing the escape button would get you there significantly faster.
- Myst is the Trope Namer here. If you were at the end of a linear series of rooms, certain hotspots would turn the cursor into a lightning bolt, letting you back to the beginning of the chain instantly. In the last two games, you would also be given thumbnails of hub areas so that you could get from one part of the game world to another easily.
- Sierra's Point-and-Click SCI Engine games generally had the ability to adjust the character's walk speed up to a very fast rate, including installments of King's Quest, Space Quest, Gabriel Knight, Police Quest, and Quest for Glory.
- In at least some of the Leisure Suit Larry games, double-clicking on an exit will make Larry walk at hyperspeed.
- In Toonstruck, right-clicking on a previously visited doorway will make Drew instantly enter the area it leads to.
- In Wrath of the Gods, waystations could be found throughout the countryside that would fly the main character via dragon to another location. This was a somewhat impractical method, however, as dragon flights cost money which was hard to come by in the game. There were also shortcuts through the underworld.
- Borderlands has the Fast Travel network, which is a system that lets you instantly travel to any region you previously visited so you don't have to walk the entire way. The sequel retains Fast Travel and also added a one way version (colored in yellow and signified by a "No U-Turn" mark) where you can teleport out of the area you're in, but you can't go back to it unless you walk there again.
MMORPG
- In Final Fantasy XIV, you can either use the Aethernet system to warp to another tuned Aethernet crystal for a fee, or use one of the Chocobo Porters to ride from the central hub to visited settlements and vice versa.
- In Guild Wars, you can travel, at will, instantly to any public area that your character has yet visited, making it unnecessary to trek there more than once.
- In Ragnarok Online:
- Kafra employees offer teleport service that allows instant travel between towns.
- Butterfly Wings, a consumable item that allows instant travel from anywhere to your save point.
- Warp Portal, an acolyte skill, allows instant travel to save point or any 3 memo locations for up to 8 players.
- Colored cash shop butterfly wings allows instant teleport to any town in a certain region.
- Cash shop dungeon teleport scrolls allow instant teleport to most dungeons in the game.
- Shin Megami Tensei IMAGINE:
- Traesto and Traesto Stones, a skill and a consumable item (respectivelly) that teleport you to your home point. The skill has an awfully long incantation time, but a specific equipment reduces it to zero.
- Ariadne's Thread, a consumable item that lets you teleport to any place in the game world, and is even used by NPC's after some of the main quests so you don't have to walk all the way back to the main quest giver NPC.
- The Home Points in every town (except Protopia) can be used as teleportation devices. However, the ones in Home III and Shinjuku Babel can only be used once a day (and Home III can only teleport to Shinjuku Babel, and vice-versa), and you need to pay 50,000 Macca everytime you want to use the teleport function in Arcadia and Souhonzan.
- World of Warcraft
- Everyone has a hearthstone used to teleport back to an inn in various quest hubs. This was extended in Warlords of Draenor to include a garrison hearthstone and then in Legion to a Dalaran hearthstone, meaning many players will have three different hearthstones to carry around.
- You can pay to fly yourself from city to city (as long as you've visited enough cities or reached a high enough level to unlock the "flight path"). This system is restricted to given set paths, unlike the flying mounts instituted later.
- The Pandaria expansion hub usually also has one-way portals to every capital, and the main capital of each faction (Stormwind/Orgrimmar) also have portals to the other capitals as well as portals to the Cataclysm expansion zones that can be unlocked fairly easily, since these were scattered all over Azeroth. Some classes also have some teleportation options of their own, most notably mages.
- Wynncraft has several methods of transportation that helps the player move around the map at a faster rate, most of which are usually unlocked after completing a certain quest.
- The Seaskipper allows the player to get to certain parts of Wynncraft's ocean without having to swim, though the player usually has to pay a fee to get to some places. The locations the player can travel to are also limited depending on where the player is travelling from. To give an example, travelling from Selchar allows the player to go to every location that the Seaskipper allows while travelling from a place like Nemract only lets them go to a handful of areas.
- Arcanum has a number of fast-travel options, but they're all limited somehow:
- The train network lets you go to Tarant, Black Root and Ashbury, but not if you have the dog as one of your followers (and why wouldn't you?). Note that this isn't mentioned when buying the tickets, so you can only get partially refunded in addition to the whole rigamarole of "do you have a mage in your party" that happens every single time you take it.
- Once you Get on the Boat, you can only go to Tarant, Ashbury, Black Root and Caladon.
- Map fast-travel is the main method of exploration and travel, but is often interrupted by bandits and assassins (on the other hand, said interruptions are handy for getting gear than can be sold for decent prices). Travelling on foot is theoretically possible, but would take an absurd number of hours in real-time.
- Tulla has a portal room, but it's only available to mages.
- Cthulhu Saves the World's pause menu has a teleport option which lets you instantly teleport to any previously visited town at no cost (other than having to walk all the way through any dungeon you just teleported out from).
- Dragon Age:
- In Dragon Age: Origins, party members told to hold position will later teleport to your controlled character's location when taken off hold (if they are far enough away). Since you can change which character you control at any time, this can make for some easier exploring and backtracking in some areas, though it is disabled in combat. Even more strangely, however, a rogue can stealth through groups of enemies and then teleport his allies to his location. All this despite being told that there is no such thing as teleportation in-universe.
- In all three games released so far, you can travel between zones through icons on the global map, at almost any time, except during combat and story missions. Dragon Age: Inquisition also adds fast travel within zones — between Inquisition camps, keeps, and some landmarks (usually settlements).
- The Dragon Quest series has the Zoom spell and the Chimaera Wing item, both of which teleport you to any previously visited town or castle. In the ninth game, Zoom is even free of MP cost to cast, though only the hero can learn it.
- EarthBound (1994) has the PSI Teleport spell, used by Ness and Poo, which allows you to go back to any location in the game that you've been to previously. Ness at first only has access to the Alpha variant of the spell, which requires you to do a running start in order to teleport, but gains access to PSI Teleport Omega after completing Magicant. (Poo has access to PSI Teleport Omega when he joins the party, and is in fact how he joins the party.)
- Etrian Odyssey games offer several alternatives: the most seen of these are Ariadne Threads or Warp Wires, which will outright take you back to town from wherever you are in the labyrinth. Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan also has Silver Whistles, which instead take you to the dungeon's entrance. And Etrian Odyssey and its remake The Millennium Girl have the Floor Jump mechanic: once you've fully mapped a floor and reached the descending staircase, you can easily teleport between every fully mapped floor's stairs.
- Persona 4 lets you skip to nearby areas by pressing the square button. This feature was in turn brought over to Persona 3 in its Portable re-release, which originally only limited fast travel (to a limited number of places) by talking to a particular student in the protagonist's classroom.
- All Infinity Engine games had the issue of characters taking very long to leisurely walk across vast locations, so Planescape: Torment added the option to make all characters run while not in combat. It was enabled by default.
- Pokémon has the moves Fly and Teleport, which can instantly take you to any or the last previously visited Pokémon Center respectively. Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire have upgraded Fly so you can drop off on any route as well.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 1 allows you to skip to certain locations, called "landmarks", that you have discovered.
- Xenoblade Chronicles X features many landmarks across the world to Fast Travel to, to the point where nearly half the hex grids on any continent's given map have warp spots in them. The game counters this by making the process of exploration both the entire point of the game and a game-long reward in itself, so that players will sometimes still want to take the long way around even though they don't have to.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 2 allows you to fast travel at almost any time, even at times when you'd expect not to be able to due to story reasons.
- Splatoon enables players to skip swimming to the front-lines by Super Jumping to any of their allies. Players have to be strategic though; your landing spot is clearly marked for enemies to camp unless you have equipment that negates it, the jump can be sped-up by using certain gear, and certain weapons come with the "Squid Beakon" deployable item that can be selected as a landing spot for the rest of the team.
- The main Danganronpa games let you teleport anywhere in the map, though it's disabled or restricted at some points in the plot. This is discouraged in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, because taking steps allows you to increase your levels and raise a Virtual Pet.
- Virtue's Last Reward and its sequel Zero Time Dilemma allow you to jump between diverging points of the story. This was a response to Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, where you had to tediously play the game multiple times trying to unlock the true ending. Most importantly, this mechanic also serves as a plot device.
- The Elder Scrolls:
- The series in general has had fast travel since Arena. Daggerfall allows you to fast travel to any location right away, but Oblivion and Skyrim require you to visit a location before you can fast travel there. (Skyrim also has carriages that will, for a price, take you from any major city to any other major city to make it easier.)
- Morrowind is an exception, as it lacks fast travel. It does have it in the form of ride services like Silt Striders (giant native insects which have been lobotomized and are "driven" by manipulating exposed muscle tendons. Passengers ride in the beast's hollowed-out shell), boats along the coasts, and by the Mages Guild "Guild Guide" service (instant teleportation between Mages Guild halls). Additionally, the spells "Divine Intervention" and "Almsivi Intervention" will teleport you to the nearest Imperial shrine and Tribunal temple, respectively. The Mark and Recall spells are similar, allowing you to set a "Mark" and then "Recall" to that spot. Useful for traveling long distances when no fast travel is available, getting out of a sticky situation in a hurry, or for transporting more loot than you could carry on foot.
- Fallout:
- Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas use the same travel system as their Bethesda Elder Scrolls sister series, but there aren't any passenger services to make the initial visit to locations easier. New Vegas has a single exception in the NCR monorail between Camp McCarron and the eponymous city, but only between those two locations.
- Fallout 4 in standard mode uses the same system as its predecessor games. Once you've advanced far enough in the main quest, you can call for a Brotherhood of Steel vertibird or use the Institute's teleportation system to much more quickly traverse the Commonwealth. In Survival Mode, standard fast travel is disabled, making these the only methods for getting around quickly. Thankfully, if you choose to destroy the Brotherhood in the main quest and side against the Institute, whoever you work with out of the Railroad or Minutemen will take over vertibird services with one captured from the Brotherhood.
- Starting from Grand Theft Auto IV, you can have a taxi take you to whatever part of the map you want to go to either for a price (if you're using the regular, yellow taxis driving around Liberty City), or for free if you've maxed out Roman's friendship level (which includes going bowling with him).
- Grand Theft Auto V has the Taxi already added to your contacts from the start, allowing you to take a cab to wherever you'd like for a price. Unlike GTA IV, however, you'll always have to pay for your fare every time (unless you're Franklin and you buy the Downtown Cab Co side business, anyway).
- In L.A. Noire, you can make your NPC partner drive you to the next important location; after any plot-relevant conversations have played out, you automatically arrive.
- Minecraft has railroads, teleporting Ender Pearls, and Nether Portals. It's worth noting however that the Railroads have to be set-up manually, Ender Pearls need to be thrown and have a habit of teleporting you far above your intended destination causing fall damage, and Nether Portals mean you have to navigate through the Nether, a hell-like dimension. This can be utilised by setting two Portals in the real world first, and then trekking through the Nether, which is often more dangerous than just trekking through the regular world.
- The first two Saints Row titles have this in the form of the Taxi Service. By calling the number on a taxi (like you would in Real Life, so you might want to find a Taxi first or hit up the Saints Row Wiki for the in-game numbers), you can have a Taxi come pick you up and take you wherever you want in Stilwater for a reasonable price. The 2022 Reboot succeeds this with a clever implementation of the game's Photo Mode. Simply taking a picture of Santo Ileso's landmarks (which are marked for you on the map this time around) unlocks new points for you to warp to or respawn at when you die.
- Shadow of the Colossus warps you back to the starting shrine after defeating each boss. It otherwise has no system of fast travel.
