Starfield is a reminder that fast travel is interesting and often weird

A look at fast travel in games like Starfield.

is the sort of game that starts conversations, and one of the conversations I've been hearing a lot over the last few days has to do with fast travel. This is one of those elements of games that has become so common as games have gotten bigger that it can be easy - for me at least - to overlook how interesting it is in the first place.

I've only played a bit of Starfield so far, but I've started to realise that fast travel is intoxicatingly simple here. You're on a planet and you can fast travel to your ship and then jet into space and pick a route to the stars. Or, I think you can often just stand on a planet, pull up the menu, and jet yourself somewhere else without bothering to head to the ship first.

Starfield, and other games like it, goes in the other direction. Space is huge, but because it's so huge you need to use fast travel to essentially hypertext your way around it. On the plus side, lots of quests and side-quests! On the negative side, there can be a loss of immersion, of the feeling that you're really in space, blasting off, landing, flicking those overhead switches space pilots love to use.

In this way I'd argue that, well deployed, fast travel can open up the imaginative space of a game in interesting ways. You are your avatar for most of the game, but now and then, when you're fast travelling, you have to imagine your avatar moving through unseen space without you.

We have summarized this news so that you can read it quickly. If you are interested in the news, you can read the full text here. Read more:

eurogamer /  🏆 68. in UK

Australia Latest News, Australia Headlines

Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.

Looks like dogs may be extinct in StarfieldIt seems our canine companions are a thing of the past in Starfield.
Read more »

What time does Starfield release on PC and Xbox on Wednesday?Starfield will be launching all over the globe this week
Read more »

Intel's new Starfield GPU driver hotfix still has a host of problemsThe new driver sorts out Starfield load times, and some instability and texture issues, but admits there is still work to be done.
Read more »

Starfield review - a stellar effortAfter over 70 hours with Bethesda's new 25-years-in-the-making space-faring RPG, here's our Starfield review.
Read more »