I'm Officially Leaving Elite: Dangerous. (Not Mad or Upset)

[MoonRacer]

This is fun, but I still would like to ride as a passenger (same with the stagecoach). Instead the train and stagecoach are time-shifting teleporters...

If people hate the 'stage coach teleporter' (because they want to teleport from where they stand), how would they react if the journey took time and forced them to watch?

In Morrowind somebody actually wrote a mod for the 'Silt Strider Travel'. Silt Striders are huge insects used as sort of coach travel all about the isle, in addition to ship travel and mage guild teleports. No fast travel at all.
Silt Strider is originally a teleport too, but the mod lets you sit on the silt strider and the strider actually walks across the land, through rivers and lakes, and so on. It is really nice, especially if you use other mods for much better graphic. But - it does cost a lot of time, so after a time I switched it off again.

 

[CMDR Pugwash]

In RDR2, you can take a train or stagecoach for fast travel. Thing is, I want to take the train and actually RIDE THE TRAIN, looking out the window and enjoying the scenery from one town to the next. AFAIK, this is not an option unless I jump on a cargo car and ride as a stowaway. This is fun, but I still would like to ride as a passenger (same with the stagecoach). Instead the train and stagecoach are time-shifting teleporters...

Yet there are tons of reviews complaining about the lack of fast travel in RDR2... It seems a lot of people in the gaming community hate traveling, which I find strange - why play a beautiful open world game if you just want to bypass that open world and jump from action scene to action scene? ED is a little bit different, as a long supercruise is just staring at space dust and the same skybox for minutes or hours at a time, which is very different than riding a horse through a beautiful landscape. Still, if I could jump to any system in the galaxy in one hop, that would lessen the game considerably. This is why I prefer ED over Space Engine - it's not about the destination but the journey.

Rdr2 has fast travel as you describe. I too was expecting to follow the journey with maybe an option to skip if you got bored. I'm sure it was like that in previous Rockstar games.

I love roaming the country. My only complaint would be that it is too busy. I feel I bump into people too much.

Back on topic, ED is about space travel. You can't accelerate time without dropping Multiplayer which ain't going to happen.

OP is on to plums.

 

[Old Duck]

If people hate the 'stage coach teleporter' (because they want to teleport from where they stand), how would they react if the journey took time and forced them to watch?

I'd like for the option to for real-time train / stagecoach ride, but I understand that fast travel in a single-player game like RDR2, Skyrim, Spider-Man, etc. is useful when IRL time is limited.

Back on topic, ED is about space travel. You can't accelerate time without dropping Multiplayer which ain't going to happen.

You wouldn't need time acceleration to 'fast travel' in a system. Frontier could just enable the ability to jump to a specific station or planet instead of popping out at the star. They could even force us to make the first trip in supercruise in order to acquire a 'quantum signature' for the station / planet we want to hyperspace to later. One 2 hour trip to Hutton Orbital, and then the rest of the visits you could just hyperspace to the orbital outside of masslock range.

That said, it's likely never going to happen, and I'm okay with that as well. There's lots of things wrong with the game, but the lack of 'fast travel' isn't one of them IMO.

 

[MoonRacer]

You wouldn't need time acceleration to 'fast travel' in a system. Frontier could just enable the ability to jump to a specific station or planet instead of popping out at the star. They could even force us to make the first trip in supercruise in order to acquire a 'quantum signature' for the station / planet we want to hyperspace to later. One 2 hour trip to Hutton Orbital, and then the rest of the visits you could just hyperspace to the orbital outside of masslock range.

The problem I see with this solution: I am doing a lot of data delivery missions at this time. (Fed/Empire Grind, don't ask). The usual procedure is, to receive the mission(s), then plot the target, launch, jump to the targets star, and travel to the station. The only chance to be interdicted is on this last leg while traveling from the targets star to the target. If you jump to the station directly, there would be only a very small window to attack. This would lead to 'sure attacks' in a certain time/space frame, and not very engaging I think. People who like to fight (not me) would suffer, but also the missions would become too easy and boring, even for people like me. Now I try to fly unpredictable and avoid interdictions or win them. Except if the attacker is really easy.

 

[Schmack]

The problem isn't fast/slow travel but too much sameness in either choice. The training wheels that should be removed as you get better actually seem to get reinforced instead. Now you rarely hear of someone dropping out of hyperspace into a star, and thargoids are optional content with "doors" you can select to experience them. Materials now have traders, no need to find the materials one by one. Even when you find them you get groups of 3. Raw mats now have large caches on distant planets where you can fill your cache at one site. It's not realistic that every element (except selenium) would exist in biological POIs all in one system, all a small grindy distance from the entry point, but on different planets like a mall for elements. But it's a game and as it ages developers start to market it more toward people don't want to grind as much to do the same tasks.

The list of training wheel aspects of this game is pretty long. Limpets are probably one aspect (one I like). Engineering is yet another. Then you have supercruise assist, assisted docking, the FSS that doesn't require you to ever leave the entry point to discover every body in the system, VO mining that completely removes the money grind, the ferry that takes people to the magical world of FSD and other module enhancements at the Guardian sites, and the enhancements themselves that turns 10 jumps into 3. The FSD charging and jumponium and a host of other QOL "training wheels" add ons.

Only the explorers who rarely come to civilized space are playing basically the same game they were since the start, minus the obligatory, crass addition of the scanning hardware that forced these folks to change up without ever having touched a man made structure.

Once players achieve the ranks and the status, they often wonder about aimlessly. The game doesn't provide a lot of extra for them to do that has any progress markers other than engineering and credits, the latter of which are in abundance.