Why the Bethesda RPGs don't allow fast-traveling from indoors?

[seppesusi]

At least from Oblivion to Fallout 4 (Fallout 76 was changed) the game doesn't allow fast-traveling from interior locations. Since there's a mod for each of the games to disable this restriction (works well based on my experience) there doesn't seem to be any technical reason. Allowing fast-travel from everywhere doesn't seemingly affect the game balance (making it possible to escape from dungeons) since the "you can't travel when enemies are near" rule is active.

 

Especially Oblivion suffers from the forced backtracking with its dungeons, but Skyrim made improvements nonetheless by usually placing an exit at the tail end.

[M48A5]

Because of the backlash they would receive from the canon mongers and immersion mongers.

[madonnagwen]

they leave it as a mod option

[Wolfstorm]

I think its for the same reason why you cant mount a horse inside it.

Fast travel implies you have a horse, or used a carriage you found in the road.

[M48A5]

I think its for the same reason why you cant mount a horse inside it.

Fast travel implies you have a horse, or used a carriage you found in the road.

This does not apply to all the Bethesda Softworks games.

[Vagrant0]

There is a technical limitation, just not one that generally applies to PC players. In Bethesda games made within Gamebryo or Creation, interior spaces were their own disconnected area. With Oblivion, there were also more worldspaces which were not physically connected to the standard world. This led to calculation issues when it would try to simulate how much time a travel action would take, and in several cases cause players to become stuck in perpetual loading screens. Much of this was eventually fixed or covered up between patches and having hardware better than the base Xbox 360. The limitation was left in with newer games because of both wanting to minimize this issue before patching, and eventually because they forgot why they added it to begin with.

Edited April 7, 2020 by Vagrant0

[HeyYou]

There were some quests in oblivion, that had you trapped in an interior cell. Beth didn't want folks to be able to simply fast-travel out of there.....

[seppesusi]

There were some quests in oblivion, that had you trapped in an interior cell. Beth didn't want folks to be able to simply fast-travel out of there.....

Do you remember which quests specifically (I can't recall the names)? Will the questline break if you fast-travel and don't have a save to revert to?

[DrakeTheDragon]

For an extreme example, when you fast travel out of the starting prison, without having finished the tutorial dungeon, over the course of which you also select your class and birth sign, i.e. define you major skills and what not, you won't be able to gain skill points or level up. I ran into it due to exiting the place right after race selection and cosmetic setup through a console command, and it took me half a day to figure out why this newest play of mine never increased its skills or was still level 1. Served me right for essentially breaking the game intentionally, even though I wasn't aware.

 

Now let's take some less extreme examples.

Say you stole something/killed someone and are locked into prison to serve your time, have your attributes damaged or the like. When you're able to just fast travel out of it, that'd be totally unimmersive.

Minor spoilers:

 

 

Being locked into the dream world or inside the painting, how would the quest be still finishable, if you just fast travel out and due to the quest being locked at its current stage can't even get back in?

 

 

There's actually quite some cases of quests where it's 1-way entrance, no way out, until you solved it. Being able to fast travel out of them would definitely break them, bar you from ever finishing them and get your rewards.

[Vagrant0]

There were some quests in oblivion, that had you trapped in an interior cell. Beth didn't want folks to be able to simply fast-travel out of there.....

Not actually that much of an issue. IIRC there were scripting methods and settings in the cell to prevent fast travel in those specific situations where the player was in a forced location.

 

Kinda like I described above, it was more of a technical and bugginess reason why it was disabled in so many cases. Have to remember, the fast travel system in Oblivion was based around the path grid, so things that were disconnected from the path grid needed some way to resolve the disconnection.