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

[CameronWhitez]

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.

Your both examples are absolutely correct as it depends upon the case and situation

[Skyjesterus]

In Oblivion some interior cells do allow fast travel (e.g. Rosethorn Hall etc). Curiously it's disallowed for the PC's other homes in the game.

[Egor17]

There are 2 reasons why fast travel is limited in all games.

 

1- A game like a book or movie is telling a story and fast travel CAN be like reading chapters out of sequence. Or the writers don't want you escaping a trap they went to all the trouble of writing onto the game just to kill you. Teach you to save your position more often. Rookie mistake!

 

2- Is technical. Computers are limited to what they are told to do. The more variables the bigger the program, the longer the load time.

You want it to look good and be fast. It's a balance. Fast travel adds a huge amount of variables. What you think of as infinite load time isn't infinite, just may take a year or a century. A lock or loop is a totally different thing. Almost all computers have protection against that now. They stop. What most call a CRASH.

 

Most often it's a variable of reason 1.