Hello!
I have been seeing a lot of discussion regarding the fast travel system in No Rest for the Wicked and that some people aren’t enjoying the fact that you can only travel to your last visited whisper. I am personally really enjoying the approach Moon Studios are taking with the world building and short cuts that are meant to mitigate the need for fast travel, but I have an idea that may please the audience that think you should be able to fast travel to more places then just the last visited.
What if the whispers had kind of a queue system in which your X(number) last visited whispers were to appear. And if you were to interact with a whisper not currently in the queue, the first one in would leave the queue of possible fast travel destinations. This way players would be able to sidetrack from their quest/adventure without feeling like they are losing progress in that certain area. This would allow users to have multiple “anchor points” available in the world while still not compromising on the vision of a living world that you are supposed to explore over and over again.
Lets say players start off with only one slot in the queue. But using Plague ichor you could increase the amount of slots in your queue. I feel like the maximum amount of available slots should be quite low. A maximum of four maybe?
One problem I see with this approach is that players will keep certain whispers on rotation in their queue because of their geographical value. Lets imagine that a whisper XYZ is the one to leave your queue the next time you interact with another whisper. The player will teleport to whisper XYZ just to put in the last place of the queue so that it wont leave the queue. But maybe the system shouldn’t allow for players to re-queue whispers and they just keep their original position?
I was also considering that the whispers could be available for fast travel for a set amount of time after they were interacted with. But after further thought I realized it is a bad idea because it would incentivize players to travel to all their whispers to keep the fast travel timers topped up. And while I am okay with timers in the game that reward you at the end, I don’t think there should be timers that require constant attention otherwise you will be punished (because all of your whispers would be reset).
I hope these ideas can spark further discussions within the community and the dev team.