I really don’t like that you have to sacrifice 10 items (or was it that many?) to activate a Whisper just to fast travel. This feels like a completely unnecessary game mechanic that makes the game less enjoyable. Please reduce the number of items required to enable fast travel. This system is very frustrating and makes me want to stop playing. It feels bad to have such an unnecessary mechanic in the game. Maybe you could at least reduce the number of items required, or remove it entirely.
Remove the requirement where you have to sacrifice items to activate whispers in order to fast travel. Instead, we could sacrifice 10 items at a campfire to reroll one random item (weapon/armor).
I’ve already discussed this with another person before, so I’m copying and pasting the same message:
First, I’ll say that the current system of sacrificing random items sucks and offers nothing to the game, and we agree with that.
You only end up throwing away consumable items and the items to craft them, which in turn are poorly balanced and therefore useless xD.
But the idea of unlocking teleporters isn’t a bad idea in itself, it’s just been poorly implemented.
It is important to say that the developers intended to have direct teleportation only in cities. The reason is that they spent a lot of effort in making the world interconnected and full of shortcuts and therefore it does not take much time to cross it if you learn the map. The developers therefore wanted to make their interconnected map well learned by the players since they made it in such a way as to make it perfectly navigable without TP.
Despite this, there was strong feedback from players who wanted to implement fast travel, so they implemented it, but they introduced these costs because they essentially wanted to encourage players to learn the map and then upgrade all the Wispers.
In theory, this is a sensible decision, as it would be a good choice for players who are just learning how to quickly navigate the map using shortcuts, And the TP is for experienced players who have already mastered the map.
But in practice it doesn’t work like that, upgrading the whisper doesn’t require having learned the map but only sacrificing random items.
Also the devs wanted to place the empowered whispers, one at the beginning of an area and one at the end but for some reason at the end of the Nameless Pass there is no TP, and the TP of the Lowland Meadows is only one and it is in the center.
If the 2nd Nameless Pass TP is added you would actually find that navigating from the map is quite fast, and intermediate TP are not necessary, traveling starting from the TPs that have already been given to us by the devs feels good, the only TP that is missing is the one at the end of the Nameless Pass.
This is the TP that is missing from the End of Nameless Pass:
I think it would make more sense if the intermediate TPs were unlocked with story events or in any case in a different system that guarantees that the player has actually learned the map or at least had time to do so rather than the current system.
(the other interlocutor also spoke about other games as a comparison)
As for Elden Ring and Zelda, they are very different games when it comes to re-exploring the map, the only reason you return to an area you’ve already completed in those games is to talk to an NPC (and other things but they happen rarely), while in NRFTW re-exploring an area is very incentivized.
The NRFTW map is more similar to the Dark Souls 1 map than the Elden Ring map, and is completely different from Zelda BOTW & TOTK map, In size, Interconnections, verticality and traversal speed.
If it helps you visualize the thing better: imagine riding around on a horse in Elden Ring and Zelda, and try to imagine the same thing in NRFTW and Dark Souls, it wouldn’t work very well and wouldn’t make much sense.
This is the link if you want to see the rest of the discussion: Feedback, de/buffs - #10 by Lombix_4