For the same reason I have decided I don't like fast travel in games. The whole thing becomes this strange distorted reality where the travel nodes and their immediate surroundings are over represented in your mental model but most of the rest of the map is blank. Now I don't think games should get rid of their fast travel systems But I find that enjoy the game world a lot more without them and think every one should try.

The first time I did this was the breath of the wild zelda game, I got to the point in the tutorial where they teach you to fast travel and said, "no I don't want to" so I spent the whole game slow traveling around, planing my trips enjoying the scenery finding new routes , Just bumming back and forth across the map enjoying the game and all it's corners in small slices each night, it took me a couple months to get complete and it was great.

My current phase of this madness is Valheim with no portals and no map. and wow it is an experience. With no map you get this hyper distorted view of the landscape the other way around, it is still based on what you can navigate easily but stuff like shorelines and terrain features are over represented and forests are these scary black boxes. Fog is very very scary, more than once fog has rolled in and I got so lost that I have had to say "well I guess I am living here now." I am currently having fun trying to figure out how to use the in game tools as surveying instruments to make my own hand drawn maps.

The hardcore mode of Kingdom Come: Deliverance really made me appreciate the game (although that's the only way I played it). It became a very immersive experience.

Valheim without a map would be a bit too much for me. No way to quickly escape to some safe green pastures sounds too stressful :).

> For the same reason I have decided I don't like fast travel in games.

I was playing Wing Commander, Privateer way back when (mid-1990's) and didn't realize that there were ways to travel faster. So I did the obvious: I pretended I was a trader on a long haul route, dug out some books and notebooks, and just did whatever until I arrived at my destination or was attacked by pirates. I loved the passive game play in the moment, but I didn't realize how much until about a decade later. That kinda ruined gaming for me in general since games tend to keep the player busy (even if they aren't action games).

In some respects, I think that slow travel offers a sense of authenticity to the game. Well, I should say to some games. Many games set out goals for players. It's obvious why. If there is nothing to accomplish, there is little sense of accomplishment. Yet goals also ruin things in my mind since there is an urgency to get things done to see what the outcome is. Of course, games also reward following up on that urgency. That's contrary to real life where you may be rewarded or you may have to wait upon the rewards.

Valheim does that so well. The feeling of walking through an unfamiliar forest and stumbling across a faint trail that you made weeks ago, knowing that it will eventually lead you back to your old base and thus back to where you were trying to get to before you got lost…

Reading the Reddit for the game, filled with people complaining that the portal system is too restrictive and forces them to make upwards of three long boat trips over the course of the game is a bit sad. It’s as though they expect the fun to happen when they finish everything, but the fun all happens while you’re actually playing the game.

I do agree, playing open world games without fast travel can be a bit of a slog though. I considered playing Skyrim without fast travel but many of the quests make you run half way across the map and back multiple times.

Without fast travel you’d be forced to plan your trips more and bundle all the tasks in an area which would be cool. But it’s probably too much to ask for the general public who will see it as annoying.

I'm thinking of the The Forest survival game. The first one in the series was great.

The successor game added an in-game compass/radar which detracted from the immersion, made the world feel small and boring.