I'm in agreement with Walpknut that I think removing Fast Travel in Hardcore mode is better than having it. Also, if you didn't bring enough supplies to end up that situation anway, it's kind of your fault.
Something simple like being able to pay to hitch on with a Caravan would have worked fine as an in-lore method of fast-travel.
I have to point out that what players refer to as 'fast travel' is an out-of-game menu option; it's meta-play. The player elects not to sit through the [likely boring and tedious] trip. There is a
mod for Morrowind that actually displays trips by silt-strider in real time; it is the very opposite of so-called "fast travel".
The root of this is the "If I don't see it, it didn't happen" mentality. As if seeing a show's protagonist leave the house for work, and then —suddenly— arrive at the office really meant that their commute didn't happen; that they must live across the hallway from work; that they didn't just drive for 30 minutes, because it only took 3 seconds for them to get there!
Consider the The Witcher, when Geralt first leaves Kaer Morhen for Vizima. The game abstracts the long and mostly uneventful trek across the countryside —that has nothing to do with the story— and resumes the game just as he arrives at the outskirts of his destination; just at the moment of a hellhound attack. This is no different in Fallout. The Vault Dweller leaves a settlement, and the game indicates the high-level details of the trip, and resumes when something important happens... like an encounter, or the PC's arrival at a principle location—places that actually matter.
The game Riven is almost entirely about exploration, with a few puzzles. Riven has Zip-Mode, where the player can elect to skip the re-tread to get right to their intended location. This is not some in-game privilege, or tangible benefit in the game, it's a player convenience that is VERY akin to the scene selection menu option on a video player, so that you don't have to sit through the parts that you are not concerned with.
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For Fallout specifically (but it applies to other games), 'Fast Travel' without accounting for terrain encounters IS an exploit, but this is a lazy design flaw IMO. Fallout used the wasteland as an encounter zone, and there is no reason that FO3 couldn't have done the same. The game already tracks travel time, but FO3 merely teleports the PC to the destination; Oblivion did the same, but is worse because buff spells didn't expire until the end of the trip... meaning that the player could buff the PC's strength, load up with heavy loot, and travel to the other side of the continent with the load. Fallout buffs could expire on the road; and the PC could get mugged on the trip. FO3 should have implemented the same IMO.
There is more to it than just "makes us lose time just by crawling to our destination", it actually forces the player to do their best to avoid enemies on the way.
A double flaw for an RPG. This forces the player to endure the PC's hardships—when they shouldn't have to, and forces player influence on the PC's avoidance of danger. FO2 had dangerous encounters, but their avoidance relied upon PC skill.
Fallout 1's map travel doesn't really play well with Fallout New Vegas in the long and short term, these games are built upon the idea of player exploration, that's like 60% of the mechanics.
We are talking about a menu-meta-option... and "Fast Travel" only leads to places they have already explored.
*I disagree about the map... I think it would play perfectly; so long as it behaved like the maps in Fallout 1 & 2
Remember the map in Skyrim? Of course they could have had a 3D clone of Fallout's map screen. Their lost advantage was that unlike Fallout, they could have shown the wasteland in abstract or FPP (or TPP/ISO-3D); player's choice.
I'm in agreement with Walpknut that I think removing Fast Travel in Hardcore mode is better than having it.
This is needless masochism. Hardcore mode is not masochism mode, it's a mode with improved consequence; [ for the
PC ].
Also, if you didn't bring enough supplies to end up that situation anway, it's kind of your fault.
But the PC can still make the trip in realtime; this is why it's absurd. Its only effect is to personally punish the player. The player should be able to indicate that the PC travel to a location and have the PC do their best to get there; set & forget. The game should have the option to resume after the trip, when they arrive; the player picks up when there is something important to do.
*Ideally there should be risk of encounters at any point along the way, so that it's not like warping from place to place. The actual time that it takes for the player (as opposed to the PC) should be immaterial.
Something simple like being able to pay to hitch on with a Caravan would have worked fine as an in-lore method of fast-travel.
This is a great feature, and the first two games had it, but (a big point of contention here)... there is absolutely no need for an in-lore explanation of something that isn't in-game; the PC does not suddenly appear at the destination —they made the trip in person. The player need not have. That's what map travel is for.
*This is why you don't see
Indiana Jones sit in a plane for twenty hours.
As Walpknut also said, NV's gameplay doesn't gel well with random encounters. They were just about meaningful in Fallout 1/2, but in the context of the NV where the Mojave is explored in a much more full and explicitly designed way rather than the barren stretches of California, random encounters come off massively stilted and awkward.
The setting is a desert. One of the common complaints was that it was too empty—and yet it's a desert; would it be a believable desert if the entire game map was like Vegas itself? The setting is perfect for a map-travel mechanic, for the very reason that the player would not always have to trod back & forth through an empty desert wasteland.
