I feel like elder scrolls managed to achieve the right sort of balance with that sort of thing. I find that the discovery of landmarks you can fast travel to any time you like is a pretty satisfying exploration loop. It's even better when you install a mod that lets you immediately jump out of a dungeon instead of being forced to trawl through an area you've already explored just to get to the exit. A lot of games developers are very guilty of doing this and it seems to be just a general oversight in level design. Depends on what sort of game you're going for though, I do agree that when it comes to movement it's a bit silly to have them running for miles and miles when even pretty fit people would never be able to do that.
Also I see a lot of people going on about vehicles, but what about jetpacks and flying monsters? :D
"Also I see a lot of people going on about vehicles, but what about jetpacks and flying monsters? :D" that fits into the vehicles category, now, doesn't it?
now, it depends on the sort of game you are making to have a jetpack - in elder scrolls, for instance, it would be just silly lol
fast travel as a satisfying exploration thing (being able to fast travel to a point after discovering it) is all fine and dandy, but why fast travel to a determined point? what are the fast travel points anyway? a magical portal? that assumes there's magic in the game. if it's not a magical portal, then why not allow fast travel from any point on the map to wherever we want to go? it's fast travel, as in "skip ahead the travel if you'd like".
regarding npc's that escort us, and that was my initial point, which incidentally ties with fast travel, for these situation where the npc takes us somewhere, we should be able to fast travel to where they are taking us, if we want, having previously visited the area or not. (all this so we can have npc's that don't run around everywhere, like idiots, or even when they apparently shouldn't be able to. "i am a 90 year old man, sitting on the floor, almost dying of some disease, clearly unable to walk without taking ages to move. i want to show you a dungeons of some sorts before i pass away. let me show it to you." proceeds to run for 3 minutes to the dungeon). f that. let us fast travel if we don't want to walk along the barely moving npc!