In most games, how fast travel works is you open the map, click the point you want to go to, and suddenly appear there. Sometimes this is given flavour with city gates or subway stations, but often it's just random points or a menu filled with a list of places you’ve been to before. Cyberpunk 2077 has travel terminals, and I've never really been sure if you're basically getting the bus or if this is a teleportation device. Neither answer really matters when it comes to my annoyance with the system.
In order to fast travel in Cyberpunk 2077, you can't just click the spot you want to go to. Instead, you must travel by foot or car to the nearest fast travel point, and then select which other fast travel point you want to zip to. The function unlocks after the prologue and is limited to fast travel points you have walked or driven past previously (over the course of the game you'll unlock most without trying), and never upgrades throughout the game. Each time, you need to get yourself to the nearest one and then make your way from there. It’s a pretty flawed way of doing things.
The first 'con' of this system is easy - it's not necessarily that fast to fast travel if you need to make your way to another unrelated point on the map first. In the middle of Pacifica that's not too much of a problem, but when you're out in the Badlands with Panam, it can be a pain. The 'pro' of the system is fairly straightforward too - it makes the world feel more lived in. Whenever you're in an elevator in Cyberpunk 2077, the only button you can press (the only button that exists) is the one heading to the floor you're going to. If you don't expressly need to enter a building or door for a mission, it remains forever closed.
Every interaction with Cyberpunk 2077's world reminds you that you are playing a video game, and a video game forced to cut corners to contain its overambitious scope at that. But fast travel feels like a mechanic of a world that is alive beyond your current objective. That's why I can't bring myself to ever truly hate it, even on the many occasions it has annoyed me. However, in returning to the game for the latest update, I have been reminded of another annoyance, and how Cyberpunk 2077 cannot help but get in its own way.
In Cyberpunk 2077, you can have two directional lines on the map at any one time - ♍a yellow one leading to whatever mission or side story you are working on, and a white line that can be put anywhere. You can use this line to guide you to a store, a NCPD shootout, a random spot on the map you want to see in photo mode, or a fast travel marker. But this presents a problem.
I wanted to try out the new quake attack, but had no hammer. I wandered to the nearest melee store (no fast travel needed) but they only sold knives. So I looked on the map and selected the next melee store and made my way to the closest fast travel point. However, I couldn't mark this fast travel point on my map - doing so would mean unmarking the store I was heading to, and with so few melee stores and me so unfamiliar with them (all of my weapons were looted), I was left to stumble around for this fast travel point, and then to do the same again twice more as these melee stores refused to stock hammers.
It's perhaps a symptom of the modern gamer to be so entitled as to be unable to either remember a simple map location for a minute of travel time, or figure out without hand-holding directions where a spot on a map two blocks away is. I accept that. But fast travel itself is for modern gamers who just want to go here then here then here, and nuts to your immersive world. Once more, the fast travel idea is a solid slice of world-building from Cyberpunk 2077 that is undone by the game's own execution. I enjoyed my time back in Night City for 2.0 and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Phantom Liberty, but by the end of it, I just want✱ed to fast travel awꦿay to somewhere slightly less frustrating.