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[Nillo]

Full disclosure, this is based on a recent /truegaming/ thread that I found interesting. There was a discussion about how the idea of "travel" is rarely explored as a central theme of a video game. We have many games about surviving in the wilderness, but few games do that while also giving you purpose to reach a certain destination. FTL is one that comes to mind. An older example (that I haven't played myself) is Oregon Trail.

Can you name any good video games that convey a sense of traveling somewhere?

[s0]

welp, many rpgs use a sort of "journey" theme. if you think about traditional jrpgs for instance, they usually involve travelling from town to town via a world map and also gaining access to new means of transportation (the famous FF airships) that allow you to reach new places on the map.

also i guess the game "journey" is about a journey

both of these don't really fit the criteria of the reddit OP though. there's some oregon trail-likes such as "out there" (oregon trail in spehssss!!) and "organ trail" (oregon trail with zombies). but other than that i got nothing.

EDIT: i guess the entire space sim genre (elite, X, freespace etc) is basically about travel?

EDIT2: also euro truck simulator which shares many mechanics with space sims

[LucasMaxBros]

EarthBound. You could also say quite a few RPGs has a sense of travel, but EarthBound specifically feels like you're going from place to place because the settings are so familiar. Like at first it's your neighborhood, then your town and suddenly you're in the next City and exploring beyond it into the country side to find Happy Happy Village. You've got a desert with traffic, the main city by way of bus. Then you go to some more exotic places like Scaraba or Deep Darkness.

All at the same time you're traveling to collect the eight melodies and find where they might all be at. In fact the sense of traveling is communicated better because you really don't know where you're headed until you're really there. You just explore the scenery and chat with the locals or have a few fights until you get the right info or intuition to find the melody.

Now would I say traveling is the center theme of the game? In some way, yes. The game is about exploring and coming to terms with the world. Everything seems light-hearted but there's a sense of darkness or uncertainty about becoming mature. The game is about Ness/ you the player finding their place in the world. And this theme is brought back 100 fold when you get to the Sea of Eden, beat your evil self and then gain ultimate power by remembering all the places you had TRAVELED TO and the experiences that were bundled with them.

[SirNiko]

Starbound is maybe the closest I have. You land on a planet and build a base/explore minecraft style, but eventually you juice up your spaceship enough that you can leave for the next planet and repeat the process. You can upgrade your ship a little and store some items on it, but frequently you just have to leave behind your outposts when you move on. Or at least, that's what I understand. I didn't enjoy it enough to keep playing it that long.

I'm playing Ratchet and Clank: All 4 One and aside from the first level all the rest of the game is linked with natural transitions. A factory opens up into cliffs, which moves into a dense forest, then you descend into a cavern and so on. At one point you even fly a rocket, navigate an asteroid field, and land on the moon without the game cutting away, which I really liked. It's a big change from the rest of the series where the levels are a sequence of planets connected cut-away flight sequences. I really like games that take the time to create and show the connections between the levels rather than abruptly changing tile sets on the map screen.

Half Life 2 did mostly the same thing, especially in Episode 2 which had a lot of cross-country travel.

I also really liked Final Fantasy Legend 1 & 2 where you had to climb the big tower and kept discovering new mysterious worlds on each floor. I enjoyed that more than wandering around a world map in a lot of ways.

Toejam and Earl? They had to survive as they climbed to the highest levels of Earth for their rocket parts. Maybe a game like Shining in the Darkness where you gradually worked your way to the bottom of a single huge dungeon?

A game where you set up a portable base (like a wagon or a trailer) and travel across the world could be fun, though I'd want to ditch the survival aspects and hype up the exploration aspects a la Journey. The fun of traveling is seeing new people and places, while the Oregon Trail felt mostly the same throughout (mechanically, it could have just been about you staying in one place and surviving and been the same game). Journeying wasn't the theme so much as survival.

[JWK5]

With the Elder Scrolls/Fallout games you can kind of get that if you apply the various mods that make you require food and water, sleep, warmth, etc. There was some pretty impressive Neverwinter Nights mods that were similar as well.

[TeeGee]

80 Days is an awesome game about travel. Probably the best I've played. Curious Expedition, which should come out soon, also comes to mind.

[DJFloppyFish]

the last of us



 

[Shenanigans]

Check out The Organ Trail. No, I'm not misspelling that. It's a zombie game done in the style of the Oregon Trail. You can play the free Flash version here: http://hatsproductions.com/organtrail.html

[gimymblert]

flight simulator

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Full disclosure, this is based on a recent /truegaming/ thread that I found interesting. There was a discussion about how the idea of "travel" is rarely explored as a central theme of a video game. We have many games about surviving in the wilderness, but few games do that while also giving you purpose to reach a certain destination. FTL is one that comes to mind. An older example (that I haven't played myself) is Oregon Trail.

Can you name any good video games that convey a sense of traveling somewhere?

final fantasy X was all about travel actually, the game was one big journey and you seldom revisited old areas until the very end when you got an airship, but for like 99% of the game it was 'go north!' from one island to the next

[cynicalsandel]

In Wind Waker you have to sail everywhere.

[Endurion]

Heart of Africa

You explore 18-somethings Africa and try to find a pharaos grave (that's randomly placed somewhere on the continent). You can walk about, travel by canoe or use a ship passage.

Not being cautious gets you drying in the desert or stuck in a swamp desperately looking for human signs.

[Impmaster]

Skyrim with the Realistic Needs and Frostfall mods is an amazing fantasy world simulator. You have to be the hero and all, but you also have to survive just like the hero would. It turns the journey going to quests just as interesting as the quests.

[ProgramGamer]

Flippin' Minecraft was half about traveling to different places, but then again the primary focus was mining resources in order to fuel the building aspect of the game.