Lol yeah, levitation wasn't a completely broken ability at all.

Don't know about Daggerfall, but Morrowind had some exceedingly useless skills, and I, for one, was not sad to see them go in Oblivion. Call it dumbing down if you want, it doesn't bother me. Also, Mark and Recall spells are fairly useless if you have a fast travel system...

eug1404 wrote: Have you ever played Daggerfall? Or even Morrowind? With each new release they lessen the number of skills and restrict what the player can do more. Some examples: The continuing removal of skills(crossbows, climbing, spears, all linguistic skills, thrown weapons, magic schools) Simplification of the character development system(e.g. the removal of Daggerfall's brilliant advantages/disadvantages system, background traits, etc...) The spell maker and enchanting have both gotten worse with each iteration. Sure in Daggerfall you could make insanely powerful spells, but you had to be insanely powerful to cast them, so it balanced out nicely. Same goes for enchanting, to get the best enchantments you needed crazy good gear, which was hard to come by. Morrowind weakened this a bit, but still had a good enchanting system. Spell making and enchanting in Oblivion are garbage. The removal of the mark/recall and levitation spells. The separation of cities into separate mini-worlds, unaffected by the outside world The dumbing down of the plot. Whilst never great at plots, Bethesda really dropped the ball with Oblivion. Daggerfall had a deep plot of political intrigue. Morrowind's was extremely well fleshed out with great lore. Oblivion's was a generic fantasy save the world from a demonic invasion plot The removal of lycanthropy and the simplification of vampirism(no clans, no vampire hunters) I could go on for hours.

This... I guess my ire for Oblivion is that it was so obviously trying to appeal to non RPGer at the cost of some of the really cool stuff TES was known for.

Ramza wrote: Yeah, i'm pretty sure Gwarden was just trolling. That or he's just the most determined apologist ever.

Or option 3. Has no idea what he's talking about.

kapusta wrote: Don't know about Daggerfall, but Morrowind had some exceedingly useless skills, and I, for one, was not sad to see them go in Oblivion. Call it dumbing down if you want, it doesn't bother me. Also, Mark and Recall spells are fairly useless if you have a fast travel system...

Ah yes the fast travel system. While I understand the reason why it was introdiced, its still an overly simplistic way to deal with travelling in an open world game like Oblivion. Sure not everyone wants to trek across the wilderness to complete a quest, but I wish there was a way of reducing the disconnect that comes as part of a mechanic used to simplify travel without allowing it to fit into the gameplay. At the very least give us a overland map with a moving point marker and the chance of random encounters (ala DA:O or Arcanum) while taking gametime to get to the new location. Its not perfect but at least it tries to keep you in the game, it also means teleport spells become useful again as they eliminate the random encounter risk and actually move you to new location instantly.

The skills were not useless The thing you seem to be missing is that what may seem useless/pointless to you maybe a skill that someone else puts a lot of stock in. The diversity of the skills in TES (much like Wizardry) were one of the reason I liked them. There were so many ways to biuld your character. You could custom you character to such a degree you knew your were unique. There was no standard "fighter", "magic user", "theif" build.

kapusta wrote: Don't know about Daggerfall, but Morrowind had some exceedingly useless skills, and I, for one, was not sad to see them go in Oblivion. Call it dumbing down if you want, it doesn't bother me. Also, Mark and Recall spells are fairly useless if you have a fast travel system...

this

Also fast travel is not compulsory by any stretch of the imagination so complaining about it is redundant.

cryocore wrote: The skills were not useless The thing you seem to be missing is that what may seem useless/pointless to you maybe a skill that someone else puts a lot of stock in.

You mean like folding Axe and Spear into Blade? Yeah man, such a dealbreaker.

And getting rid of Medium Armor! How am I supposed to roleplay with only two armor types instead of 3!

cryocore wrote: You could custom you character to such a degree you knew your were unique. There was no standard "fighter", "magic user", "theif" build.

Considering there were 7 skills within each combat category in Oblivion, you could still come up with plenty of wholly unique builds. And looking at the Daggerfall skillset alot of those are pretty redundant (although Medical is a cool idea and should make a comeback).

cryocore wrote: Ah yes the fast travel system. While I understand the reason why it was introdiced, its still an overly simplistic way to deal with travelling in an open world game like Oblivion. Sure not everyone wants to trek across the wilderness to complete a quest, but I wish there was a way of reducing the disconnect that comes as part of a mechanic used to simplify travel without allowing it to fit into the gameplay. At the very least give us a overland map with a moving point marker and the chance of random encounters (ala DA:O or Arcanum) while taking gametime to get to the new location. Its not perfect but at least it tries to keep you in the game, it also means teleport spells become useful again as they eliminate the random encounter risk and actually move you to new location instantly.

Oh god, anything but the "random encounter while travelling on the world map" crap. I've hated it ever since Fallout 1. There's something about those encounters that is a terrible immersion breaker for me, probably because they force you into a confrontation without considering how you would approach it normally, i.e. if you came across the same group of bandits/unique monster/whatever in the game world. Would you spot them early because of your cautious playing style? Would you avoid them by sneaking or casting invisibility on yourself? Would you fight them? I would actually argue that random encounters feel more generic due to being forced onto you and not being tailored for your character.

cryocore wrote: The skills were not useless The thing you seem to be missing is that what may seem useless/pointless to you maybe a skill that someone else puts a lot of stock in. The diversity of the skills in TES (much like Wizardry) were one of the reason I liked them. There were so many ways to biuld your character. You could custom you character to such a degree you knew your were unique. There was no standard "fighter", "magic user", "theif" build.

Do you really feel unique if you choose something like Spear and Medium Armour in Morrowind as opposed to Heavy Armour and Blunt or Long Blade in Oblivion? Seriously, there are plenty of customisation options and there are many other games that are far more restrictive. Any D&D CRPG comes to mind actually.

Gwarden wrote: Also fast travel is not compulsory by any stretch of the imagination so complaining about it is redundant.

It is when they removed all RP friendly methods of traveling faster, e.g. the silt-striders. You either fast travel, breaking any sense of immersion, or you have to spend hours grudgingly walking/riding everywhere. It at least sounds like they may have fixed this with Skyrim.

Gwarden wrote: You mean like folding Axe and Spear into Blade? Yeah man, such a dealbreaker. And getting rid of Medium Armor! How am I supposed to roleplay with only two armor types instead of 3!

By this train of logic why not just merge all skills into defense, attack, magic and socialise? That's essentially what they all come down to, and if it makes no difference if they're in different skills, then why bother?

I find it odd that you're a bit of a film buff, with some pretty 'high' tastes, yet you're the Michael Bay fan of video games; defending changes that are very clearly aimed at the lowest common denominator.

kapusta wrote: Morrowind had some exceedingly useless skills, and I, for one, was not sad to see them go in Oblivion.

Name one useless skill in Morrowind.

kapusta wrote: Seriously, there are plenty of customisation options and there are many other games that are far more restrictive.

No shit, but the whole point of the TES games is that they give you as many options as possible. The characters are shit, the quests are largely shit, the plot is shit, the sole redeeming feature, and core selling point, of all TES games is the freedom they give you. When you start removing this freedom, skill by skill and ability by ability, then you're left with a shitty RPG.

Also the whole "other games are worse" line of logic is horribly flawed. If we take it as valid then it's not acceptable to criticise any game other than 'Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing'.

Ok so, levitation good, horse riding bad? Fast travel via silt-strider good, fast-travel via map markers bad?

These are cosmetic differences at best and yet you trumpet them as game breaking. Overexaggeration. And travelling cross country in Oblivion was a hundred times more interesting and immersive than travelling cross country in Morrowind. The walk/run speed in Morrowind made it feel like you were moving through quicksand.

And removing/merging a tiny cross section of skills is not just folding all abilities into 3 mega skills. Again, massive overexaggeration. It makes very little difference and in fact in Skyrim they're bringing back more specific weapon skills so arguing about that is redundant.

Firstly "overexaggeration" isn't a word, and is an oxymoron in any case. How can you overexaggerate something? You're either exaggerating or you're not, there is no supreme degree of exaggeration that requires a new, extremely retarded, word to signify it.

Gwarden wrote: Ok so, levitation good, horse riding bad? Fast travel via silt-strider good, fast-travel via map markers bad? These are cosmetic differences at best and yet you trumpet them as game breaking.

Where the hell did I say horse riding was bad? Stop putting words into my mouth and going off at pathetic strawman. They are not "cosmetic differences" at all, they are immersion breaking. In Morrowind fast travel all took place within the constraints of the game world, it did not require any additional suspension of disbelief. In Oblivion it happens on some arbitrary GUI screen and is totally disconnected from the game world.

Gwarden wrote: And travelling cross country in Oblivion was a hundred times more interesting and immersive than travelling cross country in Morrowind. The walk/run speed in Morrowind made it feel like you were moving through quicksand.

Rubbish. I agree the walk speed was far too slow in Morrowind, but travelling cross country was far more interesting in Morrowind than Oblivion. For one thing the setting itself was extremely unique, especially in the Telvani areas, which made travelling far more interesting than Oblivion's yawn fest generic fantasy-land-in-a-box.

Morrowind was also hand-crafted to a greater degree, so the world felt more realistic, and there were often special rewards and the like waiting for exploration. Oblivion had none of that. The enemies were also varied across Vvanderfall, so you never knew what you were going to encounter, and were sometimes surprised, which added to the enjoyment of exploration. Oblivion had cookie-cutter "bandits"(with hundreds of thousands of gold in Daedric Armor...) swamping the planet.

Gwarden wrote: And removing/merging a tiny cross section of skills is not just folding all abilities into 3 mega skills. Again, massive overexaggeration.

You're the one who claimed that merging similar skills together is not simplification, and is desirable. If we follow your logic to it's natural conclusion the 3 skills system is what we get.

They said they're putting carriages in for travel between cities iirc. I don't know if that means replacing or additional to oblivion's style of fast travel. It might be additional so you can get to cities you haven't been to yet fast, since the other fast travel will be only letting you travel places you've already been. Not sure if they're instaneous like silt striders or you get a quick ride..

eug1404 wrote: Name one useless skill in Morrowind.

Spear and Medium Armour are the first ones I'd think of. Mathematically, you end up with fewer possible combinations if you remove them, but there's really little impact on the gameplay.

eug1404 wrote: No shit, but the whole point of the TES games is that they give you as many options as possible. The characters are shit, the quests are largely shit, the plot is shit, the sole redeeming feature, and core selling point, of all TES games is the freedom they give you. When you start removing this freedom, skill by skill and ability by ability, then you're left with a shitty RPG. Also the whole "other games are worse" line of logic is horribly flawed. If we take it as valid then it's not acceptable to criticise any game other than 'Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing'.

Of course, I know exactly why I enjoyed the 2 TES games that I've played, and it definitely wasn't because of intricate plots, compelling characters or diverse quests. It was the balance between the different parts that make up gameplay and the freedom that was perfect in both Morrowind and Oblivion. Oblivion's advantage, in my view, was that it had a much better combat system, as opposed to Morrowind, where it was rather painful, and kind of forced me to resort to magic and daikatanas. Exploring was far more pleasant as well, regardless of how generic the world might have been. Removing a few skills doesn't exactly make Oblivion a game for retards.

Btw, yea, I agree that the Daedric armour-wearing bandits were an abomination. However, it looks like Skyrim isn't in danger of ending up with the same level scaling system.

eug1404 wrote: Firstly "overexaggeration" isn't a word, and is an oxymoron in any case. How can you overexaggerate something? You're either exaggerating or you're not, there is no supreme degree of exaggeration that requires a new, extremely retarded, word to signify it.

It is a word, and I think its apt in describing the nature of your rebuttals.

Quote: overexaggerate is defined in Webster's New Millennium Dictionary of English as meaning "to go beyond anticipated exaggeration."

eug1404 wrote: Where the hell did I say horse riding was bad?

Quote: you have to spend hours grudgingly walking/riding everywhere.

eug1404 wrote: They are not "cosmetic differences" at all, they are immersion breaking.

Oblivion fast travel = go to your map and select location followed by a load screen

Morrowind fast travel = go to a silt strider menu and select location followed by a load screen

Thats pretty much the definition of a cosmetic difference.

eug1404 wrote: In Oblivion it happens on some arbitrary GUI screen and is totally disconnected from the game world.

So you're saying the the Morrowind GUI wasn't arbitrary? How is the Morrowind menu interace any different from the Oblivion one?

eug1404 wrote: Morrowind was also hand-crafted to a greater degree, so the world felt more realistic, and there were often special rewards and the like waiting for exploration. Oblivion had none of that. The enemies were also varied across Vvanderfall, so you never knew what you were going to encounter, and were sometimes surprised, which added to the enjoyment of exploration. Oblivion had cookie-cutter "bandits"(with hundreds of thousands of gold in Daedric Armor...) swamping the planet.

See, I just flat out disagree with this. Oblivion was chock full of dungeons, forts, daedric shrines, sidequests, villages, and random enemy encounters. The world building in Oblivion was gorgeous and simple exploration was a joy. Morrowind by contrast often felt devoid of life and featured wide open spaces with very little to do.

eug1404 wrote: You're the one who claimed that merging similar skills together is not simplification, and is desirable. If we follow your logic to it's natural conclusion the 3 skills system is what we get.

3 skills is not the natural conclusion, once again a massive OVERexaggeration. As kapusta says, removing a few skills doesnt make for simplistic gameplay and if merging a couple of specific weapon or armor skills breaks the game for you then you must be an incredibly hardcore rp'er. Its akin to merging First Aid/Doctor from Fallout 2 into Medicine in Fallout 3 - a minor change.

It has been a long time since I played morrowind, but weren't the slit striders for transporting across a few cities?
Where as oblivion is instant teleportation to every location on the map.

Zerulas wrote: Where as oblivion is instant teleportation to every location on the map.

You must discover each location before you can fast travel to it, bar major cities. Morrowind featured a pretty extensive fast travel system beyond just silt striders.

Gwarden wrote: It is a word, and I think its apt in describing the nature of your rebuttals.

Miriam-webster != supreme master of English language. It's the only dictionary that contains the word, and even then only online. The word is far from widely accepted, and for good reason. It's redundant, and you sound like an idiot using it, although I suppose that's inline with the content of your posts, so you may as well continue.

Gwarden wrote: you have to spend hours grudgingly walking/riding everywhere.

If you think this translates into me saying that horse riding is bad, rather than the criticism of the lack of in-game fast travel options that it was, then you truly are as much of a brain-dead moron as you come across.

Gwarden wrote: Oblivion fast travel = go to your map and select location followed by a load screen Morrowind fast travel = go to a silt strider menu and select location followed by a load screen Thats pretty much the definition of a cosmetic difference.

No it isn't, one of these takes place entirely within the game world and requires no extra suspension of disbelief from me. My character walks up to a silt-strider, pays his fare, and arrives at his destination. The other has my character magically teleporting his way across the country via a mystical map.

Gwarden wrote: So you're saying the the Morrowind GUI wasn't arbitrary? How is the Morrowind menu interace any different from the Oblivion one?

Are you incapable of following a simple conversational strand? That was in reference to the fast travel system. In oblivion it's removed from the world, in Morrowind it was a core part of it.

Gwarden wrote: See, I just flat out disagree with this. Oblivion was chock full of dungeons, forts, daedric shrines, sidequests, villages, and random enemy encounters. The world building in Oblivion was gorgeous and simple exploration was a joy.

Oblivion was chock full of shitty dungeons and leveled enemies, it was far from a joy to explore unless you're a simpleton moron who likes endless repetition. To top it all off the setting was your average incredibly dull fantasy affair, and the entire world was built by computer generation, with hand-touching after the fact.

Gwarden wrote: Morrowind by contrast often felt devoid of life and featured wide open spaces with very little to do.

Any one region of VVardenfell had more character than the entirety of Oblivion, some of which was in its barrenness. And there was plenty to do in most areas if you looked, so I have no idea where you're getting that complaint from.

Gwarden wrote: As kapusta says, removing a few skills doesnt make for simplistic gameplay and if merging a couple of specific weapon or armor skills breaks the game for you then you must be an incredibly hardcore rp'er. Its akin to merging First Aid/Doctor from Fallout 2 into Medicine in Fallout 3 - a minor change.

Completely removing spears, medium armor, throwing weapons, crossbows, language skills and incredibly useful spells is not a "minor change". It's inherently providing the player with less choice, and given we've already established that the sole redeeming feature of TES games is choice/freedom, that's a bad thing.

Nice Todd Howard interview, picked out some highlights on skills and the uniqueness of Skyrim's setting:

Quote: Are there any other kind of hints you can give us about the directions of like the types of weapons people are going to be able to play with? “The main thing that I can say is that, they go back to, we had X weapon types in Daggerfall, then X weapon types in Morrowind, and Oblivion had its own, and Skyrim had its own. And any time there’s something that we stop doing whether that’s spears, having a skill for that, or crossbows and things like that, we tend to each time start over. And we want to find weapon types with this game that really yield gameplay. So those skills are separate. There’s a two-handed weapon skill, there’s a one-handed weapon skill, and there’s an archery skill. Because those really are playstyles. I’m going to use a one handed weapon and then either cast magic with my other hand, or I’m going to use a shield, or I’m going to use a two-handed weapon, where it’s going to fill both those slots, obviously (two-handed.) Within each of these skills, there are perks. They’re perks, but they’re not like Fallout, in that each skill has its own perk tree. Take one handed for instance. You have a one handed skill, and then you can perk that. There’s a skill tree underneath one handed. And within that there are separate perk areas for maces, and then axes, and then swords. So as opposed to having say an axe skill, that is a part of the perk tree within one handed. It gives us a better balance. You can say “Well I like one handed stuff,” and then you can start specializing as you raise that skill.” Are you able to be a werewolf in Skyrim? “We’re fans of that stuff as well, and we’re currently messing with all that. I don’t want to commit to, ‘here are the things you can change into and what they’re like right now.’ Not because we’re not doing it, or not attempting to. I just don’t know honestly where that’s going to end up and how deep we’re going to get into that. We will try things, and if we don’t feel it’s helping the game, there are other areas we’d like to spend our time on in the game.” Within the one-handed skill tree you’ve got these different perks for maces, and axes, and swords and so on. Within the magic system is it kind of similar, is it by school that you’re perking up, or is it individually like I’ve got fire spells, and I’m going to perk fire spells? “Well there’s the school Destruction, so that covers like a category of spells, and then within Destruction there are perks for fire based spells. So people see we’ve removed Mysticism, but that’s just a label right? Those spells go into other skills. And then it gets deeper within those skills. The easy thing for us is to just add more skills. That’s actually easier. Because in the old games there was just a skill and a number, there wasn’t really a progression. We really want you to feel that you’re getting better in this particular skill. And perks are the main way we do that now. And I think the game right now has like 280 perks if you include the ranks. So even a character that raises all their skills to 100, and they’re playing and they’re level 50, they’ve only gotten to pick 50 perks. They’re very different characters. And a lot of the power is in the perks as opposed to the raw number of the skill. There’s still some power in the raw number of the skill, just not as much as there used to be. All that stuff has been moved into the perks.” How are races different from one another? “So the main decision you make in the beginning is what race you’re going to be. You no longer pick class. You basically pick what you’re going to look like, and obviously the race is a big part of that. And that comes with certain skill increases. So certain races have certain skills that are higher to start with, and then they also have either spells – depending on what race you pick – and/or racial abilities.” On the lack of class and the new leveling system: “You just play, and your skills go up as you play, and the higher the skill the more it affects your leveling. It’s a really, really nice, elegant system that sort of balances itself. People would play and the general pattern would be, they played for like three hours and then, ‘oh, I picked the wrong skills, I’m going to start over.’ They weren’t necessarily upset about that, but to us it’s ‘is there a way we can solve that? Is there a way we can make this better’ And we think this is it.” Radiant Story: “We want to be careful to not oversell it. It’s a tool that we use to make quests. We started the game by making them all very, very random/dynamic. You do see the holes in that. It doesn’t tell a good story. Good stories are still told by good writers and we do most of our quests that way. Radiant Tool is the tool you use to make any quest. And you can make all of the roles in that quest, you can hand craft all of those roles, or you can take any part of the quest and conditionalize it. So what it allows us to do is to take parts of a quest or an activity, and conditionalize it, without having to hand script conditions. “When we’re going to send you to do something, we can tailor that, a bit to the things you’ve done.” What aspects of Skyrim are going to appeal to a gamer who wasn’t a fan of previous TES games but was a fan of Fallout? “If you really, really don’t like Oblivion, I don’t know that this is suddenly going to switch you over. One of the things that Fallout 3 does well is there’s a certain tone of the world, there’s a certain uniqueness to it, it has style. Oblivion, for what it is, can be very kind of classic, traditional fantasy. There’s not a lot of unique style to the world. Whereas Skyrim I definitely think has a unique style. We got better at that, and we push it, like what is the culture of these people? So it has its own flavor. It’s definitely grittier. It’s lower tech. The world’s lived in. The ruins feel ancient and thousands of years old. We’re also careful in Skyrim of the various ages of, ‘when was this built?’ Where Oblivion everything can feel like everything in this town was built on the same day. There’s a more unique and a better flavor to the province of Skyrim and the game Skyrim than we had in Oblivion and Cyrodiil.” Will there be an X64 version for PC players? High resolution textures (will they have to be modded in?) Do you have a dedicated group for the PC version? “We work on it together. The main thing for people to know is our background is PC games. The game is authored here on PCs. That’s what we work on. A lot of the team is playing the game on PC all day. We do want the platforms to each have a really, really high level of fidelity. I personally play a lot on the Xbox. It tends to be my preferred platform. We do a lot of graphics development still FIRST on the Xbox, just because it’s smoother. And then a lot of that stuff does go over to the PC. We tend to do as much as we can as the project goes on, because we want to support as wide a range as possible. We also tend to do that stuff late, because right now we want to work on the main game and how it plays and getting the graphics fast everywhere, and then as the project gets closer to release we start supporting all those other things. You’ll definitely be able to run the PC on a much higher resolution. All of our games that we’ve done so far – Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout – the PC versions have higher res textures they ship with by default. A lot of times you don’t notice that, because when you play a console game you’re sitting six to ten feet away from the screen. Whereas on the PC, you’re sitting a foot, two feet away from the screen. Those kinds of differences in texture resolution, you don’t notice unless you’re looking at two screenshots on a computer and flipping between them. We are gonna support that stuff. I can’t say how far. But the same thing with the interface. We do a lot of PC interface stuff. There are uniquenesses [sic] to how we handle it on the PC.”

full transcript:http://nerdtrek.com/skyrim-details/

Sounds good to me.

Tbh I just wanna know if I'm going to have 10 different guards yelling "Why won't you die?!" at me at the same time. Wouldn't be the same without them

STOP RIGHT THERE NORDIC SCUM

Gwarden wrote: Nice Todd Howard interview, picked out some highlights on skills and the uniqueness of Skyrim's setting: full transcript:http://nerdtrek.com/skyrim-details/

Btw that's the game informer podcast from February, not a new interview. Whoever runs that site has uploaded youtube clips of the podcast broken up.
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/podca...ddhowardse.aspx

Ahh gotcha. Well regardless I hadnt seen the transcript.

A good video interview with GameTrailers. Dragons can pick people up!
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/t...extended/713229
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/t...extended/713231

cryocore wrote: Ah yes the fast travel system. While I understand the reason why it was introdiced, its still an overly simplistic way to deal with travelling in an open world game like Oblivion. Sure not everyone wants to trek across the wilderness to complete a quest, but I wish there was a way of reducing the disconnect that comes as part of a mechanic used to simplify travel without allowing it to fit into the gameplay. At the very least give us a overland map with a moving point marker and the chance of random encounters (ala DA:O or Arcanum) while taking gametime to get to the new location. Its not perfect but at least it tries to keep you in the game, it also means teleport spells become useful again as they eliminate the random encounter risk and actually move you to new location instantly.

I actually really liked the lack of a fast-travel system in Morrowind (you could cop a few coins and catch a fast travel ride to a pre-set destination, but other locations beyond that would force you to commute to some degree, and if you were traveling to and from a tomb you'd have to go on foot). It really made you take in the world around you and actually felt more like you were on some epic quest... Whereas while the world in Oblivion was still large, as in it'd take some time to trek from one end to the other, it was severely diminished when you could warp across the map.

Morrowind, Wind Waker, and even WoW (d:) had a really nice element of "nostalgia" for me; basically you'd start in one location and stay there for a while, then go off out into the world and do a whole new bunch of things. Later on you'd find yourself back at where you started and actually be a bit like "wow... I haven't been here for a while."

Maybe um... maybe that was just me, but I really appreciate when I come across that in a game.

I didn't know Oblivion had fast travel on my first playthrough, was awesome lol

I'd be fully in support of forcing a player to discover an area before it can be fast traveled to.

SirGrim, wasn't that the case in Oblivion? I can't remember, either that or the main cities could be instantly fast travelled to but smaller things like dungeons couldn't?