Redundant Gameplay Mechanics
One thing that's been bothering me lately is how redundant fast traveling between maps feels.
For example, you can fast travel to the dock that takes you to the Isle of Grom or to the entrance of Brickswich Stadium. The problem is that these fast travel points don't actually take you to the destination, they only take you to the teleport that takes you there. After fast traveling, you're immediately forced to fast travel again just to reach the area you actually selected.
After reading through chocolatekake 's thread, I realized they pointed out another great example of this. If you want to get from the Isle of Grom to Brickswich Stadium, the process looks like this:
- Fast travel to the ferry.
- Wait for it to load.
- Travel to the main map.
- Wait even longer for it to load.
- Fast travel to the stadium entrance.
- Wait for it to load.
- Enter the stadium.
- Wait even longer for it to load, again.
That's a lot of loading and menu navigation for what should be a simple trip between two locations.
In a perfect world, nothing would be level streaming/loading based at all. Every island and interior would be physically connected to the world so you could simply skate there naturally. I understand why the game is structed this way from a technical standpoint, but I still think the current implementation adds unnecessary steps.
Skate 1-3 handled this much more cleanly. If you wanted to go somewhere, you opened the pause menu, selected the location and the game loaded you directly there. There wasn't an extra layer of fast traveling just to reach another fast travel point. It was simple, straightforward and respected the player's time.
Realizing this made me start wondering about other parts of the game.
Are there other current gameplay mechanics that you think are unnecessarily redundant or could be streamlined? Are there any systems that people have gotten used to but could realistically be improved?
