A pattern has emerged since I first started playing ESO in 2015.

I’ll return to the game after not playing it for ages, find myself wanting to play little else for several months, then gradually step away and leave it for some time. There’s always some external factor that brings me back and, over the years, the game has become something of a mental refuge.

Recently, The Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) has helped me get through a difficult couple of months at work. The release of a new system created by our internal developers didn’t exactly go according to plan, resulting in many long days and late nights over the past six weeks. Hours were spent in conference calls, listening to colleagues suggest the next steps to resolve the issues, only to repeat the process the following day when the evening’s testing didn’t go as hoped.

It wasn’t easy to take proper breaks during that period. The only thing we could do was grab 15-minutes here and there between calls and scheduled tests. During those times, I found myself reaching for the controller and logging into ESO. It was comforting to have something to escape to – a place where I didn’t have to talk or think too hard, and where the only conversations I had were with non-player characters (NPCs) about problems I knew I could solve with my swords.

I didn’t always follow up on their requests, though. Instead, I’d head off in a direction and see what I could find. I came across a fisherman sleeping on the ground while a cheeky mudcrab tried to steal his catch drying on a nearby wooden rack. I discovered a poor fellow in a delve who’d been crushed by a falling rock and couldn’t escape. And there was a house filled with the meows of many cats, each leaving a lifeless rat by the front door.

The Elder Scrolls Online, video game, fisherman, mudcrab, asleep, fish

‘Solvitur ambulando’ is a Latin phrase often attributed to Saint Augustine, meaning ‘It is solved by walking’. Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote in the 19th century: ‘I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.’ Shakespeare’s character Prospero said in The Tempest: ‘A turn or two I’ll walk, to still my beating mind.’ And in the words of Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, ‘You never come back from a walk feeling worse.’

I may not have had enough time to get out for a real walk, but ESO provided a channel for digital strolls whenever I needed them during that project. The feeling of the world opening and uncovering its secrets as I travelled through the game’s locations on foot was just what I needed to take a mental break. The slightest hint of a new mystery to solve or path to follow through the trees was enough to make me wander off into the wilderness and forget about everything else for a few moments.

Looking back on the experience, it made me realize something about RPGs and did wonders for my mental health. The ability to use Wayshrines to teleport across the map is kind of at odds with the usual epic-quest premise when you think about it. The Cambridge Dictionary defines a quest as ‘a long search for something that is difficult to find or an attempt to achieve something difficult’. Does this mean it’s more like a task on your to-do list if you can reach your destination in a few seconds behind a loading screen?

It feels like using ESO’s Wayshrines too much risks reducing a huge in-game map to something almost like the diagram of the London Underground. You run a few errands in town, pick up a bite to eat, then hop back on the Fast-Travel Line; jump off a few stops later to deliver a parcel to an NPC, get your weapons fixed, and sell some inventory you no longer want. Don’t forget to take your belongings and tap your Oyster Card on the Autosave before you head above ground.

I get it, though. When life is full of adult responsibilities and you don’t want to spend an hour walking between locations, the mechanic offers a convenient shortcut, allowing you to squeeze as much action as possible into whatever time you can spare. I’m not saying that fast travel is inherently bad or that I never use it – it’s certainly useful when you’re playing with friends and quickly want to get somewhere to finish a dungeon together before switching off for the night.

The Elder Scrolls Online, video game, delve, skeleton, rock, crushed

But I think my preference will always be to use my feet to travel in RPGs. I want to take in all the sights during the journey to my next destination – not that I’ll always have a specific location in mind – and come across those small stories within the story like the examples mentioned earlier. I may not have come across the house filled with cats in ESO and momentarily forgotten about my work problems if I’d decided to use a Wayshrine that day.

Head out on the digital road the next time you need a mental escape. You may just find that your problems are eased by walking.