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I'm still trying to decide if the introduction of teleporters was a good idea or not.

They allow you to get back to the shops for resupply - but a vendor at the same point would achieve the same thing, and justify a different choice of goods.

They allow quests to double back easily to locations already visited, but that encourages the level designers make a linear main path, with the only major diversions being backward. A shortcut that takes the player through a piece of new territory to open a door from the other side would achieve the same back linkage (as in a couple of places in DS1). The Utraean Peninsula map connected everywhere multiple ways without them, and is many players' favorite map.

They operate the same way as elevators, but are much more "magical". More suspension of disbelief is required. If all is needed is a slow transition to another region (lots of load/unload going on) then an elevator works just as well. The only thing a transporter contributes is that it can link more than two locations, but is that a real benefit?

Elevators can operate horizontally (the extreme example being the airships in Mageworld, but the rafts in LoH, Kaishun and Abstraction are elevators too). The player's sense of location is not interrupted by an elevator, whereas a teleport takes you to an unrelated new position, and you need to look at an overall map to see where you are, so that adds a requirement to the UI for a global map.

So far I have two transporter instances in Lara's map, but one could be changed to an elevator without spoiling the effect, and the other is not needed for transportation, just as a storyline reinforcement, and it only operates in one direction.