If you were going to play Daggerfall without the fast travel you might as well play Desert Bus instead, at least that game would require you to be physically at the controller between destinations

Try it out with Daggerfall Unity. I heard a lot good about it. There is a way to have Steam still track your playtime with custom launch command.

The bigger and more empty (or filled with nothing important) the map is, the worse the game becomes. I can’t judge those two games map yet, but from experience I prefer smaller and more dense and interesting maps. Especially if we talk about RPGs and Adventure games.