Dragon’s Dogma 2 Director Explains Why Less Fast Travel Can be a Good Thing
Fast travel is a contentious issue within open world games. Make it too easy, and you risk trivializing the world; make it too hard, and players may find travel tedious. Weighing in on the debate, Dragon’s Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno explained why he is keen to avoid the former, preferring that players travel normally and experience the world around them.
“Just give it a try. Travel is boring? That's not true. It's only an issue because your game is boring. All you have to do is make travel fun,” Itsuno told IGN in a new interview, part of our the exclusive month-long IGN First coverage of Dragon’s Dogma 2. “That's why you place things in the right location for players to discover, or come up with enemy appearance methods that create different experiences each time, or force players into blind situations where they don't know whether it's safe or not ten meters in front of them.”
“We've put a lot of work into designing a game where you can stumble across someone and something will happen, so while it's fine if it does have fast travel, we decided to design the kind of map where players will make the decision for themselves to travel by bike or on foot in order to enjoy the journey.”
Dragon's Dogma 2 and its predecessor are unique in that they don't allow unrestricted fast travel. Both games require expensive and rare Ferrystones to teleport to designated Port Crystals. Dragon's Dogma 2 also adds Oxcarts that allow travel only along specific paths, with the caveat that you may be ambushed along those routes.
In adding the Oxcarts, Itsuno says the goal wasn’t to make a “simple method of safe transportation.” Instead, he sees it as an additive way to build out Dragon’s Dogma 2’s world.
“While riding one, you might find the path blocked by goblins and have no choice but to get off and join the battle. Then as you do, a Griffin might swoop in and destroy the entire cart with one blow, forcing you to walk the rest of the way while cursing its name,” Itsuno explains. “But
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