I’ve always had a complicated relationship with fast travel. Open world video games ut🌠ilise it for both convenience and necessity, while even smaller titles with multiple locatio💮ns offer up a menu to save you walking from one location to the next in search of tasks to complete. It’ll often strike a balance between encouraging you to explore the world on your terms and letting you fast travel when you don’t fancy wasting minutes marching across the map.
Capcom’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dragon’s Dogma 2 will offer some form of fast travel when it ships in March, but its director Hideaki I𓄧tsuno has made it abundantly clear in a that he would rather players embrace the unpredictable wonder of the world his team has created instead of just hopping to your desired location through a loading screen.
What Does It Mean To Fast Travel In 2024?
"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 said. "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 metres in front of them."
Itsuno’s perspective is admirable, and I applaud him for calling out how open world games of the past few years have favoured content over curation, thus making fast travel a necessity if players want to be rewarded for their time. Games like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin’s Creed Mirage and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Far Cry 6 are constantly asking you to chase icons or complete specific tasks, so much so that using fast travel is encouraged over actually hopping into a vehicle or exploring the world on your own. It’s a direct consequence of modern game design where excess is more important than curating a virtual world to feel memorable with stories and characters that will stay with you. Even 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Breath of the Wild and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tears of the Kingdom make use of fast travel in order to reach certain destinations faster, but at least abandoning ꦛthe mechanic in Nintendo’s duo of masterpieces will reward the player, instead of acting like their desire to actually exist in a game world is an inconvenience.
Much like Dragon’s Dogma 2, BOTW and TOTK are designed so that no matter where you're in the game world, walking for a few minutes in any direction is bound to reward your natural sense of curiosity. A shrine might await beneath the foot of a mountain, or a hostile camp in the deep, dank caverns of a drowned lake. Sometimes it’ll be an NPC offering wares to pick up or a dragon flying silently over the landscape, instilling a feeling of satisfying awe that you discovered this phenomenon all on your own. But every encounter and idea was still designed. Nintendo just created good enough tools that you’re able to arrive at this end all by yourself. It’s the magic of modern open world design done right, and something which very few in the triple-A space manage to get right.
Then you’ve got titles like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Death Stranding, in which fast travel is a direct contradiction of its core themes and mechanics. You are a delivery man navigating the ruins of the apocalypse in which walking on the terrain is challenge enough, let alone dealing with supernatural evil or having to sustain yourself on a never-ending supply of Mon🌳ster Energy. To casually allow fast travel would make it a fundamentally weaker game, so instead Kojima Productions tries to make every delivery you make compelling, or offer a variety of vehicles, contraptions, and other means of going from A to B. It works, and as a consequence, fast travel never came to mind.
How Does Fast Travel Work In Dragon’s Dogma 2?
Dragon’s Dogma 2 lands somewhere in-between. In order to fast travel, you will need to use expensive items known as Ferrystones to warp to designated Port Crystals on the map. Fast travel isn’t free, nor does it come without consequences. Do you waste resources that could be spent on healing items, weapons, and pawns on an easy means of travel, or walk on your own two feet across the fantastica﷽l wastes instead? Turning fast travel into a costly mechanic with lasting repercussions is a brilliant way to stress that you are but an adventurer trying to make ends meet in this world, and that the ability to hop between the material plane at will instead of rawdogging it on horseback is not a blessing to be taken lightly. It’s an ingrained element of world building, turning fast travel into a luxury to be earned after myriad battles fighting for your life.
Itsuno believes that fast travel isn’t necessary if you create a world filled with worthwhile stuff to explore, ensuring that a cadence of combat encounters, puzzles, and discoveries greet us at such a pace that needing to fast travel should rarely enter our minds. We might make use of it once in a blue moon in order to jump between cities or deliver something related to your quest, but at all times, the biggest incentive should be to walk in♓ a rando🐼m direction and lose yourself. In a landscape of video games where content is king and quantity so often means more than quality, it’s reassuring to see an anticipated sequel like this take such a stand.
