In an interview with IGN, Dragon’s Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno defends his game’s lack of unrestricted fast travel …
Travel is gonna become boring if you have to travel the same road multiple times in the course of the game even if you have a bunch of cool stuff along that road. Eventually, I won’t give a shit about that stuff since I’ve seen it a million times. So I would hope there is still some kind of fast travel to go between places I have already been if the world is super big. Otherwise it’s just gonna feel like you’re padding the game for time to inflate a 10 hour story to take 40 hours to finish.
I think the better way to help fix this issue is random encounters, spawns, and a world that changes as the game moves along.
Moving along the same road can be made interesting if different things are happening every so often as you come through. New friendly encounters, new fights with different enemies, maybe randomly spawning treasure or scripted puzzle sequences that can appear dynamically around the whole world. Add to that a world that becomes modified by story events, maybe that road gets blocked and a different passage opens up that takes you to the same end destination, but with a new path and things to explore.
It’s not an unsolvable problem, but it is something that goes by the wayside often.
Depends on the reason for traveling. If you are headed down the road to a goal and keep getting sidetracked by random encounters in a way that is distracting you from the thing you want to do then they just make travel tedious.
It all comes down to why am I traveling and why are encounters on the road more engaging than the reason for being on the road in the first place.
One thing to consider too is scheduled events. Imagine a couple towns get together and throw a fair along a route that connects them, and you get to see celebrations and games and vendors who might sell trinkets that are hard to track down otherwise. Perhaps the local monarch goes on a hunt with the massive party of servants and knights that might entail, with different practices for different cultures. A band of cultists clears an area for several days leading up to their yearly ritual. It’s migration season for a certain species of animal/monster. There are so many possibilities!
Even just vendors passing through can be made more interesting. Do they carry their wares via backpack or cart? Are they being attacked by bandits? Wild animals? Are they trying to smuggle goods or services somewhere?
It all has to be programmed of course, which is the main holdup on what makes it so hard to flesh out those parts of the world.
I do also see weight in the idea that, past a certain point, traveling is just boring, especially if the only thing of importance is the Main Story Quest. Travel is also often boring in real life too but we can tune it out, or find little ways to pass the time and entertain ourselves during the more mundane moments. We’re not frequently afforded that luxury in games. When you’re playing a game and dealing with the downtime going from point A to B, often there is literally nothing to do except hold down the movement keys and deal with the occasional path change/obstacle.
The point of games is to be engaging, and if there’s nothing to do while traveling but look at the scenery and surroundings it will eventually get boring. Even if the travel gets interrupted occasionally for an encounter, I think it’s arguable to say that the content is literally not travel anymore and in fact papering over a bad travel system (if the only thing interesting is the stuff you find that you have to stop and take care of). Adding more unique/transient stuff along routes is only half of the battle; work has to be put in to make traveling enjoyable in and of itself for players to want to do it instead of skip it.
But as always, the best solution to our problem is to simply add more trains.
Edit: slight restructuring/grammar
To add to this, DD1 has quite a number of NPC’s that travel between regions and you can come across them. As you progress through the game their patterns and locations change.
I actually am ambivalent on the latter mechanic as it really makes it a pain sometimes, but it still has lots of ways that it can work well.
From the article:
And for the record, Itsuno does say that he thinks fast travel is “convenient” and “good” when done right.
Based on Dragon’s Dogma 1’s use of Ferrystones, as well as this mechanic returning along with oxcarts in the sequel, I think this director understands that there needs to be a balance. It’s good when it’s both properly implemented and has a purpose. You’re right that nobody wants to run up and down the same roads countless times, but it’s up to the devs implementing limited fast travel to make sure you won’t have to. Then it’s up to the player to decide whether fast travel is worth it for any given situation. Knowing when to use your fast travel and how to maximize it is a skill that you develop and should be rewarded for mastering.
But it also needs to have a purpose. In more arcadey games, I don’t like worrying about resources like that. But in more grueling games like Dragon’s Dogma, where the journey is often a very intentional part of the gameplay loop if not the main challenge itself, it fits right at home.
I think even the more compelling games I’ve played used fast travel…Not as an excuse to reduce exposure to a tedious world, but to respect a gamer’s time! I prefer fast travel to hubs and allowing me to make a short journey to wherever my next objective is. No Man’s Sky has my favorite system for fast travel: Teleportation Portals which you can use to create a network of fast travel spots. It makes exploring previously settled planets a lot easier but still encourages the player to explore their unique universe. It’s limited, but in an elegant way which I find to be pleasing.
I can only think of one game that made travel boring: Skyrim. The main reason is that once you’ve experienced one random event…You’ve seen them all as there’s no flavor to those random on the road events. Fast Travel to any point on the map was designed to hide the blandness of Skyrim.
Even Hideaki must realize that travelling the same road repeatedly will become dull because one can only pack so many random events in a game…I hope that he makes for an option to even avoid that level of tedium in the extremely late/post-game. Else his game will become the very thing he’s critiquing.
Open world games need two types of fast travel. The first is your standard type, which is pretty much a teleportation ability. That should be greatly limited. At most, just for cases where you need to travel across the entire map, and should be hidden behind some kind of in-game explanation like “you’re taking a boat/plane/subway” or whatever.
The other one should be some way of moving really fast across the map so previously explored areas aren’t a chore to move across. Literally fast travel, and not teleportation. And no, conventional solutions like horses or cars is still not fast enough. It’s still minutes of mindlessly moving from point A to B in most cases. It needs to be truly fast. Spiderman 2 actually did explore this concept pretty well, with ideas like catapulting yourself or using a wingsuit to glide long distances. Other games need to come up with someway of allow players to cross huge distances in in a few seconds.
Man I’m glad dd2 is in his hands
It’s a fair point. I completely forgot fast travel was a thing when I played Spider-man because I enjoyed swinging around. I think teleportation is often used as a crutch to get around the fact that travel does tend to be boring (hello Bethesda).
The only reason I knew there was fast travel in Spider-Man was because there was an achievement for it.
I don’t NEED fast travel, but I would prefer if games still had an in-universe method of traversing from, say, the Easternmost region and the Westernmost region (i.e. a train, boat, horse carriage, etc.). I just don’t like spending significant amounts of time running back and forth through areas I’ve already discovered all the content in.
I appreciate fast travel in games like Kingdom Come Deliverance, where the fast travel still accounts for the time and resources spent.
100% agree, lots of open world games these days make the only reason to explore so that you can find the fast travel beacon so you never have to explore the “open world” again.
It hides shitty and half assed world building though so I guess devs got that going for them.
I think it is more of a gameplay issue than a world building issue.
Fast travel solves a problem the developers create, needing to be in specific locations regularly to accomplish specific tasks. If you don’t need to be anywhere in particular to offload collected items or to craft stuff, or return to someone to turn in quests to level, then you can just spend the time exploring at whatever pace you want.
Game design that makes repetitive travel necessary is when fast travel becomes necessary to avoid tedium.
