Navigating massive, open-world games like Bethesda Game Studiosâ Starfield or CD Projekt Redâs The Witcher 3 usually requires a shortcut to span their sprawling maps. Though you can hop in a car in Rockstar Gamesâ Grand Theft Auto or travel by horse in Ubisoftâs Assassinâs Creed Valhalla, players often look for a much faster way to get around. And sometimes, in games like the huge RPG Starfield, fast travel is required to get from one end of its galaxy to another. Despite its convenience, fast travel can be a contentious issue in game design, and Dragonâs Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno has something to say about it.
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Dragonâs Dogma 2, the upcoming sequel to Capcomâs cult classic high-fantasy RPG Dragonâs Dogma, will feature various ways to move around its world. While fast travel is one of them, itâs not the only means of traveling, and thatâs because Itsuno believes that fast travel can be boring when relied on too heavily.
âJust give it a try. Travel is boring? Thatâs not true. Itâs only an issue because your game is boring. All you have to do is make travel fun,â Itsuno told IGN in a January 22 interview. âThatâs 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 donât know whether itâs safe or not ten meters in front of them. Weâve put a lot of work into designing a game where you can stumble across someone and something will happen, so while itâs 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.â
Itsuno isnât throwing shade at any one game, though the first one that comes to mind is Starfield. With its thousands of largely empty and static planets, the 2023 RPG practically necessitates the use of fast travel because of the vast amount of nothingness between the floating space rocks. Unfortunately, charging your thrusters for warp speed all the time, every time, cheapens spaceâs impact and limits the spontaneous encounters you could have. This is what I think Itsuno is really getting at here; fast travel impedes on emergent gameplay, an important facet of open-world game design that provides those random events that tend to stick with us long after a gameâs main quest ends. In Starfieldâs case, fast travel became something of a crutch for a lot of playersâmyself includedâwhich prompted Bethesda to work on ânew ways of traveling.â
How does travel work in Dragonâs Dogma 2?
Like the 2012 game before it, Dragonâs Dogma 2 will offer a limited way to fast travel in the form of the expensive and rare resource known as Ferrystones. These magic rocks allow you to teleport to a Portcrystal, temporary or permanent fixtures in the world that you can spawn at in order to make getting around easier and quicker. There are also Oxcarts, wooden wagons pulled by the worldâs many horned bovines, that can be absolutely decimated by any of the gameâs ferocious beasts, as Itsuno explained to IGN
âWhile 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,â Itsuno said. âBut none of that has been set up by us in advance. Instead, Griffins naturally have an inclination toward attacking cows they discover as they move, and these pieces all just happen to work together to naturally create the situation. So yes, an oxcart ride in this world may be cheap, but a lot can come as a result of that cheapness. I think thatâs the kind of world weâve managed to create.â
Lead developer Kento Kinoshita explained that because fast travel isnât a major priority for Dragonâs Dogma 2, there are a myriad of extemporaneous encounters you could have in the game. Goblins could destroy a bridge youâre trying to cross, prompting you to take a different path, which might see you run into a peddler who has their own motives. This kind of gameplay philosophy, Kinoshita said, was designed to give players the space to think for themselves.
âI guess we wanted there to be a cost to shortening a long distance,â Kinoshita said. âIn a way, that strongly mirrors the real world too. There are a lot of rules in real life that are needed to make a system possible, and ignoring those rules makes things seem less realistic, or less valuable.â
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The wait for Dragonâs Dogma 2 isnât much longer now. The game launches on March 22 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, so in time, weâll find out just how importantâor notâfast travel is to getting around its world. For now, Iâm just stoked for the many unexpected moments Iâll have during my journey.
