Dragon's Dogma Director Suggests Fast Travel is for 'Boring Games'

In a recent interview with IGN, the director of the upcoming Dragon’s Dogma 2 spoke about the concept of fast travel in games. It was made clear: he doesn’t like fast travel at all. In the discussion, Hideaki Itsuno explained that if fast travel is present, there’s a suggestion that it’s there to avoid ‘boring’ travel. To that, he made a damning statement, stressing that, ‘It’s only an issue because your game is boring.’

Take It All In

It has been more than ten years since the last Dragon’s Dogma game was released, and fans are excited about the impending release of the follow-up title. In a recent interview with IGN, the game’s director spoke about the worldbuilding that has been woven into the development of Dragon’s Dogma 2. Specifically, he touched upon the nature of making a map that’s bursting at the seams with opportunities to explore and uncover all manner of secrets and activities.

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.

In Dragon’s Dogma 2, fast travel isn’t all that accessible. It’s a costly practice that will have the player limiting the number of times they use the function, which is a far cry from most open-world games that make it to the market these days. For instance, Starfield, which launched in September and is riddled with fast travel skips that make space travel almost redundant.

Even when a player does make use of a fast travel function in Dragon’s Dogma 2, they may find themselves ambushed halfway through their journey. That’s a similar mechanic to Kingdom Come: Deliverance, where players can fast travel but at any point they can be set upon by enemies and forced to fight before they can resume their journey.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 will be released on March 22.

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