Fast Travel is For 'Boring' Games, Says Dragon's Dogma 2 Director

Dragon’s Dogma 2’s director Hideaki Itsuno is not a fan of fast travel in open-world games. In an interview over at IGN, Itsuno affirmed his commitment to making traveling the world of Dragon’s Dogma 2 something players look forward to.

Itsuno argues that if players find traveling the open-world of a game to be boring, that’s not inherent to the genre, it’s the mark of a boring game:

“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. 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.”

This isn’t to say that Dragon’s Dogma 2 won’t feature fast travel, just that Capcom is banking on most players not feeling the need to often utilize the feature because the team is confident they’ve built a world worth exploring.

Fast travel options in the game include Port Crystals which can be teleported to with expensive and scarce Ferrystones as well as a new option, Oxcarts.

Oxcarts will travel along predetermined paths and players run the risk of being ambushed while on them, but offer a cheaper alternative for those just looking to get from point A to B without as much effort, at least when the path isn’t being blocked by goblins, forcing the player to get involved. That is, unless a Griffin randomly swoops in and takes care of the goblins. That’s a thing that can happen in Dragon’s Dogma 2 simply due to the way the world has been designed to allow for those sorts of emergent scenarios. 

Dragon’s Dogma 2 releases on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows platforms on March 22.