Dragon’s Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno has weighed in on fast travel in video games. His thoughts? Travelling the traditional, ‘long’ way itself isn’t boring. It’s more about whether the game you are playing is interesting enough to keep you entertained while you travel.
“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 told IGN when asked about fast travel mechanics.
“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.”
The Dragon’s Dogma 2 team has designed a game where players can “stumble across someone and something will happen,” Itsuno explained. “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.”