Games only need fast travel when they make travel "boring", says Dragon's Dogma 2 director
Games only need fast travel when they make travel "boring", says Dragon's Dogma 2 director
This article is about an article. See the original interview on IGN.
I agree, largely, that fast travel sucks when a game is exploration focused. But after you've explored, fast travel is usually a good thing. Even the best exploration oriented games have fast travel. No Man's Sky is a great example where there's great seamless travel with your ship while you're exploring -- but you can still portal from a space station to your base in another system. For content dense games like Zelda or BG3, fast travel means you spend more time in content -- the only thing to optimize is the locations and density of portals.
For him, the world is there to be discovered because there are things to be discovered. He talks about forcing players into "blind situations" and "stumbling across someone and something will happen".
Yeah, but we've had that for decades with fast travel....
Game like FO2 had you "travel" on a map. And you'd randomly get stopped for events.
And random events are his rational for why fast travel is bad.
Fast travel isn't the issue, it's boring games that are the issue. It's be trivial for fast travel to randomly spit you out partway through for an event, then let you continue after.
Kingdom Come does this and I really enjoyed it. At lower levels you are just thrown into an ambush/event but you can get perks that allow you to anticipate the ambush/event and react first. Ambushing the ambushers never gets old..
Yes, travel should come with a cost. Kingdom Come deliverance had a similar concept: you'd get hungry, can get ambushed, or you need to sleep at some point.
The Gothic games introduce fast travel very late in the game, with teleporter stones. Also, they had a very densely packed map, so travelling to some other place did not really took that much time. But I think it is a nice alternative.
I recently started playing outward and it has (practically) no fast travel. It really is refreshing, it keeps you thinking what area is best to go to next and you should keep track of your rations, carry capacity etc
(Also, what game do you refer to with FO2?)
Right. BG3 does this with long rests too -- cinematic interruptions are a thing :)
That was my main beef with Final Fantasy 11. When you first started, depending on which main town you picked, it was a 20 minute or HOUR walk to the nearest Crag (fast travel building), and you HAD to have an escort there because the mobs along the way were too tough for anyone under level 20.
But even after you unlock several Crags most of them were still a 20-30 WALK from where you were going. That MMO was of the old mindset of "walking is still content, so if we make them walk everywhere they'll feel fulfilled with all they've done in an hour!" Not when most of the game is walking!
Here's the IGN article
Haha, thanks. I thought I copy pasted it into the comment but didn't actually stop to look at the link haha
Dragon's Dogma One was miserably boring in its travel.
AC odyssey was joy to travel in. I did use fast travel, but riding or sailing was by no means a chore.
Yeah, nothing better than go get random npcs running toward me with random ass quests "help help my mom was kidnapped you have 15min to save her or SHE DIES SHE'S RIGHT IN THAT CAVE IN OVER THERE", or to have bandits and assassins jump me four times during a walk to the capitol. Jolly good content.
What game is that?
Burnout Paradise (pre-remaster) is an amazing game where just driving around between races and exploring the map is fun… until you lose a race. You then spend the next 5 minutes going all the way back to the start only to try again. It’s especially infuriating when you lost the race due to something completely unpredictable. You know who handles this well? GTA: Vice City Stories. Yes, you travel between missions, but if you die in a mission, there’s a taxi right in front of the hospital that takes you back to the start immediately. Exploring is fun until you are forced to do it. Even DayZ doesn’t force it. You die, well, you might as well start from scratch because your gear will probably de-spawn before you can get back to it.
I book plane rides because I do not have time to drive places... If the map is big enough it should have a fast travel option.
Yeah some of us have only a few hours to play. Can't waste time walking.
I always found "slow" travel in Bethesda games very dull including in Starfield, at least when the game lets you slow travel. In contrast, travel in Star Citizen is very "slow", but I never get tired of it because it's so perfectly designed for space sim lovers. There's so much detail in the ships I never get bored just looking around, there's always something to adjust among ship systems, and if you're in a multi-minute qt jump you can literally just get up from the pilot seat and go somewhere else in your ship to do something other than wait.
Fallout 4 slow travel was great, IMO. You often ran into NPCs or new things to explore that you missed on the giant map.
Starfield is pointless though. There's like a 5km sphere where all the ships are orbiting every planet and the jump mechanics between solar systems is basically nothing but fast travel anyway. Why am I even flying a ship? I can't deorbit. I can't control travel between worlds or around a world. I can't explore much with it. Combat is rudimentary at best.
I'm a little butt-hurt.
I wish there were more games that scratch the Just Cause 3 itch. It's ridiculously fun to fly around everywhere with your grappling hook and wingsuit, yet there are very few games that come close.
I agree there, fast travel almost always feels like I'm opting out of playing the game tbh
I liked the direction DD1 had for travel (still had the grind issue on the longer play throughs)
I love exploring in Pokemon Gun. It is a survival game, but the travel and collecting rare items is fun. There is also the fact that once you get a flying creature, it is a lot more enjoyable than walking.
Spider-man agrees.
I didn’t realize Spiderman had a fast travel option till after I finished the game
I knew it did, and chose not to use it. Only game I've done so with for years.
AAAhhhhh this is a big negativ point for me....
I agree. I almost never fast travel in games, when I do it's at the very end game usually if I'm just trying to 100% it.
I never felt the need to travel in Cyberpunk 2077. Nor for Yakuza or Dragons Dogma.
I beat most of Skyrim without fast travel too, though that one began getting tedious at the end. I never even attempted with RDR2, it felt pointless.
Nah, like in games like the Witcher 3, I don't want to ride my horse everywhere 30x over. I don't have that time to waste.
I don’t even want to ride my horse to the nearest signpost, work out where the quickest signpost is to where I want to be, then ride my horse the last bit.
That was tedious as fuck. Coupled with the “I’m going to finish this quest then go to bed” only to have some random encounter or combat get in the way, I never finished the game. Got better things to do.