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
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!
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/games-only-need-fast-travel-when-they-make-travel-boring-says-dragons-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.
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…
Right. BG3 does this with long rests too – cinematic interruptions are a thing :)
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?)
Fallout 2
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
https://www.ign.com/articles/dragons-dogma-2-director-explains-why-less-fast-travel-can-be-a-good-thing
Haha, thanks. I thought I copy pasted it into the comment but didn’t actually stop to look at the link haha