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.
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.
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