Dragon’s Dogma 2 doesn’t have traditional fast travel, with the director saying you don’t need it if your game isn’t boring

Fast travel is something every player has grown accustomed to in the many worlds of video games. Regarded as almost an essential tool of open-world games, it’s there for the players that get annoyed by traveling the world, making it easier to move from location to location. But Dragon’s Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno is here to challenge the notion.

“Just give it a try. Travel is boring? That’s not true,” he said to IGN in an interview while revealing that his upcoming fantasy title would keep the feature mostly out of it, just as the original Dragon’s Dogma did. “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 then meters in front of them.”

He continued, “We’ve put a lot of work into designing a game where you can stumble across someone and something will happen, 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.”

How will travel work in Dragon’s Dogma 2?

Just as in the original title, Dragon’s Dogma 2 will not allow players to freely jump around any spot in the map they want. Instead, what fast travel there is is actually heavily restricted and comes at an actual cost, requiring a resource called Ferrystones to teleport to specific Port Crystals around the world.

In addition to that, they’ve added an un-safe method of transportation in the form of Oxcarts: small carriages pulled by Oxes that travel in real time through specific routes. These vehicles are vulnerable to be ambushed by monsters and enemies, and it’s thought as a way to build out the world. The director explained that “while riding one, you might find the path blocked by goblins and have no choice but to get off and join the battle. Then as you do, a Griffin might swoop in and destroy the entire cart with one blow, forcing you to walk the rest of the way while cursing its name.”

“But none of that has been set up by us in advance. Instead, Griffins naturally have an inclination toward attacking cows they discover as they move, and these pieces all just happen to work together to naturally create the situation. So yes, an oxcart ride in this world may be cheap, but a lot can come as a result of that cheapness. I think that’s the kind of world we’ve managed to create.”

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is, without a doubt, one of the most anticipated video games of 2024. The open-world action RPG by Capcom will be released on March 22, 2024, on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC