Fast travel in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is very restricted and that rules

If you just started Dragon’s Dogma 2, it might have come as a shock that this sprawling open-world, role-playing epic is missing one common feature: fast travel. Well, it’s not quite missing, but it’s extremely limited in ways that run counter to the normal rhythms of this hugely popular genre.

The way it usually works in open-world games is this: You set forth on an adventure, heading out to unexplored regions. As you explore, you unlock fast travel points that make it easy to return to those areas. It takes a matter of seconds to get back to town when you need to rest, shop, or turn in quests. Even in games that prioritize organic exploration and discovery — like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom — fast travel is available, and usually free. It’s just accepted as a necessary addition to make these huge game worlds manageable.

Dragon’s Dogma director Hideaki Itsuno and his team at Capcom feel differently about it. In keeping with the many ways Dragon’s Dogma 2 intentionally makes your life difficult — restricting game saves to prevent save-scumming, for example — the approach to fast travel puts realism and immersion over convenience.

There are, in fact, three automatic travel options in the game: oxcarts, ropeways, and Portcrystals. Most wouldn’t really call oxcarts fast travel since they’re painfully slow, only run along a few set routes between towns, and, although you can nap to pass the time, your journey might be interrupted by bandit or monster attacks. Ropeways come with their own hazards, as they’re subject to aerial attack — and it’s a long way down.

Portcrystals resemble traditional fast travel, but with a couple of huge caveats. You need to use a Ferrystone to warp to one, and these are a very rare and precious resource. There are only a handful of Portcrystals in major locations across the entire game. If you can obtain your own Portcrystal you can place it wherever you like, but these items are rarer still.

All this means that during general play, fast travel is out, either because it’s too expensive or too inconvenient. You’re going to have to make your way on foot, and it’s going to take time — especially considering that nighttime hikes are inadvisable, so you’re encouraged to make camp for the night. Sounds tedious, right? Why did Capcom design the game this way?

The answer Itsuno has given in interviews is the one designers often give when they explain why they’ve chosen to cut back on travel convenience. To paraphrase: It’s about making sure players spend their time out in the world discovering stuff. “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 map in a way that the journey [itself] could be enjoyed,” Itsuno told IGN,

It’s true that Dragon’s Dogma 2 has an unusually dense map that’s teeming with activity and primed for all sorts of random happenstance — even more so than the recent Zeldas. The more players zip themselves from point to point across this dynamic anecdote-generation machine, the less opportunity there would be for the unexpected discoveries and events that make the game so memorable, whether it’s a fight with an accident-prone cyclops or crossing paths with a pawn who might change your life. But, in truth, Itsuno only gave half an answer.

Yes, open-world games like this should be about the journey. But most of them are specifically about the journey of discovery. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is also about the return journey, making your way back, often by a different route to see what else you can find. It’s about conserving your resources, balancing the risk and reward of exploration, thinking about how much you can carry, and keeping a wary eye on the sun as it descends toward the horizon.

I love this stuff. I love anything that makes me feel present in the world the developers have created and that makes distances feel real. I love games that resist the habit of optimizing time spent playing them; that, with a gentle but firm hand, encourage the player to just live in the moment, immersed in their adventure, rather than to play with one eye on a to-do list.

Image: Capcom

Travel is a hugely important part of interaction with game worlds — both practically and emotionally — so I get why Itsuno and his team pushed back against the impulse to skip it. Even though fast travel is easy in Spider-Man 2, my son never uses it because he just loves web-slinging so much. (You should see him go soaring and pirouetting through New York City — it’s poetry in motion.) I know many people were bored by the long, featureless sailing trips of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, but those moments of wind-blown calm, scored by the quiet rushing of the waves against the hull of Link’s little boat, are some of my most treasured gaming memories, a permanent happy place. Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding makes a whole game out of packing your bag and going for a hike, and its rugged landscape is the only other character that game really needed.

I don’t think World of Warcraft would have become half the sensation it did were it not for its approach to travel. When building the MMO two decades ago, Blizzard insisted that there would be no loading screens breaking up its huge landmasses, and that — with the exception of a Hearthstone item that would take you back to the inn of your choice on a one-hour cooldown — the only way to cross its distances would be to fly across them in real time by air taxi, watching the landscape scroll past below. In theory, this was dead time; while in the air, you couldn’t do anything but chat to your friends. But it was one of the things that made that world feel so real.

Restricting fast travel isn’t the only way to foster this kind of relationship with a game world, but it’s one of the most effective. And, for Dragon’s Dogma 2, it was the right one. (Personally, I would have cut the Portcrystals completely; they don’t feel like they fit the world, and introducing fast travel only to make it awkward and expensive is a bit too contrarian. The lumbering oxcarts and treacherous ropeways fit right in, though.) Capcom’s game is a capricious, random, surprising, brilliantly conceived adventure simulator, and one of the few games to recognize that adventures are about the journey home home as well as heading out. If it had allowed you to warp back at the end of a quest, it would simply have cut itself in half.