Capcom’s Dragon’s Dogma 2 is looking to be one of the most anticipated games of 2024, with many people having high hopes and expectations for the cult classic sleeper hit sequel. But for many players of the old game, a concern has been prevalent in their mind: how will they traverse the world? Fast travel was borderline nonexistant in the original Dragon’s Dogma, with only a few port crystals to take you from one point to another, and the trek through the game’s impressively large map could be considered a bit tedious. This is one of the major points fans were concerned about going in to Dragon’s Dogma 2, and in an interview with IGN Dragon’s Dogma director Hideaki Itsuno assures fans that they have definitely focused on this as a point of improvement for the sequel.
Just give it a try. Travel is boring? That’s not true. 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 ten meters in front of them.
Itsuno is boldly claiming that Dragon’s Dogma 2 will have no need for point and click fast travel. In fact, the game features a pretty robust cart system that will take you from one major location to the other, but this cart system can be interrupted by any number of interruptions like say, a griffon wanted to chow down on your cart’s ox. If the griffin kills the ox or smashes the cart, then you’ll have to trek the entire rest of the way, or maybe you determine that the road is safer to travel on foot after the battle, since there would be no ox to attract predators.
In any case, risky as it is, this is a great example of why Itsuno is one of the best minds in the business today. This outside-of-the-box innovative thinking is a great way to implement exploring the land in a way that can fit a player’s playstyle without necessarily skipping whole sections of the world. Whether or not this pans out well is only something we can wait for the full release on, but the video game industry needs room for more innovation to these typical scenarios like this, and we can only pray that it’s implemented in a way that’s fun and memorable.