In a recent interview with IGN, Dragon's Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno didn't mince words about his preference for actually exploring the open world rather than navigating through the map menu express: 'Travel is boring' It's not. It's only a problem because your game is boring. You just have to make the journey fun."

In Dragon's Dogma and its sequel, fast travel is more limited in form, requiring users to spend bounty resources if they want to avoid getting from point A to point B the old fashioned way. However, Itzuno is careful to avoid the result of sloppily moving around the world map without incident.

"We've put a lot of effort into designing games where you meet someone by chance and something happens," explains Itsuno. We could have fast travel [in the game], but we decided to design the maps in such a way that the players themselves would make the decision to bike or walk to enjoy the journey."

Dragon's Dogma 2 introduces a second "fast travel" in addition to the first game's ferry stone, but there is a twist to this as well. Dragon's Dogma 2 will feature carts for traveling between settlements, similar to the wagons in Skyrim and the silt striders in Morrowind, but this fantastical form of public transportation seems to be complicated by random encounters along the way.

Itsuno describes the kinds of surprises players will discover in the open world and the new transportation system as follows. Goblins may block the road and you may have to get rid of them, or hungry griffins may be drawn to the livestock pulling your wagon and block you... In Morrowind, a single countryman riding a fantasy bus with a silt strider but adding the curveball of systemic attack seems to take it to another level.

After all, Itzuno is not necessarily opposed to a more generous and user-friendly fast-travel system, calling it "convenient," but the unique focus of "Dragon's Dogma's" grounded approach could make this open world a real draw could be.