Back when Dragon’s Dogma 2 released, getting somewhere was a hassle. I, myself, had one of my journeys utterly dismantled when my ox cart was ambushed, destroyed by my own pawn’s ill-advised spell, and summarily attacked by a gryphon that stole me miles away from my original location.
That was somewhat addressed in a June patch that added the Eternal Ferrystone, which lets you teleport to one of your assigned Portcrystals from the map and, as the name suggests, didn’t run out. It’s counter to the deliberately thorny design of Dragon’s Dogma 2 which, in my humble opinion, makes it appealing.
Still—it was enough of a pain point that Capcom saw fit to address it. And per an interview with Eurogamer, director Kenta Kinoshita maintains that its presence doesn’t impact that original vision because, well, you don’t gotta use it:
“I feel that we’re not forcing anyone to fast travel anywhere , we’re just giving those who wish to take that option an alternative—even if they don’t use it every time. I’m sure every player has times when retracing the path from the main town back to where they’re going, yet again, where they will feel the game is getting repetitive. And everyone has real-world time constraints, so they don’t want every session to feel that lengthy. Sometimes you just need to get where you’re going. That option is there for you now.”
Kinoshita continues: “If a player wants to make a decision to remain in the high verisimilitude version of being an adventurer who has to walk everywhere—or they want to go in the middle and take the ox cart and take the risks that approach has—that’s absolutely still an option. It’s just you now have a third option.”
And, look, maybe I’m just being a stubborn stick in the mud, but I’m not really sure I agree with Kinoshita, there. The presence of a more convenient option heavily impacts whether or not a player is going to use the alternative—and those limitations often push players into experiences they otherwise never would’ve gone for.
Take me, for example. I don’t think I would’ve used my fragile, flimsy ox carts if I had the option to simply bamf to my portcrystals for free, but because I was forced into it by launch-year DD2, I did, and I had a grand old time!
I’d have less of a compunction about the Eternal Ferrystone if it was a late-game item, meant to help smooth things over when you’re already deeply acquainted with the game and its many journey-spoiling monsters. But you can get this thing during the Seat of the Sovran quest, a mere handful of quests into the game.
In other words, you unlock the ability to fast travel with this unlimited ferrystone far in advance of actually needing to fast travel anywhere—which, like it or not, disincentivises the long way ’round. Still, Kinoshita maintains: “That’s the best way to implement quality-of-life improvements: don’t impinge on the original experience, but just give the player more possibilities, if possible.”