Fast travel is a near ubiquitous feature in any remotely open video game. It’s hard to imagine any game that involves exploring a large world that does not, in some capacity, give the player the ability to skip from their present location to another place they’ve been to before. Each game will have a slightly different implementation of the system, with different parameters for its start and end points, as well as whether the player is free to use it whenever or if it requires consuming some form of resource. But in nearly all implementations, it’s a convenience that’s taken for granted.

Convenience is not always compelling game design, however. Similarly, when a feature amounts to bypassing part of the game, it raises questions about how well designed the game is to begin with. Due to the myriad ways fast travel can be implemented, it’s a bit hard to describe in the abstract, so instead, I’m doing to look at a few games in particular that have fast travel worth mentioning, whether for good or bad reasons.

Persona 5

Starting off with a short one, we have Persona 5. There’s not much to say about the use of fast travel during the exploration of Tokyo in the daytime. The player can walk through the various stops on the way to where they’re going, or they can just go straight there. Persona is a series where the world develops in time more so than in space, so you’ll be seeing the same areas a lot. Therefore, it’s hard to feel like you’re missing out if you don’t go to the subway station every single day. At the same time, these locales and the NPCs within them do change a bit over time, but in a granular enough way that you’re unlikely to miss much by not examining every single place on every single day.

Fast travel becomes more of a problem in the Palaces, the Persona 5 equivalent of what would be called dungeons in other games. They’re simple enough in concept: throughout each Palace, the player will find various safe rooms that also function as fast travel points. That way, on returning for a second day of infiltration, the player can start from wherever they left off. Nothing too shocking here. But each Palace culminates in a heist in which the party sends their calling card to its master so they can steal the treasure from within. The calling card alerts the Palace security, meaning the heist has higher stakes than a usual infiltration. Except, there’s always going to be a safe room near the end of the Palace, so you can just skip all of that and go straight to the boss. How simple would it have been to just say that fast travel is impossible during heists due to heightened security? It would certainly make the heists more interesting.

Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth

Moving on, we have an RPG with a much larger world. In Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, there are lots of points of interest that can be used as fast travel points. Initially, the player is limited to fast travel within the region they’re currently in, which seems reasonable enough. There’s usually some means of traveling back to other regions, though, so this is really just adding another step to the fast travel, as well as a minor expense to pay for said transportation.

But that’s not the biggest issue. The problem is when we look at the Chocobo Stops. These function sort of like the save points in older Final Fantasy games in that the player can use a consumable item to rest and recover the party’s health. In this case, it’s a cushion, because the benches at these stops aren’t comfortable enough otherwise. Silly, but hardly out of the ordinary for a game like this. However, it’s not clear why one would ever bother doing this, because they could just fast travel back to a place where they could rest without the cushion, and then fast travel back to the Chocobo Stop. The only benefit to resting at the Chocobo Stop, then, is that the player won’t have to see any loading screens and therefore they’ll save a bit of time. On the other hand, the benefit of using fast travel to rest is that one will never need to worry about keeping cushions on hand, or even needing to use Chocobo Stops at all, because there are so many other potential fast travel points to choose from.

Final Fantasy XV

The previous open-world Final Fantasy has a very different approach to fast travel. All across the map, there’s a road system on which the party can drive their car, the Regalia. As long as they’re driving in daylight, there’s very little that can interrupt these road trips, so you wouldn’t miss much besides some scenery, tunes, and banter by fast traveling. And that’s exactly how the fast travel works: Anywhere you can drive to, you can fast travel to, as long as you’re at the Regalia. Fast travel to anywhere else is just taking the Regalia as close as it will get, and the player will need to walk the rest of the way. The exception is that the player also has the option to fast travel to wherever the Regalia currently is. The player could take advantage of this by leaving it somewhere advantageous while out and about, so when they’re done, they can instantly get back to wherever they need to be. Ultimately, I find this to be a more compelling system than Rebirth’s. Even when it’s exploited, it never fully bypasses the need to traverse the game’s environments.

Dark Souls and Elden Ring

From the beginning, there is no fast travel in Dark Souls. Anywhere the player wants to go, they’ll need to go by foot, and they’ll need to find their way back. Eventually, they do unlock the ability to use Bonfires as fast travel points. This works well not just because it’s delayed, but because of the point it’s delayed to. Up until unlocking fast travel, the player has been exploring locations that are new to them. But right around when fast travel is unlocked, they need to start going back to those places to explore them deeper. It’s a convenience for certain, but a convenience only granted once it becomes particularly useful. Prior to that point, it would have been superfluous.

Alas, the sequels to Dark Souls give the player this convenience from the start, or at least from very early on. Perhaps it’s a consequence of their structure; not only are these games less keen on returning to prior locations than the first, but the player also needs to return to a hub location to spend their souls and level up their character. At the very least, there’s still the need to first find a bonfire to fast travel from, so it isn’t a get out of jail free card.

I wish I could say the same about Elden Ring. In that game, sites of grace (functionally the same as bonfires) are scattered throughout the map. This time, being an open world game, they can be approached from many directions, rather than more constrained level design funneling the player to them through one specific route. They can be warped to from anywhere, at any time, rather than needing to return to a site of grace. This is a bit odd because sites of grace are frankly easier to reach than bonfires were due to the non-linear environments. But more importantly, the challenge of not just getting in but also getting out is gone.

Dragon’s Dogma

Here we have a particularly creative example of fast travel. The first thing to know about fast travel in Dragon’s Dogma is that it’s constrained by a limited resource. And when I say limited, I don’t mean finite, but I do mean that you can’t just wantonly use your Ferrystones without concern. You shouldn’t have to worry too much about scarcity, but only because they’re scarce. Using them for every little thing would deplete them quickly, but saving them for meaningful distances will keep your inventory well stocked. This balance goes to show just how important it is to have some limitations on fast travel.

The second thing to know about fast travel in Dragon’s Dogma is far more interesting. Not only are the resources necessary to fast travel limited, the fast travel points are also quite limited. There are only so many Portcrystals on the map. But the rub is that the player can pick them up and place them wherever they want, save for a handful of fixed Portcrystals in important locations. Sometimes, it’s reasonable to leave the Portcrystal exactly where you found it so you can return there whenever you like. This is particularly useful for remote locations. Other times, there’s little reason to ever return to where you found it, so you can put it somewhere more productive. Further still, wherever you left a Portcrystal might cease to be a relevant location later on, at which point you can pick it up and move it somewhere else. It’s a more involved process than just about any other fast travel system, and I think it’s one of the very best.

There is a problem, however. The Dark Arisen version of Dragon’s Dogma, that is to say the version virtually everyone will be playing, adds an Eternal Ferrystone. As the name implies, it’s a Ferrystone that can be used infinitely. So all that stuff I said about not using Ferrystones willy-nilly? You can do that now, no problem.

Death Stranding

Here we have another exciting example. Unlike most open world games, which often treat the open world as mere connective tissue between things for the player to do, in Death Stranding, traversing the world is what the game is all about. Fast travel would seem to undermine that, like playing Doom with all of the enemies disabled. But Death Stranding finds a way. Fast travel points are limited to the private rooms where Sam Porter Bridges can rest, but the much bigger limitation is that he can’t bring any cargo with him while using fast travel. As delivering cargo is the primary goal in Death Stranding, fast travel can never be used to bypass any sort of challenge the game presents. It’s the rare convenience that doesn’t compromise the experience.

Spider-Man 2

In some regards, fast travel in Spider-Man 2 isn’t interesting at all. You pick a spot on the map, and Spider-Man goes there. Conceptually, it’s incredibly simple. On a technical level, it’s very impressive, however, with the transition being nearly instant and seamless. But I’m not here to talk about tech. This might be the single least constrained fast travel system on the list. So why don’t I dislike it? It’s simple: the biggest drawback to fast travel is that it’s less fun. Swinging and gliding across the map is a wonderful feeling, and there’s hardly anything that can actually get in the way of that. Unlike Persona 5, they’re not bypassing any sort of challenge, and movement is blisteringly fast in this game, so it can barely even be considered a convenience. Instead of spending an item or mana or in-game currency, it’s as though the player is spending part of their own soul to use fast travel. Do you really want to get there right now, so much that you’ll miss out on this?

What’s the point?

If fast travel is a solution to a problem, then it’s worth asking what that problem is. It’s reasonable for the player to not want to repeat the same stretch over and over again. Letting them get back to the farthest place they’ve been is a reasonable solution. Or, if traversing the map is meaningfully difficult, letting them get somewhere they’ve been before with less stress is also reasonable, so long as traversing the map isn’t the primary focus of the game. In either case, it shouldn’t be trivialized to the point where the player is fast traveling almost everywhere they go. Some convenience is fine, but remember that friction is often what makes things interesting. Sure, it’s optional, but one shouldn’t just expect the player to deliberately opt out of that convenience for their own sake. Sometimes, the developer needs to take a firm stance.

But when fast travel is merely to save the player time, it would suggest that traversing the map simply isn’t interesting enough. Fast travel is therefore slapping a bandage on a gaping wound instead of sewing it shut. Traversing the world shouldn’t be a chore. In that sense, fast travel is often less of a bad design choice and more a consequence of many other bad design choices. If the player would rather skip parts of a game, it’s worthwhile to ask why.