https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/games-only-need-fast-travel-when-they-make-travel-boring-says-dragons-dogma-2-director

This article is about an article. See the original interview on IGN.

I agree, largely, that fast travel sucks when a game is exploration focused. But after you've explored, fast travel is usually a good thing. Even the best exploration oriented games have fast travel. No Man's Sky is a great example where there's great seamless travel with your ship while you're exploring -- but you can still portal from a space station to your base in another system. For content dense games like Zelda or BG3, fast travel means you spend more time in content -- the only thing to optimize is the locations and density of portals.

Yeah, nothing better than go get random npcs running toward me with random ass quests "help help my mom was kidnapped you have 15min to save her or SHE DIES SHE'S RIGHT IN THAT CAVE IN OVER THERE", or to have bandits and assassins jump me four times during a walk to the capitol. Jolly good content.

Burnout Paradise (pre-remaster) is an amazing game where just driving around between races and exploring the map is fun… until you lose a race. You then spend the next 5 minutes going all the way back to the start only to try again. It’s especially infuriating when you lost the race due to something completely unpredictable. You know who handles this well? GTA: Vice City Stories. Yes, you travel between missions, but if you die in a mission, there’s a taxi right in front of the hospital that takes you back to the start immediately. Exploring is fun until you are forced to do it. Even DayZ doesn’t force it. You die, well, you might as well start from scratch because your gear will probably de-spawn before you can get back to it.

I always found "slow" travel in Bethesda games very dull including in Starfield, at least when the game lets you slow travel. In contrast, travel in Star Citizen is very "slow", but I never get tired of it because it's so perfectly designed for space sim lovers. There's so much detail in the ships I never get bored just looking around, there's always something to adjust among ship systems, and if you're in a multi-minute qt jump you can literally just get up from the pilot seat and go somewhere else in your ship to do something other than wait.

I love exploring in Pokemon Gun. It is a survival game, but the travel and collecting rare items is fun. There is also the fact that once you get a flying creature, it is a lot more enjoyable than walking.

Spider-man agrees.

AAAhhhhh this is a big negativ point for me....

I agree. I almost never fast travel in games, when I do it's at the very end game usually if I'm just trying to 100% it.

I never felt the need to travel in Cyberpunk 2077. Nor for Yakuza or Dragons Dogma.

I beat most of Skyrim without fast travel too, though that one began getting tedious at the end. I never even attempted with RDR2, it felt pointless.