I think even the more compelling games I’ve played used fast travel…Not as an excuse to reduce exposure to a tedious world, but to respect a gamer’s time! I prefer fast travel to hubs and allowing me to make a short journey to wherever my next objective is. No Man’s Sky has my favorite system for fast travel: Teleportation Portals which you can use to create a network of fast travel spots. It makes exploring previously settled planets a lot easier but still encourages the player to explore their unique universe. It’s limited, but in an elegant way which I find to be pleasing.

I can only think of one game that made travel boring: Skyrim. The main reason is that once you’ve experienced one random event…You’ve seen them all as there’s no flavor to those random on the road events. Fast Travel to any point on the map was designed to hide the blandness of Skyrim.

Even Hideaki must realize that travelling the same road repeatedly will become dull because one can only pack so many random events in a game…I hope that he makes for an option to even avoid that level of tedium in the extremely late/post-game. Else his game will become the very thing he’s critiquing.