Ready for your next quest in Dying Light: The Beast? See you on the other side of the map in about… Ten minutes? Fifteen? Really, however long it takes to get there on foot or by car, because Dying Light: The Beast apparently hates convenience and wants Kyle Crane to suffer more than he already has.
The lack of fast travel in Dying Light: The Beast, the latest entry in Techland’s long-running series of first-person zombie-killing adventures, is undoubtedly intended to encourage exploration, but all it does for me is encourage frustration. Even after carefully considering the reasons why this open-world zombie survival game shouldn’t have a fast travel option, they each fall flat — just like Kyle Crane, when I rush him off a building in haste.
For example, you might argue that The Beast’s parkour is amazing, and I’d wholeheartedly agree, but that doesn’t mean I want to run, jump, and climb all the time. True, Dying Light: The Beast offers cars I can use, but vehicles, road access, and fuel supplies are limited. And I would agree that stumbling upon new locations is what makes an open-world game interesting, but when you’ve traversed a location several times, there’s little left to discover.
Following my first visit to the urban Old Town area, I got the feeling that Dying Light: The Beast was deliberately increasing my travel time by dispersing objective locations within the same quests. When one of the side quests directed me to a dark zone in Old Town, I opened my map, looked for the nearest car, found it, drove toward Old Town, ran out of fuel, opened my map again, ran the rest of the way, and, eventually, had a lovely time with the dark zone’s zombies — only to find that the next quest objective sent me back to where I began, on the other side of the map.
I must acknowledge that Dying Light: The Beast doesn’t have the largest map ever seen in an open-world game, but that’s all the more reason to argue in favor of fast travel; if its absence bothers me on a smaller map, it would certainly bother me on a bigger one.
Naturally, it would help to plan quest objectives in a certain order, but are we really talking about “encouraging exploration” if I feel compelled to reduce my travel time? It sounds more like I’d be “decreasing inconvenience” as much as possible. Furthermore, if I feel invested in a storyline and want to know what happens next (which is a good thing, Techland!), I don’t want to complete other quest objectives first.
There’s only one reason I can think of in favor of preventing fast travel: You don’t get an easy exit route. And I have to admit, I wouldn’t want to miss out on the small heart attack I feel whenever night falls – but surely there are workarounds for that. For example, fast travel from Dark Zones could be prohibited, or fast travel points could be positioned outside safe zones, forcing you to make a short run through the dark before reaching safety. Perhaps even better, Dying Light: The Beast could allow fast travel between fast travel locations only, so you decrease travel time without the option of instant teleportation.
There are plenty more tweaks to preserve the sense of realism and open-world exploration. Fast travel could be limited to vehicle spawn points, for example, cost in-game money, or be interrupted by random encounters (the chance to be attacked by unexpected fiends). Of course, it’s only sensible to unlock new fast travel points after exploring their surroundings.
Perhaps the strongest argument in favor of fast travel, however, is choice: Even with a fast travel system in place, players who prefer to travel solely on foot and by car would still have that option, whereas players with less time to play, or with less thirst for driving and parkour, could spend that time on other in-game activities. That, in my opinion, is the real sense of freedom one should expect from an open-world game.
