https://www.ign.com/articles/dragons-dogma-2-pc-mod-grants-players-the-power-of-unlimited-teleportation
A new Dragon's Dogma 2 PC mod has given players the ability to teleport to key locations on the world map, while removing the need for ferrystones and portcrystals.
Mods solve many of the problems I have with the game, but still, it's $70 game, it shouldn't need mods for basic functionality
The game certainly has problems, but the lack of fast travel is demonstrably an intentional decision to encourage the style of gameplay they envision, not some lack of functionality. This is exactly what mods are for.
Except they failed terribly in making travelling fun. I had to go from Vernwoth to Harve over 15 times in my playthrough and it doesn't even have an oxcart so its teleport or walking. If you walk there you have to fight 3-5 packs of goblins, a cyclops, 1-2 ogres, maybe a drake, a ton of lizards and some slimes. Every. Single. Time. Enemy density makes every travel by foot a chore and they respawn way too fast. Nothing encourages that playstyle, even if they say so otherwise, either you run from every fight which sucks or you make a 10min stroll into a 1hr mess of a combat and end up being extremely overlevelled, further ruining the fun of the game. DD:DA also had a focus on travel but still gave you the eternal ferrystone, So it is in fact functionality lost, because we lost the ability to choose how we travel, how we enjoy the game.
Btw, in DD:DA I only used the eternal ferrystone for escort quests because they were terribly designed, for everything else I walked because it was actually super fun and often chill.
Yeah, I feel like they could have added more portcrystals and also, made ferrystones more common than it currently it. Travelling is genuinely a chore in this game. In DDDA, eternal ferrystone made things much easier, relatively speaking.
Seems to me like FerryStones just fall to the old too-good-to use system. By the time I started running around vermund I quickly got to double digits quantities of FerryStones and never fell to single digits comfortably using them.
From my understanding, the game doesn't lack fast travel, the resources for it are just incredibly rare unless you use micro-transactions.
That's almost correct. The microtransaction is not a ferrystone (the fast-travel consumable). It is a portcrystal (a one-time additional fast travel location). You cannot buy ferrystones with real money.
Ferrystones are found or purchased rarely. It's a clearly intentional decision to force you to explore the world on foot and weigh whether the current danger is bad enough to use a precious ferrystone to get home or if you should try and push through.
That's a lot fairer and makes a lot more sense than what I was imagining. Although I'm still a little wary of the devs designing a purposefully limited time-intensive system, and the publishers then dangling a paid solution in front of players. Even when it's just a part of the solution.
It's no wonder you were misinformed, there was tons of people sputing lies when the game released.
DD2 is a very correct successor to DD1, it captures the same feel and the gameplay just seems superior in every aspect. It's true that most people experience dragon's dogma with the dark arisen dlc, which gave you an eternal ferry stone and kind of defeats the purpose, but the vase game had nothing of the sort.
The fact that there's paid port crystals isn't that big of a deal tbh, I needed like 2 total (gate town and bakhbattal or whatever's the name) and the game gives you 3. Running around killing stuff is the game, and the other user that said that thrybhsd to travel to harpe town 13 times... Harpe town has a chain quest but you can do it all straight, I went there 3 times total, and 1 was because I wanted to unlock a class/vocation and forgot the last time.
Considering all this, I don't think the publishers offered a paid solution at all, because the solution is playing the game itself.
You can find port crystals around the map or via quests. There are also some fixed ones on the map.
You can place them anywhere... Outside I think? But maybe just anywhere.
Once you find/place them you can use a Ferrystone while outside to travel to any one you have placed. There is almost always at least one Ferrystone for sale in each town, and it will refresh after a few days when you buy it. It will cost 10,000 gold.
The number of port crystals you can place are limited (in the first game it was 8 or 9?). You can find roughly 5 per playthrough iirc. You can NewGame+ as many times as you want once far enough in the main quest (retaining most items, equipment, all vocation levels and experience...i imagine any vocation master skills too; generally just the quests and the world reset). I'm still on my first playthrough so haven't tried.
But there are no issues finding Port crystals and buying / finding Ferrystones. You DO NOT NEED MTX. That headline was so overblown.
That's the Bethesda formula for over 20 years. I'm not saying that it's desirable, but it might have "inspired" some devs / publishers.