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Fast Travel Games secures $4m in new investment round

VR game developer aims to increase its publishing operations with the funding

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VR game developer Fast Travel Games has raised $4 million in a new investment round.

The studio said that the funding will go towards expanding its business operations, which include publishing and developing new IPs for VR platforms.

Handelsbanken Fonder led the investment round. Meanwhile, Industrifonden, Brightly Ventures, Creades, and Inbox Capital also participated.

Since its establishment in 2016, Fast Travel Games has published titles such as Broken Edge while developing games, which include Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife and The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets.

Fast Travel Games CEO Oskar Burman said, "The VR games market continues to grow at a steady pace, and with the introduction of the PS VR2 and the Quest 3 this year, and the Apple Vision Pro around the corner, we're confident this growth will continue…With this new investment, we're in a solid position to capitalize on this new exciting gaming frontier."

The game studio said that it plans to reveal new publishing partnerships in the future.

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Play as aliens or agents in suspenseful sci-fi multiplayer title Mannequin, coming to PS VR2 in 2024

In a world where time has frozen, use social deduction and tech to survive. 

Hello PlayStation nation! My name’s James Hunt and I’m the Game Director for Fast Travel Games’ new PS VR2 title, Mannequin, coming in 2024. You may know the Fast Travel team from our long history of single-player VR experiences like Cities: VR and the upcoming Vampire: The Masquerade – Justice, but Mannequin will be our first ever in-house multiplayer title, allowing up to 5 players to enjoy suspense, social deduction and fast, sudden action.

Let me tell you all about it.

Frozen in time

In Mannequin, our first original IP since 2019’s The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets, the world is reeling from the appearance of an extraterrestrial presence. Sites across the globe have started mysteriously freezing in time, and first responders called to these areas have become motionless, helpless statues.

Not only that, but a race of alien beings has been discovered at these locations, known to you and I as Mannequins. They boast potentially life-threatening abilities, and it’s up to a team of special Agents to hunt down these supernatural new threats before they themselves fall victim to the Mannequin’s powers.

What follows is a tense game of cat and mouse.

Fight to a stand still

In a standard match of Mannequin, three players work together as the titular aliens, facing off against a team of two Agents. As Mannequins, you’ll have the ability to assume a pose and then freeze yourself, turning into a statue with the appearance of one of the trapped first responders. You can use this power to set up the perfect ambush, lying in wait for Agents to appear and then dashing forward freezing them in-place with a touch of the hand.

But Agents are far from defenseless. Armed with state of the art technology, they can scan levels for a Mannequin’s rough location. Catch the enemy in the act or suss out which statue is an enemy in disguise and you’ll need to blast them with your laser pistol. The first team to wipe out the other wins, but there’s a few more twists that make Mannequin a game of intense strategy and shifting favor.

The race is on

Each of the game’s levels features Power Stations that Mannequins can steadily drain. Draining two Power Stations will grant the team enhanced powers, including the ability to see exactly where your enemy is. This can quickly turn the tide of a match, but Power Stations make for high risk areas that Agents are likely to keep under close watch. Make sure you’re not stumbling into a trap.

Agents also have another reason to defend these Power Stations. If Mannequins haven’t claimed them within three minutes of the start of a match, the human team will get the upgrades instead. Each side can also revive any downed allies, but this too creates the perfect opportunity for a deadly ambush.

This makes each game of Mannequin a sharp, tight and tense exercise in hide and seek. Can the Mannequins fool the Agents into thinking they’re friendly, then strike at the right moment? Or will an Agent’s cunning and use of gadgets help them come out on top?

Get involved

Here at Fast Travel, we know that making the best multiplayer games can’t happen without the support of our fantastic community. We want to know what you think of today’s reveal and what you want to see in the full game when it launches in 2024. We will have more to share, including the first gameplay footage, soon.

We really believe that Mannequin is going to be a flagship multiplayer game for PS VR2, but that can only happen with your help. Until next time, ask yourself – who can you trust?

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Fast Travel Games Unveils Asymmetric Multiplayer Hide-and-Seek VR Game ‘Mannequin’

Press release, step into a time-frozen world filled with suspense, social deduction and fast, sudden action.

Read more and sign up for upcoming playtests at www.mannequingame.com Get a first look at Mannequin in the reveal trailer: https://youtu.be/mfodXa_ZRXQ?si=KWSWyMROd5uLhkys The world has stopped. Time is frozen. All attempts to make contact with the aliens have failed. Special Agents have been deployed to neutralize the threat once and for all. Play as alien Mannequins and set up deadly ambushes by posing as humans frozen in time, or as human Agents wielding high tech gadgets to neutralize the Mannequins from a distance. " Mannequin blends suspense and strategy in a unique way that can only be captured in VR," explained James Hunt, Game Director. "Each encounter will have your heart beating, encouraging teamwork and clever tactics. The world may be frozen, but you must remain fluid – it's about outthinking your opponents and staying one step ahead.  

• Choose Your Side: An extraterrestrial presence has appeared across the globe, and the world has stopped. The First Responders sent in to investigate the sites have all fallen victim to the frozen time. In matches for up to five players, play as an alien Mannequin or join the human special forces as an Agent. Prowess lies not in marksmanship, but in the art of outwitting the adversary.
• Pose As A Human: Mannequins focus on close combat and can time-freeze threats by touch. Players can use their VR headset, controllers and body to pose in 3D space in order to blend in among the time-frozen humans. Infiltration is the tool, and the art of camouflage is the mastery.
• Fight As An Agent : Agents specialize in ranged combat with an EMP Gun to neutralize the aliens. Use the EMF Reader to uncover concealed threats or leverage the Power Stations to recharge and seize the tactical edge in combat.
• Voice Chat:  Communicate and strategize internally without the opponent team eavesdropping. Beyond the heated battles, socialize, experiment with posing, and interact with fellow players within the lobby

More information and assets for Mannequin can be found on the official website . Follow the game at @mannequingame on all major social media platforms, and join the game’s Discord for the latest updates

About Fast Travel Games Fast Travel Games is a VR exclusive games developer and publisher based in Stockholm, founded by industry-leading veterans and behind critically acclaimed VR titles such as Apex Construct, The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets, and Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife. Our mission is to create high-quality VR games with believable interactions, set in immersive worlds and populated with memorable characters

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Fast Travel Games announce Ghost Signal: A Stellaris Game for VR

The team at Fast Travel Games is taking the Stellaris franchise into the realm of VR with the upcoming Ghost Signal.

Many VR gamers are familiar with Fast Travel Games’ work on Cities: VR or any of their other VR titles. Now, Fast Travel is teaming up with Paradox Interactive to bring its Stellaris franchise to the world of VR with Ghost Signal: A Stellaris Game for the Meta Quest 2.

The news came via a press release that announced the two companies’ partnership. While the original Stellaris was a 4X RTS title, it would appear that Ghost Signal: A Stellaris Game will be a roguelite experience with players commanding a spaceship and meeting aliens that can end up being friends or foes. In the press release the game is described as follows:

“This virtual reality action roguelite set in Paradox Interactive’s hit galactic universe tasks players with captaining a ship and setting out amongst the stars in search of the enigmatic Ghost Signal.”

“Ghost Signal: A Stellaris Game envelops players in a vast ocean of stars where they will meet mysterious aliens, encounter planet-sized creatures, and engage in dynamic space battles. During their journey, players can scan exotic beings for their logbook, conduct research in multiple tech trees, and more.”

Right now there’s not many more details on Ghost Signal: A Stellaris Game, nor is there a release date . However, we’ll be sure to keep you posted as more details come to light. Until then, you can check out the details on the game's official website expect to see Ghost Signal on the Meta Quest 2 platform sometime in the future.

Blake has been writing and making videos about pop-culture and games for over 10 years now. Although he'd probably prefer you thought of him as a musician and listened to his band, www.cartoonviolencemusic.com. If you see him on the street, buy him a taco or something. Follow him on twitter @ProfRobot

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Blake Morse posted a new article, Fast Travel Games announce Ghost Signal: A Stellaris Game for VR

Strike A Pose: Fast Travel's New Multiplayer Game Mannequin Adapts Prop Hunt For VR

Taking mechanics from Prop Hunt and skillfully adapting them for VR, Mannequin forces players to stroke a pose and hide among frozen NPCs in a multiplayer hunt between humans and aliens. Read on for our full hands-on impressions from Gamescom.

Fast Travel Games revealed Mannequin today, its newest multiplayer VR title coming to Quest, SteamVR and PSVR 2 in 2024. It pits two sides against each other – a team of aliens (the titular 'mannequins') against a team of human agents. The former will spread across the map and attempt to blend in among frozen, time-locked humans, while the latter have to hunt down the aliens by catching them between poses or figuring out which frozen humans are actually mannequin players in disguise.

Here's the official description from Fast Travel:

The world has stopped. Time is frozen. All attempts to make contact with the aliens have failed. Special Agents have been deployed to neutralize the threat once and for all. Play as alien Mannequins and set up deadly ambushes by posing as humans frozen in time, or as human Agents wielding high tech gadgets to neutralize the Mannequins from a distance.

The game has its origins in mechanics from the community-made Counter Strike and Garry's Mod game mode Prop Hunt. The concept has since spread into mainstream multiplayer titles, with alternative game modes featuring Prop Hunt rulesets now available in titles like Call of Duty and Fortnite. Those original flatscreen versions see a team of hunters track down a team of players disguised as various environmental props across a given map, hiding in plain sight. Mannequin takes this concept and transforms it for VR, bringing physicality into the mix by requiring players to strike a pose as humans instead of props. Using motion controllers, the alien players will have to position themselves into a believable position among a randomized layout of frozen NPCs across the map.

The game is designed for five total players in a match – three alien mannequins and two hunters. However, during our demo Fast Travel developers mentioned that the team is working on options for other combinations of players, such as 1v1, with necessary balancing adjustments.

The mannequin players begin the round in alien form, which will be easily spotted by the hunters. However, as they move around the map, they're able to freeze into a pose with the press of a button, transforming themselves into a frozen human and (hopefully) camouflaging themselves among the other time-locked NPCs. Using guns and detective tools, the human agent players will have to move across and spot the aliens, either in their native form or while disguised as a mannequin.

A match comprises of a best-of-five rounds, with a round completed when either side completely eliminates the other. There are no respawns – dead players can move around freely to spectate though – and no health bars: any player, alien or human, will be downed in one shot.

As you might expect, the human agents have guns at their disposal. However, ammo is limited and the fire rate is fairly slow, meaning you'll have to make your shots count. If you incorrectly suspect an NPC is an alien in disguise and shoot, you'll be left open for an opposing alien to pounce on you.

Aliens don't use guns to down agents, but instead can dispose of them with a single touch of their hand against the agents' bodies. While simple on paper, it's hard to make up the distance against the agents without getting spotted. This is where extra abilities come in.

Both the aliens and hunters have some extra tools up their sleeves that lend them a helping hand. The aliens, for example, can use a dash ability that will shoot them forward and quickly close distances to get a killing blow onto the enemy. It can also be used at any time – even to break out of your frozen mannequin pose once a human gets close.

The human agents have an EMF Reader that will scan the area to give you an approximate read on the rough location of the aliens, which will help give clues as to which NPCs might aliens in disguise. Another tool can be thrown out at will, placed in the environment, to reveal when aliens are moving through a specific area. The maps also include optional points that can be captured by either team, called Power Stations, granting them extra abilities and advantages once secured.

Because the matches play out over three to five rounds, strategy and teamwork starts to come into play once one team gains an advanatge. Up by two rounds? You might coordinate with your team to play more aggressive in the third round, barrelling into enemy territory or pushing for an early Power Station capture to secure those extra abilities for the round. Integrated in-game proximity voice chat facilities this level of coordination with your team, though the game currenlty doesn't include any other options (such as a ping system) for those who don't want to chat.

After playing through two matches, one as the aliens and one as the hunters, with a full five-person squad at Gamescom, I came away suitably impressed. While there's a lot of polishing to be done, the early build we played had the fundamentals down: this is a really engaging multiplayer game that uses the physicality of VR to great benefit.

What's especially exciting is how the game feels set up for future generations – while the current iteration only facilitates posing with your arms via motion controllers, you can see how full body tracking might offer more dynamic possibilities. Once you can position yourself into more dynamic poses – sitting down, crouching, leaning – then Fast Travel will be able to adjust the frozen NPC poses to accomodate accordingly, no doubt adding considerable depth to the experience.

That said, despite the limited posing offered by current technology, the game's core concept is one we haven't seen done like before in VR. Even if it borrows mechanics from the prop hunt concept, there's enough transformation and novelty in adapting it for VR to result in something that feels fresh and original, hopefully with a decent amount of depth to it as well.

All things considered, it looks like Fast Travel Games are onto something with Mannequin. I can't wait to see where they take it from here.

Mannequin is set to release in 2024 for Quest, PC VR and PSVR 2 headsets.

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Prop Hunt-style VR Multiplayer ‘Mannequin’ Brings Open Alpha to SideQuest

Fast Travel Games today broadened access to it open alpha for Mannequin , the upcoming asymmetrical multiplayer VR game on Quest 2/3/Pro, bringing access to all through SideQuest.

Update (March 20th, 2024) : Previously only available to Discord members, Fast Travel Games just opened Mannequin’s open alpha a bit more with the launch on SideQuest , the unofficial sideloading app store for Quest 2/3/Pro. It’s only available for a limited time between now and its Spring 2024 launch, so make sure to jump in sooner rather than later. It also has a number of updates, including the ability to find friends In custom games, two new levels (replacing Courtyard and The Lab), an updated lobby, and a number of balance and performance tweaks, Fast Travel says. Additionally, the studio threw out a new gameplay trailer that includes a brief explainer of the action, linked above the original article:

Original Article (February 20th, 2024) : First revealed in September, Mannequin  promises to bring a 2v3 experience akin to a deadly game of cat and mouse, letting two elite Agents hunt three shape-shifting aliens, aka Mannequins.

Somewhat like the ‘Prop Hunt’ mode from Gary’s Mod , the Mannequins have to blend into the scenery of frozen humans, but have the power to ambush Agents by dashing forward and freezing them in place with a single touch. On the flipside, Agents can scan for Mannequins and neutralize with their trusty EMP gun.

Fast Travel Games says the alpha “represents a very early build of the game with a first look at just a few of the levels and features planned for the full game,” and is said to include two levels in addition to a social lobby so players can chat or talk strategy ahead of matches.

The open alpha is free to download via the game’s Discord  (see update), with the full game set to launch on Quest, PSVR 2, and PC VR headsets later in 2024.

As hard to believe as this is, it *appears* as if Fast Travel Games [FTG] has actually made something interesting. I’ll give this a lookie-loo. I’m not too crazy about having to jump through flaming hoops by involving myself in that fetid cesspool that is Discord, but then, that right there is FTG’s fingerprints shining through …. []^ )

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Become The World's Greatest Swordfighter

Broken Edge is a VR multiplayer fantasy dueling game where you embody historical swordfighters. Use their unique techniques and powers combined with cutting-edge fencing mechanics to claim victory against online components and climb the ranks!

Embody Your Fighter

Use their unique techniques and powers combined with cutting-edge fencing mechanics to claim victory against online components and climb the ranks!

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Move and swing your sword freely as you would in real life, then apply tactical skills to block incoming blows and break your opponents' weapon at the point of impact!

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The duels in Broken Edge take place in a dream-like surreal setting with vivid colors. It's the perfect place to hone your skills.

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Take part in the global contest and prove yourself in fierce PvP cross-platform duels against players all over the world.

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All characters are equipped with unique weapons, coupled with their own distinctive martial arts style. Learn to master these ancient fighting patterns to awaken the energy of your blade and dominate your foes online.

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Dragon’s Dogma 2 has next to no fast travel and that rules, actually

You can climb that mountain, but have you thought about the hike back down?

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If you just started Dragon’s Dogma 2 , it might have come as a shock that this sprawling open-world, role-playing epic is missing one common feature: fast travel. Well, it’s not quite missing, but it’s extremely limited in ways that run counter to the normal rhythms of this hugely popular genre.

The way it usually works in open-world games is this: You set forth on an adventure, heading out to unexplored regions. As you explore, you unlock fast travel points that make it easy to return to those areas. It takes a matter of seconds to get back to town when you need to rest, shop, or turn in quests. Even in games that prioritize organic exploration and discovery — like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom — fast travel is available, and usually free. It’s just accepted as a necessary addition to make these huge game worlds manageable.

Dragon’s Dogma director Hideaki Itsuno and his team at Capcom feel differently about it. In keeping with the many ways Dragon’s Dogma 2 intentionally makes your life difficult — restricting game saves to prevent save-scumming, for example — the approach to fast travel puts realism and immersion over convenience.

There are, in fact, three automatic travel options in the game: oxcarts, ropeways, and Portcrystals . Most wouldn’t really call oxcarts fast travel since they’re painfully slow, only run along a few set routes between towns, and, although you can nap to pass the time, your journey might be interrupted by bandit or monster attacks. Ropeways come with their own hazards , as they’re subject to aerial attack — and it’s a long way down.

Portcrystals resemble traditional fast travel, but with a couple of huge caveats. You need to use a Ferrystone to warp to one, and these are a very rare and precious resource. There are only a handful of Portcrystals in major locations across the entire game. If you can obtain your own Portcrystal you can place it wherever you like, but these items are rarer still.

All this means that during general play, fast travel is out, either because it’s too expensive or too inconvenient. You’re going to have to make your way on foot, and it’s going to take time — especially considering that nighttime hikes are inadvisable, so you’re encouraged to make camp for the night. Sounds tedious, right? Why did Capcom design the game this way?

The answer Itsuno has given in interviews is the one designers often give when they explain why they’ve chosen to cut back on travel convenience. To paraphrase: It’s about making sure players spend their time out in the world discovering stuff. “We’ve put a lot of work into designing a game where you can stumble across someone and something will happen, so while it’s fine if it does have fast travel, we decided to design the map in a way that the journey [itself] could be enjoyed,” Itsuno told IGN ,

It’s true that Dragon’s Dogma 2 has an unusually dense map that’s teeming with activity and primed for all sorts of random happenstance — even more so than the recent Zeldas. The more players zip themselves from point to point across this dynamic anecdote-generation machine, the less opportunity there would be for the unexpected discoveries and events that make the game so memorable, whether it’s a fight with an accident-prone cyclops or crossing paths with a pawn who might change your life. But, in truth, Itsuno only gave half an answer.

Yes, open-world games like this should be about the journey. But most of them are specifically about the journey of discovery. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is also about the return journey, making your way back, often by a different route to see what else you can find. It’s about conserving your resources, balancing the risk and reward of exploration, thinking about how much you can carry, and keeping a wary eye on the sun as it descends toward the horizon.

I love this stuff. I love anything that makes me feel present in the world the developers have created and that makes distances feel real. I love games that resist the habit of optimizing time spent playing them ; that, with a gentle but firm hand, encourage the player to just live in the moment, immersed in their adventure, rather than to play with one eye on a to-do list.

Travel is a hugely important part of interaction with game worlds — both practically and emotionally — so I get why Itsuno and his team pushed back against the impulse to skip it. Even though fast travel is easy in Spider-Man 2 , my son never uses it because he just loves web-slinging so much. (You should see him go soaring and pirouetting through New York City — it’s poetry in motion.) I know many people were bored by the long, featureless sailing trips of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker , but those moments of wind-blown calm, scored by the quiet rushing of the waves against the hull of Link’s little boat, are some of my most treasured gaming memories, a permanent happy place. Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding makes a whole game out of packing your bag and going for a hike, and its rugged landscape is the only other character that game really needed.

I don’t think World of Warcraft would have become half the sensation it did were it not for its approach to travel. When building the MMO two decades ago, Blizzard insisted that there would be no loading screens breaking up its huge landmasses, and that — with the exception of a Hearthstone item that would take you back to the inn of your choice on a one-hour cooldown — the only way to cross its distances would be to fly across them in real time by air taxi, watching the landscape scroll past below. In theory, this was dead time; while in the air, you couldn’t do anything but chat to your friends. But it was one of the things that made that world feel so real.

Restricting fast travel isn’t the only way to foster this kind of relationship with a game world, but it’s one of the most effective. And, for Dragon’s Dogma 2 , it was the right one. (Personally, I would have cut the Portcrystals completely; they don’t feel like they fit the world, and introducing fast travel only to make it awkward and expensive is a bit too contrarian. The lumbering oxcarts and treacherous ropeways fit right in, though.) Capcom’s game is a capricious, random, surprising, brilliantly conceived adventure simulator, and one of the few games to recognize that adventures are about the journey home home as well as heading out. If it had allowed you to warp back at the end of a quest, it would simply have cut itself in half.

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A Long Way In A Short Time – The History Of Fast Travel Games

We talk to CEO Oskar Burman on the history of this VR-exclusive developer as it prepares to put out its fourth title in three years.

In VR, you’ve probably noticed, there isn’t much you can depend on. This industry is a minefield of risky markets and unwieldy technology that any developer is lucky to simply navigate and come out on the other side unscathed, let alone successfully. But there is one studio that’s earned an uncharacteristic reliability in these past five years, and that’s Fast Travel Games.

The Stockholm-based studio, which has the luxury of neighbouring alongside talent hotbeds like DICE and Rovio, already has three released VR games under its belt and will add a fourth next month with Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife. None of its past titles are what you might consider stone cold VR classics. They are, however, consistent performers – rock solid in playability, considered in design and never anything less than enjoyable to experience.

Slipping a headset on to play a Fast Travel title often feels like sitting down in front of your console and booting up a new release. These are games you can count on, a persistent trait only a few studios can claim to have matched this far in. Whether it’s the core thrills of Apex Construct’s archery combat, the warmth of The Curious Tale Of The Stolen Pets’ whimsical worlds or even the brilliantly physical stealth of Budget Cuts 2 (co-developed with Neat Corp), we’ve come to depend on Fast Travel as a sort of VR constant.

Swedish Superstars

Perhaps that’s no surprise when you consider the culminative experience behind the studio’s three core founders. CTO Kristoffer Benjaminsson and Creative Director Erik Odeldahl both hail from DICE, working on the Battlefield and Mirror’s Edge series respectively. For a time CEO Oskar Burman also worked at the EA-owned juggernaut, but he’s also held senior positions at Just Cause developer, Avalanche Studios and, until 2016, was the General Manager of Angry Birds creator Rovio’s Stockholm studio. Quite a résumé between them, then.

Why leave the safety and comfort of those established studios for all this, though? Burman’s own story is familiar – dreams born after watching 90’s cult classic, The Lawnmower Man and then brought into stark reality after getting to demo the HTC Vive in 2015 at a space Valve’s Chet Faliszek had set up at the offices of Payday developer (and StarVR creator), Starbreeze. Talking to me over web-call, Burman even describes the experience with the same ‘mind-blown’ sound effect I think we’ve all made to translate our VR excitement at some point.

“I had been at Rovio for three of four years by that time,” Burman says, “I was leading that studio but I felt like now is the time to go and build my own studio and focus on VR. I’ve been kind of waiting for the right time to start something new, but this is the time.”

There were discussions, Burman notes, about possibly working on VR projects in their current positions, but the three didn’t want to be weighed down by corporate bureaucracy (which, to this day, is very real when it comes to VR). EA, for example, had shown interest in VR with a Star Wars: Battlefront experience on PSVR, but were years away from giving it the serious commitment seen in Squadrons. They wanted to be lean and nimble, to move fast, maybe break a few things, but start learning from those fragments right away. “That’s one of the things I’ve learned throughout the years is, when you launch games, that’s when you learn,” Burman says. The aptly-named Fast Travel Games was born.

The trio’s connections and body of work afforded it the benefit of venture capital, something few other start-up VR studios will have been fortunate enough to enjoy. But the team set it to work almost right away; the remaining months of 2015 were spent on R&D and securing office space (which, at first, included sharing with Budget Cuts’ Neat Corp) and Fast Travel’s first game entered development in the early days of 2016.

Constructing Apex Construct

The team had big ambitions within the context of the VR market. It wanted to make a full, multi-hour campaign, the kind that Burman and co had been crafting for their entire careers and a direct response to the influx of wave shooters and short experiences VR was seeing so much of at the time. Apex Construct, Fast Travel hoped, would be the game early VR adopters had been pining for.

Design was smart and tight, sticking to what we already knew worked in VR. There was archery-based combat against enemies that fired huge, glowing projectiles you could dodge, for example. Though the narrative was linear, Fast Travel built out wide-reaching levels that could be revisited in later missions to open up new doors and passages, a neat way to reuse assets whilst maintaining the illusion of progression. Apex was an exercise in ticking the boxes not normal checked by your standard VR fare.

Critically, it performed quite well but, to Burman and co’s surprise its efforts to make a game VR owners wanted weren’t immediately rewarded with sales. “I think, we were disappointed at launch because we thought the market– we just thought there would be more demand at that point in time,” he says.

Over time, thanks to news headsets like Quest, Apex’s sales did begin to pick up — something Burman notes as very unusual for a single-player narrative title — but those early days were definitely a challenge for Fast Travel. “I would say 2017 but even more 2018 was the tough years when the momentum kind of died off and you started to question yourself: is this going to happen? What’s going to drive it going forward?” Burman recalls.

But Apex did accomplish one key goal; it gave Fast Travel a lot to learn from. “We learned a lot about VR interactions and what you need to think about when designing a VR game,” Burman says. “There’s a lot of other people that can speak to this but the detail of interactions, the stuff you’re expecting in VR like, if you see a texture with a button on you go press it immediately.”

There was also the growing demand for smooth movement locomotion, which Fast Travel had to implement into the game at a fairly late stage (before it had been teleport-only). Indeed, the bones of Apex Construct can be seen in every game the developer’s made since, if not always in the most obvious of ways.

A Curious Diversion And A Stealthy Surprise

Fast Travel wouldn’t take these learnings into a direct sequel to Apex Construct. Instead, for its next project, it picked something a little smaller, more manageable and — on the surface at least — quite different from its debut title. The Curious Tale Of The Stolen Pets was a cutesy puzzler that looked a little like a VR version of a Wallace & Gromit animation. You didn’t fire a bow and arrow, but instead rotated diorama-sized worlds in search of cutesy critters hiding in sunken ships and chests filled with carrots.

This, Burman says, was a passion project for the game’s lead, James Hunt, who worked with a smaller team inside the now-growing Fast Travel Games in a short amount of time to produce something of a light treat. “It’s a shorter game but it’s in many ways more polished than Apex,” Burman says. “It’s polished through and through, and also how the art comes together with the music from Wintergatan. It really works out perfectly.”

And, like Apex before it, Curious Tale has slowly but surely built an audience. “I think it’s the best-selling game we have right now on the market,” Burman reveals. “We did the hand-tracking addition to the game last year and it seems like it’s sticking and has this kind of unique niche in the Quest ecosystem.”

But, even if Curious Tale was unexpected, it wasn’t half as surprising as Fast Travel’s collaboration with Neat to release Budget Cuts 2: Mission Insolvency. The first Budget Cuts was an early showcase of how VR literally changed the game, emphasising physical movements to remain out of sight and rewarding player skill in ways flatscreen games can’t quite match. It’s also a pretty consistent seller on Steam – so why did Neat ask for help on the sequel?

“It was pretty natural to us,” Burman explains. “We had been spending a lot for time together, we knew each other, we trusted each other. Neat felt like they really wanted to build a sequel to the game and they didn’t have the capacity to get it out in that short time-frame they wanted it out.”

And so Fast Travel was enlisted. “It was fun, to do something, to work together,” Burman recalls. And a deeper bond has formed because of it. The two studios are now working on separate projects, but share a Slack group to talk about other games and movies. You can’t help but wonder, as the VR industry grows, if these two along with other Stockholm VR developers like Resolution Games and Cortopia might begin to hold reputations just as respected as the gigantic mega-studios that surround them.

The Afterlife Awaits

Around the time Fast Travel was working on Curious Tale and Budget Cuts 2, though, another opportunity arose. Paradox Interactive, another Stockholm-based publisher, was interested in getting into VR. The question was how to do that; existing IP like Empire of Sin and Prison Architect likely didn’t seem like an ideal fit.

But Paradox also owns the rights to an entire universe of horrors, the World of Darkness franchise, home to a tabletop RPG and games like Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Its lore is comprised of various mythical monsters creeping out of the shadows and causing all sorts of misery. Fertile ground for a VR horror game, then.

“We felt like this being a ghost must work very well in VR,” Burman says, referring to the Wraith factions in the world. Wraiths are, essentially, dead people. They can enter the world of the living and effect it with supernatural powers, which is exactly what Fast Travel pitched to Paradox for Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife.

“It’s… uh, it’s a horrifying game,” Burman adds with a laugh. He doesn’t share the same affinity for horror that Creative Director Erik Odeldahl clearly does , but still says Wraith represents some big steps for the team. “If you play Wraith, you can definitely see the history from Apex and from Budget Cuts 2 in it, but there’s also things from Curious Tale in terms of interactions and such. But we’re taking all our learnings into this project. It’s a lot of stuff we’ve learned throughout the years that’s coming together here. It’s definitely our most ambitious project yet.”

In our interview earlier this month, Odeldahl told me Fast Travel Games was named as such because himself, Burman and Benjaminsson saw VR headsets almost as a portal to instantly bring you to new worlds. But, looking at the developer’s expansive output in the space of the past few years, the label feels all the more appropriate. Wraith arrives on Quest and Rift on April 20th, and there are SteamVR and PSVR versions arriving later down the line but, given the precedent Fast Travel has set, it might not be long until we hear about what’s next.

“We’re not going to be a horror studio from now on, we are going to move between genres, definitely,” Burman says, confirmed the studio is working on its next game (and even games) already. “Because I think we have the capability to do that and we have a great team that spans over different genres and games. So it’s going to be a variety. There’s a lot of stuff in the works. I really can’t say much more than that.”

Quite a rollercoaster of a few years, then, though that could be said of any VR developer at this point. What makes it all worth it for Burman is that, after all those ups and downs, Fast Travel is not only still here, but it’s growing, with nearly 30 employees already. “There’s so many that didn’t make it in a way,” Burman says of other studios, “like steered away and built something else. So I’m super proud of that. We’re still here, almost everyone in the team is still with us. It’s a bunch of true VR believers in this company that stick around and fought for this to happen.”

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How to fast travel in Dragon's Dogma 2

Jump in the ox cart, because you’re too tele-poor to teleport

• Ferrystones and Portcrystals
• Portable Portcrystals

In January, Dragon’s Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno made his personal opinions about easy fast travel commutes very clear . Players familiar with the original Dragon’s Dogma remember shilling out thousands of gold for Ferrystones in an expensive effort to give their feet a rest. Unsurprisingly, tracking down these mythical items—or paying top dollar for them—is still very much a thing in the sequel.

Sure, traveling by foot opens up opportunities to stumble on quests, find treasure or useful materials, or get absolutely smoked by a Griffin with zero warning because of your underleveled pawns . But sometimes, you’ve only got an hour to play before your dinner plans or bedtime and you’d like to get that annoying quest turned in pronto. Thankfully, Dragon’s Dogma 2 introduces a second form of fast travel—though calling it ‘fast’ is a bit of a misnomer. 

Take a scenic ox cart ride

Using an ox cart is the cheapest and most common way to quickly travel from place to place in Dragon's Dogma 2. These bumbling vehicles connect all major settlements you’ve discovered. You first gain access to use a couple of ox carts freely upon your arrival in Vernworth, either to Melve via its north gate, or the Checkpoint Rest Town via the west gate. 

You’ll sometimes see an ox cart rambling past as you’re out exploring. Feel free to jump in for a quick escape back to a safe settlement. If you want to summon an ox cart, you can find a bell near the gates to most towns, and interacting with them will pass the time until a cart is ready to leave. 

Either chat with the driver or sit in the back to start your journey, which usually costs between one and three hundred gold, and then doze off at your leisure. You can’t choose where you go, either—this isn’t a fantastical Uber situation. The driver will let you know if you're lucky enough to reach your destination.

But not at night (and you might get attacked)

The inclusion of oxcarts as an added fast travel option is welcome, but they have their limitations. Ox carts don’t travel at night , and traveling via this new method isn’t instantaneous—it can take half a day or longer to reach your final destination. You can choose to take a snooze to pass some time, but if you’re trying to reach a timed quest, it’s possible that you won’t make it as quickly as you should. 

To make things worse, ox carts are frequently attacked by monsters out in the world, and no, you can’t just sleep through a battle. You’ll need to disembark and slaughter your foes before getting back on track. If the beast is big and bad enough, it can destroy your ox cart entirely, forcing you to hoof it the rest of the way.

Go Ferrystone shopping and attune to Portcrystals

Many settlements in Dragon’s Dogma 2 have shiny purple beacons called Portcrystals . These are permanent fast travel points and must be activated before they can be used—simply approach one in order to unlock it.

Attuning to these crystals doesn’t mean you can open your map and start teleporting around willy-nilly. A one-time-use item called a Ferrystone is required to fast travel, and these rare and expensive items aren’t found in any large quantity until later in the game. Ferrystones come in handy when aiming to complete time-sensitive quests. 

The easiest way to snag your first Ferrystone is at Philbert’s Sundries in Vernworth, though it’ll set you back a cool 10,000g. The good news, however, is that Philbert restocks his Ferrystone every three days , and this might be the case for other merchants with them, too. Finding a Seeker’s Token and turning it into the Vocation Guild in the city will also unlock one of these handy items. 

Track down portable Portcrystals for luxury fast travel

The Cadillac of Dragon’s Dogma 2 fast travel comes in the form of portable Portcrystals . These extremely rare reusable items allow you to place a fast travel marker anywhere on your map, and these can be moved at any time. You can only place 10 at once, but finding that many may prove a formidable challenge anyway. 

To help you begin your portable Portcrystal journey, chat with the elf, Glyndwr, hanging out near Roderick’s Smithy in Vernworth. Helping him will trigger a series of quests that leads you to a hidden elf village. Completing the lengthy chain earns you your very first Portcrystal. You can also get one via the main story for helping Captain Brant complete his quests.

Unfortunately, you’ll still need Ferrystones to make use of these beacons, but it’s something to aspire to if you’re after ease of movement, or have a quest that requires frequent revisits to the same location.

Given how much emphasis Itsuno and his team put on making the world alive and ever-evolving, using your own two legs the majority of the time seems like the best option for getting around. Convenience isn’t the name of this Capcom game.  

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Carley has been a professional Japanese > English translator for over a decade, working largely in the pop culture sphere. In May 2020, she joined the team at OTAQUEST, specializing in lesser-known aspects of Japanese pop culture, rambling about retro games, forgotten anime series, and Tokyo’s indie musicians in her first official paid gig as a staff writer. She continues to share her love for gaming by contributing hundreds of articles to sites such as Siliconera and VGKAMI.

Carley spends her free time gaming with her husband, scoping out breweries and wineries, and writing self-indulgent fanfiction. She prefers lore-heavy RPGs and walking sims and has only played Dragon Age: Inquisition 13 times. Her favorite Final Fantasy game is all of them.

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How to fast travel in Dragon's Dogma 2

Learn how to get around the map quickly in a game that encourages you to walk everywhere

How do you fast travel in Dragon's Dogma 2? One thing you'll quickly come to learn is that fast travel in this open world RPG is designed to be a little frustrating. Whereas most open world games will present you with plenty of fast travel locations that you can teleport to at any time, Dragon's Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno stressed long before launch that the game will not have typical fast travel mechanics because the world is fun to explore, so traveling on foot will never be boring.

It's both a blessing and a curse really, because it may make the game more exciting, but sometimes it's imperative you get somewhere quickly and retreading the same path over and over again can get repetitive. There are two fast travel methods available in the game, both of which take some explaining, so here's what you need to know about how to fast travel in Dragon's Dogma 2.

Fast traveling with oxcarts explained

The first fast travel method you'll be introduced to in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is via oxcart, which is the cheapest method of getting somewhere without walking. Every major village you encounter will have at least one oxcart station that travels along one route, so you can pay a small fee - usually a couple of hundred gold - to ride on the cart as it travels to its sole destination. For example, there are two oxcart stations in Vernworth, the capital city. One of them will take you to the village of Melve, while the other goes to the Checkpoint Rest Town on the border of Battahl - you'll need to come here for the Dragon's Dogma 2 Saint of the Slums quest and to find Rodge in Dragon's Dogma 2 .

Oxcarts only travel during the daytime and leave at specific times, so if there isn't one waiting at a station, you can interact with the bell nearby to wait until it arrives. However, this isn't fast travel, per se. You can doze off in the back of the cart, but there's a high chance the oxcart will be attacked by enemies on the trip, which will wake you up and you'll need to deal with them before continuing. This doesn't always happen, but it means when it does, you'll need to be ready. If you encounter an oxcart on your travels, you can also hop in by speaking to the driver and riding wherever it's headed. 

Of course, time passes as normal when traveling by oxcart, so you need to bear that in mind if you have any timed quests on the go. It's also not particularly quick, so in reality, traveling by foot is probably quicker when it comes to in-game time. The oxcart is simply helpful when you want to take most of the effort away, especially if it's a path you've traveled many times before and know there aren't any secrets to discover.

Fast traveling via Ferrystones and Portcrystals explained

The other, slightly more traditional way of fast traveling in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is by using Ferrystones to take you to portcrystals. Unlike oxcarts, these are instantaneous, but they also have their limits. Firstly, each Ferrystone is single-use and you must use one from your inventory to fast travel this way. These are glowing blue stones and while they're not super rare, you definitely won't ever have an unlimited stock of them so you need to use them sparingly. You can purchase Ferrystones at certain vendors for 10,000 gold, including Philbert's Sundries in Vernworth, however you'll also loot them every now and then from chests.

You can't travel wherever you like with a Ferrystone though. You can only go directly to Portcrystals, which are essentially fast travel beacons, and you must discover them first before you can warp to them. They're also very few and far between; in the early stages of the game, you'll likely only find two for some time, as there's one in Vernworth and another on the beach in Harve, a village you must visit during an early quest.

However, you can find Portcrystals you can carry eventually. These are far rarer than Ferrystones, but you can place them wherever you like, for permanent fast travel spots. You can only have 10 down at any given time, but you don't need to worry about hitting that total for a long, long time.

You can acquire your first Portcrystal by speaking to Glyndwr and completing his quest. Glyndwr is an elf in Vernworth, near the row of shops in the town square. He wants you to visit him outside of town and show him how to use a human-made bow, so you must be the Archer vocation when taking on the quest. At the end of it all, you'll net a Portcrystal to be placed wherever you like.

That's everything you need to know about how to fast travel in Dragon's Dogma 2, though I've also covered how to cross water in Dragon’s Dogma 2 in case you get blocked by a river while on foot. Make sure you read up on our guide to the Dragon's Dogma 2 Vocation Frustration quest as well, for unlocking the Warrior and Sorcerer vocations.

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Give me a game and I will write every "how to" I possibly can or die trying. When I'm not knee-deep in a game to write guides on, you'll find me hurtling round the track in F1, flinging balls on my phone in Pokemon Go, pretending to know what I'm doing in Football Manager, or clicking on heads in Valorant.

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Spider-Man 2's Popular Fast Travel System Was Almost Cut Because It 'Totally Broke Our Game'

Insomniac breaks down spider-man 2's fast travel challenges and how it solved them..

Spider-Man 2's fast travel system was one of its most popuar features when Insomniac's superhero blockbuster launched in late 2023. With a press of a button, players could zip to any part of the map nearly instantaneously , making it one of the best demonstrations of the PlayStation 5's power to date. But for all of its excellence, it might have missed the cut entirely.

Speaking at GDC 2024, Insomniac design director Josue Benavidez revealed the challenges the studio faced in designing Spider-Man 2's open world — challenges substantial enough that Insomniac considered scrapping the fast travel system entirely.

"We were working on this new fast travel. It was one of my favorite new features. And it totally broke our game. Because the map was fully revealed, you could go anywhere," Benavidez explained.

Spider-Man 2 is not the first action-adventure game to have issues with fast travel. Modern games have found various ways to integrate the feature into their gameplay without sacrificing convenience, often by limiting its availability to camps and other safe locations. Jedi: Fallen Order famously omitted fast travel, but fan demand led Respawn to add it in for the sequel .

Spider-Man 2's problem, Benavidez said, was that players initimidated by its large open world would simply open the map, pick a waypoint, and go straight to their destination. This was frustrating to Insomniac, who wanted players to take the time to explore the environment they had created.

"It was so detrimental that we considered cutting [fast travel] or delaying its unlock until players had finished the game. I eventually decided that, no, the fast travel wasn’t wrong. The game was wrong," Benavidez said.

Insomniac responded by going back and rebuilding Spider-Man 2's open world gameplay loop virtually from scratch. Over the course of the session, Benavidez outlined how the development team wanted players to "engage with the gameplay as they encountered it," likening the challenge to delivering cake — simply going to the bakery and delivering cake is boring, but if players only have a general idea of where to find the cake, they may discover a coffee shop and other locations in the course of looking for it.

The biggest challenge, Benavidez said, was that Spider-Man could functionally fly, meaning that players could effectively skip encounters. While it was always possible to simply shoot Spider-Man down, Insomniac wanted to use that option sparingly, meaning it had to find ways to incentivize encounters and discovery.

To achieve this goal, Insomniac built up numerous systems, from new currencies, to a greater emphasis on landmarks. The district progression system was introduced in order to tie together all of the activities in a different area and give players a reason to stick around beyond finishing up collections. To keep players focused on the gameplay, Insomniac layered pop-up messages to keep players from checking the meaning of icons on the map.

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Benavidez says that Insomniac's devs knew they were on to something early on during Spider-Man 2's usability tests. "We had a test where a player never opened their map. They just went to the top of a tall point and look outed," Benavidez said.

In the end, Insomniac didn't have to remove Spider-Man 2's fast travel, though the game does require players to level up a district in order to travel it to immediately. We wrote in our review , "Not making fast travel readily available is smart, and truthfully, I barely used it anyway as swinging and gliding around the city is so much more fun, even though the load times are nonexistent and the speedy, swooping camera effect of switching between Peter and Miles is very cool. Gliding is especially great for crossing long distances thanks to the numerous wind tunnels that carve their way through New York's seemingly endless grid of streets flanked by art deco architecture and modern mirror-like skyscrapers."

Spider-Man has since swung past 10 million units sold while earning numerous Game of the Year nominations. For more, check out the rest of the best games of 2023 .

Kat Bailey is IGN's News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.

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