The Ride Between the Rides
How open world games stop traversal from becoming a chore
Every open world team hits the same wall eventually. You have a map. You have content scattered across it. And somewhere in the middle of production, someone plays a build end to end and says the thing nobody wants to hear: getting to the good parts isn't fun.
That's the whole problem in one sentence. Traversal is the connective tissue of an open world, and it's usually the last system anyone budgets properly for. Combat gets a strike team. Quests get a writers' room. Locomotion gets whatever's left, and then you spend the back half of the schedule bolting on fast travel to paper over the damage.
Cameron Williams, who worked on Red Dead Redemption and GTA 6 before moving to Absurd Ventures, put a name to what players feel when this goes wrong. He calls it exploration anxiety, and the internal monologue he describes is brutally familiar: how far away is the next thing, do I really have to run all the way across the map, and what do I actually get for it. The phrase he used for the broader condition is open world fatigue. If your players are asking those questions, no amount of extra content will save you, because the cost of reaching any of it has already been priced in as too high.
There are a handful of ways teams have solved this. They aren't interchangeable. Each one implies a different kind of world, and picking the wrong one for the world you're actually building is how you end up shipping a map players teleport across.
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1. Ask the question honestly before you answer it
The first move isn't a mechanic. It's a diagnosis: is it tedious to get from A to B in this world, yes or no?
If the answer is no, you're free. Put in the horse, the car, the mech, whatever fits the fiction, and stop worrying. If the answer is yes, you have a design problem, and a vehicle is the least interesting solution available to you.
I've watched teams skip this step and go straight to "we'll add a mount." The mount ships, the traversal time drops by forty percent, and the tedium is completely unchanged, because the problem was never speed. It was that nothing happened along the way.
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2. Put content in the space between content
The cheapest fix, and the one most likely to survive contact with a schedule, is to stop treating the gaps as gaps.
Elden Ring is the reference case. Players who put a hundred hours into that game will tell you they barely remember riding Torrent, which sounds like an insult until you realise what it means: they were never conscious of travelling. Something in the distance pulled them off route, or something pulled itself toward them, or the ground opened and dumped them somewhere new. The route dissolved into the world.
Compare that to how a marker-driven map trains its players. The moment you drop a waypoint on the far side of the world, you have told the player, in the clearest possible language, that everything between here and there is filler. You've authored the space and then instructed people to ignore it. FromSoftware sidestepped this by marking quest givers rather than quest destinations, which sounds like a UI decision and is actually a content decision.
The production implication is uncomfortable but simple. Distribution matters more than volume. A world with two hundred points of interest clustered around hubs will feel emptier than a world with eighty spread so that you can never travel two minutes without tripping over something.
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3. Make the act of moving a skill
The other approach is to make locomotion itself worth engaging with, so the journey has a gameplay loop of its own.
Breath of the Wild is the obvious one. Climbing wasn't a traversal shortcut, it was a resource puzzle. You read the surface, you budget stamina, you decide whether to push for the ledge or drop to a rest point. Then you reach the top and the paraglider converts all that vertical effort into range. Climb, look, glide, land on whatever looked interesting from up there. That's a complete loop, and it's the actual core gameplay of the game, not a service layer beneath it.
Tears of the Kingdom took the same loop and raised the ceiling. Skyview towers fire you into the stratosphere so your field of view expands before the glide even begins. And if you got bored of the horse, build something. The team essentially handed the traversal design over to the player and trusted them with it.
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4. Keep the rules of movement universal
Here's where the same idea fails, and it's worth studying the failure more closely than the successes.
Horizon Forbidden West gave players a glider. Good. It also restricted climbing to marked surfaces, which meant every approach to a cliff involved scanning for handholds instead of just moving. The glide range was short enough that the payoff rarely justified the climb. And the Sunwing, the flying mount that actually solves traversal in that world, unlocks near the end of the game.
Every one of those is defensible on its own. Together they produce a player who gives up and uses fast travel, which is what happened. The lesson isn't "don't gate abilities." It's that a traversal toolkit only reduces friction when its rules are consistent enough to be internalised. If the player has to check whether a surface is climbable, climbing is no longer a movement verb. It's a lookup.
Grant the core traversal verbs early and make them work everywhere. Save the gating for range, speed, and spectacle.
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5. Inconvenient traversal, but only if the world can carry it
Red Dead Redemption 2 makes fast travel deliberately awkward and puts most of the game on horseback. That is not a mistake and it is not laziness. Rockstar built a world that changes as you cross it, holds together as a continuous place, and rewards being looked at. The friction is the point, because the friction is what makes you see it.
This is the single most misapplied lesson in the genre. A team plays RDR2, admires the commitment, and imposes the same friction on a world that has nothing in it. Players notice immediately. The reaction is exactly what you'd expect: let me glide across this map, there's nothing here.
So the rule cuts both ways. Slow traversal is a tax you levy on the player, and you had better be spending the revenue on something they can see out the window.
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6. Build the world so it folds back on itself
Dark Souls solved traversal by refusing to have it as a separate system.
There's no fast travel until Anor Londo, and that constraint forced the level design into a shape almost nobody has replicated. The aqueduct reopens after the Taurus Demon. Darkroot Garden circles into Undead Parish. The Parish elevator drops you straight into Firelink. You don't find shortcuts in Lordran so much as discover that two places you thought were far apart were adjacent the entire time.
The tension that creates is real. Descending into Blighttown feels dangerous specifically because the hub is receding and you know the climb back is on you.
Worth being honest about the trade, though: the same design pressure is arguably why later Souls games are more linear. Give the team fast travel from the start and the discipline that produced Lordran evaporates. Interconnection is expensive, it constrains your level layout severely, and it doesn't scale past a certain world size. It's a solution for dense worlds, not big ones.
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7. Or just make the world smaller
The least fashionable answer is usually the correct one. Prague in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is barely an open world. A few hundred buildings, a couple of districts, four train stations. It works because the density is high enough that traversal never becomes a cost centre.
Set that against No Man's Sky, where the same structures recur on every planet, separated by miles of nothing. Once the arms race for map size is over, and it is over, the teams left standing will be the ones who used their space rather than the ones who bought more of it.
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8. Give people something to navigate by
Even with all of the above, players need to be able to orient without the map open.
Landmarks are the standard tool, and they work, but the balance is delicate. Too few and players are lost. Too many and you produce what Williams calls analysis paralysis, where the possibility space is so large that people can't choose and default to beelining the main quest. From the co-op level design side the guidance is more concrete: at least three visually distinguishable landmarks so players can triangulate, and never duplicate a landmark silhouette. Duplication doesn't just cause disorientation, it breaks communication between players who are trying to describe where they are.
The related trick is variation. Rockstar's maps are zoned, with each zone transitioning smoothly into the next, and the change in scenery is what keeps a long ride from feeling like a treadmill. The counter-example that gets cited is an Assassin's Creed map that felt copy-pasted end to end, which killed exploration outright. If ten minutes of travel looks the same at minute one and minute ten, you have built a corridor with extra polygons.
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9. When traversal is the fantasy, lean all the way in
Superhero games get to cheat. Movement is the power, so the traversal system is the game, and players will refuse fast travel even when it's offered. Insomniac's Spider-Man is the cleanest modern proof: web-swinging has a skill ceiling high enough that getting somewhere is a performance.
Death Stranding is the extreme version of the same insight. Kojima's team looked at the traversal problem and made it the entire loop. Terrain reading, load balancing, infrastructure left behind by other players. Nobody accuses that game of tedious travel, because travel is what you came for.
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What I'd actually do
If I were scoping this at the start of a project, the order would be:
Decide the world's size from the traversal fantasy, not the other way around. Big worlds need strong movement verbs granted early. Dense worlds can go without and use interconnection instead. Deciding size first and figuring out movement later is how you end up with a mount patch six weeks from cert.
Grant the core verbs in the first few hours, and make them work on every surface in the game. Gate range and speed, never permission.
Watch fast travel usage in playtest. It's the most honest metric you have. Every teleport is a player telling you the space between two points wasn't worth crossing, and the number goes up long before anyone writes it in a survey.
And keep asking the diagnostic question, build after build, because the answer changes as the world fills in. Is it tedious to get from A to B? If it is, adding a faster vehicle is treating a symptom. Put something out there worth stopping for.
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