Fast travel.

What about it?

Well, my original idea was a boat that you pay for passage between areas, and that's held up. The main difference is in execution, earlier versions were less user friendly but more immersive. The ship always starts at Aequor, and you have to pay the captain to travel between 3 areas - Aequor (on the middle island), Shivermoore (the snow island), and Port Magnus (the bottom island). You can travel from the Port to Aequor via the bridge between islands too.

The problem there is you also have to go through the forest in the middle of Middunn to reach Aequor. It's faster and easier to just get the ship, and Shivermoore is only accessible via ship. So, in the final version it'll work as follows:

The ship always starts at Aequor. Once you talk to the captain about the ship, its position is unlocked. If you walk across the bridge to Port Magnus, the ship will teleport to stay near you. The ship is always accessible at all times this way, making fast travel easy.

In earlier versions, the ship didn't teleport. It would stay at the last location you left it, and the Captain would remain at that location. This meant you had to go back to the ship to travel to and from Shivermoore, and fast travel between islands wasn't really a thing. This is an example of where I've focussed on just making the game fun as opposed to frustrating. I could reintroduce the static ship system but it's more fun if it teleports to the closest dock, and makes it easier to get between locations without going through tedious areas.

As I said in my first tweet back in 2018, while I want to tell an interesting story my main focus here is fun gameplay and I'm not letting anything get in the way of that. Even if it makes the game easier, I'd rather have it easy and fun than hard and tedious. And if you want a challenge, that's what the NG+ modifiers and bonus content is for. The first playthrough isn't supposed to be super hard by design though, I'll say it again:

Fun gameplay with an interesting story is my priority here.