A beautiful, but flawed, wonder.
Into Free(dom)
Dragon's Dogma 2 feels, in many respects, like a game on the edge. Capcom’s follow-up to 2012’s cult classic Dragon’s Dogma is a game that feels like it could teeter into a disaster-piece at any given moment, yet somehow retains enough focus and identity to squarely land on the stable side of the cliff.
By design, the game has many points of friction baked into the gameplay experience - extremely limited fast travel, expensive economy (items, inns, equipment), diminishing health reserves, slow travel, dangerous fall damage, and more. And yet, I never felt like I was being punished in the way one might assume if they had only read about the game, rather than played it. Each one of these might look like a "flaw", but it's actually imperative in the flow of the game's core experience.
The exploration might be a slow, methodical trek across a vast open world, but it's never boring. Every step brings something exciting around the bend - from packs of wolves who might drag you off to your doom, to hidden coves of treasure and beasts - there's a real sense of adventure and exploration here that is hard to find in a game today. It's not a survival game in the sense that you need to make shelter, or manage a hunger meter, but it can sometimes feel like you're really fighting to survive a hostile wilderness as you roam. I sometimes found myself just hoping to find a campsite, or wondering if I should head back to town or keep pushing forward as the night approached.
Publisher: Capcom Developer: Capcom Platform: Played on PC Availability: Released March 22, 2024 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S/X |
Frolicking in the fields of Vermund.
To be frank, this game is quite easy past the early game. Beyond the first few hours, I never came close to dying. I took long trips for days and days in the wilds without stopping (mostly due to my compulsive need to explore every cave and cliff I came across). So while the points of friction I mentioned earlier might sound like it is going to make for a tough experience, I can assure you it is not a truly punishing game. And even if you do die, carrying a wakestone can revive you. If you don't have any on hand, you'll just load from the most recent autosave, which the game does pretty frequently in my experience. Despite being a pretty normal experience difficulty-wise, the wilderness and night can still feel dangerous. I always took great care around high cliffs especially- fall damage being the greatest threat to my health most often.
Nighttime, by the way, is really awesome! It's so dark, that without a lantern you can't see anything really. And even with a lantern your vision is pretty limited. Dangerous beasts lurk in the dark and you can often stumble into an encounter you didn't see coming. I was once wandering through a forest, lantern in tow, when suddenly I heard a voice "Arisen...", a faint light appeared in the darkness...that's a dragon. Moments like this are somewhat common, but they are always exciting. Minotaurs, chimeras, griffins, ogres and more can ambush you and it keeps night feeling dangerous, even if it never actually is.
The primary mechanical focus of the game is combat, which is still excellent when compared to the first Dragon's Dogma. Really, there is not much difference between the two in the overarching way combat and exploration works - you and your pawn have a vocation (job) that levels up independently of your character level. This vocation determines your stats, abilities, damage types, and even the types of exploration available to you (mages can levitate and thieves can scale/jump off walls, for instance). You don't need to worry so much about what you level up as in Dragon's Dogma 2 - your stats will automatically adjust based on vocation according to your character level.
With a total of 10 vocations available to you, there are a good number of options in terms of playstyles, and you're never locked into just one. Each vocation has unique skillsets, each with enough variety to craft a playstyle more suited to your own preferences within the confines of the vocation itself. The animation work done on all of the skills available to you make combat so interesting and engaging, it never really gets boring - even when you’re fighting your 100th pack of goblins of the day. The fights remain exciting in large part because the enemies also have a lot of different behaviors and abilities. Goblins can throw rocks, spears, do lunging attacks and more, all while running away in fear or using pack tactics. Wolves will hit and run, or grab you or your pawn and carry you off. And so on, and so on. The unending dynamism keeps things interesting no matter where you are, or what class you are playing.
Pawns- AI controlled companions that follow, fight, and gather on your behalf - are a nice way to connect players, without directly interfering with a player’s single-player world. You will be able to bring your main pawn (self-created and managed), and 2 pawns from the riftstones, which include both Capcom provided pawns and the pawns other players have created. Pawns have a limited number of vocations available to them, but they are able to have specializations that grant them some abilities or behaviors otherwise unobtainable. Additionally, inclinations allow you to customize your pawn’s behavior more acutely. The AI is not perfect, but I think it is more than functional in terms of being a useful party member. If you played the first game, they function very similarly here.
There are, of course, other minor mechanics and systems in play in the game that just don’t matter much. Romance and affection exist, but they are so underutilized and inconsequential it’s not really worth diving in depth on them or considering them as a major part of the experience. However, if systems like that interest you, you should be aware they exist in name only here.
Earlier I mentioned how this feels like a game on the edge of being a very bad game, but that edge cuts both ways. For all of its wild successes and phenomenal gameplay, Dragon’s Dogma 2 falls short of being truly great. It is a game on the precipice of all-time greatness - greatness that, I feel, is pretty attainable if some minor adjustments are made in DLC or expansions. And while it is disappointing that it never quite reaches the highs I feel it could, there is hope it might in the future.
My most identifiable complaints lie in two areas. First, enemy variety is disappointing. The enemies that are present in the game are a thrill, to be sure, but there are fewer types of enemies when compared to the first game, even when you count subtypes and offshoots (e.g. Hobgoblins vs Goblins). The game could really use a few more small enemy types, but would immensely benefit from additional large or huge enemy varieties. Large enemies introduce a fun, dynamic experience in each fight with their scalability, and having more you can climb or ride or engage with would really liven up the experience in a significant way.
Second, there are not enough quests, and the ones that exist can often feel uninteresting.. A lot of fetch quests, monster culling, and escort quests - with very little variety beyond that. When you do get something more unique it’s really a breath of fresh air. That isn’t to say things like monster battles or escorting shouldn’t be included in the larger structure of any additional quests, but quests could stand to be more diverse. The main questline is pretty barebones - both in variety and length. There just aren’t enough things to do in the game in a directed sense. This is most notable in the second major area of the game and late game, where the main story really just kind of ends without any buildup or resolution to some seemingly major questions about the world. There are fewer relevant side quests here as well. The expanses themselves are so full of care and wonder, and yet I can’t help but feel the characters and story are so egregiously underbaked. As this is meant to be a spoiler-free review, I won’t go into specifics, but I was left asking things like, “what happened to (major characters A, B, and C)? Did anything in (Area X) lead anywhere? Did I just miss it?”
A battle with a griffin, one of the few large enemy types available to fight.
Performance is a sticking point for many people, and unfortunately, Dragon’s Dogma 2 suffers here. I am playing on PC, so mileage may vary, but even with relatively high end hardware on 1440p I run into some choppiness and 30 fps average in towns or cities. For field exploration I can get a solid 60 on mostly high settings (messing around with some setting for optimization is necessary, in my opinion). Variability is high here, so I’m not really sure what the answer is for Capcom, but changing my settings didn’t really seem to help much unless I went below what I would consider a reasonable threshold for my current hardware. If you are okay with a 30 FPS threshold for stable framerates, it seems attainable on most modern systems. I will not be doing an in-depth tech review here, but if it concerns you or you want to learn more, it is definitely worth looking into.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the “DLC” currently available for the game. At time of writing, there are a plethora of microtransactions available for purchase that will give you an assortment of minor consumables. These items are easy to obtain in the game, and are largely inconsequential to the experience. Purchasing these is a waste of money, and will not benefit you in any meaningful way. Capcom’s decision to include them is a bit baffling, and bad business practice on the corporate side of things, but as they are immaterial to the gameplay experience, they will not be affecting my review of the game. Any ethical concerns over DLC feels like a separate battle to fight and the controversy surrounding the DLC in this game in particular feels strange- considering it is not uncommon for Capcom to do this in any of their games in the last several years. Why Dragon’s Dogma 2 is bearing the brunt of the frustration over microtransactions, I do not know. However, if we are to look past the DLC practices in other major titles, it feels necessary for me to do the same here. I think if the DLC had been a sort of “pay to win” situation, it could affect my outlook, but as it is, I feel no obligation to consider it.
Verdict Dragon’s Dogma 2 is more a reimagining of the original than a sequel, but offers a sense of exploration and wonder that is unmatched in the current gaming landscape, and has some of the most fun combat out there. Dynamic combat and world events keep the game fresh and engaging after many hours of play. Even with its glaring deficiencies, it is hard to say I’ve had more fun playing any game this year. The truth is that this is a hard game to put a number on. The things it does well (exploration and combat) it does exceptionally well. It is a best-in-class experience on those fronts, creating a sense of adventure rarely seen in games. The things it does poorly (writing, quest design, monster variety) are by all metrics underwhelming, but certainly fixable in a long-view of the game (if it receives support going forward, which is not guaranteed at time of writing). This is a pretty niche experience, and it might not be a game with the mass appeal Capcom is hoping for, but I believe it is a game worth playing and experiencing. If you want to try it out, but are wary of shelling out $70, the cheapest way is to play Dragon’s Dogma 1. There are key differences, yes, but it would give you the closest thing to a demo for this game available.  |
Image Credits: Capcom and Taylor Rioux
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