I can't rightly voice how long I've been waiting for a follow-up to my personal 'most underrated RPG of all time' Dragon's Dogma. A game it felt like literally no one in the world had played except for me, yet one I couldn't help but fall madly in love with each time I played it for the style it possessed that no one seemed interested in replicating! The monster climbing mechanics with body part crippling, the Pawn swapping systems with dynamically learning and teaching AI moments, the sense of on-the-ground adventure in the vast swathes of travelling you were required to do, the supremely weird yet bizarrely memorable characters who under any other team would have all been classic RPG stereotypes but under the Dragon's Dogma team feel almost like winking homages both exaggerated and subverted. It teemed with possibility, life, intrigue... and all that snubbed because of a little game called Skyrim.
But times have changed! Bethesda have pretty much proven outright that they no longer have that magic spark to change the gaming landscape anymore and everyone's on the look out for the next swords-and-sorcery RPG to keep us satiated. In steps Dragon's Dogma 2, swept on wings of fury, claiming their rightly place as the it thing... at some point. We still don't have a release window and that slightly bothers me. We've gotten far too many 'forever in development' games for my liking. Still, at least Dragon's Dogma 2 is no longer an odd rumour that would pop up ever year or so hinting at the desire to 'get back to it' from the original director. We need wait no longer, gameplay and footage is here to consume! And with that we come across the big elephant in the room: It looks exactly like the first game.
Not in terms of graphical parity, mind you. Dragon's Dogma 2 is running on the latest iteration of Capcom's gorgeous RE engine, which has bedazzled the world year after year powering the stellar Resident Evil Remake series. (plus 7 and 8, obviously.) Of course liberties had to be taken on the complexity of character models, (I suspect Dragon's Dogma 2 doesn't have the budget to so much as consider facial capture tech) it all still looks good. No complaints there. What I mean to imply is that Dragon's Dogma feels like the same principal of game that the first one perpetrated. Muddy green European country beset by grandiose, if crumbling, stone edifices- vast swathes of untouched fields populated only by wayfarers and dynamic beasts. It feels like the first game but more, more alive. And that's exactly what I wanted.
Dragon's Dogma always felt like it was meant to be one of those 'sandbox style' open world games where the world doesn't care about you. Everything reinforces that from the sheer scale of the giant boss creatures, the relative stinginess of the economy, the scale of the home hubs, even the rudimentary individual relationship system wherein you built friendships (and even love interests) on a one-to-one basis rather than by becoming the celebrated hero of the world. But at the time it was beholden to tech constraints. Still, there were hoards of monsters that would spawn in the brush and attack travellers, they just happened to be the exact same creatures that spawned in the exact same places everytime you went anywhere. (Until you entered the end-game world state, of course.) That seems like a dream Capcom's DD team are finally ready to capitalise on.
As we're still in the era of only talking strictly about what was shown off in the demo footage, there's not a lot that people on the game can talk about beyond ideas they wanted to explore. For one we've heard that a point of inspiration was Grand Theft Auto 5 and the way that game made every NPC feel like they are going about their daily lives. With a map 4 times the size of the first game it's important that Dragon's Dogma 2 put a bit of effort into feeding that illusion, and that hints back to the idea of a breathing open world that I think this game is going for. Already we've seen footage showing Griffins just raiding the countryside, which were more flagship encounters in the original game that stole the show. If those majestic creatures are more of a dynamic occurrence now, that just makes me wonder what the show stealers are going to be!
One word I always come back to when it comes to Dragon's Dogma, and which is starting to populate my thoughts on my favourite games, is 'robust'. I love an engine that will allow me to bend it's rules without breaking. Being able to throw an ally at an airborne beast so they can grab ahold of it felt great in the original game and we're already seeing examples of that being built upon for Dragon's Dogma 2. That one shot of the Troll having it's balance blown out from under it, forcing the monster to fall back over a mountain gap and wildly grab the otherside of the ravine, creating a makeshift bridge for the characters to scale, is just wild levels of creative ingenuity in gameplay- I just pray that's merely a taste of what's to come in the whole game.
And then there's jank. Dragon's Dogma is far from the smoothest running video game you've ever played in your life, in fact- it's a bit of a jittery ride. AI can be confused to the point where your own team can be an impediment to success, monsters sometimes stumble off of tall buildings to their own demise. The game is silly, but in the most endearing possible way. All that roughness is very much part of the identity we very much want to see replicated, and according to the preliminary impressions it's sounding like the game is every bit as adorably off-kilter as we need it to be. Not enough to ruin the experience, but enough to colour the gameplay in a way that's memorable. Because if there's one thing that can be said about Dragon's Dogma, it sure is memorable!
Dragon's Dogma is one of those games where what we love about it only requires magnification in order to satisfy the fanbase, and as long as narrative cues were taken more from 'Dark Arisen' than from the base game of the original, I have no doubt that 2 will finally scoop off the recognition this budding franchise has been lacking. You know, unless they do a 'Horizon' and surprise release the game during a zombie apocalypse or an alien invasion or something else equally as moronic. There's magic in what Dragon's Dogma did, and that magic was alive along enough to bounce around Capcom for 10 years without abating, and I can't wait to load that up on my console once again. You know, as soon as we get a darn release date! (What is it with modern games slipping back into the 'no release date' meta? It's starting to get on my nerves!)
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