Dragon's Dogma II

[oggyraiding]

I've been playing this through the night. A bit unsure about it. It's pretty brutal, even a small group of goblins can easily kill you if you're not careful. You have a minimum of one NPC with you at all times, but can have up to four, so I've got a party of all four starting classes for maximum balance. It's not as hand-holdy as many modern RPGs, at best you get given a point in the map and you have to work out your own way there. I've not had any of those amazing moments many game reviewers are talking about where something wacky/intense happens in the dynamic open world. Not that the open world is boring, it's just that fast travel uses a rare and expensive item, and it is a pretty big world from what I can gather so far.

Combat is where I am most unsure. It's pretty much the same as the first game, so if you like that then great. Sometimes it's cool picking up a goblin hiding behind a shield and chucking him off a cliff. And the return of climbing on large enemies, feels good climbing up to a cyclops' head to stab him in the face. Not every class has a dodge - I picked the thief which does, but it is not as effective the dodge in Soulsbornekiroring games. In some respects it feels like a hack and slash game, as the core melee combat is quite fast and basic attacks don't seem to drain stamina. But then you've got the difficulty in line with the From Soft games, maybe a bit more forgiving as you can always have NPC pawns with you.

I think it does a lot of things right - exploration feels more rewarding than many modern action RPGs, and the devs weren't lying when they said the world was more dense. It just has a slight clunkiness to it. Maybe I just need to adjust to its combat as the last few action RPGs I've been playing have been Demon's Souls and Elden Ring so I've calibrated differently.

[Inspector Norse]

Been looking at this as it seems to be something of a midpoint between, for example, Elden Ring and Skyrim. Reviews are really good, but user reviews are slamming it for having loads of microtransactions... but then other people are commenting that those are irrelevant, it's all stuff you can fairly easily get in the game anyway. And now I'm just confused.

Is it a game where I can sit down to play for a bit and get sucked into exploring and seeing what's round the next corner or inside this little tower and that and suddenly it's 3am and I've drunk a whole bottle of wine? And are the microtransactions offputting or can you just choose to ignore that aspect completely without it having any effect on the gameplay?

[Thursday]

Not played it, but I don't think it's so much that the microtransactions are pushy or in your face, it's just that their mere existence is so at odds with the design of the game. It makes a very deliberate choice to not give you certain resources, so the fact that a store exists that let's you buy more of these things changes things even if you can easily ignore the store because knowing it exists kind of changes things. I don't think reviewers knew a ton about them either.

To echo what I've seen others say, if Elden Ring had a bunch of things tacked onto it, it'd be making people think "this is just hard by design to make you go to the store." when it's not the case, but it's not a good look.

[Barry Admin]

I really loved the first one, it was very influenced by Dark Souls and other games, and it had the standard shit Campcom control system, but damn, it also had a lot of charm and such.  I try to get back into it every once in a while so I can finish it.

Hope this comes to Gamepass!

[oggyraiding]

The microtransactions seem limited to a finite amount of revival stones, and quantities of rift crystals. You need rift crystals to hire pawns, stronger pawn, more crystals. But they don't seem hugely scarce. Also a £12 pack included with the deluxe edition that has a few helpful items and gear, typical of an RPG nowadays. Not great, but I doubt I'll be negatively impacted if I don't get them.

I think Capcom have been really hitting it out of the park recently, but their monetisation of Resi 4 Remake, Street Fighter 6, and now Dragon's Dogma II as been dodgy.

[Mobius]

I was looking forward to this for ages but apparently it runs at 30fps and often lower?

I'll probably buy it in the next few hours anyway

[oggyraiding]

Frame rate does sit around 30FPS, with occasional drops. Which is odd as the graphical fidelity isn't necessarily amazing. Also odd that they didn't include a performance/graphics mode option as is standard on new-gen consoles.

Having spent a few more hours with it, I'd say despite the hype, it has a lot of quirks and design decisions that may be offputting to people expecting another Elden Ring or Skyrim sort of thing. Could be wrong, but I can imagine many people dropping it/trading it in after a few hours.

[Timothy]

Enjoyed it until I got motion sickness due to the framedrops and blurry graphics on Xbox. Sold it for now, hope they patch it out later.

[letsgobrian]

Finished my first playthrough of this and found the ending to be really audacious.

Spoiler alert

There's seemingly 2 ways to the end the game, but during the good ending's credits I got goaded by an NPC into redoing the final fight. If you commit suicide before it starts you finally get the Dragon's Dogma II title drop (until you do this the game has been called Dragon's Dogma in all the graphics).

Now reborn in a broken game world, you then have a limited amount of time to complete a series of trials to save the world. Once you've done that you could hang around and grind for post-game resources and gear, but you are now being goaded by the same NPC into finishing the game.

Once you answer that, you have one more task to do (and you can still give up during this) and if you manage that, then and only then you get the true ending.

[close]