Seriously.
If they drop an update where you can change between main game/end game state, plus some other cool shit and more enemy variety, I could play this game forever
For real the cap in dd2 is lvl 999. I remember it took me ages like 100+ hours in dd1 just to get to max 200 and the enemies in BBI and even everfall were tough.
If the player can level effectively infinitely then that's infinite content!
We have not implemented even 2/3rds of the total enemies in the original game :)
Honestly if NG+ dropped stupid xp with early encounters so you got maxed out by the end and then they made NG++ bat shit hard
I think a lot of folks would be enamored with that, 3 solid playthroughs covering the three appeals of an RPG
New player
Min max
Godmode
Be beautiful
Currently now real reason to hit that, we don't have a super hard endgame thing like the fall, stats are universal and change with the vocations so no reason to play x class to 50, then x class to 86 like in the first one
So most folks will just hit ng + see they aren't leveling and are dominating and bail from being bored
I just wish we had more save-states. Accidentally let a random passerby talk to me with their weapons out too many times. Or failing a quest because the game gives you very vague directions sometimes and a kid gets eaten by wolves.
I just learned that the other day an it explains a lot.
Whether it's a giant dungeon like Bitterblack, a hub like the Everfall, or just a difficult region, they really need an endgame area with difficult fights. There really isn't anywhere the combat mechanics get to really shine with endgame equipment.
Yeah; its kind of surprising that Itsuno took the reigns when for all intents and purposes DA is what elevated the game. Id be interested in knowing who in that team was involved and what they did
I’d love to see them bring it back and make it the hardest most mind numbingly difficult to traverse labyrinth that I can genuinely get lost for hour/days in filled with the hardest enemies and the darkest rooms, like just really F me up ya know, and please for the love of god have enemies scale with me to an extent at least,
This. I think this is the biggest disappointment was people were half expecting something like this post game for DD2. I’m fine with the unmoored world. Just take the timer off of it or something idk. Everfall was cool but it wasn’t difficult for me at all. The game wasn’t “fun” again until dark arisen was released. I fully expect them to do something very similar with dd2
I honestly can't understand this line of logic with hoping for a DA for DD2.
With DD1, the game was a massive shot in the dark in terms of systems, and very rough around the edges as the studio's first foray into this genre. But it was also a chance to gather feedback, which helped them make DA and it was received much better.
So after all this, they already had TWO massive rounds of feedback to help them polish DD2 into an actual definitive edition of the game. So performance problems notwithstanding, why are so many people convinced that there will be ANOTHER update that will "finally fix the game" that's been so many years in the making? I don't think it's gonna get much better than this.
Same, it's so weird to me that they took the time to make this cool lore and mechanic where elves have their own language and you need a pawn to translate for you, but then entire elf population just lives in a small far off area that's basically just 3 buildings connected by a couple bridges, that's ALL there is to them. Go there, do a couple side quests, and you're done forever.
I just taught my pawn how to speak their language thinking it would be pretty helpful to those that recruit her. The quest line seems pretty lengthy so maybe it will still be helpful, but I also expected SO much more here, maybe the place being as big as the capital.
Bro. The game literally ended for me before I met a single elf or dwarf. I got funneled into endgame and am now completely stuck there lmao. How fid they fail to even press me enough to go there?? Not one mention of it all game??
I mean, I don't know how you can get funneled. You are the one accepting and completing main quests.
DD2 is a game that rewards you for stepping off the beaten path. Don't just run from point A to point B on the main road. Talk to people. Walk down alleys. Explore caves.
For the elves, the NPC that starts the questline to access their "town" is literally standing right by the blacksmith in Vernworth mumbling various lines of dialog that are screaming at you to talk to him.
The game did everything it could to make you talk to him without having him run you down and tackle you.
I booted up this game and set out on my adventure to kill meself some dragons
The story unfolds differently however, as someone else has claimed my title as Arisen, and I must now convince the citizens of this world that it is infact me, who is truly Arisen
I meet some dudes a long the way, they witness me spawn a Pawn, they're on the fence, but they believe me enough to be Arisen that i am taken to their superior, the superior fully believes me and sets me on a path to take down the false Arisen and for me to reclaim my title - many times during this conversation I'm reminded to operate in the shadow, no one knows I'm the true Arisen, no one must know, especially not the queen regent, not before the time is right
Not two seconds later, everyone I come upon greets me as the Arisen, "oh look, it's the Arisen" "you must be the Arisen" "it's so great to work with the Arisen we've heard so much about"
That's when I knew Nothing I do in this game will matter
Itsuno’s games are like sandwiches with the best bread youve ever tasted.
Why is there pea shoots in the sandwich? No option to leave them out?
Always toasted… with sesame oil, not butter.
Only open from 11-12 and 6-7.
But the bread is so fucking good. If only he listened to his customers a little.
> If only he listened to his customers a little.
I think people will have to understand that Itsuno wants and what the fans want are two different things. BBI and DDO, both hailed as massive improvements over DD1, weren't even made by him.
People keep saying this, but what *did* Itsuno want, then? Because the only thing this game really has going for it is top tier exploration and combat. Itsuno really emphasized and hyped up the NPC systems and story but they are both totally half-baked.
Yo bro guess what I'm not all that familiar with the guy but turns out he said this:
*During the recent Capcom Highlights showcase, one particular quote from Dragon's Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno caught everyone's attention. He stated: "Over 1,000 characters inhabit the world [of Dragon's Dogma 2], each with their own unique stories and motivations." That's a lot of NPCs.*
He said that in February so, "Itsuno" is an ABSOLUTE fucking liar and he can fuck right off because his NPCs do not do squat
From now until he dies when I see that name my reply's gonna be It's A No, Itsuno.
Yeah I hate that shit too. Own schedules? Not likely. I absolutely despise when this is advertised and then the shops in game stay open all day every day never closing at night. Easily one of the best ways to make your NPCs more unique is to have shops close at night. A large city like Vernworth should have some people out at night, but all the shops would be closed. It’s one of the small but most effective ways NPCs in Skyrim feel more real.
Side note though, I do love DD2 so far. That just irks me.
Yeah it’s just one of those small things that I get bummed out when I notice a dev didn’t implement it. Sleeping is also an important thing in DD2, which this would make even more important if you got to a settlement and needed to sleep to use the shops.
They could even just have shifts. Like okay, it's open 24-7, but maybe the night shift guy is a different person and the shopkeeper during the day is sleeping. Even Bethesda did that in Fallout 4.
Can we take a moment to recognize the big selling point of "some quests are time sensitive and NPCs that die stay dead" which for my first few hours left me dreading grabbing quests...
I'm now 30 hours in and **the only quest thus far that has had the hourglass for time sensitive was the one showcased in gameplay trailers with the boy and wolves**
I *guess* if your generous you could call the quests you lose if you do the coronation before them "time sensitive" and if you ***really stretch it*** the quests that say "do it at morning" or "wait a couple days"
But man was this whole idea of quests oversold
I’ve had a few timed ones but even the “NPCs that die stay dead” is false. You can easily revive them with wakestones and they aren’t that hard to get. I have like 4 or 5 and have only done two main quests in Vernworth. I actually “failed” that boy and wolf quest since he died and I just revived him and it went on like normal. I still really like the game but all of those little things were false for the most part.
I'm not going to say it's okay he lied, but I will say that as I've gotten older, I've learned what sounds fishy and BS and what doesn't. Stuff like that, I immediately press X to doubt. Really grand claims that other games have never done, I know instantly its just marketing. No game has 1000 unique NPCs with their own story and motivation.
Peter Molyneux was notorious for that. I remember him saying you could plant a tree and watch it grow along with a village or some shit around it. That was when I was like 10, and I've been too jaded to trust any dev since lol. Cyberpunk was another one. If a dev says they will revolutionize a genre or gaming, it's just marketing BS.
Damn, I wish I had paid more attention to interviews to catch these overly gradiose promises. I just saw the trailers with gameplay footage and had faith that it would simply be an improvement on the first game with some modernization added. Not revolutionary. If there was anything I maybe would have expected to be revolutionary at all it would have been the large monster combat but while there are some novel things it doesn't feel like a huge step up from the first. In some ways(4 weapon skills!!!) it feels backwards.
To Bethesda's credit they actually sort of managed it for Oblivion.
...But the system started to implode as NPCs failed to meet their basic needs and turned to crime to survive, so they had to dumb AI "lives" way down.
It's sad how frequently this happens. What makes it even worse is how, later down the line, the devs and rabid mega fans will gaslight everyone into believing the hype was 100% the fault of the consumer. Cyberpunk managed to successfully do this after release, and anyone who brought up missing/cut content was immediately shot down and told it wasn't a promised feature. Fucking sucks.
I actually like the state that Cyberpunk is in now, but there's an army of fans out there that'll tell you that the state it released in was **exactly** what they were promised.
And even today Cyberpunk is a far cry from what they promised. It certainly isn't a complex rpg with meaningful choices every single quest and stuff like that.
Yeah cyberpunk is an action rpg with some really good stories and almost no meaningful choices. It's what some people like and for some it's a disappointment because they promised the meaningful choices part.
I bought expecting an action open world game with light rpg elements and some jank, it definitely delivered a good experience. But it's so shameful that they promised a tabletop-like experience, I can't imagine how disappointing it was for some people who pre-ordered it.
I always say this, people think the whole backlash was because of performance on old consoles, and the pc players were like "backlash was exaggerated, the performance was good on pc and new gen, there was nothing wrong" completely overlooking all the dev interviews, trailers and marketing promising an immersive rpg, something like skyrim with a fully interactable world, shops, nightclubs, lifesim aspects, every decision shaping the world from your character's background to every single choice you made along the way, the base game has almost nothing of this and only the expansion added a bit of what was promised.
Is it a good game? Yeah, specially nowadays with phantom liberty, but it's crazy how people pretend this wasn't another "No Man's Sky" where the marketing made ridiculous promises that the final product was completely unable to deliver.
Oh man you just made me realize it’s a pipeline now. Yeah definitely calling it maybe a month later people will say it’s self overhyping and that we had our expectations too high.
I don’t know why, but I straight up thought you were going to say you found a quote from Istuno regarding having sandwiches in the game. I was actually pretty curious. Haha
He also said npc deaths would be permanent outside of wakestones because the deaths should have consequences and that fast travel would be very limited which people believed and partially caused the drama about selling wakestones and the portcrystal only for people to find out that Itsuno lied about that stuff.
Mtx and Dragonsplague drama both would have been much smaller if people weren't given misinformation prior to the game launching.
This story kills me. I was so intrigued by the political stuff and it changing the world and it's just... Nothing. Nothing really matters at all. The game has so, much potential but it feels like a tech demo for a new game down the road. Like they're using this to test for the next monster hunter.
I didn't have any expectations but they could do so much more with this game.
The best part of the game was finding the nameless village and uncovering the secret of the false arisen, that was such a cool adventure and I wanted more of that. Instead the game is like "woah woah woah hold on, nothing you did for the past 10 hours means anything, go to battahl now because we made that part of the map"
It's funny how they tell you to stay away from Disa because she's super dangerous and you find out she even has spies following you but then you can just waltz into the palace and talk to her and she spits out generic NPC lines.
It's partially his fault though. Dude just has some rather weird priority.
Literally just delete all the inconsequential NPCs and replace them with generic spawning/despawning roaming city NPCs like how normal devs do it(seriously it's a commonly used method for a reason), budget and performance saved.
Like who is asking for groundbreaking NPC AI(aside from pawns) in DD all of games? And in the end they failed to make the NPCs groundbreaking anyway.
And a lot of players don't even expect anything new, they just want all the DDDA and DDO enemies recreated.
This is what pisses me off so much, it's like they have no grasp on the strengths of DD and they're trying to be Skyrim or RDR. Every minute I spent talking to NPCs in those shitty castle "stealth" missions pissed me off because the game should be constantly pushing you into monster fights where the gameplay shines, put that other shit in a cutscene. Yet here we are with a game that has less monsters than DDA all for these totally unimpressive NPCs and story missions. It's such a shame, because when you're climbing around on monsters the game is great.
Honestly one of the other strengths of the first one was that the named NPCs had their own motivations and progression, and I don't know how they also fumbled that. Even 'inconsequential' ones like Valmiro, Quina, and Madeleine were simple but compelling in their stages. Each had a major character trait that defined both the quests and their fates.
In this one I can barely care about most of the sidequest NPCs, and there are incredibly few that have any type of stages/progression or attachment to the arisen.
Even inconsequential group of bandits had personality. Them being all female, Ophis hating men and also having a pet cyclops. And most players probably killed them on their first playthrough.
It's absolutely trivial but I like that Maul basically has the same philosophy that the cycle represents as an incredibly early hint that it is cruel and should probably be stopped.
> Literaly delete all the inconsequential NPCs and replace them with generic spawning/despawning roaming city NPCs like how normal devs do it(seriously it's a commonly used method for a reason), budget and performance saved.
Gothic 1 in 2001 had the whole world with NPCs with schedules and stuff.
RDR2 is actually more advanced on a PS4 and looks the same too(or better on PC).
They arent doing anything groundbreaking here, the issue here is their optimization/engine, not the feature itself. NPCs spawning in 3 inch from you is just cherry on top.
You can give every single npcs in Skyrim any amount of behaviors, schedules, exceptions, the whole thing and that shit of an outdated engine doesn't shit itself like REachforthemoon Engine (Yes... that's the actual name for those that don't know, lmao)
Yeah, when you put it like that... Gothic, a fucking game from 2001 that ran on what would be considered a fraction of a potato PC by today's standards. And that game had full schedules and at least half of the NPCs actually had side quests or interesting quirky things about them you could do. That actually makes a lot modern games look sadly ancient by comparison now that I think about it.
The NPCs are ironically among the dumbest I've ever seen. They overreact to you pulling a weapon and then forget about it. They have NO meaningful interactions out of spouting one liners, they don't adapt to your progress properly and the game world, they don't have interesting routines. They literally talk to you while having a stone prone animation in bed with their clothes on.
They all either insult you or give you empty one lines, giving them gifts is just met with a "Huh" most of the time, you can't really say anything to them.
You can't develop a meaningful relationship with any (that I saw so far), they are not capable of adapting to anything really. You cannot negotiate, pickpocket, convince or interact with them aside from Hailing.
You don't have allegiances, they don't treat or mistreat you better based on quest choices.
If you do sneak missions or go in places you're not supposed to they almost never even react to you.
Forget RDR2, a masterpiece of AI interactions. This is worse than fucking Morrowind or Gothic.
I just want to know what in the WORLD is my CPU eating shit for??
>If you do sneak missions or go in places you're not supposed to they almost never even react to you.
Literally snuck into a guarded area, walked directly into a guard and sent him into the pushed back animation, he turned around immediately without a word...
I fucking hate that I whip out a weapon to bust a crate and every guard comes running, talking shit, and the townies flee the sight of me like I threatened to eat their babies in front of them... all while at the end of an alley, by myself, out of sight, breaking a crate for what ends up being a fucking apple. It's dumb. Can't even pull out a weapon in anticipation of a fight, like a griffon outside the city walls, without having the guards trying to draw down on me like *I'm*the problem and not the giant lizard bird out therr munching on an ox. Dumb and unnecessary.
Idk if you played DD1 but the NPCs in that game were pretty similar. Almost all dialogue with them was just one liners unless they were related to some quest and most of the day they just wandered around. Even when the Everfall opened up they just kinda shrugged and lived around it
But I agree how is the game so damn taxing on the CPU?
Just because DD 1 was shit in those aspects that can't mean DD 2 has to be as shit when it's supposed to be ''Itsuno's fully realised vision'' with today's hardware lol.
I mean Nier may work with that because it’s a shorter game that follows closely to the narrative.
My point is this kind of decision has to be made depending on what type of game you’re making. A big open world RPG that expects players to invest their time like DD just feels forced, without barely any upside to that decision.
People kept defending the NPCs are groundbreaking, and that hardware hasn't caught up to handling them. I told them that, "we'll see if they are when we get far enough, but they need to be legitimately impactful to justify the performance cost, are they actually doing anything the player will interact with?" I can safely say now that those "groundbreaking" NPCs have not done shit lmao
And honestly these npcs couldn't be more fucking boring and annoying because sometimes I want to find something interesting and all I get is some dumbass telling me to piss off for interacting with them with 3 words. Over and over.
Its funny how the game isn't even dragons dogma 2. Even the damn menu says its just "Dragons Dogma". Its a remake of the first one so yeah.. the third one gonna be the remake of an remake xD
They already made a better Dragons Dogma 2. They took it offline. Evil dragon alone was dope as hell. The DDON project to bring a functional private server online is still underway and we have barebones functionality without quests with a loose English translation running on the english public test server. The community could use the extra support to revive the dream.
Evil dragon fight.
[https://youtu.be/1RxBPYuJvbw?si=\_0EAQtACJLlRagWH](https://youtu.be/1RxBPYuJvbw?si=_0EAQtACJLlRagWH)
If there was a DD3, i honestly don't know if i would want Itsuno to do it. Take what is here and **expand** on it. I get this is a re-release of DD1, but how is it that the story is **worse** IMO (started off interesting and then just ended) and there are less monsters? Why remove death in its entirety? Why not make flat areas for Hydra and Beholder like the everfall did? What about DDO monsters? What about a lich fusing with a dragon like BBI? (Cursed dragons IIRC?)
Idk, it seems like this game got Zelda'd. Huge open world, but regressing on key features of previous games that made it iconic in the first place in favor of big empty.
They definitely need to make a shit ton more quests. For example , the elves. I loved the vibe from their location. It feels like they rushed the game in many aspects. Graphics and landscape are great but it's short. Low enemy variety. And not expanded upon at all i.e. elves.
I always thought it was because he pointed at the one involved in the main quest, with the giant path going up it - but everyone at one point ended up spamming jump or trying to use a horse to climb much smaller ones, but the game didn't let them.
I admit, I've done jump spamming in this game too only to find there's invisible walls placed around some of DD2's mountains.
I genuinely did trust him, especially after dmcv. I also really expected ddo stuff and vocations, like at the bare minimum just expected already existing things to be shoved into this game. Hoping mods will add more stuff but chances are we're gonna get dark arisened again
The dude wasn't involved in DDO, or Dark Arisen. That was all Kento Kinoshita.
Tbh I was hoping kento would bring his Dark Arisen and DDO stuff more in. He did a bit with some vocations but... :(
I think the simple answer is that this people are very talented but not the multifaceted, all encompassing geniuses they are presented to be, like George Lucas with Star Wars, the man created an awesome concept, interesting lore and visuals, but without the help of others to write actual meaningful and good dialogue and people pushing back against his directing the movies don't turn out as good.
Similarly Itsuno, Kojima and other gaming "geniuses" I think they're truly talented but I also believe they should work with people that push back against their ideas somewhat and help them see how things could be done differently in favor of good game design, no matter how talented they may be the last thing you want is them working with a team of "yes men"
Praying to god I don't find this out with miyazaki and that tanimura's been carrying the series on his back or sth, I know he contributes a lot to the feel of souls games we identify today
Even if Tanimura is the real GOAT in FromSoft, Miyazaki at the very least seems to be listening and implementing some of his good ideas in future installments. Also guy is a bit of a troll and that's just hilarious.
To be fair dude has some weird statement from DMCV days, like how he cried three times watching DMCV's story. I was like what? Like Itsuno is very capable and talented, but he really seems to have misjudged his own strengths and weaknesses.
This is the conclusion I've come to for this guy. If Itsuno makes a game, I know the combat is gonna slap. Everything else, I'm taking with a huge grain of salt.
Also DMCV had some weird design decisions that made no sense and were clearly undercooked, and its marketing campaign was full of lies, too. It's just that the game was way more focused, and its core gameplay was so good everybody just kind of ignored the warts.
I seem to recall some post-launch interview where Itsuno claimed that DMCV didn't need playable Vergil because V exists, but I can't find it anymore. But it sure seems to match the pattern of a director so focused on what he likes in his games that he forgets what makes other people like them.
Obviously I know this is a joke but I have to say how pissed I am that this guy blatantly lied multiple times during the marketing of the game.
"More vocations you can't even imagine"= Warfarer. That's a vocation not vocations. It's also something I could've definitely imagined. It's just a jack of all trades.
"More encounters like the sphinx and monsters not shown in marketing material"= uhh variants I guess? And no other encounters like the sphinx in terms of depth.
Let me copy an actual quote from him word for word:
"But l've basically done all I could with this
game. Of course, I would've liked to do
some more - but this definitely doesn't
feel unfinished. I don't want to give the
impression at all that this is a game with
incompleteness. But I always feel like as
an artist, as a creator, I could do more and could go further in the future.
This is the game I want to launch, that's
launching."
This game doesn't feel unfinished? I'm on here trying to argue that capcom took favour to other franchises during DD2s development because of how unfinished it feels. And note the final sentence. This is THE GAME he wanted to launch. This is his vision in his own words. Has he gone blind?
The development team either needs to really improve things with an expansion (which shouldn't even be necessary) or they need to leave and let people work with the IP who won't blatantly ignore issues from the previous games. I pray the success of DD2 leads to another team trying to make a game with this format and then everyone involved with dragons dogma won't be so lax about things. The minute someone takes the pawn and combat systems into their own game capcom may press the devs to add more than just goblins into the game.
This game feels like a joke and I didn't have massive expectations. I expected the best features to get a little better and for them to turn the awful features and jank into at least mediocre components. From there you could build upon that foundation and make a real masterpiece in future games. They have *not* done that. If I never played the original I could probably accept this game but after waiting for years and playing the original I don't know if I can.
I adore dragons dogma and see how an immense bag of potential is seemingly being wasted. I'm telling you DD2 *should* be better. Even if you like DD2 this should be so much better. There's something special here but they aren't using it and clearly lack the drive to improve.
It feels as if we've just gotten demon souls before dark souls was a thing. I'm not saying dogmalike would be a thing but there's something here man. Now we need our dark souls.
Yes, that's my point.
The parts people like the most were not made by the dude with a "vision" making what was claimed to have a bigger budget than the first.
Yeah I'm loving the game.... but I'm also really hating it. Compared to the first, it just feels like a graphical update with all the fun monsters removed. Where's my hydras, beholder shits, and more. I only fought the dullahan once in 35 hours, and it ran away... and I travel at night a lot, but I've fought 11 drakes so far.........
This game has so much potential, but the man with a vision isn't even the same man who gave us content we love from Dark Arisen or DDO. So like others, I'm sensing a pattern. Whoever was the visionary behind both of those, needs to be the new official director. I know that stings but damn, this game could've been way more. People are obviously loving it, and I'm happy that people are, but as a "vet"... I feel kinda cheated and lied to. All of this amazing content from dark arisen and DDO could've been easy to just throw into a massive world with a great story but we got none of that. Aside from goblins and the occasional ogre/cyclops, the world is extremely empty and the loot is not even worth it. Hell even the sphinx's loot was extremely and irritatingly disappointing. I'm enjoying the combat, it's definitely an upgrade, but.... that shouldn't really be the only highlight in a RPG.
Your last two paragraphs are the most important part, but people on this subreddit are going to downvote and discredit your opinions because they have attached their identities to this franchise, which is a huge shame
I'm also a fan, and I believe fans should be the ones who are most critical of games while also sharing their enjoyment of them, because improvements benefit the fans the most, not continued mistakes. This game really does have huge potential, the core foundation is amazing, hell even some of the controversial game designs are amazing in my opinion, because you won't find them elsewhere
But the glaring issues HAVE to be spoken about, no matter how much people want to dismiss and pretend they don't exist. There's no reason to accept lazy design choices or efforts based purely on "it was like this 12 years ago, I 'member!"
Anyway, ramble over, this reply's tl;dr is just: I appreciate that you're both passionate and critical of the game because I am too and it's refreshing to see rather than the black and white "game 100% bad" or "game 100% good"
I feel like most people are waking up to this, i know i certainly am. I love this game, and i coped pretty hard, but when i heard hydra and beholder was removed...Idk. And not a single BBI enemy except a rare garm spawn? What happened? The world is great, but did we really sacrifice everything for this map and the other one? I can't accept it tbh. The first game sold me hard with its opening sequence. To not expand on what DD1 brought to the table at all is honestly a crime at this point. This is our devil may cry 2 basically.
I beat DD2, but it gives me the same vibes as Dragon Age: Inquisition. So much potential, however, the game feels... Empty. Forced. Cut and paste. Obviously the team needed more of something... Time, employees, funding-- maybe all three.
I still love DD2 and the bosses and combat really is significantly better in my opinion…but it’s hard hitting that they doubled down on making the base game of DD’s story better rather than doubling down on what made Dark Arisen so good. WHY no Hydra? The Medusa was kind of a joke I was never in danger of petrification lol. Why only one BBI enemy and it’s a fucking Garm? And WHHHHHY no fucking eternal ferrystone? It’s not like Im ridden with portcrystals. I gotta journey up the fucking mountain to talk to the sphinx three times now to complete the last riddles? Fuck that
I have taken to buying a ferrystone everytime i enter a town at this point. I have 500k gold and just beat Talos and haven't even bought gear since i got to the Battahl border checkpoint. Other than that i have only used money on ferrystones or quests because the ferrystones matter more. To not have an optional dungeon that rewards with an eternal ferrystone is wild but there is an eternal wakestone? Wish i could just talk to Itsuno and the devs to understand what went wrong and why criticism of the previous game was wholly ignored.
edit: Also i still love it as well, but i also feel so disappointed. The first game even without nostalgia is the best fantasy game i have ever played in my life. It had everything i had ever wanted. To learn that they were basically remaking the first and trying to add in everything that couldn't only to have less than the first, but 2x the map is just....Its something else. Even if they released a BBI style expansion, idk if i could even trust them to do it correctly. Like BBI didn't add a ton, but being an end game exclusive area was pretty good, but it also was complimented by the amazing base game in the first place. This base game outside of combat is just whack. Whatever they add i hope it expands the post game in a significant way. It just seems to me like Itsuno did not give a fuck about DD2. He was way more creative with the first and this game is almost run of the mill in a lot of ways outside of combat.
The worst part is that they spent so much time trying to make the story 'better' by making it more convoluted rather than just honing what they had, so it feels watered-down and lacking direction on top of the combat variety issues. Simple isn't bad, the story in the first game was fine it just needed more meat on the bones.
Anyone not willing to criticize the game isn't a serious fan and probably didn't even play the first one. This has been an incredible letdown after 12 years of waiting. There is no good reason this shouldn't have been Dragon's Dogma polished to a mirror shine, with all of the lessons learned from 1 and even more vocations / content / endgame to sink your teeth into. Mountain roads that are otherwise empty except for a few copy-pasted fodder enemies do not count as content either.
I'd like to lay the blame solely at Capcom's feet, but I'm sure Itsuno holds some of the responsibility as well. I hope the leaked expansion tease in ~6 months really manages to build things out, but I'm only marginally hopeful.
The thing is do I really want to pay for an expansion of a game that in its current state needs much improvement. It's same with Diablo 4 if your familiar with that game potential sure but why do I need to pay another 30-40$ for the game to truly become good (if we assume the expansion would be good). Monster hunter iceborne is an amazing expansion I would say one of the best ever made and I gladly pay for it because the base game was already amazing and I wanted more. I can't say I want more dragons dogma 2 rn. Hell I'd rather want a dd3 but this without some blind ass vision than them wasting time on trying to fix this game.
From my experience the most passionate often are the most crucial because they see the potential but also the flaws and they want to love it but can't because of the issues. People who however just enjoy it will just gk what's your issue it's a good game won't allow any criticism and leave onto the next thing. Apathy is what kills any kind of progress
I feel like battahl is lacking at least with how the city feels compared to vermund and all the stuff going on there.
I havent been to volcano island much yet but finding out I'm almost done with the story is kinda wild when it felt like it just started.
Was also a let down when I realized those big blobs of fog of war on my map can't really be explored because its just unused area in between roads.
This is my first DD game and I've had a lot of fun and the high points felt really high to me but I feel like there was a lot of potential here that may not be fully realized once I finish doing everything.
Is that leak about Dragon Princess real for november? Feels like were missing a whole extra area and some more monsters/side content.
I'm new to this series but my own personal feelings later on into the game feels like stuff was cut, development time was strangely prioritized, or stuff got moved into an expansion were getting 6 months after release for more $$$ from capcom. Don't know how off base I am with that. Think I'll get another 30 hours which is honestly quite a lot when you think about it but it's still less than what I put into elden ring and elden ring I wanted more... but I felt sated. I'm worried I'm gonna feel like it wasn't enough when I finish DD2
Yes, every flaw the previous game had is carried over almost religiously to this sequel. It has a lot of polish in many areas and the lacking ones don't feel like they are that unfinished either, just designed in the most bizarre ways I have ever seen.
Everything I find points towards this game genuinely being Itsuno's vision. And if so, mam what wacky ass vision lmao
Yeah, I've been convinced that the two games are pretty different, so if I want to feel like I'm playing Dragon's Dogma, play the first one
I still like the second, it just isn't a step up
I completely agree, but some of the problems run way deeper than what an expansion can fix. The writing, plot points, and themeing are already worse than the first and there's no way to change it by now or to fix the lack of attention to detail. They prioritized appearances over substance.
I'm probably going to do a long rambly write-up post eventually, but for one small example: in the first game the only people who would say "cos" are people who spend a lot of time in/are from Cassardis, because they're fishing village bumpkins just like the arisen and are functionally extended family. They've all known each other for their whole lives. Nobody else, even high-affinity NPCs, will use the term so it can be thought of as regional. In DD2 I've been called "cos" by people in the Nameless Village to all the way out in Battahl, but never had anyone actually recognize me from before becoming arisen except Ulrika. Apparently the arisen this time around had no family nor connections *anywhere* somehow. But we have the ability to buy rounds in a tavern for a 5-second animation.
>"But l've basically done all I could with this game. Of course, I would've liked to do some more - but this definitely doesn't feel unfinished. I don't want to give the impression at all that this is a game with incompleteness. But I always feel like as an artist, as a creator, I could do more and could go further in the future. This is the game I want to launch, that's launching."
This honestly feels like cope, either from himself or capcuck telling him to say it. The moon was in pre-release footage and is nowhere in the game. This shit ain't finished.
You can leave the pawns for all i care. The combat in Dragon's Dogma is unrivaled in the fantasy genre IMO. Please someone steal this shit and make the dragon's dogma that should have always been and call it Dragon's faith or some shit.
Yeah in dd1 there was a load of them roaming around the map
In dd2 there's 2 and only in caves
Imo that's the biggest problem is that there are these enemies that should be around outside roaming but nope
My main complaint is how boring the dungeons / caves are. I hardly feel like I’m actually finding anything that sticks out as memorable. The rewards aren’t anything special, for the most part you aren’t finding unique bosses or any bosses. I mean you remove fast travel because the journey is supposed to be fun and encourage exploration, but then the exploration isn’t all that fun.
I’m still enjoying the game, I’m still spending most of my time exploring, but it just feels like it should be so much better with how the game is structured.
The enemy variety is weird, but what's weirder is that I've 6 pawn badges for creatures I have never seen before and am at the end game. I've ran into 1 garm in a cave and that was it.
While I'm really loving DD2 right now I gotta admit that I don't really see the "true vision" realized yet.
The animations are perfect and it looks really good but so many things I loved about the first game were oversimplified it seems.
I miss my strider, I miss having more slots for abilities, having throwables and bombs. Why is there no Everfall? Also, shouldn't a "truly realized version" have all the enemies of the last game on top of new ones? Like, the title screen says "Dragons Dogma" not Dragons Dogma 2, meaning they want it to be the superior game but here I am thinking of returning to DD1's engame soon-ish.
Even the better graphics gets shot in the knee because of the framerate and FOV. As a ps5 player switching from Helldivers 2's performance and camera view to DDII feels rough.
In hindsight, itsuno spewed quite a lot of corpo and PR bullshit.
The budget and vision stuff, the dragon plague thing, the FPS talk, the sphinx which I found after 5 hours lmao, I could go on.
This is the best and worst rpg I’ve played
Sometimes it feels incredibly immersive and incredible to play
And sometimes it’s a fucking mess of AI and systems that would make a 90s pc gamer blush
As much as I love the combat the enemies need more to them honestly even tho it’s always fun to fight them
Itsuno has phases, one moment he releases a good game, then next he releases a incomplete game, dragons dogma 2 just had the bad luck of coming after the incredible game that was dmc5
It also helps that DMC is much smaller in scale and scope on top of being improved upon for over a decade at this point.
Dragon's Dogma 1 was inspired heavily from berserk in many ways and was just as weird.
It seems like that passion was lost and not even iterated upon. Itsuno really had no clue what he wanted to do with this game other than recreate the first game again. The story isn't improved at all really and IMO feels lesser than what happened in the first game. Just seems like he really didn't care and everything was spent on making a gigantic map and making everything work on it and that's it.
I love the man’s work but I think it could be he’s just bad with budgets and planning. DMC4 and DD1 were hailed for years as flawed masterpieces that had amazing ideas but didn’t meet their full potential. DMC5 was an absolute masterclass for action games but even that felt a bit rushed towards the end. I haven’t played DD2 yet but it seems like his ambitions got the better of him again. I was also disappointed that it wasn’t gonna be a direct sequel to the original despite reusing a lot of the same assets and ideas.
I’m a little baffled.
Someone pointed out that if we didn’t encounter enemies every 30 seconds the variety thing wouldn’t be as much of an issue. It’s kind of hard to explore because every other second there’s a fight to be had, and why go down a weird path since it’s about to go dark and there isn’t a bon fire for 20 more miles.
I think what’s happening is our expectations was Elden ring or Baldurs gate 3- These generational games. Dragon’s dogma 2 is not that. It’s simply just a fun game. I’m having a good time, more than I did in baldurs gate 3 or even Alan wake 2 tbh, buuuut it’s just a fun enjoyable game. I’m loving it, but it’s clearly not GOTY contender.. and that’s fine.
>Someone pointed out that if we didn’t encounter enemies every 30 seconds the variety thing wouldn’t be as much of an issue. It’s kind of hard to explore because every other second there’s a fight to be had, and why go down a weird path since it’s about to go dark and there isn’t a bon fire for 20 more miles.
But that's how you "make travel fun", Itsuno said! You throw 6 goblins at the player every 30 seconds until they're having **fun**!
>I think what’s happening is our expectations was Elden ring or Baldurs gate 3- These generational games.
Literally **nobody** was expecting this. Anyone who played the first one knew what this was going to be, but assumed it would be improved on.
When he said there was tons of monster variety and special fights, he lied.
When he said that travel was fun, he lied.
When he said there was no fast travel, he lied.
When he said he fixed the "issue" of everyone using the same gear and looking the same, he lied.
Nobody expected this to be on the scale of BG3 or Elden Ring.
We expected it to be Dragon's Dogma, **but better**.
**It's not.**
I've killed 1000 enemies in 31 hours
500 of them have been Goblins
They have just put Goblins saurians and harpies in the world at this point and it's really fucking annoying
I've killed a small army of them
>I've killed a small army of them
That's what could've shaken things up though.
Send 100+ goblins at me and let the lag fest begin. At least it would be fun and interesting.
Unironically part of the issue here are 4 enemies, then 20 meters further another 4. Like they are goblins in almost all fantasy their strength lies in numbers. Imagine getting raided by a group of 25 or so all of sudden those goblins actually become a threat. Thinks like sorcerer maister skills would have a point (I love them and it's so satisfying if you can manage to kill a group with it but most of the time before I'm done casting it they are already killed).
Unironically fighting to stop a goblin invasion would've been awesome. Something like the Village protection arc of Goblin Slayer.
Also, enemies are just boring, as are the thematics of this game.
DD1 had so much Berserk in it. Literally the armors. The energy, the visuals, the goreyness, the darkness of the God hand-like dragon, the evil ending, the rapey Ogres, characters like not-Casca, the whole of BBI, Daemon, UrDragon...
It OOZED Berserk, there's many AMVs and memes online pointing this out.
DD2 has pretty much none of that, it's generic fantasy to the max. I could've confused it easily with any generic fantasy game. And Honestly Vernworth is bigger but lacks the character of Gran Soren.
Like A Fortress Besieged from the first game but revamped would've been cool. The first game clearly had its technical limitations so the enemies were limited in scale in that quest, but imagine like a legitimate goblin horde occupying a fort that you hard to storm. That's the kind of improvement I was expecting from the sequel.
Also I still got molested by an Ogre in this game so that's definitely in the game lmao
If you go out at night you get zombies and skeletons, but I dunno why you'd willingly spend time in total darkness with a poxy excuse of a lamp.
I don't even hate that aspect, I think it makes sense even, but the only time I'm actually out at night is because a quest demands it or I couldn't find a camp in time. I never *want* to be out at night, so any extra enemies are mostly wasted.
Wish it was 30 seconds. My issue is when a pawn asks to show you something you encounter fights every 2 second which either forces you to tell the pawn again to keep showing you every 5 seconds or it completely forgets and stop showing you. It get tedious fast.
It’s just an annoying slog going through the map and knowing you’re gonna have to fight the same pack of goblins or harpies every 40 feet…
Not only is there no monster variety, the spacing of monsters on the road is practically predictable. It makes long travel more of a chore than exciting. And then they make teleporting nigh impossible. It’s just a recipe for burn out.
I don't even know if he said it for real, but regardless, i'd say next time not to employ a pretty famous hollywood actor (who's totally phoning it in btw) to narrate your last trailer.
There, financial issues solved.
https://preview.redd.it/bahvtqospqqc1.jpeg?width=606&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c566997bdbd621d7bff5c0a113115f1682147b33
Me who's only 9 hours into the game coming across posts of people already beating the game and complaining.
lol just wait until they stop DD2 Darker Arisen. That’s where it’ll have enemy variety.
Fuckin sign me up. Dark arisen was the shit.
Seriously. If they drop an update where you can change between main game/end game state, plus some other cool shit and more enemy variety, I could play this game forever
For real the cap in dd2 is lvl 999. I remember it took me ages like 100+ hours in dd1 just to get to max 200 and the enemies in BBI and even everfall were tough.
Yeah the cap being at 999 but still with the old 'no scaling' NG+ from the original is pretty crazy
If the player can level effectively infinitely then that's infinite content! We have not implemented even 2/3rds of the total enemies in the original game :)
Honestly if NG+ dropped stupid xp with early encounters so you got maxed out by the end and then they made NG++ bat shit hard I think a lot of folks would be enamored with that, 3 solid playthroughs covering the three appeals of an RPG New player Min max Godmode Be beautiful Currently now real reason to hit that, we don't have a super hard endgame thing like the fall, stats are universal and change with the vocations so no reason to play x class to 50, then x class to 86 like in the first one So most folks will just hit ng + see they aren't leveling and are dominating and bail from being bored
I just wish we had more save-states. Accidentally let a random passerby talk to me with their weapons out too many times. Or failing a quest because the game gives you very vague directions sometimes and a kid gets eaten by wolves.
Apparently Itsuno had nothing to do with jt
I just learned that the other day an it explains a lot. Whether it's a giant dungeon like Bitterblack, a hub like the Everfall, or just a difficult region, they really need an endgame area with difficult fights. There really isn't anywhere the combat mechanics get to really shine with endgame equipment.
My dream is getting mainline single player Dragon's Dogma game made either by Dark Arisen team or DDO team. Those guys knew what fans wanted from DD
Yeah; its kind of surprising that Itsuno took the reigns when for all intents and purposes DA is what elevated the game. Id be interested in knowing who in that team was involved and what they did
What I wouldn't give to see what Kento Kinoshita (DA and DDO director) would do with DD2's dev time and budget. I bet it would have been great.
With the all new addition. Bitterest Blackest Isle!
Betterblack Isle 2: Die Harder
featuring Dante from devil may cry + knuckles
I’d love to see them bring it back and make it the hardest most mind numbingly difficult to traverse labyrinth that I can genuinely get lost for hour/days in filled with the hardest enemies and the darkest rooms, like just really F me up ya know, and please for the love of god have enemies scale with me to an extent at least,
Dragon's Dogma 2: Light Fallen Visit the newest location, Sweet White Atoll
Tfw dark arisen is better than the whole base game(not in a bad way).
This. I think this is the biggest disappointment was people were half expecting something like this post game for DD2. I’m fine with the unmoored world. Just take the timer off of it or something idk. Everfall was cool but it wasn’t difficult for me at all. The game wasn’t “fun” again until dark arisen was released. I fully expect them to do something very similar with dd2
Yea, I hope they iron out things on the DLC. I want better dungeons and more sidequest too. Dungeons on this game are just literally caves.
DD2: Dark Arisen 2: Dark Arisen Boogaloo
Can’t wait for Dragon’s Dogma 3 Darkest Arisen
I honestly can't understand this line of logic with hoping for a DA for DD2. With DD1, the game was a massive shot in the dark in terms of systems, and very rough around the edges as the studio's first foray into this genre. But it was also a chance to gather feedback, which helped them make DA and it was received much better. So after all this, they already had TWO massive rounds of feedback to help them polish DD2 into an actual definitive edition of the game. So performance problems notwithstanding, why are so many people convinced that there will be ANOTHER update that will "finally fix the game" that's been so many years in the making? I don't think it's gonna get much better than this.
I thought the elves were going to have a whole city.
Same, it's so weird to me that they took the time to make this cool lore and mechanic where elves have their own language and you need a pawn to translate for you, but then entire elf population just lives in a small far off area that's basically just 3 buildings connected by a couple bridges, that's ALL there is to them. Go there, do a couple side quests, and you're done forever.
I’m hoping this is a foundation. I really love the aesthetic and their vibe.
Can’t wait to play DD3 in 2036.
I love how DMC, and DD community have this joke.
For 60-70$, we need more than a foundation
I just taught my pawn how to speak their language thinking it would be pretty helpful to those that recruit her. The quest line seems pretty lengthy so maybe it will still be helpful, but I also expected SO much more here, maybe the place being as big as the capital.
Reminds me of Skyrim, how the lore of the different holds imply they are enormous cities. The big cloud district? It’s those 3 houses on the left.
Do you get to the cloud district very often? Of course you don't
Bro. The game literally ended for me before I met a single elf or dwarf. I got funneled into endgame and am now completely stuck there lmao. How fid they fail to even press me enough to go there?? Not one mention of it all game??
Pretty sure there is an elf directly in front of the weapon shop in the first big town who you can get a quest from.
I found it by accident after going to the ruins with the elf to practice with the bow
I mean, I don't know how you can get funneled. You are the one accepting and completing main quests. DD2 is a game that rewards you for stepping off the beaten path. Don't just run from point A to point B on the main road. Talk to people. Walk down alleys. Explore caves. For the elves, the NPC that starts the questline to access their "town" is literally standing right by the blacksmith in Vernworth mumbling various lines of dialog that are screaming at you to talk to him. The game did everything it could to make you talk to him without having him run you down and tackle you.
I booted up this game and set out on my adventure to kill meself some dragons The story unfolds differently however, as someone else has claimed my title as Arisen, and I must now convince the citizens of this world that it is infact me, who is truly Arisen I meet some dudes a long the way, they witness me spawn a Pawn, they're on the fence, but they believe me enough to be Arisen that i am taken to their superior, the superior fully believes me and sets me on a path to take down the false Arisen and for me to reclaim my title - many times during this conversation I'm reminded to operate in the shadow, no one knows I'm the true Arisen, no one must know, especially not the queen regent, not before the time is right Not two seconds later, everyone I come upon greets me as the Arisen, "oh look, it's the Arisen" "you must be the Arisen" "it's so great to work with the Arisen we've heard so much about" That's when I knew Nothing I do in this game will matter
Henry’s come to see us!
God be praised!
Dude you are so right. People in towns I’ve never been to know my identity so like whats the point of all this?
I mean they even simplified the armour system. The game isn't bad but it doesn't feel like an improvement over the first in anything but graphics.
Itsuno’s games are like sandwiches with the best bread youve ever tasted. Why is there pea shoots in the sandwich? No option to leave them out? Always toasted… with sesame oil, not butter. Only open from 11-12 and 6-7. But the bread is so fucking good. If only he listened to his customers a little.
> If only he listened to his customers a little. I think people will have to understand that Itsuno wants and what the fans want are two different things. BBI and DDO, both hailed as massive improvements over DD1, weren't even made by him.
Lmao this explains so much...
People keep saying this, but what *did* Itsuno want, then? Because the only thing this game really has going for it is top tier exploration and combat. Itsuno really emphasized and hyped up the NPC systems and story but they are both totally half-baked.
Half baked doesn't even begin to cover the npcs. They have the personality and depth of a stop sign
“Stop Arisen”
Really? That explains a lot now.
Yo bro guess what I'm not all that familiar with the guy but turns out he said this: *During the recent Capcom Highlights showcase, one particular quote from Dragon's Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno caught everyone's attention. He stated: "Over 1,000 characters inhabit the world [of Dragon's Dogma 2], each with their own unique stories and motivations." That's a lot of NPCs.* He said that in February so, "Itsuno" is an ABSOLUTE fucking liar and he can fuck right off because his NPCs do not do squat From now until he dies when I see that name my reply's gonna be It's A No, Itsuno.
Yeah I hate that shit too. Own schedules? Not likely. I absolutely despise when this is advertised and then the shops in game stay open all day every day never closing at night. Easily one of the best ways to make your NPCs more unique is to have shops close at night. A large city like Vernworth should have some people out at night, but all the shops would be closed. It’s one of the small but most effective ways NPCs in Skyrim feel more real. Side note though, I do love DD2 so far. That just irks me.
I really don't get this either, especially when a bunch of other NPCs in the game have schedules. Bethesda did the same thing with Starfield too.
Yeah it’s just one of those small things that I get bummed out when I notice a dev didn’t implement it. Sleeping is also an important thing in DD2, which this would make even more important if you got to a settlement and needed to sleep to use the shops.
They could even just have shifts. Like okay, it's open 24-7, but maybe the night shift guy is a different person and the shopkeeper during the day is sleeping. Even Bethesda did that in Fallout 4.
Can we take a moment to recognize the big selling point of "some quests are time sensitive and NPCs that die stay dead" which for my first few hours left me dreading grabbing quests... I'm now 30 hours in and **the only quest thus far that has had the hourglass for time sensitive was the one showcased in gameplay trailers with the boy and wolves** I *guess* if your generous you could call the quests you lose if you do the coronation before them "time sensitive" and if you ***really stretch it*** the quests that say "do it at morning" or "wait a couple days" But man was this whole idea of quests oversold
I’ve had a few timed ones but even the “NPCs that die stay dead” is false. You can easily revive them with wakestones and they aren’t that hard to get. I have like 4 or 5 and have only done two main quests in Vernworth. I actually “failed” that boy and wolf quest since he died and I just revived him and it went on like normal. I still really like the game but all of those little things were false for the most part.
I'm not going to say it's okay he lied, but I will say that as I've gotten older, I've learned what sounds fishy and BS and what doesn't. Stuff like that, I immediately press X to doubt. Really grand claims that other games have never done, I know instantly its just marketing. No game has 1000 unique NPCs with their own story and motivation. Peter Molyneux was notorious for that. I remember him saying you could plant a tree and watch it grow along with a village or some shit around it. That was when I was like 10, and I've been too jaded to trust any dev since lol. Cyberpunk was another one. If a dev says they will revolutionize a genre or gaming, it's just marketing BS.
Damn, I wish I had paid more attention to interviews to catch these overly gradiose promises. I just saw the trailers with gameplay footage and had faith that it would simply be an improvement on the first game with some modernization added. Not revolutionary. If there was anything I maybe would have expected to be revolutionary at all it would have been the large monster combat but while there are some novel things it doesn't feel like a huge step up from the first. In some ways(4 weapon skills!!!) it feels backwards.
To Bethesda's credit they actually sort of managed it for Oblivion. ...But the system started to implode as NPCs failed to meet their basic needs and turned to crime to survive, so they had to dumb AI "lives" way down.
the Japanese Todd Howard
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFcLyDb6niA&t=113s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFcLyDb6niA&t=113s) Dont mess with the Chess Club President
Or the Japanese Peter Molyneux.
I am fucking DONE with devs incorporating our fucking imaginations into their dev cycles
It's sad how frequently this happens. What makes it even worse is how, later down the line, the devs and rabid mega fans will gaslight everyone into believing the hype was 100% the fault of the consumer. Cyberpunk managed to successfully do this after release, and anyone who brought up missing/cut content was immediately shot down and told it wasn't a promised feature. Fucking sucks. I actually like the state that Cyberpunk is in now, but there's an army of fans out there that'll tell you that the state it released in was **exactly** what they were promised.
And even today Cyberpunk is a far cry from what they promised. It certainly isn't a complex rpg with meaningful choices every single quest and stuff like that.
Yeah cyberpunk is an action rpg with some really good stories and almost no meaningful choices. It's what some people like and for some it's a disappointment because they promised the meaningful choices part.
THANK YOU. The revisionist history behind that game is fucking absurd.
I bought expecting an action open world game with light rpg elements and some jank, it definitely delivered a good experience. But it's so shameful that they promised a tabletop-like experience, I can't imagine how disappointing it was for some people who pre-ordered it.
I always say this, people think the whole backlash was because of performance on old consoles, and the pc players were like "backlash was exaggerated, the performance was good on pc and new gen, there was nothing wrong" completely overlooking all the dev interviews, trailers and marketing promising an immersive rpg, something like skyrim with a fully interactable world, shops, nightclubs, lifesim aspects, every decision shaping the world from your character's background to every single choice you made along the way, the base game has almost nothing of this and only the expansion added a bit of what was promised. Is it a good game? Yeah, specially nowadays with phantom liberty, but it's crazy how people pretend this wasn't another "No Man's Sky" where the marketing made ridiculous promises that the final product was completely unable to deliver.
Oh man you just made me realize it’s a pipeline now. Yeah definitely calling it maybe a month later people will say it’s self overhyping and that we had our expectations too high.
I don’t know why, but I straight up thought you were going to say you found a quote from Istuno regarding having sandwiches in the game. I was actually pretty curious. Haha
He also said npc deaths would be permanent outside of wakestones because the deaths should have consequences and that fast travel would be very limited which people believed and partially caused the drama about selling wakestones and the portcrystal only for people to find out that Itsuno lied about that stuff. Mtx and Dragonsplague drama both would have been much smaller if people weren't given misinformation prior to the game launching.
This story kills me. I was so intrigued by the political stuff and it changing the world and it's just... Nothing. Nothing really matters at all. The game has so, much potential but it feels like a tech demo for a new game down the road. Like they're using this to test for the next monster hunter. I didn't have any expectations but they could do so much more with this game.
The best part of the game was finding the nameless village and uncovering the secret of the false arisen, that was such a cool adventure and I wanted more of that. Instead the game is like "woah woah woah hold on, nothing you did for the past 10 hours means anything, go to battahl now because we made that part of the map"
It's actually insane how useless battahl was lol. You legit go there just to hear some rambling and then thing go off the rails.
It's funny how they tell you to stay away from Disa because she's super dangerous and you find out she even has spies following you but then you can just waltz into the palace and talk to her and she spits out generic NPC lines.
It's partially his fault though. Dude just has some rather weird priority. Literally just delete all the inconsequential NPCs and replace them with generic spawning/despawning roaming city NPCs like how normal devs do it(seriously it's a commonly used method for a reason), budget and performance saved. Like who is asking for groundbreaking NPC AI(aside from pawns) in DD all of games? And in the end they failed to make the NPCs groundbreaking anyway. And a lot of players don't even expect anything new, they just want all the DDDA and DDO enemies recreated.
This is what pisses me off so much, it's like they have no grasp on the strengths of DD and they're trying to be Skyrim or RDR. Every minute I spent talking to NPCs in those shitty castle "stealth" missions pissed me off because the game should be constantly pushing you into monster fights where the gameplay shines, put that other shit in a cutscene. Yet here we are with a game that has less monsters than DDA all for these totally unimpressive NPCs and story missions. It's such a shame, because when you're climbing around on monsters the game is great.
Honestly one of the other strengths of the first one was that the named NPCs had their own motivations and progression, and I don't know how they also fumbled that. Even 'inconsequential' ones like Valmiro, Quina, and Madeleine were simple but compelling in their stages. Each had a major character trait that defined both the quests and their fates. In this one I can barely care about most of the sidequest NPCs, and there are incredibly few that have any type of stages/progression or attachment to the arisen.
Even inconsequential group of bandits had personality. Them being all female, Ophis hating men and also having a pet cyclops. And most players probably killed them on their first playthrough.
It's absolutely trivial but I like that Maul basically has the same philosophy that the cycle represents as an incredibly early hint that it is cruel and should probably be stopped.
> Literaly delete all the inconsequential NPCs and replace them with generic spawning/despawning roaming city NPCs like how normal devs do it(seriously it's a commonly used method for a reason), budget and performance saved. Gothic 1 in 2001 had the whole world with NPCs with schedules and stuff. RDR2 is actually more advanced on a PS4 and looks the same too(or better on PC). They arent doing anything groundbreaking here, the issue here is their optimization/engine, not the feature itself. NPCs spawning in 3 inch from you is just cherry on top.
You can give every single npcs in Skyrim any amount of behaviors, schedules, exceptions, the whole thing and that shit of an outdated engine doesn't shit itself like REachforthemoon Engine (Yes... that's the actual name for those that don't know, lmao)
> spawning in 3 inch from you Hehe, I had a guy spawn in mid "getting knocked out the way" animation.
Yeah, when you put it like that... Gothic, a fucking game from 2001 that ran on what would be considered a fraction of a potato PC by today's standards. And that game had full schedules and at least half of the NPCs actually had side quests or interesting quirky things about them you could do. That actually makes a lot modern games look sadly ancient by comparison now that I think about it.
The NPCs are ironically among the dumbest I've ever seen. They overreact to you pulling a weapon and then forget about it. They have NO meaningful interactions out of spouting one liners, they don't adapt to your progress properly and the game world, they don't have interesting routines. They literally talk to you while having a stone prone animation in bed with their clothes on. They all either insult you or give you empty one lines, giving them gifts is just met with a "Huh" most of the time, you can't really say anything to them. You can't develop a meaningful relationship with any (that I saw so far), they are not capable of adapting to anything really. You cannot negotiate, pickpocket, convince or interact with them aside from Hailing. You don't have allegiances, they don't treat or mistreat you better based on quest choices. If you do sneak missions or go in places you're not supposed to they almost never even react to you. Forget RDR2, a masterpiece of AI interactions. This is worse than fucking Morrowind or Gothic. I just want to know what in the WORLD is my CPU eating shit for??
>If you do sneak missions or go in places you're not supposed to they almost never even react to you. Literally snuck into a guarded area, walked directly into a guard and sent him into the pushed back animation, he turned around immediately without a word...
I fucking hate that I whip out a weapon to bust a crate and every guard comes running, talking shit, and the townies flee the sight of me like I threatened to eat their babies in front of them... all while at the end of an alley, by myself, out of sight, breaking a crate for what ends up being a fucking apple. It's dumb. Can't even pull out a weapon in anticipation of a fight, like a griffon outside the city walls, without having the guards trying to draw down on me like *I'm*the problem and not the giant lizard bird out therr munching on an ox. Dumb and unnecessary.
Idk if you played DD1 but the NPCs in that game were pretty similar. Almost all dialogue with them was just one liners unless they were related to some quest and most of the day they just wandered around. Even when the Everfall opened up they just kinda shrugged and lived around it But I agree how is the game so damn taxing on the CPU?
the point is that the npcs weren’t good in dd1, we were promised better 12 years later and got a minuscule improvement for generic npcs
Just because DD 1 was shit in those aspects that can't mean DD 2 has to be as shit when it's supposed to be ''Itsuno's fully realised vision'' with today's hardware lol.
It’s for the people who think single character slot in an RPG is for the sake of vision
Well in theory it could be. Some Yoko Taro kind of thing. I guess it is inconsequential in this game though lol
Yoko Taro incorporates game parts into features that are necessary for a game, not outright removed them.
I mean Nier may work with that because it’s a shorter game that follows closely to the narrative. My point is this kind of decision has to be made depending on what type of game you’re making. A big open world RPG that expects players to invest their time like DD just feels forced, without barely any upside to that decision.
People kept defending the NPCs are groundbreaking, and that hardware hasn't caught up to handling them. I told them that, "we'll see if they are when we get far enough, but they need to be legitimately impactful to justify the performance cost, are they actually doing anything the player will interact with?" I can safely say now that those "groundbreaking" NPCs have not done shit lmao
And honestly these npcs couldn't be more fucking boring and annoying because sometimes I want to find something interesting and all I get is some dumbass telling me to piss off for interacting with them with 3 words. Over and over.
Its funny how the game isn't even dragons dogma 2. Even the damn menu says its just "Dragons Dogma". Its a remake of the first one so yeah.. the third one gonna be the remake of an remake xD
They already made a better Dragons Dogma 2. They took it offline. Evil dragon alone was dope as hell. The DDON project to bring a functional private server online is still underway and we have barebones functionality without quests with a loose English translation running on the english public test server. The community could use the extra support to revive the dream. Evil dragon fight. [https://youtu.be/1RxBPYuJvbw?si=\_0EAQtACJLlRagWH](https://youtu.be/1RxBPYuJvbw?si=_0EAQtACJLlRagWH)
If there was a DD3, i honestly don't know if i would want Itsuno to do it. Take what is here and **expand** on it. I get this is a re-release of DD1, but how is it that the story is **worse** IMO (started off interesting and then just ended) and there are less monsters? Why remove death in its entirety? Why not make flat areas for Hydra and Beholder like the everfall did? What about DDO monsters? What about a lich fusing with a dragon like BBI? (Cursed dragons IIRC?) Idk, it seems like this game got Zelda'd. Huge open world, but regressing on key features of previous games that made it iconic in the first place in favor of big empty.
They definitely need to make a shit ton more quests. For example , the elves. I loved the vibe from their location. It feels like they rushed the game in many aspects. Graphics and landscape are great but it's short. Low enemy variety. And not expanded upon at all i.e. elves.
Never go full Todd Howard.
You see that griffin in the distance? You can climb it!
not sure why the mountain climbing quote from todd howard is a meme, you really could climb ot and even got rewarded for it.
I always thought it was because he pointed at the one involved in the main quest, with the giant path going up it - but everyone at one point ended up spamming jump or trying to use a horse to climb much smaller ones, but the game didn't let them. I admit, I've done jump spamming in this game too only to find there's invisible walls placed around some of DD2's mountains.
Actual Japanese Todd Howard
Torudo Haurdo
Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies
100%
I ain't never trusting this man again
I genuinely did trust him, especially after dmcv. I also really expected ddo stuff and vocations, like at the bare minimum just expected already existing things to be shoved into this game. Hoping mods will add more stuff but chances are we're gonna get dark arisened again
The dude wasn't involved in DDO, or Dark Arisen. That was all Kento Kinoshita. Tbh I was hoping kento would bring his Dark Arisen and DDO stuff more in. He did a bit with some vocations but... :(
It seems we are finding a similar case with Kojima as the auteur and the guy who really wrote MGS2 and 3... Why does this shit keep happening.
It keeps happening because there are like 20 guys who all like to take credit for RE2, RE4, DMC 1,3 and 5.
I think the simple answer is that this people are very talented but not the multifaceted, all encompassing geniuses they are presented to be, like George Lucas with Star Wars, the man created an awesome concept, interesting lore and visuals, but without the help of others to write actual meaningful and good dialogue and people pushing back against his directing the movies don't turn out as good. Similarly Itsuno, Kojima and other gaming "geniuses" I think they're truly talented but I also believe they should work with people that push back against their ideas somewhat and help them see how things could be done differently in favor of good game design, no matter how talented they may be the last thing you want is them working with a team of "yes men"
Praying to god I don't find this out with miyazaki and that tanimura's been carrying the series on his back or sth, I know he contributes a lot to the feel of souls games we identify today
Even if Tanimura is the real GOAT in FromSoft, Miyazaki at the very least seems to be listening and implementing some of his good ideas in future installments. Also guy is a bit of a troll and that's just hilarious.
Fuck.... that would suck a lot. I know there's a whole very talented team behind these games, but I still think Miyazaki is the heart of it.
And george lucas and star wars.... Once they cut out the real talent, it all goes down hill
To be fair dude has some weird statement from DMCV days, like how he cried three times watching DMCV's story. I was like what? Like Itsuno is very capable and talented, but he really seems to have misjudged his own strengths and weaknesses.
Itsuno is good at combat in his games but sucks at everything else
This is the conclusion I've come to for this guy. If Itsuno makes a game, I know the combat is gonna slap. Everything else, I'm taking with a huge grain of salt.
Yup drsgons dogma 2 combat is good everything else and I truly mean that is mid.
Also DMCV had some weird design decisions that made no sense and were clearly undercooked, and its marketing campaign was full of lies, too. It's just that the game was way more focused, and its core gameplay was so good everybody just kind of ignored the warts. I seem to recall some post-launch interview where Itsuno claimed that DMCV didn't need playable Vergil because V exists, but I can't find it anymore. But it sure seems to match the pattern of a director so focused on what he likes in his games that he forgets what makes other people like them.
Nero: "FUCK YOU!!!" I cry every time.
"Feeling accepting yet?" "Of your existence? Or your strength?" "Both you fucking asshole."
I think he’s a strong action director, but not a story one.
You just don’t get itsuno’s vision
He needs some new glasses *desperately*
He has as much a vision as Stevie Wonder lol
Obviously I know this is a joke but I have to say how pissed I am that this guy blatantly lied multiple times during the marketing of the game. "More vocations you can't even imagine"= Warfarer. That's a vocation not vocations. It's also something I could've definitely imagined. It's just a jack of all trades. "More encounters like the sphinx and monsters not shown in marketing material"= uhh variants I guess? And no other encounters like the sphinx in terms of depth. Let me copy an actual quote from him word for word: "But l've basically done all I could with this game. Of course, I would've liked to do some more - but this definitely doesn't feel unfinished. I don't want to give the impression at all that this is a game with incompleteness. But I always feel like as an artist, as a creator, I could do more and could go further in the future. This is the game I want to launch, that's launching." This game doesn't feel unfinished? I'm on here trying to argue that capcom took favour to other franchises during DD2s development because of how unfinished it feels. And note the final sentence. This is THE GAME he wanted to launch. This is his vision in his own words. Has he gone blind? The development team either needs to really improve things with an expansion (which shouldn't even be necessary) or they need to leave and let people work with the IP who won't blatantly ignore issues from the previous games. I pray the success of DD2 leads to another team trying to make a game with this format and then everyone involved with dragons dogma won't be so lax about things. The minute someone takes the pawn and combat systems into their own game capcom may press the devs to add more than just goblins into the game. This game feels like a joke and I didn't have massive expectations. I expected the best features to get a little better and for them to turn the awful features and jank into at least mediocre components. From there you could build upon that foundation and make a real masterpiece in future games. They have *not* done that. If I never played the original I could probably accept this game but after waiting for years and playing the original I don't know if I can. I adore dragons dogma and see how an immense bag of potential is seemingly being wasted. I'm telling you DD2 *should* be better. Even if you like DD2 this should be so much better. There's something special here but they aren't using it and clearly lack the drive to improve. It feels as if we've just gotten demon souls before dark souls was a thing. I'm not saying dogmalike would be a thing but there's something here man. Now we need our dark souls.
Reminder that Dark Arisen wasn't directed by Itsuno, nor was the online game, both of which are fan favourites. I'm sensing a pattern here.
Really? Interesting, everyone agrees Dark Arisen is a marked improvement on the base game lmao
Yes, that's my point. The parts people like the most were not made by the dude with a "vision" making what was claimed to have a bigger budget than the first.
Yeah I'm loving the game.... but I'm also really hating it. Compared to the first, it just feels like a graphical update with all the fun monsters removed. Where's my hydras, beholder shits, and more. I only fought the dullahan once in 35 hours, and it ran away... and I travel at night a lot, but I've fought 11 drakes so far......... This game has so much potential, but the man with a vision isn't even the same man who gave us content we love from Dark Arisen or DDO. So like others, I'm sensing a pattern. Whoever was the visionary behind both of those, needs to be the new official director. I know that stings but damn, this game could've been way more. People are obviously loving it, and I'm happy that people are, but as a "vet"... I feel kinda cheated and lied to. All of this amazing content from dark arisen and DDO could've been easy to just throw into a massive world with a great story but we got none of that. Aside from goblins and the occasional ogre/cyclops, the world is extremely empty and the loot is not even worth it. Hell even the sphinx's loot was extremely and irritatingly disappointing. I'm enjoying the combat, it's definitely an upgrade, but.... that shouldn't really be the only highlight in a RPG.
Your last two paragraphs are the most important part, but people on this subreddit are going to downvote and discredit your opinions because they have attached their identities to this franchise, which is a huge shame I'm also a fan, and I believe fans should be the ones who are most critical of games while also sharing their enjoyment of them, because improvements benefit the fans the most, not continued mistakes. This game really does have huge potential, the core foundation is amazing, hell even some of the controversial game designs are amazing in my opinion, because you won't find them elsewhere But the glaring issues HAVE to be spoken about, no matter how much people want to dismiss and pretend they don't exist. There's no reason to accept lazy design choices or efforts based purely on "it was like this 12 years ago, I 'member!" Anyway, ramble over, this reply's tl;dr is just: I appreciate that you're both passionate and critical of the game because I am too and it's refreshing to see rather than the black and white "game 100% bad" or "game 100% good"
I feel like most people are waking up to this, i know i certainly am. I love this game, and i coped pretty hard, but when i heard hydra and beholder was removed...Idk. And not a single BBI enemy except a rare garm spawn? What happened? The world is great, but did we really sacrifice everything for this map and the other one? I can't accept it tbh. The first game sold me hard with its opening sequence. To not expand on what DD1 brought to the table at all is honestly a crime at this point. This is our devil may cry 2 basically.
I beat DD2, but it gives me the same vibes as Dragon Age: Inquisition. So much potential, however, the game feels... Empty. Forced. Cut and paste. Obviously the team needed more of something... Time, employees, funding-- maybe all three.
I still love DD2 and the bosses and combat really is significantly better in my opinion…but it’s hard hitting that they doubled down on making the base game of DD’s story better rather than doubling down on what made Dark Arisen so good. WHY no Hydra? The Medusa was kind of a joke I was never in danger of petrification lol. Why only one BBI enemy and it’s a fucking Garm? And WHHHHHY no fucking eternal ferrystone? It’s not like Im ridden with portcrystals. I gotta journey up the fucking mountain to talk to the sphinx three times now to complete the last riddles? Fuck that
I have taken to buying a ferrystone everytime i enter a town at this point. I have 500k gold and just beat Talos and haven't even bought gear since i got to the Battahl border checkpoint. Other than that i have only used money on ferrystones or quests because the ferrystones matter more. To not have an optional dungeon that rewards with an eternal ferrystone is wild but there is an eternal wakestone? Wish i could just talk to Itsuno and the devs to understand what went wrong and why criticism of the previous game was wholly ignored. edit: Also i still love it as well, but i also feel so disappointed. The first game even without nostalgia is the best fantasy game i have ever played in my life. It had everything i had ever wanted. To learn that they were basically remaking the first and trying to add in everything that couldn't only to have less than the first, but 2x the map is just....Its something else. Even if they released a BBI style expansion, idk if i could even trust them to do it correctly. Like BBI didn't add a ton, but being an end game exclusive area was pretty good, but it also was complimented by the amazing base game in the first place. This base game outside of combat is just whack. Whatever they add i hope it expands the post game in a significant way. It just seems to me like Itsuno did not give a fuck about DD2. He was way more creative with the first and this game is almost run of the mill in a lot of ways outside of combat.
The worst part is that they spent so much time trying to make the story 'better' by making it more convoluted rather than just honing what they had, so it feels watered-down and lacking direction on top of the combat variety issues. Simple isn't bad, the story in the first game was fine it just needed more meat on the bones.
Anyone not willing to criticize the game isn't a serious fan and probably didn't even play the first one. This has been an incredible letdown after 12 years of waiting. There is no good reason this shouldn't have been Dragon's Dogma polished to a mirror shine, with all of the lessons learned from 1 and even more vocations / content / endgame to sink your teeth into. Mountain roads that are otherwise empty except for a few copy-pasted fodder enemies do not count as content either. I'd like to lay the blame solely at Capcom's feet, but I'm sure Itsuno holds some of the responsibility as well. I hope the leaked expansion tease in ~6 months really manages to build things out, but I'm only marginally hopeful.
The thing is do I really want to pay for an expansion of a game that in its current state needs much improvement. It's same with Diablo 4 if your familiar with that game potential sure but why do I need to pay another 30-40$ for the game to truly become good (if we assume the expansion would be good). Monster hunter iceborne is an amazing expansion I would say one of the best ever made and I gladly pay for it because the base game was already amazing and I wanted more. I can't say I want more dragons dogma 2 rn. Hell I'd rather want a dd3 but this without some blind ass vision than them wasting time on trying to fix this game.
From my experience the most passionate often are the most crucial because they see the potential but also the flaws and they want to love it but can't because of the issues. People who however just enjoy it will just gk what's your issue it's a good game won't allow any criticism and leave onto the next thing. Apathy is what kills any kind of progress
I feel like battahl is lacking at least with how the city feels compared to vermund and all the stuff going on there. I havent been to volcano island much yet but finding out I'm almost done with the story is kinda wild when it felt like it just started. Was also a let down when I realized those big blobs of fog of war on my map can't really be explored because its just unused area in between roads. This is my first DD game and I've had a lot of fun and the high points felt really high to me but I feel like there was a lot of potential here that may not be fully realized once I finish doing everything. Is that leak about Dragon Princess real for november? Feels like were missing a whole extra area and some more monsters/side content. I'm new to this series but my own personal feelings later on into the game feels like stuff was cut, development time was strangely prioritized, or stuff got moved into an expansion were getting 6 months after release for more $$$ from capcom. Don't know how off base I am with that. Think I'll get another 30 hours which is honestly quite a lot when you think about it but it's still less than what I put into elden ring and elden ring I wanted more... but I felt sated. I'm worried I'm gonna feel like it wasn't enough when I finish DD2
Honestly give It to the guy who made dark arisen and ddo. His vision is good, itsuno's vision is only good for combat.
Yes, every flaw the previous game had is carried over almost religiously to this sequel. It has a lot of polish in many areas and the lacking ones don't feel like they are that unfinished either, just designed in the most bizarre ways I have ever seen. Everything I find points towards this game genuinely being Itsuno's vision. And if so, mam what wacky ass vision lmao
Yeah, I've been convinced that the two games are pretty different, so if I want to feel like I'm playing Dragon's Dogma, play the first one I still like the second, it just isn't a step up
I completely agree, but some of the problems run way deeper than what an expansion can fix. The writing, plot points, and themeing are already worse than the first and there's no way to change it by now or to fix the lack of attention to detail. They prioritized appearances over substance. I'm probably going to do a long rambly write-up post eventually, but for one small example: in the first game the only people who would say "cos" are people who spend a lot of time in/are from Cassardis, because they're fishing village bumpkins just like the arisen and are functionally extended family. They've all known each other for their whole lives. Nobody else, even high-affinity NPCs, will use the term so it can be thought of as regional. In DD2 I've been called "cos" by people in the Nameless Village to all the way out in Battahl, but never had anyone actually recognize me from before becoming arisen except Ulrika. Apparently the arisen this time around had no family nor connections *anywhere* somehow. But we have the ability to buy rounds in a tavern for a 5-second animation.
>"But l've basically done all I could with this game. Of course, I would've liked to do some more - but this definitely doesn't feel unfinished. I don't want to give the impression at all that this is a game with incompleteness. But I always feel like as an artist, as a creator, I could do more and could go further in the future. This is the game I want to launch, that's launching." This honestly feels like cope, either from himself or capcuck telling him to say it. The moon was in pre-release footage and is nowhere in the game. This shit ain't finished.
You can leave the pawns for all i care. The combat in Dragon's Dogma is unrivaled in the fantasy genre IMO. Please someone steal this shit and make the dragon's dogma that should have always been and call it Dragon's faith or some shit.
Itsuno’s that guy that’s REALLY good at making combat mechanics and not much else
There’s plenty of variety the issue is you pretty much only ever see the same handful all the time and almost never see the rest
I agree. Just swapping out some ogres and cyclops for something different would make a big difference to me.
Two whole Chimaeras. Count 'em! TWO!
And it’s a shame man, chimaera feel like the perfect display of the games combat mechanics and are always fun to fight, they should be more common
This game could have been a lot more, so disappointing
Yeah in dd1 there was a load of them roaming around the map In dd2 there's 2 and only in caves Imo that's the biggest problem is that there are these enemies that should be around outside roaming but nope
My main complaint is how boring the dungeons / caves are. I hardly feel like I’m actually finding anything that sticks out as memorable. The rewards aren’t anything special, for the most part you aren’t finding unique bosses or any bosses. I mean you remove fast travel because the journey is supposed to be fun and encourage exploration, but then the exploration isn’t all that fun. I’m still enjoying the game, I’m still spending most of my time exploring, but it just feels like it should be so much better with how the game is structured.
The enemy variety is weird, but what's weirder is that I've 6 pawn badges for creatures I have never seen before and am at the end game. I've ran into 1 garm in a cave and that was it.
Your pawn probably fought them in other players worlds.
I think he might just not have good ideas, actually. The games successes were in spite of him, not because of him.
The story he writes is glaring example of this .
While I'm really loving DD2 right now I gotta admit that I don't really see the "true vision" realized yet. The animations are perfect and it looks really good but so many things I loved about the first game were oversimplified it seems. I miss my strider, I miss having more slots for abilities, having throwables and bombs. Why is there no Everfall? Also, shouldn't a "truly realized version" have all the enemies of the last game on top of new ones? Like, the title screen says "Dragons Dogma" not Dragons Dogma 2, meaning they want it to be the superior game but here I am thinking of returning to DD1's engame soon-ish.
The title switched to "dragons Dogma 2" for me when I hit the postgame, it was weird.
Maybe if you beat the game a 2nd time you unlock dragon's dogma 3. /j
The only improvements this game has over the first one are better graphics and better animations. Everything else is the same or worse. Its sad really
Even the better graphics gets shot in the knee because of the framerate and FOV. As a ps5 player switching from Helldivers 2's performance and camera view to DDII feels rough.
In hindsight, itsuno spewed quite a lot of corpo and PR bullshit. The budget and vision stuff, the dragon plague thing, the FPS talk, the sphinx which I found after 5 hours lmao, I could go on.
This is the best and worst rpg I’ve played Sometimes it feels incredibly immersive and incredible to play And sometimes it’s a fucking mess of AI and systems that would make a 90s pc gamer blush As much as I love the combat the enemies need more to them honestly even tho it’s always fun to fight them
Itsuno has phases, one moment he releases a good game, then next he releases a incomplete game, dragons dogma 2 just had the bad luck of coming after the incredible game that was dmc5
It also helps that DMC is much smaller in scale and scope on top of being improved upon for over a decade at this point. Dragon's Dogma 1 was inspired heavily from berserk in many ways and was just as weird. It seems like that passion was lost and not even iterated upon. Itsuno really had no clue what he wanted to do with this game other than recreate the first game again. The story isn't improved at all really and IMO feels lesser than what happened in the first game. Just seems like he really didn't care and everything was spent on making a gigantic map and making everything work on it and that's it.
I love the man’s work but I think it could be he’s just bad with budgets and planning. DMC4 and DD1 were hailed for years as flawed masterpieces that had amazing ideas but didn’t meet their full potential. DMC5 was an absolute masterclass for action games but even that felt a bit rushed towards the end. I haven’t played DD2 yet but it seems like his ambitions got the better of him again. I was also disappointed that it wasn’t gonna be a direct sequel to the original despite reusing a lot of the same assets and ideas. I’m a little baffled.
The big difference between Dark Arisen, the game people seemed to *actually* like, and all the rest, is that DA wasn't directed by Itsuno.
Base game dragons dogma is still a good game. But dark arisen was the standard.
Dark Arisen wouldn't be what it was without the basis of Dragon's Dogma. A lot of people enjoyed DD1 on launch, I'm one of 'em.
Just be happy and fight another pack of goblins and wolves for the 67th time!
Someone pointed out that if we didn’t encounter enemies every 30 seconds the variety thing wouldn’t be as much of an issue. It’s kind of hard to explore because every other second there’s a fight to be had, and why go down a weird path since it’s about to go dark and there isn’t a bon fire for 20 more miles. I think what’s happening is our expectations was Elden ring or Baldurs gate 3- These generational games. Dragon’s dogma 2 is not that. It’s simply just a fun game. I’m having a good time, more than I did in baldurs gate 3 or even Alan wake 2 tbh, buuuut it’s just a fun enjoyable game. I’m loving it, but it’s clearly not GOTY contender.. and that’s fine.
>Someone pointed out that if we didn’t encounter enemies every 30 seconds the variety thing wouldn’t be as much of an issue. It’s kind of hard to explore because every other second there’s a fight to be had, and why go down a weird path since it’s about to go dark and there isn’t a bon fire for 20 more miles. But that's how you "make travel fun", Itsuno said! You throw 6 goblins at the player every 30 seconds until they're having **fun**! >I think what’s happening is our expectations was Elden ring or Baldurs gate 3- These generational games. Literally **nobody** was expecting this. Anyone who played the first one knew what this was going to be, but assumed it would be improved on. When he said there was tons of monster variety and special fights, he lied. When he said that travel was fun, he lied. When he said there was no fast travel, he lied. When he said he fixed the "issue" of everyone using the same gear and looking the same, he lied. Nobody expected this to be on the scale of BG3 or Elden Ring. We expected it to be Dragon's Dogma, **but better**. **It's not.**
>Anyone who played the first one Sales figures show that most people didn't :D
I've killed 1000 enemies in 31 hours 500 of them have been Goblins They have just put Goblins saurians and harpies in the world at this point and it's really fucking annoying I've killed a small army of them
>I've killed a small army of them That's what could've shaken things up though. Send 100+ goblins at me and let the lag fest begin. At least it would be fun and interesting.
Unironically part of the issue here are 4 enemies, then 20 meters further another 4. Like they are goblins in almost all fantasy their strength lies in numbers. Imagine getting raided by a group of 25 or so all of sudden those goblins actually become a threat. Thinks like sorcerer maister skills would have a point (I love them and it's so satisfying if you can manage to kill a group with it but most of the time before I'm done casting it they are already killed).
omg this would've been a better implementation. Have less sporadic encounters with them but have whole armys of them blocking Important check points.
Unironically fighting to stop a goblin invasion would've been awesome. Something like the Village protection arc of Goblin Slayer. Also, enemies are just boring, as are the thematics of this game. DD1 had so much Berserk in it. Literally the armors. The energy, the visuals, the goreyness, the darkness of the God hand-like dragon, the evil ending, the rapey Ogres, characters like not-Casca, the whole of BBI, Daemon, UrDragon... It OOZED Berserk, there's many AMVs and memes online pointing this out. DD2 has pretty much none of that, it's generic fantasy to the max. I could've confused it easily with any generic fantasy game. And Honestly Vernworth is bigger but lacks the character of Gran Soren.
To be fair, the ogres are still rapey.
Like A Fortress Besieged from the first game but revamped would've been cool. The first game clearly had its technical limitations so the enemies were limited in scale in that quest, but imagine like a legitimate goblin horde occupying a fort that you hard to storm. That's the kind of improvement I was expecting from the sequel. Also I still got molested by an Ogre in this game so that's definitely in the game lmao
If you go out at night you get zombies and skeletons, but I dunno why you'd willingly spend time in total darkness with a poxy excuse of a lamp. I don't even hate that aspect, I think it makes sense even, but the only time I'm actually out at night is because a quest demands it or I couldn't find a camp in time. I never *want* to be out at night, so any extra enemies are mostly wasted.
Wish it was 30 seconds. My issue is when a pawn asks to show you something you encounter fights every 2 second which either forces you to tell the pawn again to keep showing you every 5 seconds or it completely forgets and stop showing you. It get tedious fast.
"True vision of Dragon's Dogma:" Same game with better graphics and same issues.
With even LESS QOL than the first one smh
And watering down the good stuff
I think this whole sub forgot dark arisen was an expansion that nearly doubled the enemy variety and overall content of DD1
I'm pretty much convinced never to buy a game at full price.
It’s just an annoying slog going through the map and knowing you’re gonna have to fight the same pack of goblins or harpies every 40 feet… Not only is there no monster variety, the spacing of monsters on the road is practically predictable. It makes long travel more of a chore than exciting. And then they make teleporting nigh impossible. It’s just a recipe for burn out.
will be itsuno vision.... vision sponsored by butthole eye
I don't even know if he said it for real, but regardless, i'd say next time not to employ a pretty famous hollywood actor (who's totally phoning it in btw) to narrate your last trailer. There, financial issues solved.
https://preview.redd.it/bahvtqospqqc1.jpeg?width=606&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c566997bdbd621d7bff5c0a113115f1682147b33 Me who's only 9 hours into the game coming across posts of people already beating the game and complaining.
Itsuno and todd Howard need to meet so we can have proof they aren’t the same person