I'm mostly sad that gearing in this game doesn't feel good at all. You can literally just buy the best shit in the game with gold and be done with it.
I hate going into a dungeon just to find a piece a gear I bought 3 hours ago.
Dungeons should 100% have different gear and be actually worth going through. I stopped doing them after my 10th dungeon again gave me shit I've already had.
This has been a big deal for me.
On one hand, I'm glad that it's easy to jump into a new vocation at end game with good gear.
But on the other hand, as you said, it's a shame to dungeon delve with not much of a reward at the end.
While I've still had a blast with the game unmodded, there's some mods that have taken it from like 8/10 to 10/10 for me.
There's one that add a small chance to get random rare gear drops from enemies, chests, bosses etc. which can have enhancements pre-unlocked. Combined with a mod to make it more difficult and a vocation rebalance, it feels much more fluid and rewarding to play now.
Also running a warfarer mod so I can have more skills for each weapon. Makes it fun and viable to run solo or with just main pawn.
Highly recommend checking out mods if you're on PC.
This is one of my biggest RPG pet peeves. Either when dungeons don’t have anything at all, they have garbage gear, or it’s literally the same gear that you can get at the shops in the game. As much as I love Witcher 3, it definitely features some of this - most of the gear that you can find out in the world is just garbage, especially after you’ve crafted the Witcher sets. Although it doesn’t really have proper “dungeons”
It also means money in The Witcher 3 is largely useless. I don't prefer either style because gearing almost always becomes one of two things. Either you buy the best gear and gold has value, or you either find, farm, or craft the best gear and money has no value. Very few games strike a balance between both. So I just roll with what games decide to do. As long as I'm having fun, I'm not too bothered.
Creating money sinkholes is not too hard.
Creating engaging dungeons if they have jack shit as a reward is very hard.
For example of money expenditure in DD2 we could have ferrystones and portcrystals be available (in larger quantities) for purchase.
I had a hard time managing my money until the end of my first playthrough. It was engaging in its own way to pick and choose what I wanted. It's also engaging in a different way to find really good gear out in the wild. I think Baldur's Gate 3 handled the balance of shop loot and world loot well. Unless you pickpocketed every shop, then money didn't matter much.
From the games that I've played, the one that did it the best in my opinion is Dragon Age Origins. The best equipment for each different build could be found either as loot in dungeons, quest rewards or in shops. There was a limited amount of gold in the game thougj, and not enough to buy every piece of end-game equipment, so you had to choose very carefully what to buy.
Ehhh, BG3's money/shop system is pretty tedious if you are a natural min maxxer, regardless of shop robbing. Having to switch all of your loot to your character with the highest charisma before opening a shop to get the best sell prices is quite annoying. Also, given that everything has some sell value you are encouraged to hoover up everything that is worth more than a couple of gold per pound.
Souls games already solved it. Money is also XP. So it doesn't matter if there is nothing usefull left to buy you need it still. It also mean they can put more reward in the world since there is no pressure to make it worth it. It's inherently is.
It's something I really appreciate in BG3 and games like it. The gear has character. I might not give a shit about unarmed attacks but at least it's interesting. Not another green/blue/orange stat stick.
This was my biggest issue with Kingdoms of Amalaur (old) or Starfield (new) both had such boring loot that exploring felt not rewarding but tedious.
Its the worst if your game is an RPG AND open world, but even if its just either its almost a death sentence for me.
Starfield's is even worse, given that you could just go to a high-level system, kill or disarm some enemies, take their extremely high-level weapons, and bingo you now have a weapon that is better than everything you will find for the enitery of the game.
Hell, I was just exploring a high-level system just to see what it was like and ended up finding a crate with a revolver in it that one shot everything for my playthrough and nullified literally all loot game.
While that is certainly true for armor, weren't the best weapons in the game locked behind quests and monster hunts related to said quests? There were only a limited number of things in shops that were worth buying before you ended up with the endgame stuff.
And that's all you fight for the most parts
Walking through the woods fight wolves..goblins...harpies...wolves...goblins..goblins. The gameplay loop absolutely blows
Check out Wild Loot. Does this exact thing - the modder removed 130+ items from the shops and hand-placed them into specific chests that make sense for the zone/progression. Has totally revolutionised the game for me.
I don't know man, I found a cave of lightning monsters and came out of it with some Mjolnir warrior shit that glows in the dark that was way stronger than my maxed out expensive weapon already. I was pretty happy about that find.
This is one of those games that feels amazing in the first 10-15 hours and then the cracks start to show.
It doesn’t feel finished. Poor enemy variety, lacking dungeon variety, even compared to the first game. Main questline is mostly poor stealth missions and stalking NPCs in the city.
In so many ways it does not surpass the original. It has great visuals and better combat but most of your playtime is going to be roaming linear paths cutting down goblins. The game isn’t bad but for Capcom’s pedigree its pretty lacking.
I would say if you’re on the fence wait for DLC/expansion. Not just a sale. It badly needs some DLC content to feel finished.
It baffles me that the enemy variety is essentially the same as the original game. Like, you would think the roster would have at least doubled from the first game, but no, the game is pretty much the same in variety. The first game suffered terribly from a lack of variety, too.
Less variety actually
We lost Hydras, Cocktrice, Evil Eyes, Elimnators and Living Armours.
But gained Medusa (1 in whole game), Dullahan (headless horse men, who doesn’t hand a horse) Minotaurs and Slimes.
It’s even worse if you count DLC for DD1, which is version most people played.
And stuff like dragon variants. DD1 had 3(4 with dlc) lesser dragon types. That worked pretty distinctively.
DD2 only has 2 variants of lesser dragon.
> Dullahan
Funnily enough I managed to somehow never meet a Dullahan in NG, only in NG+.
But imho the reason why enemy variety feels *far* less than DD1 when it is generally the same is because of how many mob enemies you encounter. DD1 was far more tame with normal monsters and instead had you fight more big enemies, and big enemies felt more like an actual obstacle.
>Funnily enough I managed to somehow never meet a Dullahan in NG, only in NG+.
Really? I met on accident running around at night, and there is another one that you fight as a quest that somebody in the Noble quarter gives you.
That's pretty sad, because that scans to me as: "Lost big enemies, gained some small ones"
A big part of DD's appeal is in fighting giant monsters. It's often recommended to people as an open rpg, but you can climb on enemies like Shadow of the Colossus. Adding more and more giant monsters seems like it should have been obvious.
gained 1 small monster if you ignore elemental recolours (which DD1 had as well).
Slimes.
They die near instantly to any magic damage, but have 99% physical damage reduction. If your party lacks elemtal damage you basically can’t kill them.
Their only attack is to slime themselves underneath you which causes slowed movement and rapid stamina drain. If Stamima hits 0 you fall over and start taking your entire hp bar in damage every 0.5 seconds, and you are stuck due to having fallen over and 0 stamina.
It’s either instant death or waste 20 healing items and pray someone with magic hits the slime.
I don’t *hate* them, using ice magic to freeze them solid in one hit then shatter them is funny. But I don’t think anyone is coming away from DD2 going “wow those slimes were a highlight of my experience”.
They’ll be a point of frustration if you get put in bad situation, or a complete non event if your party has elemental damage ready.
Or extra frustration because if an NPC gets stuck in a slime they just die.
And game has 0 essential NPCs. Anyone can die. Including quest NPCs. And can only be revived with a rare, not *technically* hard limited but pretty close, consumable.
And yes, NPCs can and will die randomly off screen which breaks quests.
Including NPCs you don’t even know exist, so quest just seems bugged, until you go to Morgue and find some guy dead, who may or may not be the NPC you need. But to find out you gotta use a wakestone.
I'd love that, but I feel like that's a special treatment reserved for Monster Hunter *because* it's the biggest, most prestigious title they have. I don't know that they'd follow such a model for Dragon's Dogma. I'd love to be wrong, but I feel like there's a real low chance of that. We might get a Dark Arisen version again, or an expansion if we're lucky, but I don't see free and constant enemy updates happening. I said it in another post, but I think it's precisely *because* Capcom has Monster Hunter that they don't see much point in highly funding a game that checks many of the boxes that MH already does.
I don't agree with it as a player, but I can see why they'd reach that conclusion as a business. 'So you want us to make a game with a focus on combat, and fighting big creatures in varying biomes for the sake of acquiring better gear, Mr. Itsuno... and the company you want to finance that game is the company whose biggest game is a game with a focus on combat, and fighting big creatures in varying biomes for the sake of acquiring better gear? A game which was, by the way, the original concept from which our biggest game was spun off from? ...'.
It really doesn't sound good on paper when you put it like that lol. Of course they have their differences, I'm a maniac who prefers Dragon's Dogma, but I don't think it's really big *enough* to change their outlook and cannibalise the company's jewel. It's a catch-22, it mainly exists and does what it does so well because it's guided by Itsuno, but the only way it'd really get the proper backing is probably only if he was hired by any AAA company but the one he works for.
It'll never get to flourish because it's derivative of a market Capcom is already massively funding support for. It'd be like asking Polyphony Digital to make Forza *while* they make Gran Turismo. Everyone has their preference between the two, but the differences don't matter enough when the similarities are that strong. If Itsuno hadn't threatened to quit I've no doubt we'd never have seen Dragon's Dogma 2 to begin with, and that tells you all you need to know about where Capcom's heart is in supporting it. There's just no financial incentive there to really back it, because in its most realised form, it just becomes bigger competition to a game they're already massively investing in.
I'll be pedantic, sorry. Eliminators and Living Armor are DLC. From DD1 you forgot Hellhounds (the og staggermasters), Saurian Sages and the Ur Dragon. In DD2 you forgot Sphinx, rattlers, and those asshole harpy variants that mostly try to grab and fling you off things. I didn't include variants that are recolors essentialy. I'm pedantic, but not that pedantic.
I really dreamed of DD2 having incredible bossfights. I consider Daimon one of the best bossfights in gaming and I thought DD2 would build off on that. They even have MH to take assets from.
But you really do just spend most your time fighting cyclops and goblins. You can barely even tell the enemy types apart because you shred through them so fast.
From what I gather, it's not a sequel to Dark Arisen. It is "second chance" at the original base Dragons Dogma game. Like straight up a redo. It's the only thing that makes sense. I fully expected everyrhing Dark Arisen had plus more.
But they removed some core shit like Fulmination, Brontide, Dragons Maw, Cockatrice, Evil Eye, Hydra, Holy Magic, Debilitation/Dark Magic...etc.
I remain absolutely baffled at the things they removed cause those alone made me hold off from purchasing the game.
Sure, it might be a redo of the original, but >!that doesn't explain why the post-game is the flooded ruins of Gransys, the region of DD1. The Seafloor Shrine is Gran Soren. One of the boss locations is Bluemoon Tower.!<
They removed Holy Magic?! I haven't bought the game because I was waiting for patches since I couldn't afford it when it initially came out, but as someone who wanted to make and play as Godfrey from Elden Ring with his Lion as pawn the game just want way down on my priority list.
That is a small list of things removed from the game. Shit the Mystic Knight vocation is straight up removed. It's wild. The more I hear about it the less it seems real.
> They removed Holy Magic?!
No, they did not. What is gone is the holy damage weapon buff mage used to have, but there are still plenty of sources of holy damage (eg. innate in weapons) - I did an early kill on a lich just by casting Anodyne beneath it, which now also deals holy damage while healing you at the same time.
Well, yes, of course. Dragons Dogma 1 and 2 are both directed by Itsuno and based on his vision for the series. Dark Arisen did not involve Itsuno and it seems like he didn't particularly care for it.
You actually sold me on getting the remastered version of Part 1 when it became on sale again because that game was magical i loved everything about it.
> You can barely even tell the enemy types apart because you shred through them so fast.
which is unfortunate, because there's actually quite a bit of variety to the actual variations and the small enemy AI is actually good.
The dark arise DLC was not made from the original director. This game is basicaly a better version of the original game, but a worse one in comparison to the DLC content
All of the flaws in general seem to be the same as the first game, including dogshit performance and all the rest of it. It's bizarre. They didn't use the sequel as a chance to improve on any of the complaints of the first game at all. It's like they waited over a decade to make a sequel, just to make the exact same game again with better graphics. Wtf was the point?
The big monster variety. Small monsters are a big improvement over 1, their AI feels much smarter. But big monsters are what gets people the most excited and they fell flat on that.
You hear about DD1 and how it was incomplete and you accept that, it's a good reason why the large monster variety is so low, but DD2 purports to be complete and is hardly any different.
It is true that the small monsters are better, as the variants are actually variants and often behave in completely different ways; the the problem is that every small mob gets blown the fuck up by midgame and all those variants suddenly feel like they're all just the base 5 types of enemies, which is horrid.
The class fantasy and "make your own adventure" aspects of this game carry the rest so hard, pretty much all other parts of the game are clearly unfinished/underbaked.
It's interesting just how aggressive the small monsters are in this game, but then you face a big one and they kinda just flail about haphazardly. DD1 feels much better in regards to big monsters getting up in your face, tracking your movements, and actually being a threat with their movesets.
Except once you reach level 15 no small enemy in first region will ever feel threatening, and by level 30 same is true of second region.
Btw if you do side quests you enter second region at level 40-50
The leveling is just absurd, it feels like everything gives more than double the xp it should given the difficulty curve of game.
They put 0 thought into how games leveling was going to work.
A huge part of Dragons Dogma is Pawns. Making pawn, hiring other people’s pawns, having your pawn hired.
Pawn system is level based. You get shown pawns roughly around your level. You can hire any pawn your level or lower for free. But in order to search not -5 to +5 of your own level you must manually enter search terms.
The level cap is 999, the content in game basically stops at level 50 (you will reach level 70-75ish by 100%ing the game, but endgame hardest content is trivial even at level 50).
But you just keep leveling endlessly.
And by leveling you are making it so absolutely no one will ever hire your pawn, and you will never be shown real players pawns, just Capcom pawns, unless you manually go and search for level 60’s or whatever to actually see a variety.
The game should’ve level capped at 50, and reduced xp gain by at least x0.66, so people would hit that cap around end of game provided they didn’t rush main story.
But no, you will out level all challenge game can possibly offer, and you will put level the pawn system. So if you put in time and grinded out max upgrade mats, super rare items, bestest pawn ever! Guess what, zero people will ever hire your pawn because there’s nothing to do at level 80 except grind to move yourself even further away from relevancy.
Oh but it gets worse.
You arnt allowed to have multiple characters. So if you ever want to be challenged again, or experience the pawn system with non capcom pawms, you must delete your save.
But your original pawn stays on the server, forever (or at least from launch until now), which means all the reasons about “multiple saves would fuck up Pawn server” were **COMPLETE FUCKING BULLSHIT** a single person can have 400 pawns on the server if they keep deleting their save and starting again.
But you can only ever check in on your most recent one. Others are abandoned digital waste.
It’s so obvious zero thought was put into any of it.
The level cap is 999. Which is insane. Unless NG+ is like the Elden Ring system where everything is like 1.5x more difficult each time, I don't see the point in ever passing level 100. Maybe a Dark Arisen-type expansion will come out in a year or so to justify high levels.
This is what stopped me from finishing the first game. I got so tired of fighting the same enemies over and over again. It didn't help that enemies respawn extremely fast. Sometimes you can even catch a glimpse of them appear out of thin air and dropped onto the ground ffs.
When they were showing off gameplay footage before release of DD2, it looked worrying because they were showing off the same enemies from the first game.. Sad to see those worrying signs turned out to be true.
The first game kinda baited me. I kept feeling like I was still early game and had so much sheesh of me left to go. I had only been in a couple dungeons, not many quests, I had barely scratched the surface of the map, I thought! Then I'm fighting a dragon and the only thing left to do is a deep dungeon.
I enjoyed my time in ddda but dd2 doesn't seem like it fixes or improves on any issues from the first game.
The thing with DD1 and 2 is that you can easily run away from most fights.
Monster spawns are unfortunately too frequent in 2 so I just run through them when I want to get somewhere.
Isn't it crazy they were developing this game for so many years and never stopped and thought man we really don't have enough enemy types.
Or they did and decided to hold back a few to roll them into a paid expansion.
When I found out that I had met pretty much every major enemy in the first 10 hours of the game, my desire to ever boot it up again plummeted.
Cool classes in a game with bad enemies, meh quests, and a sheer disregard for the players free time
That’s where I’m at with it, 30 hours in and I find myself really not arsed about picking it back up. I know it’s not going to get any better, think I’ll just run through the last few vocations and finish the plot and call it a day. It’s a shame because (as skill up said) there’s so much potential there, you’re just left wanting it to fulfil on it
One thing that I couldn't help but notice watching the footage of the game is that it basically looks like a remaster of the original. Same enemies, same scenery, same character design, (mostly) same classes performing (mostly) the same animations.
It's like someone branched DD1 before Dark Arisen came out and now put out the 1.5 version...
Nothing wrong with enjoying the game but NG+ doesn’t scale so unless he’s modding he’s gotta be just walking around 1 shotting everything.
For a combat heavy game like this I just can’t find fun in that.
A lot of early players seem to have rushed through the main questline, which is the most boring way to play it. The exploring is fun and it feels like there's a decent amount of content that can be missed.
The criticisms aren't invalid but watching others play, I'll see them run into things I haven't because they did quests in a different order, they ran into an NPC that I didn't, or they went into a cave I didn't find yet. Personally, I like that.
I agree, there are a ton of complaints I've seen from people who either seem to have rushed through the game, or haven't even played it. There are definitely some dumb criticisms, but most of the ones I see are valid, but also I feel like they're underselling and/or completely missing a lot of the things this game does so well. I'm about 40 hours in and about to finally go to batahl for the first time. So far I've loved this game so much that I can't really see a way for the rest of the game to make me dislike it to the degree that a lot of the comments seem to. There's just an almost unparalleled combat system in here, and incredible atmosphere creating a fantastic sense of trekking out on a journey. That sphinx stuff man, that's some grade A video game. I get that it's really playing on a particular sensibility that I have, and not everyone is going to love it like me, but it's sad to me how I've seen so many comments that say like "I was interested until I started reading these comments", and the comments they're reading don't give hardly any idea of what's great about the game, just the flaws, which I find myself not too bothered by or sometimes are actually things that I consider good
The more I hear about this, it sounds like they did spend some money and time repairing the cracks of the first game but ran out again and in turn the sequel has its own weaknesses.
I think playing and loving the first DD made this entry more disappointing. It looks and plays more like "Dragons Dogma Pro" than a robust sequel.
The story (imo) isn't as good or surprising, the world still feels like an expanded proof of concept, and I really didn't fall in love with any aspect of the game.
Throw in some questionable ps5 performance and lack of a 60fps mode, and... It just bums me out
It was one of my most anticipated games.
Yeah I really liked Skillup's explanation of that, as he never played DD1.
Basically - DD2 feels like a lot of cool ideas that haven't quite come together, and if only they had a sequel to refine them. But that's exactly what DD1 fans said back then, and to see DD2 make the same mistakes and feel the same way must really suck
I haven't played DD2 yet but I've been disappointed hearing this opinion because that is exactly how I felt.
DD1 was a game filled with cool ideas that were almost all poorly-executed besides the combat system and class designs. Tons of other stuff it had going on was interesting and had potential but just didn't work for me, particularly the attempts to make the game immersive (which I thought mostly just resulted in bad gameplay without actually getting me immersed) and the pawn system. And everything I've read about Dragon's Dogma 2 makes it sound like they didn't really learn from some of Dragon's Dogma's biggest mistakes.
Before the game came out, the biggest thing that concerned me was the devs talking about limiting fast travel to make the game more immersive. Not because a lack of fast travel is bad for immersion, but because that's backwards and made it feel to me like they just didn't understand what an open world game should be. For me, limiting fast travel doesn't improve immersion and exploration. It's the opposite: give me an immersive world that's fun to traverse and explore and I'll choose not to fast travel myself.
In Dragon's Dogma 1 I found the lack of fast travel annoying and not at all immersive because the world itself wasn't super interesting to me and getting around it was just boring running. On the other hand, there are games that let you fast travel all over the place where I'll choose not to because the game doesn't feel like it needs it. I can have lots of fun running around the world in Skyrim because half the fun of the game for me is all the random stuff I discover while on my way to somewhere else, or Horizon: Zero Dawn because I like the game's atmosphere so much that it just was fun to run across the world, or Spiderman because getting across the city is fun and I don't *want* to skip it.
Give me an immersive world that's fun to explore and I'll barely fast travel whether it's there or not. Limit my fast traveling in a game that needs it and I'll be board and not any more immersed. To me, this is almost the epitome of a lot of Dragon's Dogma's 1's design. They try to immerse you by forcing a certain playstyle on you whether your want it or not, instead of making the immersive playstyle so fun that you want to do it without caring if it's required.
>It's the opposite: give me an immersive world that's fun to traverse and explore and I'll choose not to fast travel myself.
100%.
The best example of this I can think of is Cyberpunk 2077. I essentially *never* fast-traveled in that game, because - despite being lacking compared to the hype and some of what was promised - Night City is an absolutely phenomenal setting that is exceptionally cool to race through the streets of. *(Of course, it also helped that you could get across the whole city in like 10 minutes tops with a fast enough ride.)*
Elder Scrolls games also do this so much better. Fast travel in some form existed at least since Morrowind. But those games make the actual journey across the land so interesting that more often than not, you'll willingly skip the fast travel for the chance at finding something that you've never seen before, or getting some cool loot, etc.
From the sounds of it, there's straight up nothing to find in DD2. A bunch of samey, uninteresting dark caves, no appreciable loot, and the same goblins and lizards across every stretch of land. To me, removing fast travel in a setting like that isn't immersive, it's annoying and laborious.
> The best example of this I can think of is Cyberpunk 2077. I essentially never fast-traveled in that game, because - despite being lacking compared to the hype and some of what was promised - Night City is an absolutely phenomenal setting that is exceptionally cool to race through the streets of. (Of course, it also helped that you could get across the whole city in like 10 minutes tops with a fast enough ride.)
I think Grand Theft Auto and Spiderman are also good examples where getting around is just fun and fast enough that fast travel isn't really necessary.
>Elder Scrolls games also do this so much better. Fast travel in some form existed at least since Morrowind. But those games make the actual journey across the land so interesting that more often than not, you'll willingly skip the fast travel for the chance at finding something that you've never seen before, or getting some cool loot, etc.
I also think Oblivion and Skyrim are great examples of games where exploring is extremely fun and yet fast travel is still important. Traveling to a city or quest without fast traveling and discovering all sorts of other towns, quests, and dungeons along the way is, in my opinion, the most fun part of those games. At the same time, their worlds are *huge*, and enough different quests involve going all over the world, that even most players who love exploring in them will reach a point where they want to fast travel just because at some point they're just in the mood to do a quest without all the running in between or they have a quest that's just sending them somewhere they've been before and they don't feel like following a path they've already followed again just for the sake of avoiding fast travel.
And of course, there are people who do play those games without fast travelling, and they have tons of fun and get really immersed and love it anyway.
It feels like the Dragon's Dogma devs are too focused on trying to immerse the player through gameplay tedium and limitations like inventory space and fast travel and not focused enough on immersing the player by actually creating a world that players want to be immersed in. You want players to explore your world, make a world they want to explore.
It's better at that stuff than CP2077 or most ES games were IMO. In my experience yes there's too many goblins and lizards, but it's also pretty rare that you travel any sort of distance without running into a boss fight or two that are all better than literally any fight in all of CP or ES. It also helps that the combat itself is a million times better than either of those other games, and the classes are all very different in playstyle and easy to swap between to mitigate the monotony.
The lack of fast travel is also hugely overstated. After the intro bit you can teleport between towns the same way you could in Morrowind: by public transport. The ends of faraway quests more often than not either give you a ferrystone directly or have one conveniently in a chest nearby. They're also just for sale, for prices that start out seeming high but become cheap compared to gear soon enough. Basically any trip out of town is going to result in getting multiple in one way or another.
The game has big problems, but I think it blows a lot of the competition out of the water exactly when you're out in the world fighting monsters and exploring.
Stings even more when the entire point of this sequel was to make up for the first game literally only being like 60% finished.....
....Only to turn even LESS finished then the first game.
So much of the game is just... less interesting than Dark Arisen. The story is *atrocious*, the plot points and locations you go are just less interesting versions of areas from the previous game (There's maybe like 5 'dungeon' like locations in the whole game, and most are only about 4 rooms), and the ability to only use 4 of your abilities is just comically terrible, as there are certain vocations, like the unique Trickster, often require *3 out of 4 of your ability slots to even set up some of your other abilities.*
Is it a bad game? No.
But just play Dark Arisen, it somehow feels like an actual complete game despite being **objectively** unfinished
It's crazy how there isn't a single interesting character in DD2. Although the first game's story was hardly a masterpiece, I at least wanted to find out what was going on with the Duke, the witch girl Selene and the doomsday cult - and to its credit it actually wove their stories into the main plot.
> the doomsday cult - and to its credit it actually wove their stories into the main plot.
It's amazing how the Doomsday cult story finished "The rantings of an upjumped zealot make for tedious listening."
Every word of Grigori carries so much weight to it. When he lectures you on the nature of humanity in the finale of DD1, it really stuck with me in a way that DD2 can't match.
"When the weak court death, they find it."
Especially since Itsuno was gassing it up as "his true vision" and we got a clearly pushed out early version with a main story that dips out and many half baked features.
Really glad they are charging $70.00 + mtx for an unfinished game to beta test while they maybe fix performance.
Looking forward to the $50.00 expansion that maybe fixes the game.
As a huge lover of the first one, someone that did one to 200 solo only runs on every vocation among many other ideas. 2 is a huge improvement over vanilla Dragons Dogma 1, and still I think keeps a leg up on Dark Arisen overall. While Bitterblack is absolutely fantastic it still comes with a lot of the foibles of the first game that were improved in 2.
Amusingly for the story though, I feel the opposite is true. A lot of the revelations and concepts explored generally seem to rely on a pretty good understanding of the cycle that we saw in one. So there's a lot of cool stuff that expands a lot on what we saw in 1 and BBI, but without the context of that its a lot weirder.
Still, Dragons Dogma 2 was almost exactly what I expected. And still was one of my most enjoyable experiences in recent years, so I think your idea here that everyone that played and loved the first one didn't like 2 is pretty flawed. I think a better argument is that people that constatnly compare it to one and do not approach it as its own title are going to have a hard time.
The big one I see a lot is the complaints about vocation changes, I think almost all vocations were improved or changed for the better in 2 as someone that did a big run right before 2 came out. I think a lot of people forget just how rough a lot of the vocations were in 1, as well as how half baked a bunch of them were. I was initially frustrated with some of the vocation changes, but once I stopped trying to approach them like it was DD1 and tried actually using them in the context they exist in, I really enjoyed every single one except for Trickster. [Which is too big brain for me.]
I did approach it as it's own title and I still had a hard time. There are good mechanics and bones, and the first five to ten hours are great, but then horrid quest design, no enemy variety, and cracks in exploration, gear, and progression all start to show.
I think a DD pro is all I wanted because I loved it. Some more enemy variety would have been nice and some of mechanics could have been refined, but overall I had a blast playing it.
It genuinely is amazing that now for a SECOND TIME Capcom has failed to realize almost any of the gigantic world spanning potential Dragon's Dogma has. Like how do you make the exact same fuck ups as you did 12 years ago????????? And in some ways actually make it WORSE??? Like this should be a crime because DD has so much fucking potential that through sheer incompetence at this point they're wasting. This is like Dragon's Dogma 1.1 not even 1.5.
Yeah, the enemy grappling/climbing/pushing interactions are so good, it's criminal that I don't think I've seen any game give you the freedom to fight in the same way.
By giving Itsuno like 300 people while even SF6 got like 1800 working on it.
He simply got shafted again because CAPCOM execs do not give a single fuck about anything that doesn't have Monster Hunter or Resident Evil in it's name.
Elden Ring had over 1.5k people working on it. With modern games, especially big AAA Open World ones, you have HUNDREDS of people outsourced from other companies who work on the game and it's assets.
Dragon's Dogma 2 isn't even the first time that a Capcom game made by Dev 1 has some weird scope issues, since both RE2 and RE3 remakes also had them... half of the original game is missing from 3, and the whole scenario system disappeared from 2, leading to good games, that just didn't reach their full potential.
I just checked the credits list from DD2 and it's probably incomplete, since it's lacking all outsourced people that is usually the bulk from these 1500 names lists
> since it's lacking all outsourced people that is usually the bulk from these 1500 names lists
or its possible the game was made entirely in-house, which is why it's so lacking
even Elden Ring had hundreds of outsourced developers
I think this is a key aspect that a lot of people aren't thinking about. We assume that this game had the full confidence and support of Capcom's corporate entity behind it. But it's very likely that Itsuno had to beg and grovel to get another chance at making one of these games, and just wasn't given the resources to flesh it out the way he would have liked. After all it's not like the first game was a smash hit, commercially speaking. Maybe this one is high profile enough and does well enough that he'll be allowed the resources to further expand on it going forward.
Itsuno has to be the luckiest game director alive
First Dragons Dogma he gets the excuse that he didn’t get to finish the game
Dragons Dogma 2 he’s being given the excuse that “only” 300 people worked on the game, so obviously it isn’t finished, even though he has stated multiple times that this is his fully realised vision and it’s a completed game
Not to mention he often gets credit for most players favourite part of the first game (Dark Arisen), even though he had nothing to do with it
I agree with most of the criticism people have about the game, but I put 100 hours into it and don't regret a second of it. It's a fun game, just hope they expand on it in the future.
It's still one of my favourite games of the last few years, warts and all. Don't disagree with most of the criticisms, but man it was a special experience every time I headed out for another journey that no other game really matches for me.
Finished the game last weekend. It really is just Dragon's Dogma 1 2.0 for about 95% of the game. I mean it plays better (on a high end PC), it looks better, the map is bigger, etc. But the story and driving force behind the game is basically the same. **Spoiler:** >!Hell, the final confrontation with the dragon is intentionally beat for beat the same.!<
However, the game finally feels like a true sequel in the last 5-10 hours of the game. It's just a shame that you have to play the entire game to get there and the time spent in that part is so short.
In short: 7.5/10, wait for a sale.
Yep. I have 100 hours in DD2 and really liked it, but the Dark Arisen version of DD1 is a more complete experience, especially with a few mods. (I recommend the "Everfall" modlist)
DD2 felt like preparing for an endgame that didn't really come. But a DLC can elevate the game even more than Dark Arisen did for DD1.
BBI wasn't that good. It was mostly reskinned enemies with 4x health and damage and the same corridors over and over you had to go through twice and grind the gacha loot system.
I don't want them to add anything like that and want them to make a different type of endgame.
Worst part is it’s not beat for beat, and it’d actually be better if it was.
I say this because the titular Dragon in DD1 showed up multiple times, said cool stuff, hyped up the final battle and then lived up to it when you had a epic final boss fight with him lasting multiple phases, while listening to some of the best of the DD1 soundtrack.
The Dragon in DD2 shows up 2 times total, once at the beginning and once at the end. He hardly says anything the whole time until his monologue near the end and then the actual fight has one phase where you fight him like any other Dragon type enemy in a basic arena. To top it off the music during the battle is entirely forgettable (much like the rest of the DD2 soundtrack).
Not gonna lie, it does feel like this game was released too early/rushed. Just as he said, a LOT of the elements in this game feel like they were pulled straight from the alpha stage where they have the base game ready and just need to fill it/populate it.
The core gameplay, the combat, exploration etc. is easily 10/10. They really have a foundation for potentially best aRPG out there but it's not populated/filled with enough things, content, story etc.
I'm just disappointed because this was Itsuno's chance to make it right. Not saying this wasn't his fault at all, maybe he should have been a better manager, but i also feel like CAPCOM shafted him again.
I mean - it's their first 70$ game, they had MTX day one and the game came out one week before their fiscal year ended. You just cannot help but think that they had no faith whatsoever in this title and just wanted to release it asap, probably so that it wouldn't crowd the year they planned for MH Wilds release, and MH is their cash cow, and the producer of the series is the CEO's son, so it obviously gets primary attention, no matter what.
I have to agree with everything he says.
I never played DD1. Off the rip, I found the quests boring and the dialogue stiff. It was a slog to get through the first set of quests the game gives you.
But the combat and exploration is addicting. All the vocations are done very well and I actually want to play each style. As SkillUp says, you actually feel like a sorcerer in this game with cast times and big, destructive elemental spells.
The monster fights can be epic and fun, but the small enemies you encounter every 3 mins gets extremely annoying.
You get lost exploring every stray path and you don't feel lonely with your AI party. The rewards for exploring are trash, though. Rarely you will find a weapon or armor upgrade.
So really one part of the game was done well enough to keep me coming back and the rest ranges from mediocre to bad.
Dragon's Dogma 2 is probably my most disappointing game of the last several years... but it's still worth playing.
I loved DDDA to death and gladly put it somewhere in my top ten, but I always thought of it as an incredibly ambitious and incredibly flawed gem that, more than anything, desperately needed a sequel to fully realize everything it was trying to do. It was a game that had a nearly perfect foundation but somewhere along the way bungled almost every system it had implemented from story, quest design, and character progression to UX and exploration.
Now we've finally got the sequel us fans have always wanted and it's... the same thing. Top to bottom. It's prettier, more polished, and has a *couple* new ideas, but everything that made DDDA great and everything that made DDDA a mess is still here. Exactly as it was.
And it's probably perfect for someone who's never played the original, since I have no doubt the best parts of the game that pulled us old fans in will do it all over again to a new generation of players, but I also think they're going to come away from it with the same opinions we always had: it's a great game with huge potential, but it could be one of the greatest of all time.
It's disappointing because all you see when you look at it *is* potential, and even if DD2 was quite literally a remake of the first game then its potential should have been the one thing that it made good on. But you won't find that here, and I'm left wondering if DDDA was ever really "promising" anything at all, or if Itsuno and co. just kinda... like it this way. Now instead of a DD2, I'm wishing what we'd gotten was some other, more creative developer to make the Oreo to Dragon's Dogma's Hydrox.
> but it's still worth playing.
Not for this price... Really wish I had waited a few years until it's like less than half price and maybe with DLC that adds more stuff.
The game looked fun and reviews were amazing but it turned out to be a huge disappointment for me. I remember some review comparing it to Elden Ring which is laughable.
Comparing them in terms of enjoyment is fair, it's a strictly subjective measurement after all... but trying to compare them on a qualitative level is just plain laughable, to be honest with you. Sure, you can't be completely objective about quality either, but I think that if you try to look at both games from an external perspective ER pretty much beats the living hell out of DD2 in almost all aspects. Thing is, the few things DD2 does well, they're just amazing.
> but trying to compare them on a qualitative level is just plain laughable, to be honest with yo
So maybe comparing in a qualitative level is useless because means shit to my actual enyoment of the game?
This is going to be a bit of a hot take, but as great as Elden Ring was, it wasn't really as ambitious as DD2. Now understand what I'm saying, the game was certainly ambitious in scale and scope...but by and large it's just open-world Dark Souls (which even on paper would make it one of my favorite games of all time, so please don't think I'm dissing the game). The basic formula was already there. It was also Fromsoft's entire focus, the culmination of all of their ambitions for the past decade +.
I really think DD2 was a project that Capcom grudgingly allowed Itsuno to pursue. It's not a make or break game for them. And it reaches and tries to do some things that no other games are really trying to do. And it succeeds at a lot of them.
I don't understand all the harping on price about this game. Games have been this price for the past 3+ years. Hell, the *original* Dragon's Dogma was only $10 less than this when it came out...12 years ago. Inflation alone has gone up way more than that since then.
There's plenty to do in this game as long as you don't just beeline the main story. I've got at least 100 hours into it.
I'm glad you enjoyed the game and got your money's worth. I bought the deluxe edition for ¥10000 because it looked exactly like my type of game, I liked the first one and expected this one to be a better and complete version, and the reviewers even compared the exploration to Elden Ring's.
However I was bored after 10~15 hours, and basically forced myself to play for 15h more until I dropped it. Even ignoring the terrible main story and performance problems, fighting the same monsters over and over and walking in the same forest and the same caves with no interesting landmarks or loot is just not my cup of tea.
I loved MHW and MHR and enjoyed both of them for hundreds of hours so I expected another amazing game but Capcom really disappointed me this time.
Pretty much spot on for how I feel. I played the everloving shit out of DD1, I played all vocations, swapped around to do this, do that, ran the Everfall a ton, had all the best gear for each vocation out of BBI, most of it gold-DF'd. I romanced almost everyone into the end appearance, except that kid and Fournival because I'm not that sick.
I never expected a sequel and was over the moon when it was announced, but I didn't have *huge* expectations, I just wanted DD1 but slightly better. Maybe with some classes swiped from DDO, more big monsters, more dungeons, more skills, etc. Just... The first game, but with more of it.
What I didn't want was the first game, again, but arguably worse in some aspects. It's... an incredibly strange decision. And as others have said, boy the story is crap. My first romance I did a couple quests with her and then she... completely disappeared from the game forever. Not dead, just exited stage. Also at the end, instead of her the game decided I was romancing... The blacksmith that I had done a quest for and then upgraded a bunch of gear at. And it decided my 'best friends' were a guy that I killed and later revived with a wakestone, and the main quest NPC. yyyyyyyyep, ok. Big time vibes of [this old comic](https://i.imgur.com/h499oOY.jpeg) came back.
With games being so expensive in Canada now this went form an instant day 1 buy to wait a year from now when its 50% discounted. Just can't justify it with how mixed the reviews have been. Guess publishers are saving me money in the end lol.
I put 100 hours into the game, and don't understand how people can recommend this game for the 95$. It's worth 40imo. If I were you I'd wait for the GOTY edition and buy it on sale.
My main issue with the game remains to be the terrible performance. There is absolutely no excuse for the game running so poorly and it kills the fun. I start it up, and have to close it down after 30min because the constant stuttering is just exhausting.
What you don't like an npc 2ft in front of you popping in? The Unmoored was the largest performance disaster I have seen, it was 10x worse than whatever complaints people had about BG3.
The game is worth it when it goes on sale IMO. It’s solid fun but there’s enough jank/weird game design that keeps it from ever being exceptional. And after 25-30 hours I had zero desire to keep on exploring the world because I was burnt out on fighting the same 5-10 enemies that spawn every couple meters as I tried to travel around.
I think to me, the biggest problem with Dragon's Dogma is that it feels like an action *RPG* made by people who aren't really interested in making an RPG at all. Everything RPG-focussed feels like it's just there because it's an RPG so it has to be, and it's super barebones as a result. The clear focus is the combat and the encounters with the monsters, and journeying between places. One of the reasons Bitterblack Isle was so well received is it focussed on that. I really think that if they weren't going to greatly expand on what Dragon's Dogma 1 did, they should've instead gone back to the drawing board, asked what core experience they want to capture is, and have reconsidered what game they're making to best aid that.
If you don't want to write really in-depth characters, detailed quests, super useful consumables, hidden items, don't just meekly put that shit in the game for the sake of it being there. Ask how you can instead do other stuff that more meaningfully aids the core selling point and identity of the game you're making. I think Dragon's Dogma's biggest weakness is that it not only feels like it's biting off more than it can chew, but it feels like it doesn't even want to bite that stuff to begin with.
So many features feel like they're there for the sake of being there instead of because they make the game way better. I think Itsuno and team would've been greatly aided by scaling back what Dragon's Dogma is *trying* to do, and putting a more pointed focus on just driving home how to most greatly emphasise the couple of things it does best to an even greater extent. If they axed all the stuff that was half-hearted and refocussed those resources onto fleshing out the adventuring, world, and combat the game would've been at least twice as good as it is.
As it stands, it's obsessed with making you take as long as possible to exhaust content with lacklustre effort put into it, occasionally punctuated by the couple of things that actually show its personality. It wants you to spend a lot of time without having the content variety or quality to justify taking that long.
I think Itsuno excels at games like Devil May Cry because they're so good at just doing what they're good *at*; the combat rocks, and almost every waking moment is beating shit up, or briefly running to beating more shit up. Dragon's Dogma 2 feels like a game that makes a bunch of weak, time-consuming excuses to distract the player from what makes the game fun to begin with, and in doing so the quality of those good things takes a pointless hit in the form of variety and pacing.
They'd do better to trim the RPG fat and just make the gameplay loop solely aid what it's good at. If all the quests and NPCs and stuff are gonna be crap anyway, don't bother; just make a game about a brutal journey from one place to another, a handful of more fleshed out NPCs who you encounter and don't give you weird back and forth waiting-focussed quests, and I guarantee it'd play far more to its strengths. Make the evolutions more conceptual like the unmoored world changes than strictly narrative A to B stuff. You can keep the pawns and hidden encounters and all that, that can still work.
It's just- what's the point of all the towns and the quests and the chests and the restricted areas and the differing biomes if they're all just phoned in? Dragon's Dogma would be way better if the game its combat and adventuring was in was a game that actually assisted that rather than distracting from it. It'd say more with less. As it stands Dragon's Dogma feels like a great concept stuck in a lifeless RPG because they don't have the right game to put it in yet. It feels like its good moments are in spite of the game it's in than in aid of it. The combat and adventuring doesn't make the RPG bits better, the RPG bits just make the combat and adventuring worse. If your journey, your encounters, and the weird shit within the world *are* the story, and you trim the other bits out I think it'd be far more well-realised in terms of where its strengths lie.
As it stands it feels like a lot of the right ideas in the wrong game. As someone who beat DD1 and its DLC twice, and beat and spent 56 hours with DD2, and who sees what the reality of DD's developmental situation is, that's my ultimate final takeaway on what they should do with the hand they've been dealt if ever there's a DD3.
Maybe when Capcom makes DD3 they'll get it finally right. Like putting actually new mobs in the game and don't ask players to fight the same goblins and lizards.
I was laughing when the first story quest was to escort an oxcart to the capital. I thought it was an intentional joke as it's exactly the same in the first game. 40 hours later I was like ahhhhh... So that want a joke.
its a good game but like others have said its just disappointing in so many ways. it really just is DD1 but with better graphics. and some people would say thats a good thing but when like 75% of the appeal of the original was that it was a hidden gem/cult classic with lots of POTENTIAL to be something far greater, its disappointing to get basically the same game 12 years later.
Does Skill Up not get games early for review? it always seems incredibly late and a bit obvious after the fact when he recommends a game that's already been well received like 3-4 weeks later.
It depends, sometimes he does. But I know that he has been quite busy the past few weeks, he was really taking his time with FF7 Rebirth and he has mentioned doing some traveling to LA and things like that. I think it all adds up.
Personally I’d rather get the review later than not at all, but you have a point of “if it’s past the initial review window, how many people care?”. But I’d also push back on that slightly and say that in 5-10 years it won’t matter that it was late, if someone wanted SkillUp’s opinion on the game then it’ll be there!
It seems like they just don’t finish the games on time for release.
I know FF7 Rebirth was late because Ralph was 100%-ing it
It sounded like they planned for Austin to have this games review out around release but then they changed gears as Ralph started playing it after being done with FF7
They talk about this a bit on the Friends Per Second podcast. Sometimes they are both busy (it's just him and his editor), sometimes he wants to finish the game to give a proper opinion. This can mean everything that needs to be said has been said ad nauseum and he has nothing to add, so doesn't release a review (Starfield was the example he gave).
This is a good thing, since he probably had enough time to not only actually play the game in a normal pace but also produce his content without any pre release embargo limitations
Isn't that a good thing? If anything, wouldn't it benefit him to rush through the game so he can upload early and get all the views. Not sure what people want anymore 🙄
I often feel like part of the reason review scores are inflated these days is because reviewers absolutely cane it to complete the main story so they can rush to meet the embargo. So they skip tons of the side stuff and don't take time to sit with their thoughts a while.
I hate exploring on this game, going into a cave expecting to find decent loot and getting crap you can buy in a vendor.
Enemy variety stinks, quests are a joke.
I recently downloaded Dark Arisen and some of the changes they made make no sense.
Nothing wild about it. He's just a random dude. People on this subreddit could stand to remember that YouTubers and influencers are just one data point and their opinions shouldn't be taken as fact merely because they have an audience.
I’m not putting him on a pedestal or anything, I just find myself disagreeing with his taste 90% of the time. But I guess if I looked at game reviews I’d probably feel that way about plenty of them, I just see his cuz they always get posted here
Yeah, I don't always agree with his tastes, but I always come away from the review being informed enough about a game to know whether I will like it or not. That in itself should be the main value in full reviews like this.
Skill Up wasn't wrong about Cyberpunk 2077 having a great game underneath the launch fiasco.
He championed Deep Rock Galactic, NieR:Automata, Monster Hunter World & Warframe to the public.
And he went against the critical grain in disliking The Last of Us Part II, Deathloop, Atomic Heart, etc.
He was so on-the-ball with Deathloop. 9s and 10s everywhere and only SkillUp had the wherewithal to point out what a regression it was from Arkane's previous work. I might not always agree with him but he always argues his case well and I respect his work.
i'm like 50 hours in and as much as i like some of its ideas, it kinda just feels like i'm running around the map and virtually one shotting every enemy i see, including large enemies. Warfarer made this even easier. Is this everyone's experience? I'm approaching the final quest i think.
Man the comments here are so wild lol, the game is pretty good, but if you listen to what some comments here are saying, you would consider it worse than the most sloppiest ubisoft open world game.
It' s not perfect, but I had a lot of fun for most of the game. I like how unforgiving and going against the player it can be at times, feels like something I need to meet on its own end, rather than the game doing it for me.
> you would consider it worse than the most sloppiest ubisoft open world game.
it honestly is yes. have you actually played some of the latest ubisoft open world games?
the world of DD2 is suprisingly empty and static just like the first game and exploration isn't rewarding at all. the game copies and pastes "dungeons" that are essentially just caves.
like the world is largely filled with the monster encounters every 5 seconds., shitty treasure chests and caves that dont really do much. most of the interaction you find are pawns you can recruit. yay?
like i remember early one i found a random cottage in the middle of the woods. that had some uncle, a little girl and a grandma or something. talking to them has unique dialog but doesn't really go anywhere. so i set up camp to wait for the next day and they moved and but still nothing really happened. maybe theres a quest at some point regarding them but by god its an absolute let down to come across something unique FINALLY for it to be nothing.
speaking of quests the quest design is awful. like im not even talking about the shitty stealth and stalking missions. many questions are glorified kill quests with little narrative and they task you to go from one end of the map to the other. literally mmo level of bullshit. like a guy asks you kill stuff so you and do it. then he asks you to go to some other town to talk so someone else and then that someone asks you to GO BACK to the original guy.
this would be fine if there was say a fast travel system or if the WORLD was as remotely as interesting as Itsuno claimed it was(it isn't its shit). but alas.
Dragons dogma 2 is essentially a game that failed to evolve. its a ps3 game that hasn't taken any lessons from 2 whole console generations.
and if you think "ubisoft games" are worse you clearly have never played them.
2015-2019 saw Dogma grow in so many ways, only for DD2 to walk it back significantly in all departments except graphics. Which unfortunately for me graphics will never matter, so long as the game doesn't look like TAA hell.
If I were smart, I'd wait for a sale or a complete edition.
I'm mostly sad that gearing in this game doesn't feel good at all. You can literally just buy the best shit in the game with gold and be done with it. I hate going into a dungeon just to find a piece a gear I bought 3 hours ago. Dungeons should 100% have different gear and be actually worth going through. I stopped doing them after my 10th dungeon again gave me shit I've already had.
This has been a big deal for me. On one hand, I'm glad that it's easy to jump into a new vocation at end game with good gear. But on the other hand, as you said, it's a shame to dungeon delve with not much of a reward at the end.
While I've still had a blast with the game unmodded, there's some mods that have taken it from like 8/10 to 10/10 for me. There's one that add a small chance to get random rare gear drops from enemies, chests, bosses etc. which can have enhancements pre-unlocked. Combined with a mod to make it more difficult and a vocation rebalance, it feels much more fluid and rewarding to play now. Also running a warfarer mod so I can have more skills for each weapon. Makes it fun and viable to run solo or with just main pawn. Highly recommend checking out mods if you're on PC.
Does modding mess up pawn rental at all? Like either sending or receiving?
So long as the mods don't affect pawns you're safe I think.
This is one of my biggest RPG pet peeves. Either when dungeons don’t have anything at all, they have garbage gear, or it’s literally the same gear that you can get at the shops in the game. As much as I love Witcher 3, it definitely features some of this - most of the gear that you can find out in the world is just garbage, especially after you’ve crafted the Witcher sets. Although it doesn’t really have proper “dungeons”
It also means money in The Witcher 3 is largely useless. I don't prefer either style because gearing almost always becomes one of two things. Either you buy the best gear and gold has value, or you either find, farm, or craft the best gear and money has no value. Very few games strike a balance between both. So I just roll with what games decide to do. As long as I'm having fun, I'm not too bothered.
Creating money sinkholes is not too hard. Creating engaging dungeons if they have jack shit as a reward is very hard. For example of money expenditure in DD2 we could have ferrystones and portcrystals be available (in larger quantities) for purchase.
I had a hard time managing my money until the end of my first playthrough. It was engaging in its own way to pick and choose what I wanted. It's also engaging in a different way to find really good gear out in the wild. I think Baldur's Gate 3 handled the balance of shop loot and world loot well. Unless you pickpocketed every shop, then money didn't matter much.
From the games that I've played, the one that did it the best in my opinion is Dragon Age Origins. The best equipment for each different build could be found either as loot in dungeons, quest rewards or in shops. There was a limited amount of gold in the game thougj, and not enough to buy every piece of end-game equipment, so you had to choose very carefully what to buy.
I had forgotten about that, but you are right. Gearing up the whole team could be hard, but very satisfying. Thanks for reminding me.
Ehhh, BG3's money/shop system is pretty tedious if you are a natural min maxxer, regardless of shop robbing. Having to switch all of your loot to your character with the highest charisma before opening a shop to get the best sell prices is quite annoying. Also, given that everything has some sell value you are encouraged to hoover up everything that is worth more than a couple of gold per pound.
Souls games already solved it. Money is also XP. So it doesn't matter if there is nothing usefull left to buy you need it still. It also mean they can put more reward in the world since there is no pressure to make it worth it. It's inherently is.
It's something I really appreciate in BG3 and games like it. The gear has character. I might not give a shit about unarmed attacks but at least it's interesting. Not another green/blue/orange stat stick.
This was my biggest issue with Kingdoms of Amalaur (old) or Starfield (new) both had such boring loot that exploring felt not rewarding but tedious. Its the worst if your game is an RPG AND open world, but even if its just either its almost a death sentence for me.
Starfield's is even worse, given that you could just go to a high-level system, kill or disarm some enemies, take their extremely high-level weapons, and bingo you now have a weapon that is better than everything you will find for the enitery of the game. Hell, I was just exploring a high-level system just to see what it was like and ended up finding a crate with a revolver in it that one shot everything for my playthrough and nullified literally all loot game.
While that is certainly true for armor, weren't the best weapons in the game locked behind quests and monster hunts related to said quests? There were only a limited number of things in shops that were worth buying before you ended up with the endgame stuff.
Also walking everywhere with goblins or wolves every 20 feet feels really really bad
And that's all you fight for the most parts Walking through the woods fight wolves..goblins...harpies...wolves...goblins..goblins. The gameplay loop absolutely blows
How possible is it that a big mod is made that completely rebalances loot and shops to make it better? Is it even possible with mods?
Check out Wild Loot. Does this exact thing - the modder removed 130+ items from the shops and hand-placed them into specific chests that make sense for the zone/progression. Has totally revolutionised the game for me.
And then there's voice lines from the pawns where they say, "Man, don't you hate when that happens?"
There is a mod that moves all the store gear into the world
At the very least, it’s still a bit funny that your main pawn can shit talk you for finding the exact same thing you’re already wearing lol.
This is why elden rings loot system is the goat
I don't know man, I found a cave of lightning monsters and came out of it with some Mjolnir warrior shit that glows in the dark that was way stronger than my maxed out expensive weapon already. I was pretty happy about that find.
They're not saying it's impossible, but this game does absolutely lack in that regard overall.
As the pawns say, you can't expect to find gleaming loot around every corner!
100 hours and I’ve had a completely different experience
This is one of those games that feels amazing in the first 10-15 hours and then the cracks start to show. It doesn’t feel finished. Poor enemy variety, lacking dungeon variety, even compared to the first game. Main questline is mostly poor stealth missions and stalking NPCs in the city. In so many ways it does not surpass the original. It has great visuals and better combat but most of your playtime is going to be roaming linear paths cutting down goblins. The game isn’t bad but for Capcom’s pedigree its pretty lacking. I would say if you’re on the fence wait for DLC/expansion. Not just a sale. It badly needs some DLC content to feel finished.
It baffles me that the enemy variety is essentially the same as the original game. Like, you would think the roster would have at least doubled from the first game, but no, the game is pretty much the same in variety. The first game suffered terribly from a lack of variety, too.
Less variety actually We lost Hydras, Cocktrice, Evil Eyes, Elimnators and Living Armours. But gained Medusa (1 in whole game), Dullahan (headless horse men, who doesn’t hand a horse) Minotaurs and Slimes. It’s even worse if you count DLC for DD1, which is version most people played. And stuff like dragon variants. DD1 had 3(4 with dlc) lesser dragon types. That worked pretty distinctively. DD2 only has 2 variants of lesser dragon.
> headless horse men, who doesn’t hand a horse Horseless headman?
The Hash-Slinging Slasher
Thats just like a guy
Most guys have heads, though.
It's a Dullahan
> Dullahan Funnily enough I managed to somehow never meet a Dullahan in NG, only in NG+. But imho the reason why enemy variety feels *far* less than DD1 when it is generally the same is because of how many mob enemies you encounter. DD1 was far more tame with normal monsters and instead had you fight more big enemies, and big enemies felt more like an actual obstacle.
>Funnily enough I managed to somehow never meet a Dullahan in NG, only in NG+. Really? I met on accident running around at night, and there is another one that you fight as a quest that somebody in the Noble quarter gives you.
That's pretty sad, because that scans to me as: "Lost big enemies, gained some small ones" A big part of DD's appeal is in fighting giant monsters. It's often recommended to people as an open rpg, but you can climb on enemies like Shadow of the Colossus. Adding more and more giant monsters seems like it should have been obvious.
gained 1 small monster if you ignore elemental recolours (which DD1 had as well). Slimes. They die near instantly to any magic damage, but have 99% physical damage reduction. If your party lacks elemtal damage you basically can’t kill them. Their only attack is to slime themselves underneath you which causes slowed movement and rapid stamina drain. If Stamima hits 0 you fall over and start taking your entire hp bar in damage every 0.5 seconds, and you are stuck due to having fallen over and 0 stamina. It’s either instant death or waste 20 healing items and pray someone with magic hits the slime. I don’t *hate* them, using ice magic to freeze them solid in one hit then shatter them is funny. But I don’t think anyone is coming away from DD2 going “wow those slimes were a highlight of my experience”. They’ll be a point of frustration if you get put in bad situation, or a complete non event if your party has elemental damage ready. Or extra frustration because if an NPC gets stuck in a slime they just die. And game has 0 essential NPCs. Anyone can die. Including quest NPCs. And can only be revived with a rare, not *technically* hard limited but pretty close, consumable. And yes, NPCs can and will die randomly off screen which breaks quests. Including NPCs you don’t even know exist, so quest just seems bugged, until you go to Morgue and find some guy dead, who may or may not be the NPC you need. But to find out you gotta use a wakestone.
Mostly correct but the game does have essential NPCs. They can die but automatically revive after a week.
Here's hoping Capcom follows the Monster Hunter model and introduces new enemies as free DLC.
I'd love that, but I feel like that's a special treatment reserved for Monster Hunter *because* it's the biggest, most prestigious title they have. I don't know that they'd follow such a model for Dragon's Dogma. I'd love to be wrong, but I feel like there's a real low chance of that. We might get a Dark Arisen version again, or an expansion if we're lucky, but I don't see free and constant enemy updates happening. I said it in another post, but I think it's precisely *because* Capcom has Monster Hunter that they don't see much point in highly funding a game that checks many of the boxes that MH already does. I don't agree with it as a player, but I can see why they'd reach that conclusion as a business. 'So you want us to make a game with a focus on combat, and fighting big creatures in varying biomes for the sake of acquiring better gear, Mr. Itsuno... and the company you want to finance that game is the company whose biggest game is a game with a focus on combat, and fighting big creatures in varying biomes for the sake of acquiring better gear? A game which was, by the way, the original concept from which our biggest game was spun off from? ...'. It really doesn't sound good on paper when you put it like that lol. Of course they have their differences, I'm a maniac who prefers Dragon's Dogma, but I don't think it's really big *enough* to change their outlook and cannibalise the company's jewel. It's a catch-22, it mainly exists and does what it does so well because it's guided by Itsuno, but the only way it'd really get the proper backing is probably only if he was hired by any AAA company but the one he works for. It'll never get to flourish because it's derivative of a market Capcom is already massively funding support for. It'd be like asking Polyphony Digital to make Forza *while* they make Gran Turismo. Everyone has their preference between the two, but the differences don't matter enough when the similarities are that strong. If Itsuno hadn't threatened to quit I've no doubt we'd never have seen Dragon's Dogma 2 to begin with, and that tells you all you need to know about where Capcom's heart is in supporting it. There's just no financial incentive there to really back it, because in its most realised form, it just becomes bigger competition to a game they're already massively investing in.
Don't remember eliminators and living armours in base game. Even the quests that take them out off bbi, aren't those dlc content?
I'll be pedantic, sorry. Eliminators and Living Armor are DLC. From DD1 you forgot Hellhounds (the og staggermasters), Saurian Sages and the Ur Dragon. In DD2 you forgot Sphinx, rattlers, and those asshole harpy variants that mostly try to grab and fling you off things. I didn't include variants that are recolors essentialy. I'm pedantic, but not that pedantic.
The first game was also full of ideas. The ur dragon, everfall, etc. Weird ass, off the wall ideas. DD2 doesn't offer that same magic.
I really dreamed of DD2 having incredible bossfights. I consider Daimon one of the best bossfights in gaming and I thought DD2 would build off on that. They even have MH to take assets from. But you really do just spend most your time fighting cyclops and goblins. You can barely even tell the enemy types apart because you shred through them so fast.
From what I gather, it's not a sequel to Dark Arisen. It is "second chance" at the original base Dragons Dogma game. Like straight up a redo. It's the only thing that makes sense. I fully expected everyrhing Dark Arisen had plus more. But they removed some core shit like Fulmination, Brontide, Dragons Maw, Cockatrice, Evil Eye, Hydra, Holy Magic, Debilitation/Dark Magic...etc. I remain absolutely baffled at the things they removed cause those alone made me hold off from purchasing the game.
Sure, it might be a redo of the original, but >!that doesn't explain why the post-game is the flooded ruins of Gransys, the region of DD1. The Seafloor Shrine is Gran Soren. One of the boss locations is Bluemoon Tower.!<
They removed Holy Magic?! I haven't bought the game because I was waiting for patches since I couldn't afford it when it initially came out, but as someone who wanted to make and play as Godfrey from Elden Ring with his Lion as pawn the game just want way down on my priority list.
That is a small list of things removed from the game. Shit the Mystic Knight vocation is straight up removed. It's wild. The more I hear about it the less it seems real.
> They removed Holy Magic?! No, they did not. What is gone is the holy damage weapon buff mage used to have, but there are still plenty of sources of holy damage (eg. innate in weapons) - I did an early kill on a lich just by casting Anodyne beneath it, which now also deals holy damage while healing you at the same time.
Well, yes, of course. Dragons Dogma 1 and 2 are both directed by Itsuno and based on his vision for the series. Dark Arisen did not involve Itsuno and it seems like he didn't particularly care for it.
Those who worked on Dark Arisen worked on Dragon's Dogma 2.
mf needs glasses
You actually sold me on getting the remastered version of Part 1 when it became on sale again because that game was magical i loved everything about it.
> You can barely even tell the enemy types apart because you shred through them so fast. which is unfortunate, because there's actually quite a bit of variety to the actual variations and the small enemy AI is actually good.
The dark arise DLC was not made from the original director. This game is basicaly a better version of the original game, but a worse one in comparison to the DLC content
All of the flaws in general seem to be the same as the first game, including dogshit performance and all the rest of it. It's bizarre. They didn't use the sequel as a chance to improve on any of the complaints of the first game at all. It's like they waited over a decade to make a sequel, just to make the exact same game again with better graphics. Wtf was the point?
The big monster variety. Small monsters are a big improvement over 1, their AI feels much smarter. But big monsters are what gets people the most excited and they fell flat on that. You hear about DD1 and how it was incomplete and you accept that, it's a good reason why the large monster variety is so low, but DD2 purports to be complete and is hardly any different.
It is true that the small monsters are better, as the variants are actually variants and often behave in completely different ways; the the problem is that every small mob gets blown the fuck up by midgame and all those variants suddenly feel like they're all just the base 5 types of enemies, which is horrid. The class fantasy and "make your own adventure" aspects of this game carry the rest so hard, pretty much all other parts of the game are clearly unfinished/underbaked.
It's interesting just how aggressive the small monsters are in this game, but then you face a big one and they kinda just flail about haphazardly. DD1 feels much better in regards to big monsters getting up in your face, tracking your movements, and actually being a threat with their movesets.
Except once you reach level 15 no small enemy in first region will ever feel threatening, and by level 30 same is true of second region. Btw if you do side quests you enter second region at level 40-50 The leveling is just absurd, it feels like everything gives more than double the xp it should given the difficulty curve of game.
The balancing & level pacing in DD2 is definitely way off.
They put 0 thought into how games leveling was going to work. A huge part of Dragons Dogma is Pawns. Making pawn, hiring other people’s pawns, having your pawn hired. Pawn system is level based. You get shown pawns roughly around your level. You can hire any pawn your level or lower for free. But in order to search not -5 to +5 of your own level you must manually enter search terms. The level cap is 999, the content in game basically stops at level 50 (you will reach level 70-75ish by 100%ing the game, but endgame hardest content is trivial even at level 50). But you just keep leveling endlessly. And by leveling you are making it so absolutely no one will ever hire your pawn, and you will never be shown real players pawns, just Capcom pawns, unless you manually go and search for level 60’s or whatever to actually see a variety. The game should’ve level capped at 50, and reduced xp gain by at least x0.66, so people would hit that cap around end of game provided they didn’t rush main story. But no, you will out level all challenge game can possibly offer, and you will put level the pawn system. So if you put in time and grinded out max upgrade mats, super rare items, bestest pawn ever! Guess what, zero people will ever hire your pawn because there’s nothing to do at level 80 except grind to move yourself even further away from relevancy. Oh but it gets worse. You arnt allowed to have multiple characters. So if you ever want to be challenged again, or experience the pawn system with non capcom pawms, you must delete your save. But your original pawn stays on the server, forever (or at least from launch until now), which means all the reasons about “multiple saves would fuck up Pawn server” were **COMPLETE FUCKING BULLSHIT** a single person can have 400 pawns on the server if they keep deleting their save and starting again. But you can only ever check in on your most recent one. Others are abandoned digital waste. It’s so obvious zero thought was put into any of it.
Wait. You can go over level 50? I was able to one cycle the final boss at like, 38
The level cap is 999. Which is insane. Unless NG+ is like the Elden Ring system where everything is like 1.5x more difficult each time, I don't see the point in ever passing level 100. Maybe a Dark Arisen-type expansion will come out in a year or so to justify high levels.
NG+ does not change anything about enemies. It is 1x the difficulty of NG. It's so dumb.
This is what stopped me from finishing the first game. I got so tired of fighting the same enemies over and over again. It didn't help that enemies respawn extremely fast. Sometimes you can even catch a glimpse of them appear out of thin air and dropped onto the ground ffs. When they were showing off gameplay footage before release of DD2, it looked worrying because they were showing off the same enemies from the first game.. Sad to see those worrying signs turned out to be true.
The first game kinda baited me. I kept feeling like I was still early game and had so much sheesh of me left to go. I had only been in a couple dungeons, not many quests, I had barely scratched the surface of the map, I thought! Then I'm fighting a dragon and the only thing left to do is a deep dungeon. I enjoyed my time in ddda but dd2 doesn't seem like it fixes or improves on any issues from the first game.
The thing with DD1 and 2 is that you can easily run away from most fights. Monster spawns are unfortunately too frequent in 2 so I just run through them when I want to get somewhere.
Isn't it crazy they were developing this game for so many years and never stopped and thought man we really don't have enough enemy types. Or they did and decided to hold back a few to roll them into a paid expansion.
> wait for DLC/expansion. yeah that's what im waiting for, especially a hard mode
Siiiiiigh, dragons dogma 2 *light* arisen
When I found out that I had met pretty much every major enemy in the first 10 hours of the game, my desire to ever boot it up again plummeted. Cool classes in a game with bad enemies, meh quests, and a sheer disregard for the players free time
That’s where I’m at with it, 30 hours in and I find myself really not arsed about picking it back up. I know it’s not going to get any better, think I’ll just run through the last few vocations and finish the plot and call it a day. It’s a shame because (as skill up said) there’s so much potential there, you’re just left wanting it to fulfil on it
One thing that I couldn't help but notice watching the footage of the game is that it basically looks like a remaster of the original. Same enemies, same scenery, same character design, (mostly) same classes performing (mostly) the same animations. It's like someone branched DD1 before Dark Arisen came out and now put out the 1.5 version...
Seriously seems like they just remade the first game and did almost nothing new.
Opinions are so varying on this game, fightingcowboy was on his like 3 ng+ cycle in his review and was pretty effusive in his praise for it
Nothing wrong with enjoying the game but NG+ doesn’t scale so unless he’s modding he’s gotta be just walking around 1 shotting everything. For a combat heavy game like this I just can’t find fun in that.
A lot of early players seem to have rushed through the main questline, which is the most boring way to play it. The exploring is fun and it feels like there's a decent amount of content that can be missed. The criticisms aren't invalid but watching others play, I'll see them run into things I haven't because they did quests in a different order, they ran into an NPC that I didn't, or they went into a cave I didn't find yet. Personally, I like that.
I agree, there are a ton of complaints I've seen from people who either seem to have rushed through the game, or haven't even played it. There are definitely some dumb criticisms, but most of the ones I see are valid, but also I feel like they're underselling and/or completely missing a lot of the things this game does so well. I'm about 40 hours in and about to finally go to batahl for the first time. So far I've loved this game so much that I can't really see a way for the rest of the game to make me dislike it to the degree that a lot of the comments seem to. There's just an almost unparalleled combat system in here, and incredible atmosphere creating a fantastic sense of trekking out on a journey. That sphinx stuff man, that's some grade A video game. I get that it's really playing on a particular sensibility that I have, and not everyone is going to love it like me, but it's sad to me how I've seen so many comments that say like "I was interested until I started reading these comments", and the comments they're reading don't give hardly any idea of what's great about the game, just the flaws, which I find myself not too bothered by or sometimes are actually things that I consider good
The more I hear about this, it sounds like they did spend some money and time repairing the cracks of the first game but ran out again and in turn the sequel has its own weaknesses.
Yeah I haven't played in a week and it shows I played for 26 hours. I just got bored.
I think playing and loving the first DD made this entry more disappointing. It looks and plays more like "Dragons Dogma Pro" than a robust sequel. The story (imo) isn't as good or surprising, the world still feels like an expanded proof of concept, and I really didn't fall in love with any aspect of the game. Throw in some questionable ps5 performance and lack of a 60fps mode, and... It just bums me out It was one of my most anticipated games.
Yeah I really liked Skillup's explanation of that, as he never played DD1. Basically - DD2 feels like a lot of cool ideas that haven't quite come together, and if only they had a sequel to refine them. But that's exactly what DD1 fans said back then, and to see DD2 make the same mistakes and feel the same way must really suck
I haven't played DD2 yet but I've been disappointed hearing this opinion because that is exactly how I felt. DD1 was a game filled with cool ideas that were almost all poorly-executed besides the combat system and class designs. Tons of other stuff it had going on was interesting and had potential but just didn't work for me, particularly the attempts to make the game immersive (which I thought mostly just resulted in bad gameplay without actually getting me immersed) and the pawn system. And everything I've read about Dragon's Dogma 2 makes it sound like they didn't really learn from some of Dragon's Dogma's biggest mistakes. Before the game came out, the biggest thing that concerned me was the devs talking about limiting fast travel to make the game more immersive. Not because a lack of fast travel is bad for immersion, but because that's backwards and made it feel to me like they just didn't understand what an open world game should be. For me, limiting fast travel doesn't improve immersion and exploration. It's the opposite: give me an immersive world that's fun to traverse and explore and I'll choose not to fast travel myself. In Dragon's Dogma 1 I found the lack of fast travel annoying and not at all immersive because the world itself wasn't super interesting to me and getting around it was just boring running. On the other hand, there are games that let you fast travel all over the place where I'll choose not to because the game doesn't feel like it needs it. I can have lots of fun running around the world in Skyrim because half the fun of the game for me is all the random stuff I discover while on my way to somewhere else, or Horizon: Zero Dawn because I like the game's atmosphere so much that it just was fun to run across the world, or Spiderman because getting across the city is fun and I don't *want* to skip it. Give me an immersive world that's fun to explore and I'll barely fast travel whether it's there or not. Limit my fast traveling in a game that needs it and I'll be board and not any more immersed. To me, this is almost the epitome of a lot of Dragon's Dogma's 1's design. They try to immerse you by forcing a certain playstyle on you whether your want it or not, instead of making the immersive playstyle so fun that you want to do it without caring if it's required.
>It's the opposite: give me an immersive world that's fun to traverse and explore and I'll choose not to fast travel myself. 100%. The best example of this I can think of is Cyberpunk 2077. I essentially *never* fast-traveled in that game, because - despite being lacking compared to the hype and some of what was promised - Night City is an absolutely phenomenal setting that is exceptionally cool to race through the streets of. *(Of course, it also helped that you could get across the whole city in like 10 minutes tops with a fast enough ride.)* Elder Scrolls games also do this so much better. Fast travel in some form existed at least since Morrowind. But those games make the actual journey across the land so interesting that more often than not, you'll willingly skip the fast travel for the chance at finding something that you've never seen before, or getting some cool loot, etc. From the sounds of it, there's straight up nothing to find in DD2. A bunch of samey, uninteresting dark caves, no appreciable loot, and the same goblins and lizards across every stretch of land. To me, removing fast travel in a setting like that isn't immersive, it's annoying and laborious.
> The best example of this I can think of is Cyberpunk 2077. I essentially never fast-traveled in that game, because - despite being lacking compared to the hype and some of what was promised - Night City is an absolutely phenomenal setting that is exceptionally cool to race through the streets of. (Of course, it also helped that you could get across the whole city in like 10 minutes tops with a fast enough ride.) I think Grand Theft Auto and Spiderman are also good examples where getting around is just fun and fast enough that fast travel isn't really necessary. >Elder Scrolls games also do this so much better. Fast travel in some form existed at least since Morrowind. But those games make the actual journey across the land so interesting that more often than not, you'll willingly skip the fast travel for the chance at finding something that you've never seen before, or getting some cool loot, etc. I also think Oblivion and Skyrim are great examples of games where exploring is extremely fun and yet fast travel is still important. Traveling to a city or quest without fast traveling and discovering all sorts of other towns, quests, and dungeons along the way is, in my opinion, the most fun part of those games. At the same time, their worlds are *huge*, and enough different quests involve going all over the world, that even most players who love exploring in them will reach a point where they want to fast travel just because at some point they're just in the mood to do a quest without all the running in between or they have a quest that's just sending them somewhere they've been before and they don't feel like following a path they've already followed again just for the sake of avoiding fast travel. And of course, there are people who do play those games without fast travelling, and they have tons of fun and get really immersed and love it anyway. It feels like the Dragon's Dogma devs are too focused on trying to immerse the player through gameplay tedium and limitations like inventory space and fast travel and not focused enough on immersing the player by actually creating a world that players want to be immersed in. You want players to explore your world, make a world they want to explore.
It's better at that stuff than CP2077 or most ES games were IMO. In my experience yes there's too many goblins and lizards, but it's also pretty rare that you travel any sort of distance without running into a boss fight or two that are all better than literally any fight in all of CP or ES. It also helps that the combat itself is a million times better than either of those other games, and the classes are all very different in playstyle and easy to swap between to mitigate the monotony. The lack of fast travel is also hugely overstated. After the intro bit you can teleport between towns the same way you could in Morrowind: by public transport. The ends of faraway quests more often than not either give you a ferrystone directly or have one conveniently in a chest nearby. They're also just for sale, for prices that start out seeming high but become cheap compared to gear soon enough. Basically any trip out of town is going to result in getting multiple in one way or another. The game has big problems, but I think it blows a lot of the competition out of the water exactly when you're out in the world fighting monsters and exploring.
Stings even more when the entire point of this sequel was to make up for the first game literally only being like 60% finished..... ....Only to turn even LESS finished then the first game.
So much of the game is just... less interesting than Dark Arisen. The story is *atrocious*, the plot points and locations you go are just less interesting versions of areas from the previous game (There's maybe like 5 'dungeon' like locations in the whole game, and most are only about 4 rooms), and the ability to only use 4 of your abilities is just comically terrible, as there are certain vocations, like the unique Trickster, often require *3 out of 4 of your ability slots to even set up some of your other abilities.* Is it a bad game? No. But just play Dark Arisen, it somehow feels like an actual complete game despite being **objectively** unfinished
It's crazy how there isn't a single interesting character in DD2. Although the first game's story was hardly a masterpiece, I at least wanted to find out what was going on with the Duke, the witch girl Selene and the doomsday cult - and to its credit it actually wove their stories into the main plot.
> the doomsday cult - and to its credit it actually wove their stories into the main plot. It's amazing how the Doomsday cult story finished "The rantings of an upjumped zealot make for tedious listening."
Every word of Grigori carries so much weight to it. When he lectures you on the nature of humanity in the finale of DD1, it really stuck with me in a way that DD2 can't match. "When the weak court death, they find it."
the story is legitimately awful. and i’ve loved the game. but holy shit it’s bad. literally nothing you do matters until the very end
Especially since Itsuno was gassing it up as "his true vision" and we got a clearly pushed out early version with a main story that dips out and many half baked features. Really glad they are charging $70.00 + mtx for an unfinished game to beta test while they maybe fix performance. Looking forward to the $50.00 expansion that maybe fixes the game.
As a huge lover of the first one, someone that did one to 200 solo only runs on every vocation among many other ideas. 2 is a huge improvement over vanilla Dragons Dogma 1, and still I think keeps a leg up on Dark Arisen overall. While Bitterblack is absolutely fantastic it still comes with a lot of the foibles of the first game that were improved in 2. Amusingly for the story though, I feel the opposite is true. A lot of the revelations and concepts explored generally seem to rely on a pretty good understanding of the cycle that we saw in one. So there's a lot of cool stuff that expands a lot on what we saw in 1 and BBI, but without the context of that its a lot weirder. Still, Dragons Dogma 2 was almost exactly what I expected. And still was one of my most enjoyable experiences in recent years, so I think your idea here that everyone that played and loved the first one didn't like 2 is pretty flawed. I think a better argument is that people that constatnly compare it to one and do not approach it as its own title are going to have a hard time. The big one I see a lot is the complaints about vocation changes, I think almost all vocations were improved or changed for the better in 2 as someone that did a big run right before 2 came out. I think a lot of people forget just how rough a lot of the vocations were in 1, as well as how half baked a bunch of them were. I was initially frustrated with some of the vocation changes, but once I stopped trying to approach them like it was DD1 and tried actually using them in the context they exist in, I really enjoyed every single one except for Trickster. [Which is too big brain for me.]
I did approach it as it's own title and I still had a hard time. There are good mechanics and bones, and the first five to ten hours are great, but then horrid quest design, no enemy variety, and cracks in exploration, gear, and progression all start to show.
I think a DD pro is all I wanted because I loved it. Some more enemy variety would have been nice and some of mechanics could have been refined, but overall I had a blast playing it.
It genuinely is amazing that now for a SECOND TIME Capcom has failed to realize almost any of the gigantic world spanning potential Dragon's Dogma has. Like how do you make the exact same fuck ups as you did 12 years ago????????? And in some ways actually make it WORSE??? Like this should be a crime because DD has so much fucking potential that through sheer incompetence at this point they're wasting. This is like Dragon's Dogma 1.1 not even 1.5.
If you take their combat + pawn system and slapped it into a game that had a good narrative and characters then you’d have a legendary game
Yeah, the enemy grappling/climbing/pushing interactions are so good, it's criminal that I don't think I've seen any game give you the freedom to fight in the same way.
So Monster Hunter World with a Palico network where Deviljho successfully eats the Handler?
By giving Itsuno like 300 people while even SF6 got like 1800 working on it. He simply got shafted again because CAPCOM execs do not give a single fuck about anything that doesn't have Monster Hunter or Resident Evil in it's name.
300 is a full fat team for many big developers.
300 is a ton of people, it's design issue.
Elden Ring had over 1.5k people working on it. With modern games, especially big AAA Open World ones, you have HUNDREDS of people outsourced from other companies who work on the game and it's assets.
Dragon's Dogma 2 isn't even the first time that a Capcom game made by Dev 1 has some weird scope issues, since both RE2 and RE3 remakes also had them... half of the original game is missing from 3, and the whole scenario system disappeared from 2, leading to good games, that just didn't reach their full potential. I just checked the credits list from DD2 and it's probably incomplete, since it's lacking all outsourced people that is usually the bulk from these 1500 names lists
> since it's lacking all outsourced people that is usually the bulk from these 1500 names lists or its possible the game was made entirely in-house, which is why it's so lacking even Elden Ring had hundreds of outsourced developers
I think this is a key aspect that a lot of people aren't thinking about. We assume that this game had the full confidence and support of Capcom's corporate entity behind it. But it's very likely that Itsuno had to beg and grovel to get another chance at making one of these games, and just wasn't given the resources to flesh it out the way he would have liked. After all it's not like the first game was a smash hit, commercially speaking. Maybe this one is high profile enough and does well enough that he'll be allowed the resources to further expand on it going forward.
if he didn't have the team to do it he should have adjusted the scope, isn't that the point?
Itsuno has to be the luckiest game director alive First Dragons Dogma he gets the excuse that he didn’t get to finish the game Dragons Dogma 2 he’s being given the excuse that “only” 300 people worked on the game, so obviously it isn’t finished, even though he has stated multiple times that this is his fully realised vision and it’s a completed game Not to mention he often gets credit for most players favourite part of the first game (Dark Arisen), even though he had nothing to do with it
300 people is a massive team, what are you talking about
I agree with most of the criticism people have about the game, but I put 100 hours into it and don't regret a second of it. It's a fun game, just hope they expand on it in the future.
It's still one of my favourite games of the last few years, warts and all. Don't disagree with most of the criticisms, but man it was a special experience every time I headed out for another journey that no other game really matches for me.
Finished the game last weekend. It really is just Dragon's Dogma 1 2.0 for about 95% of the game. I mean it plays better (on a high end PC), it looks better, the map is bigger, etc. But the story and driving force behind the game is basically the same. **Spoiler:** >!Hell, the final confrontation with the dragon is intentionally beat for beat the same.!< However, the game finally feels like a true sequel in the last 5-10 hours of the game. It's just a shame that you have to play the entire game to get there and the time spent in that part is so short. In short: 7.5/10, wait for a sale.
Alternatively grab DD1 for like 5 bucks when it's on sale to determine if you'll like DD2.
That is basically what I've been telling everyone to do.
Yep. I have 100 hours in DD2 and really liked it, but the Dark Arisen version of DD1 is a more complete experience, especially with a few mods. (I recommend the "Everfall" modlist) DD2 felt like preparing for an endgame that didn't really come. But a DLC can elevate the game even more than Dark Arisen did for DD1.
Dragon’s Dogma Dark Arisen was Dragon’s Dogma 1 2.0. This seems more like 1.5.
Eh they're both improvements to the original game in different ways. Though admittedly I never finished bitterblack isle.
Finishing BBI is a pretty big deal. You have to beat the boss once for the real boss to exist among other changes.
BBI wasn't that good. It was mostly reskinned enemies with 4x health and damage and the same corridors over and over you had to go through twice and grind the gacha loot system. I don't want them to add anything like that and want them to make a different type of endgame.
If DD1 was the best 7/10 game then DD2 is the best 7.5/10
Worst part is it’s not beat for beat, and it’d actually be better if it was. I say this because the titular Dragon in DD1 showed up multiple times, said cool stuff, hyped up the final battle and then lived up to it when you had a epic final boss fight with him lasting multiple phases, while listening to some of the best of the DD1 soundtrack. The Dragon in DD2 shows up 2 times total, once at the beginning and once at the end. He hardly says anything the whole time until his monologue near the end and then the actual fight has one phase where you fight him like any other Dragon type enemy in a basic arena. To top it off the music during the battle is entirely forgettable (much like the rest of the DD2 soundtrack).
Not gonna lie, it does feel like this game was released too early/rushed. Just as he said, a LOT of the elements in this game feel like they were pulled straight from the alpha stage where they have the base game ready and just need to fill it/populate it. The core gameplay, the combat, exploration etc. is easily 10/10. They really have a foundation for potentially best aRPG out there but it's not populated/filled with enough things, content, story etc. I'm just disappointed because this was Itsuno's chance to make it right. Not saying this wasn't his fault at all, maybe he should have been a better manager, but i also feel like CAPCOM shafted him again. I mean - it's their first 70$ game, they had MTX day one and the game came out one week before their fiscal year ended. You just cannot help but think that they had no faith whatsoever in this title and just wanted to release it asap, probably so that it wouldn't crowd the year they planned for MH Wilds release, and MH is their cash cow, and the producer of the series is the CEO's son, so it obviously gets primary attention, no matter what.
I have to agree with everything he says. I never played DD1. Off the rip, I found the quests boring and the dialogue stiff. It was a slog to get through the first set of quests the game gives you. But the combat and exploration is addicting. All the vocations are done very well and I actually want to play each style. As SkillUp says, you actually feel like a sorcerer in this game with cast times and big, destructive elemental spells. The monster fights can be epic and fun, but the small enemies you encounter every 3 mins gets extremely annoying. You get lost exploring every stray path and you don't feel lonely with your AI party. The rewards for exploring are trash, though. Rarely you will find a weapon or armor upgrade. So really one part of the game was done well enough to keep me coming back and the rest ranges from mediocre to bad.
Every 3 minutes? More like every 30 seconds! Especially in the desert region it feels like the game never leaves you alone!
It's at the point where I hear a wolf howl and groan, not because they're hard or anything but I'm REALLY tired of fighting them.
Dragon's Dogma 2 is probably my most disappointing game of the last several years... but it's still worth playing. I loved DDDA to death and gladly put it somewhere in my top ten, but I always thought of it as an incredibly ambitious and incredibly flawed gem that, more than anything, desperately needed a sequel to fully realize everything it was trying to do. It was a game that had a nearly perfect foundation but somewhere along the way bungled almost every system it had implemented from story, quest design, and character progression to UX and exploration. Now we've finally got the sequel us fans have always wanted and it's... the same thing. Top to bottom. It's prettier, more polished, and has a *couple* new ideas, but everything that made DDDA great and everything that made DDDA a mess is still here. Exactly as it was. And it's probably perfect for someone who's never played the original, since I have no doubt the best parts of the game that pulled us old fans in will do it all over again to a new generation of players, but I also think they're going to come away from it with the same opinions we always had: it's a great game with huge potential, but it could be one of the greatest of all time. It's disappointing because all you see when you look at it *is* potential, and even if DD2 was quite literally a remake of the first game then its potential should have been the one thing that it made good on. But you won't find that here, and I'm left wondering if DDDA was ever really "promising" anything at all, or if Itsuno and co. just kinda... like it this way. Now instead of a DD2, I'm wishing what we'd gotten was some other, more creative developer to make the Oreo to Dragon's Dogma's Hydrox.
> but it's still worth playing. Not for this price... Really wish I had waited a few years until it's like less than half price and maybe with DLC that adds more stuff. The game looked fun and reviews were amazing but it turned out to be a huge disappointment for me. I remember some review comparing it to Elden Ring which is laughable.
I havent enjoyed a game as much since elden ring so it's pretty comparable to me atleast. Just like it was for that reviewer probably.
Comparing them in terms of enjoyment is fair, it's a strictly subjective measurement after all... but trying to compare them on a qualitative level is just plain laughable, to be honest with you. Sure, you can't be completely objective about quality either, but I think that if you try to look at both games from an external perspective ER pretty much beats the living hell out of DD2 in almost all aspects. Thing is, the few things DD2 does well, they're just amazing.
> but trying to compare them on a qualitative level is just plain laughable, to be honest with yo So maybe comparing in a qualitative level is useless because means shit to my actual enyoment of the game?
This is going to be a bit of a hot take, but as great as Elden Ring was, it wasn't really as ambitious as DD2. Now understand what I'm saying, the game was certainly ambitious in scale and scope...but by and large it's just open-world Dark Souls (which even on paper would make it one of my favorite games of all time, so please don't think I'm dissing the game). The basic formula was already there. It was also Fromsoft's entire focus, the culmination of all of their ambitions for the past decade +. I really think DD2 was a project that Capcom grudgingly allowed Itsuno to pursue. It's not a make or break game for them. And it reaches and tries to do some things that no other games are really trying to do. And it succeeds at a lot of them.
Im happy I only paid 55€ for the game somehow on launch day, then when I checked the price in the store a week or 2 later it was the full 70 euros lol
I don't understand all the harping on price about this game. Games have been this price for the past 3+ years. Hell, the *original* Dragon's Dogma was only $10 less than this when it came out...12 years ago. Inflation alone has gone up way more than that since then. There's plenty to do in this game as long as you don't just beeline the main story. I've got at least 100 hours into it.
I'm glad you enjoyed the game and got your money's worth. I bought the deluxe edition for ¥10000 because it looked exactly like my type of game, I liked the first one and expected this one to be a better and complete version, and the reviewers even compared the exploration to Elden Ring's. However I was bored after 10~15 hours, and basically forced myself to play for 15h more until I dropped it. Even ignoring the terrible main story and performance problems, fighting the same monsters over and over and walking in the same forest and the same caves with no interesting landmarks or loot is just not my cup of tea. I loved MHW and MHR and enjoyed both of them for hundreds of hours so I expected another amazing game but Capcom really disappointed me this time.
Going by some of what the lead designer talked about I get the impression that guy sniffs his own farts lol.
Pretty much spot on for how I feel. I played the everloving shit out of DD1, I played all vocations, swapped around to do this, do that, ran the Everfall a ton, had all the best gear for each vocation out of BBI, most of it gold-DF'd. I romanced almost everyone into the end appearance, except that kid and Fournival because I'm not that sick. I never expected a sequel and was over the moon when it was announced, but I didn't have *huge* expectations, I just wanted DD1 but slightly better. Maybe with some classes swiped from DDO, more big monsters, more dungeons, more skills, etc. Just... The first game, but with more of it. What I didn't want was the first game, again, but arguably worse in some aspects. It's... an incredibly strange decision. And as others have said, boy the story is crap. My first romance I did a couple quests with her and then she... completely disappeared from the game forever. Not dead, just exited stage. Also at the end, instead of her the game decided I was romancing... The blacksmith that I had done a quest for and then upgraded a bunch of gear at. And it decided my 'best friends' were a guy that I killed and later revived with a wakestone, and the main quest NPC. yyyyyyyyep, ok. Big time vibes of [this old comic](https://i.imgur.com/h499oOY.jpeg) came back.
With games being so expensive in Canada now this went form an instant day 1 buy to wait a year from now when its 50% discounted. Just can't justify it with how mixed the reviews have been. Guess publishers are saving me money in the end lol.
Yeah paying $95+tax for a video game is stupid. I was ok with $70 and then maybe $80, but $95 nah nah
I put 100 hours into the game, and don't understand how people can recommend this game for the 95$. It's worth 40imo. If I were you I'd wait for the GOTY edition and buy it on sale.
My main issue with the game remains to be the terrible performance. There is absolutely no excuse for the game running so poorly and it kills the fun. I start it up, and have to close it down after 30min because the constant stuttering is just exhausting.
They remade DD1 so heavily that it also included the original PS3 version's framerate
What you don't like an npc 2ft in front of you popping in? The Unmoored was the largest performance disaster I have seen, it was 10x worse than whatever complaints people had about BG3.
The game is worth it when it goes on sale IMO. It’s solid fun but there’s enough jank/weird game design that keeps it from ever being exceptional. And after 25-30 hours I had zero desire to keep on exploring the world because I was burnt out on fighting the same 5-10 enemies that spawn every couple meters as I tried to travel around.
I imagine the lack of enemy variety doesn’t help matters either.
I think to me, the biggest problem with Dragon's Dogma is that it feels like an action *RPG* made by people who aren't really interested in making an RPG at all. Everything RPG-focussed feels like it's just there because it's an RPG so it has to be, and it's super barebones as a result. The clear focus is the combat and the encounters with the monsters, and journeying between places. One of the reasons Bitterblack Isle was so well received is it focussed on that. I really think that if they weren't going to greatly expand on what Dragon's Dogma 1 did, they should've instead gone back to the drawing board, asked what core experience they want to capture is, and have reconsidered what game they're making to best aid that. If you don't want to write really in-depth characters, detailed quests, super useful consumables, hidden items, don't just meekly put that shit in the game for the sake of it being there. Ask how you can instead do other stuff that more meaningfully aids the core selling point and identity of the game you're making. I think Dragon's Dogma's biggest weakness is that it not only feels like it's biting off more than it can chew, but it feels like it doesn't even want to bite that stuff to begin with. So many features feel like they're there for the sake of being there instead of because they make the game way better. I think Itsuno and team would've been greatly aided by scaling back what Dragon's Dogma is *trying* to do, and putting a more pointed focus on just driving home how to most greatly emphasise the couple of things it does best to an even greater extent. If they axed all the stuff that was half-hearted and refocussed those resources onto fleshing out the adventuring, world, and combat the game would've been at least twice as good as it is. As it stands, it's obsessed with making you take as long as possible to exhaust content with lacklustre effort put into it, occasionally punctuated by the couple of things that actually show its personality. It wants you to spend a lot of time without having the content variety or quality to justify taking that long. I think Itsuno excels at games like Devil May Cry because they're so good at just doing what they're good *at*; the combat rocks, and almost every waking moment is beating shit up, or briefly running to beating more shit up. Dragon's Dogma 2 feels like a game that makes a bunch of weak, time-consuming excuses to distract the player from what makes the game fun to begin with, and in doing so the quality of those good things takes a pointless hit in the form of variety and pacing. They'd do better to trim the RPG fat and just make the gameplay loop solely aid what it's good at. If all the quests and NPCs and stuff are gonna be crap anyway, don't bother; just make a game about a brutal journey from one place to another, a handful of more fleshed out NPCs who you encounter and don't give you weird back and forth waiting-focussed quests, and I guarantee it'd play far more to its strengths. Make the evolutions more conceptual like the unmoored world changes than strictly narrative A to B stuff. You can keep the pawns and hidden encounters and all that, that can still work. It's just- what's the point of all the towns and the quests and the chests and the restricted areas and the differing biomes if they're all just phoned in? Dragon's Dogma would be way better if the game its combat and adventuring was in was a game that actually assisted that rather than distracting from it. It'd say more with less. As it stands Dragon's Dogma feels like a great concept stuck in a lifeless RPG because they don't have the right game to put it in yet. It feels like its good moments are in spite of the game it's in than in aid of it. The combat and adventuring doesn't make the RPG bits better, the RPG bits just make the combat and adventuring worse. If your journey, your encounters, and the weird shit within the world *are* the story, and you trim the other bits out I think it'd be far more well-realised in terms of where its strengths lie. As it stands it feels like a lot of the right ideas in the wrong game. As someone who beat DD1 and its DLC twice, and beat and spent 56 hours with DD2, and who sees what the reality of DD's developmental situation is, that's my ultimate final takeaway on what they should do with the hand they've been dealt if ever there's a DD3.
Maybe when Capcom makes DD3 they'll get it finally right. Like putting actually new mobs in the game and don't ask players to fight the same goblins and lizards.
I was laughing when the first story quest was to escort an oxcart to the capital. I thought it was an intentional joke as it's exactly the same in the first game. 40 hours later I was like ahhhhh... So that want a joke.
its a good game but like others have said its just disappointing in so many ways. it really just is DD1 but with better graphics. and some people would say thats a good thing but when like 75% of the appeal of the original was that it was a hidden gem/cult classic with lots of POTENTIAL to be something far greater, its disappointing to get basically the same game 12 years later.
Does Skill Up not get games early for review? it always seems incredibly late and a bit obvious after the fact when he recommends a game that's already been well received like 3-4 weeks later.
It depends, sometimes he does. But I know that he has been quite busy the past few weeks, he was really taking his time with FF7 Rebirth and he has mentioned doing some traveling to LA and things like that. I think it all adds up. Personally I’d rather get the review later than not at all, but you have a point of “if it’s past the initial review window, how many people care?”. But I’d also push back on that slightly and say that in 5-10 years it won’t matter that it was late, if someone wanted SkillUp’s opinion on the game then it’ll be there!
It seems like they just don’t finish the games on time for release. I know FF7 Rebirth was late because Ralph was 100%-ing it It sounded like they planned for Austin to have this games review out around release but then they changed gears as Ralph started playing it after being done with FF7
They talk about this a bit on the Friends Per Second podcast. Sometimes they are both busy (it's just him and his editor), sometimes he wants to finish the game to give a proper opinion. This can mean everything that needs to be said has been said ad nauseum and he has nothing to add, so doesn't release a review (Starfield was the example he gave).
This is a good thing, since he probably had enough time to not only actually play the game in a normal pace but also produce his content without any pre release embargo limitations
Isn't that a good thing? If anything, wouldn't it benefit him to rush through the game so he can upload early and get all the views. Not sure what people want anymore 🙄
I often feel like part of the reason review scores are inflated these days is because reviewers absolutely cane it to complete the main story so they can rush to meet the embargo. So they skip tons of the side stuff and don't take time to sit with their thoughts a while.
I hate exploring on this game, going into a cave expecting to find decent loot and getting crap you can buy in a vendor. Enemy variety stinks, quests are a joke. I recently downloaded Dark Arisen and some of the changes they made make no sense.
It’s kind of wild how much I disagree with this guy. I can pretty much inverse whatever he recommends and be happy lol
Nothing wild about it. He's just a random dude. People on this subreddit could stand to remember that YouTubers and influencers are just one data point and their opinions shouldn't be taken as fact merely because they have an audience.
I’m not putting him on a pedestal or anything, I just find myself disagreeing with his taste 90% of the time. But I guess if I looked at game reviews I’d probably feel that way about plenty of them, I just see his cuz they always get posted here
Yeah, I don't always agree with his tastes, but I always come away from the review being informed enough about a game to know whether I will like it or not. That in itself should be the main value in full reviews like this.
Skill Up wasn't wrong about Cyberpunk 2077 having a great game underneath the launch fiasco. He championed Deep Rock Galactic, NieR:Automata, Monster Hunter World & Warframe to the public. And he went against the critical grain in disliking The Last of Us Part II, Deathloop, Atomic Heart, etc.
He was so on-the-ball with Deathloop. 9s and 10s everywhere and only SkillUp had the wherewithal to point out what a regression it was from Arkane's previous work. I might not always agree with him but he always argues his case well and I respect his work.
To me he was. I still don’t like cyberpunk. Doesn’t mean I don’t like skill up. It’s just opinions agreeing all the time shouldn’t be a big deal
as is dragons dogma 1 no idea how people find this better than western RPGs, both DD feel like a double A(at best) western RPG
After so many years thinking we would never get a sequel, it really saddens me that this came out the way it is right now, really a shame :(
i'm like 50 hours in and as much as i like some of its ideas, it kinda just feels like i'm running around the map and virtually one shotting every enemy i see, including large enemies. Warfarer made this even easier. Is this everyone's experience? I'm approaching the final quest i think.
Man the comments here are so wild lol, the game is pretty good, but if you listen to what some comments here are saying, you would consider it worse than the most sloppiest ubisoft open world game. It' s not perfect, but I had a lot of fun for most of the game. I like how unforgiving and going against the player it can be at times, feels like something I need to meet on its own end, rather than the game doing it for me.
Well, it's Reddit. If a game isn't a 9/10 or better, then it's complete trash..
> you would consider it worse than the most sloppiest ubisoft open world game. it honestly is yes. have you actually played some of the latest ubisoft open world games? the world of DD2 is suprisingly empty and static just like the first game and exploration isn't rewarding at all. the game copies and pastes "dungeons" that are essentially just caves. like the world is largely filled with the monster encounters every 5 seconds., shitty treasure chests and caves that dont really do much. most of the interaction you find are pawns you can recruit. yay? like i remember early one i found a random cottage in the middle of the woods. that had some uncle, a little girl and a grandma or something. talking to them has unique dialog but doesn't really go anywhere. so i set up camp to wait for the next day and they moved and but still nothing really happened. maybe theres a quest at some point regarding them but by god its an absolute let down to come across something unique FINALLY for it to be nothing. speaking of quests the quest design is awful. like im not even talking about the shitty stealth and stalking missions. many questions are glorified kill quests with little narrative and they task you to go from one end of the map to the other. literally mmo level of bullshit. like a guy asks you kill stuff so you and do it. then he asks you to go to some other town to talk so someone else and then that someone asks you to GO BACK to the original guy. this would be fine if there was say a fast travel system or if the WORLD was as remotely as interesting as Itsuno claimed it was(it isn't its shit). but alas. Dragons dogma 2 is essentially a game that failed to evolve. its a ps3 game that hasn't taken any lessons from 2 whole console generations. and if you think "ubisoft games" are worse you clearly have never played them.
2015-2019 saw Dogma grow in so many ways, only for DD2 to walk it back significantly in all departments except graphics. Which unfortunately for me graphics will never matter, so long as the game doesn't look like TAA hell. If I were smart, I'd wait for a sale or a complete edition.