Dragon’s Dogma 2 on Steam (steampowered.com)
I had only played a few hours into the game when I wrote this review. I’ve written my thoughts after 27.7 hours as a section further down.
This is an action RPG, open world game. You play a third-person perspective. It is single player, but it does have an online component. You can have a three additional NPC characters as part of your party who fight and play alongside of you.
After only a few hours into the game my impression is decent. As time progressed, I started to see the masterpiece this game was. This leads me to believe that this game is a hidden gem. One that offers far more than appears.
You get to have three NPC characters as part of you party. These characters are called pawns. You have one primary pawn that is always to be at your side. This primary pawn gains experience and levels with you.
From the first moments and as you adventure you come across other pawns, created by other players or standard ones, that you can hire alongside of you using a special currency. These additional pawns do not increase in level as you play. You have to hire new ones as you go that are higher in level.
I like this mechanic. For one you get a party member that you can grow attached to. This primary pawn you create when you first start your adventure. At the same time, these other support pawns are manifestations of other player’s primary pawn and I like how it adds some flavor to the game.
I think I know why they created the system the way they did. I believe that simply there are a lot of choices one could make in the progression of a character, so they decided to let people create the pawns. I believe it is important to note that you upgrade and equip your pawns the same way you do yourself. You are considered a pawn too if I understand correctly – but in your world you are the arisen. This makes the whole mechanic singular and then the networked component of being able to grab someone else’s pawn and include them on your adventure is fun.
You find these support pawns wandering the roads and as you pass by them, they open dialog with you for which you can view their stats, class, and such forth. I find this game mechanic fun and interesting.
I also like how they integrated the experience of death into the story. The whole fact that your pawns can die in the game and come back to life is woven into the story fabric. The funny thing is that even though you are a pawn yourself I’ve yet to encounter a situation where I actually die and come back. The game forces me to load from a save when my character dies. However, my primary pawn can be brought back using special stones and I believe the support pawns can be revived too – I’ve just yet to lose one.
The map is sizable but not insurmountable. I can’t quite comment on fully yet as I have not explored a lot of it. There are caves, towns, forests, destroyable bridges, and various places of interest. The usual I would describe it. The map isn’t so big you can’t walk it in a short amount of time and what makes travel time consuming is mostly the encounters along the way with things you have to fight. Below is an image of the map and the areas I have discovered so far.
After I wrote this, I realized I cut off a large part of the map especially to the west. I need to update the map image above.
I’m taking a guess about how long the run is that I detailed on the map. I’d need to actually time it. It might be more like 10 minutes. I was having to fight thing along the way so it seemed like I could have run it in 3 but when thinking about it a second time I feel like I might have estimated the time wrong.
You get to fight some large beasts. There are normal sized monsters/mobs and then like in the image above there are large ones. I find the mechanic interesting because the large ones can be mounted or even grappled and pushed over. Once down on the ground one can mount them for higher damage attacks.
A lot of these large creatures guard the roads in the early game which makes adventuring dangerous, but they become killable as you progress in level. I found I had to evade and dodge a few of them when traveling to early quests.
I found it funny and entertaining that your pawns will talk during the travels. They speak about gossip in the towns, things you are doing, and there is obviously a lot of little work that went into creating this part of the experience. It makes the world feel less lonely.
The pawns also fetch items on the ground and open chests. They can lead you to quests if they know where the location or person of interest is. Some are even specialized and can combine ingredients. I even saw some pawns who are aphroditic and are apparently quiet during the journey.
The exact composition of a pawn is difficult to remember. It involves their profession, equipment, level, specialization, and a few other variables.
One thing that bothers me is that the user interface is a bit clunky. Some menu actions are a step convoluted in such that you might have to make two clicks to exit a menu for example and it isn’t obvious. It isn’t the worst experience by far and I might not even call it bad but rather it dulls the polish on the game.
I’d say having a bad user interface makes the game look like crap especially early on when you have not had a chance to really see what it offers. I’d imagine new players are turned off and might even refund or quit before the game really opens up.
I liked the steak video when you stop at a camp and cook food. It really caught my attention because I believed they used real video footage of a steak being cooked. Ha, what a perfect way to pair some real footage with a game I thought. I feel like this was one of the highlights of playing the game because I didn’t expect it. It gave me a warm hungry feeling!
I found it a little difficult to know where the pawn is leading me for a quest sometimes. I can hear them say something but at times it can be difficult to comprehend. One of the biggest clues is when one of the others proclaims how it this journey is going to be far. The same happens when the pawns talk about a chest, statue, or object nearby. I’m sort of left looking all over the place trying to figure out where it is.
It was also refreshing to hear your primary pawn talk about its visit to another world. I believe this is when someone hires your primary pawn as one of their support pawns in their own world. This seems to happen after resting. There is a small log of events and a story of sorts about what happened. I found this game mechanic refreshing because I’ve never quite seen it elsewhere.
When pawns talk about traversing worlds they mean the worlds of other real players. It took me a bit to figure this out. I knew it was part of the story but early on I didn’t realize it actually mean the pawn was playing as someone’s follower. I find this really great and especially such that it is woven into the game story itself.
On one journey, I decided to take the cart and ride to one of the major cities instead of walk. The way it ended up was the cart got ambushed during the night by an ogre and some goblins. I felled them. Apparently, the escort of guards that go along with the cart wasn’t enough. They mostly died and I ended up going the rest of the way on foot. Luckily, I didn’t have too far to go.
There isn’t any swimming as far as I can tell. I forget the way the story describes the mechanic but there is something in the water – deep water at least. It grabs hold of you and you die. Early in the story your very first follow falls victim to this after being dropped by the dying griffin.
The graphics are fine. I can’t say if they use the latest technologies and shader tricks but from what I’ve seen it is very pleasing to the eye. They even include NVidia’s RTX which adds much more realistic lighting to the outdoor scenes. I have no complains or critics over the graphics.
I also didn’t get to enjoy the game in its full graphical glory because I had to play on NVidia’s Geforce Now. The game worked great on their systems. I felt just like I was playing it locally, but I know from experience you get a bit more crispness from a local session. I have a capable system with an RTX 3090 but I have a neighbor who is a sociopath and likes to generate RF signals that confuse the card and shutdown my system. So, thanks to NVidia I was still able to play!
The audio was fine. So far, all the text has a voice over done for it. They apparently even include voice overs in multiple voices because each of my characters appears to be able to make all the usual comments the others do each in their own tone and mannerism.
I’d say in conclusion the game is a hidden gem covered in a clunky UI.
After 27.7 Hours
I’m still playing the game. The way your pawns talk about the adventure and make commentary has turned out to be a really great feature. It makes the game feel more alive, less dead, and less lonely.
The story can be a bit rough, but it does exist which is great. There is this cohesive, central plot that makes sense and I appreciate that in a game. To me it sort of feels like some of quests were rushed or at least the quest designer couldn’t really do what they wanted perhaps from limitations in time or the game engine itself. I understand games are under a budget, so my mind’s creativity helps smooth the roughness at times.
One thing that bothers me is that I wish there was more monster variation. I must say that I have not uncovered the entire map and I’m not even sure how far I am into the game but I’m noticing I’m still fighting some of the same kinds of things. They’ve added some lava/heat aspect which is nice I think but you know I’m still seeing the same old lizards, wolves, and ogress.
They seem to have modified some of the monster meshes and changed them a bit. For example, some of the ogress now have armor around their legs so you have to climb up on them to do good damage. I like this but as I said before it would be nice if they had some new creatures out and about.
I’m a bit bored of the weapon upgrade mechanic and I feel like I’ve hit the game play loop of new area, struggle through a few levels, buy some new weapons, upgrade the weapons, and so forth. At the same time what can you expect? It isn’t bad. I’ve just experienced it in other games. Now, if this game was one of your first you might find it more exciting to play so don’t let me make it sound bad.