Wolves hunt in packs! Dragon's Dogma 2 is finally real

[Oathbreaker]

This video is mostly a retrospective of work on the original game and Dark Arisen, there's some interesting stuff in there. But they did close it out with the announcement that it's in development so I'M SUPER HYPE.

It'll be interesting to see what improvements they make, how the pawn system will be implemented (and if they'll fix the game-crashing bugs that happen with modded equipment loading in from other pawns), IF WE GET A MOUNT, and what the new explorable world will be like. Dark Arisen's content and QoL changes showed that they learned a lot just from the vanilla game and feedback for it. Hopefully they include some weirder monster designs too.

I've never really looked at what kind of stuff the MMO had in it to see how they iterated on the game going forward from Dark Arisen so I'm extremely excited to see how this turns out. I've bought this game more times than any other just so I can play it on anything. Maybe it's time for me to go back to my vanilla 360 version to finish the game on that character.

 

[estragon]

I wonder whether or not they'll be able to recapture the magic, but I'm glad they're getting the chance to try.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

I was a day one fan of Dragon's Dogma. I'm glad that its fandom and general appreciation has swelled to the degree that it merits a real sequel.

 

[Peklo]

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All I really wanted from D-Dog the sequel was for it to be as charmingly hokey and aesthetically straightlaced as before, and this seems prime to deliver just that--only with the additional benefit of furries, further solidifying the War-Zard nods.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

I'm ready

 

[Fyonn]

Alright, feel free to ignore me, I know I'm the outlier here, that everyone absolutely loves Dragon's Dogma.

Will they put healing items on a button?
For classes with mutually exclusive weapon types (i.e. Mystic Knights), will there be a way to rapidly change equipment?
Will there be an advanced class that can wield two-handed weapons?
Will they signal what enemies are too strong for you without having to judge based on the damage you're taking/dealing?
Will combat be balanced so that player skill can be substituted for bigger numbers without it leading to perfectly fighting five normal guys for ten minutes straight?

These are the things I would need to see addressed to care about a Dragon's Dogma 2. I would like to enjoy a Dragon's Dogma. They ostensibly should appeal to me. I am hopeful these things will be addressed because, given what I'm seeing in this trailer, I can't imagine what else could be new. That is a "yep that's Dragon's Dogma, alright"-ass trailer.

 

[Oathbreaker]

On combat balance, early in the game honestly it's anyone's guess. If they stick to the original or even what I've seen of what the Online game was, it'll probably still be rough going against things stronger than a goblin or random bandit until you start getting properly equipped. I kind of just expect a similar difficulty curve for most of the main story. I doubt they'll signal enemy strength unless something about their philosophy has changed because they wanted to have strong things just around so you can run into it and potentially decide running away is the best decision more... naturally? immersively? than a UI marker. Pawn chatter suggesting to run away if you get severely hurt was supposed to sort of be that. I just hope they've got a lot more monster designs to throw around and the way they populate the world is a little less "in this part of the map all the enemies are stronger versions of their counterparts near the main hub." That was easily the least interesting part for me (though I'm a weirdo that really loves the bandits blocking the road to Witchwood being way stronger because they're part of an organized force occupying a nearby fort).

I'm not sure how their class design will end up because the Online game had some pretty wild additions like Alchemist which was not unlike being from the Armstrong family of FMA. I really hope they add more wild options like that. Definitely want them to widen equipment selection for sure though, and hopefully even if there isn't a rapid equipment changing option the menus will at least be less cumbersome. Healing items on a button HAS to be a thing though, right? We can have like one or two fewer pawn commands for that and quick-swapping weapons I think (spamming follow was just a bad idea and having TWO different buttons and functions for "assist me" was weird as heck).

I have the same general hopes as Peklo though. The trailer definitely makes me confident that it'll have the same good feels I loved so much about the original, maybe with some actually fully realized narrative and world design as a treat.

 

[Fyonn]

The specific thing I think about with regards to signalling enemy strength is trying to go do the follow-up quest regarding your cousin? near the beginning of Dragon's Dogma. If you do this quest that sounds urgent as soon as you get it, you'll walk face-first into a group of regular bandits that far outclasses you.

That moment is Dragon's Dogma to me.

 

[Oathbreaker]

I expect the game will probably still have things LIKE that, but I think/hope they've realized that was too much for most people so early. That was the group I weirdly love being so strong but no doubt it was not an ideal spot to put them and then assign an early miss-able quest for one of the only important characters in the game to run right into them.

 

[Fyonn]

I mean, really it would be fine if they were visually different from regular bandits - have them wearing obviously better gear, etc. From what I've played of Dragon's Dogma, it's extremely clear it is a game with Lv5 Goblins and Lv20 Goblins, but the way you tell the difference is getting hit by one.

But it's not my intention to turn the Dragon's Dogma 2 thread into "Fyonn complains about Dragon's Dogma 1."

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

It’s funny you dislike that aspect of DD because it’s something I actually loved. Learning where you could and couldn’t go based on context clues, or learning the hard way. It’s part of DD’s charm. It was like an open world Dark Souls but a fair bit more forgiving in all the ways that mattered to me. The first group of bandits I fought whooped my ass like you said. I spent like an hour learning tactics and how to whittle away at their lives until beating them. And beating them felt like I’d done something incredible. But learning who you can and can’t fight becomes a game of its own. Don’t just jump into a fight because you’ll get your ass handed to you even if you are properly leveled. Save to be cautious. Approach carefully from afar. Test from a distance to see if you even do any damage worth a damn, and then have your escape route planned and haul ass if you need to. Battles in DD are just as much about strategy as they are about climbing on the back of a big monster and slashing franticly. DD awarded me the patience and tactics I like to approach games with. If they dumbed down the sequel in order to placate people who just want to rush in ignore a lot of the finer aspects of the game, I mean, I’ll get it, but it’ll be a shame.

 

[Fyonn]

It’s funny you dislike that aspect of DD because it’s something I actually loved. ... If they dumbed down the sequel in order to placate people who just want to rush in ignore a lot of the finer aspects of the game, I mean, I’ll get it, but it’ll be a shame.

When compared to From Software's games of the era, I think Dragon's Dogma is noticeably worse at communicating the threat any individual instance of an enemy poses. While partially the fault of the way the dev team decided to balance the game numerically, I think this is an understandable issue likely caused by time or budget limitations. Even if I understand it, the end result is an experience I don't enjoy. But the actual problem is that I'm clearly too dumb to understand why Dragon's Dogma is good, actually. 😞

More seriously, knock it off with this kind of comment. I assume - hope - you didn't mean it like that, but there are ways to say "I hope this aspect of a game I like remains" without insulting everyone who disagrees with you.

 

[Serephine]

I finished the first game by figuring out that you can heal spam your way through the it almost as hard as Okami and by buying progressively larger sticks and hitting monsters with them. It is an extreme vibes game but there's no need to dunk on how someone approaches it if it works one way or another.

 

[Peklo]

When the original game released in 2012, the stage hadn't really been set for the trajectory fantasy action RPGs would take for the following decade, because From itself hadn't really been acknowledged as the primary trendsetter and formula-establisher to emulate yet, with Dark Souls barely six months out in the wild. Dragon's Dogma even in that context felt idiosyncratic and unique, and has only grown even more so since, because it's one of the last major releases of this type that wasn't a me-too project informed deliberately or unconsciously by the cult favourite grown to industry leader; its creative origins are older and its pitch and development predate any such influence from being part of it. Itsuno's team drew from his own background in fighting and action games, they drew from Dungeons & Dragons through a simultaneously straightforward and novel interpretive lens that resulted in something as interesting as a source material and genre fusion as Capcom's own earlier beat 'em up duology. It is a totally different landscape now in the wider genre the game occupies, and it would've been so easy to anticipate it taking cues from the games that were its contemporaries and which continued their practical monopoly over it in the years since, but that doesn't seem to be the case: they have seemingly recognized that in the decade since, no one picked up on Dragon's Dogma's cues or followed its lead, so the floor is once again open for them to provide something outside of a by now well-codified norm through the specifics that mostly only this one game was intent to pursue.

I don't know whether it will ever be part of the series again past an initial marketing hook, but the game's incorporation of a B'z pop rock single as its theme song was another indication that tonally they were working on a very different wavelength to their peers, which I'm hoping carries over in some way. The first game might still have the best character creator in the genre, too, especially as far as body shapes.

 

[YangusKhan]

I mean, really it would be fine if they were visually different from regular bandits - have them wearing obviously better gear, etc. From what I've played of Dragon's Dogma, it's extremely clear it is a game with Lv5 Goblins and Lv20 Goblins, but the way you tell the difference is getting hit by one.

But it's not my intention to turn the Dragon's Dogma 2 thread into "Fyonn complains about Dragon's Dogma 1."

I've never played Dragon's Dogma, but this sounds an awful lot like Everquest-style MMOs, where the threat level of any given enemy on the overworld was somewhat nebulous and only conveyed to the player through non-overt means; I forget how Everquest itself handled it, but in FFXI, you would have to run an explicit command that would then tell you a phrase which translated roughly to how many levels above or below the monster was to you. Does Dragon's Dogma not have something like that at all?

 

[Oathbreaker]

I've never played Dragon's Dogma, but this sounds an awful lot like Everquest-style MMOs, where the threat level of any given enemy on the overworld was somewhat nebulous and only conveyed to the player through non-overt means; I forget how Everquest itself handled it, but in FFXI, you would have to run an explicit command that would then tell you a phrase which translated roughly to how many levels above or below the monster was to you. Does Dragon's Dogma not have something like that at all?

There's a little more visual cue-ing going on than is being implied but the specific group being focused on makes it VERY easy to miss that cue. It's the first group most people will run into with any such minor visual nuance and the number of total bandits you're likely to have fought prior ranges in the handful, bandits in particular have a variety of visuals regardless of which strength group they're in, and the strength difference itself between them and regular early-game bandits is more vast than anything else other than post-game and the Arisen DLC Bitterblack Isle enemies. It was honestly pretty mean to place that group where it is.

Otherwise the game sets out to give you a pretty good idea of how strong you can expect the big monsters to be because it forces you to fight three of them at their normal mid to late-game strength right away as samplers: a tutorial against a Chimera, a severely weakened cyclops, and the last with special encounter scripting to make it more of a setpiece that even has a cutscene to show you a fun little gimmick to fight them. And yeah, the big stuff does typically take minutes to fight until you're very deep into the game because the original pitch for Dragon's Dogma is what turned into Monster Hunter. Pawns if you don't turn their chatter down also sometimes comment about particularly strong enemies but they're not super reliable about commenting on that aspect, preferring to make comments like the thread title. But that's all in the original and it's worth hoping that they've made things a little easier to pick up on (and maybe? a little less repetitious with pawn comments) this go around.

But yeah overall I'm just super hyped that 2 looks like it's still going to be Dragon's Dogma because I need WAY more of it.