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Dragon’s Dogma 2 - The Good and the Bad

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is the most anticipated RPG to ever exist. While it is appealing to most audiences, some have keen eyes over the bad reviews of the game. So, is Dragon’s Dogma 2 Good or Bad? Let’s get into this discussion below.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 Score, Review and Rating

The Metacritic Score for Dragon’s Dogma 2 is around 87, and from OpenCritic it got a huge score of around 89, which is impressive. But, on Steam, Dragon’s Dogma 2 got 6/10 reviews from 47k players. So, this confuses players as to what the actual review here is.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 Performance on Console and PC

The Xbox Series X seems to be the big loser of the bunch when it comes to performance, with some Fextralife remarking that it hovers in the 30 range of FPS or so.

PS5 sees strong performance of 40 to 50 FPS, which might be bolstered with the PS5 Pro coming out later this year. 

PC reigns supreme of course, but that is going to come down to hardware and your mileage may vary. The majority of reviews are on PC and PS5 with only a handful on Xbox and even those seem to come from Xbox exclusive outlets so they feel a bit biased without remarking much on the performance.

So just know that going in, Xbox players you might deal with fewer frames, but it ultimately seems to be something that sucks but isn't game-breaking from what I've read. 

Outside of that, the game is getting glowing reviews about how much of a throwback style of game this is. There's no hand-holding and it's a pick-your-own-adventure style of game.

Dragon’s Dogma 1 vs Dragon’s Dogma 2Dragon’s Dogma 1 vs Dragon’s Dogma 2

 

Do you want to go into that dungeon or would you rather complete the quest you're on? The choice is yours. 

The improvements upon the first game's vocation systems are marked and greatly needed, allowing you to easily switch vocations and have your stat scaling locked to that vocation. 

Meaning, that if your character is level 12, swapping between vocations allows your stats to match a level 12 version of said vocation.

Because your vocations have ranks, your character has a level. Big negatives come down to clunky quest design, forcing you to have to do a lot of searching for where quest objectives are. 

Spotty UI that, while improved upon the first game, might still snag here and there.

This will take some getting used to. Also, a lot of reviews remark that the early game can seem very flat or boring. And we see that as a bit of a positive because this game is not going to bend to you.

So you need to learn how the systems work and the early game being slower to introduce new concepts might be better while you work within things like a punishing save system or an NPC dialogue system that will force you to pay attention to what they need versus skipping what they say to check a quest log layer. 

This all boils down to what seems like an intoxicating adventure with a few blemishes that will either turn you away completely if you're expecting a Soulsborne game or enrapture you if you're looking for another open-world engrossing RPG where you set the pace for the type of adventure you want. But that's the breakdown of everything.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - The Good

The Good in Dragon's Dogma 2

From Director and Kotaku

It's truly an open-world experience where the game is geared more towards exploration than the linear experience of say the Souls-like series or many other conventional RPGs at the time. 

And the game director deliberately made the game this way. He wanted it to feel like a game that was very alive and open and dynamic.

And he wanted it to have this online system that is not necessarily co-op, but it's a little bit different. 

Kotaku made a really interesting kind of foray at the beginning of their review, talking about how they approached the pawn system for this game and how it was essentially called BBS RPG, a reference to bulletin board systems, which is kind of a reference to the way that the World Wide Web used to operate. 

And Kotaku says, in essence, he wanted to bottle the strange murky sensation of early internet forum browsing of forging relationships with people whom you can only perceive as text on a screen.

This is kind of the same thing we get from the Souls series when it comes to the little remarks that are left with the game in the ground. And that comes to life with your pawn. 

The Pawn Mechanics

The pawn mechanics have been streamlined and made a lot better here in Dragon's Dogma 2. Their ability to kind of bring you items or express their displeasure or pleasure with their own arisen is a huge communal draw to the game outside of the actual co-op ability.

One of the biggest aspects of the pawn is their ability to navigate you towards quest objectives or things discovered in another player's world, either your pawn and theirs or their pawn and yours. 

In Dragon's Dogma 1, they would talk amongst themselves and respond, but in Dragon's Dogma 2, their personalities shine based on their experiences. 

In Dragon's Dogma 2, there's a far greater emphasis on them conversing amongst themselves, enhancing the illusion and the tension even further.

This is just something that we think is one of the biggest draws to the game and how you're going to create the relationships with you and your pawn. 

And through a lot of these reviews, people have said, the story might not have gripped me as hard as my relationship with my pawn or some of the other pawns or the other reviewers. That's kind of a cool and endearing way to play the game where the story's there.

But the relationship in the game that we play, the adventure we go through and the turmoil that your pawn and we kind of undertake is the real narrative.

And we think that's a really fun thing to kind of go through. And the pawns then kind of lean into a quest system. The quest system is very engaging and fun.

The pawn system creates a ton of amazing immersion within it because it points you in the direction of where to go. 

The tricky thing, though, will be how you recall the information that you either get from the NPC in the form of requests or from your pawn pointing you in different directions.

And maybe you have to stop midway through something because you have a real-life thing to do. Then you come back. But unless they're specifically asking you for help, you'll have to remember the information yourself.

That's a big part of what we have seen mirrored across a lot of these reviews saying that you kind of have to pay attention when you jump into playing the game. 

Quest Log and Information

That is a big thing that we think a lot of it will be a comfort zone-breaking thing for some people because they're used to just checking a quest log, pressing A through the dialogue as fast as they can, and then just going and finding the thing, getting and retrieving it. 

Whereas the game is more of an organic system wherein you go to do a main quest and you find five or six other little requests along the way that send you into a rabbit hole of doing things completely off the main path.

And if you're looking at that as a detractor, we would encourage you to kind of look at it as a way to experience the game in all of its wealth rather than simply going on a linear path. That's kind of what the game's trying to get you to do. A big addition to Dragon's Dogma 2 is camping.

Camping

You do camp in the first one, but not in the way that you do here. It's one of the best inclusions of the game as it allows for on-the-fly swapping of skills, augmentations, and other ways to gear out characters before a big fight or next dungeon because you're going to be spending a lot of time in between these town visits fighting big monsters. 

If you've kitted yourself out a very specific way and you go into another fight and you just don't have the kit to deal with it, camping is a way that you can deal with it rather than saying, okay, the difficulty of this has just been cranked up because I'm not kitted out for it.

Combat and Skill

That then brings us into combat. Combat itself is on a sliding scale, meaning it will be a bit easier in the beginning, but gradually gets harder as more elements are added in like conditions and elemental damage types to go from one to multi-dimensional fights where you're treating several ailments while also trying to lean into a monster's weaknesses. The game is not based purely on skill like say Dark Souls.

It's more about knowledge of what you're encountering and preparing yourself via items and stores, setting up your pawns, selecting augments for your character, or swapping vocations to best suit the objective. 

Fetcher Life remarked that the game plays very similar to a tabletop or pen-and-paper RPG where you've set yourself up for the big gnoll cave and because you've set yourself up so well for the gnoll cave, it wasn't that hard. 

But had you not done the prep and just kind of gone into a blind, the gnolls were going to bend over and spank you.

Another reviewer put, navigating Dragon's Dogma 2 takes effort more than it takes skill. The game applies an intuitive and consistent logic to its world, eases you into understanding it, and then sets you free, trusting that when you do encounter resistance, you'll rise to the occasion. 

And that's a really good kind of siren song way to describe a lot of what you're going to encounter in this game.

If you played the first one and you sunk hours and hours into the first one, you're going to know that that's the way you approach this game. 

But like said before in our Dragon’s Dogma 2, the Good and Bad Review, a lot of people are going to approach this game from a Soulsborne way and it's just not going to be that way. And the game will not bend to you.

You're going to have to bend to it. That kind of goes into the bad section we'll talk about later. But there is a kind of pure randomness to the stuff that you will encounter in your playthrough that your friends won't or maybe that they will.

And that's reflected in the way that you unconventionally navigate through the game world compared to set routes from point A to point B, like a more linear RPG.

Vocation System

Now on top of all this, we have our vocation system. You can swap between vocations very fluidly and easily, allowing you to play a new vocation at any point with stats that will match your character level as these are now separate from your vocation ranks.

Before in Dragon's Dogma 1, you would get stats off of leveling up your vocations or leveling up as a vocation. Now you level up a character and your vocation will give you stats based on your level. Swapping vocations swaps those stats.

So you're always properly set up stat-wise. Changing vocations is breezy and automatically reallocates stats. So it's confirmed and awesome and beautiful.

But passive skills are a big portion of vocations and passive skills are called augments that are unlocked via one vocation and they are skills that can be transferred to another vocation. 

So this allows you to kind of customize your approach to say maybe playing a mage after syncing hours and ranks into a fighter. You can pull some of those augmentations across to make for a tankier mage or a different mage that leans into different directions.

End Game and Game Plus

But the game ultimately, to kind of come to the end of this section, the game doesn't end when the story ends.

There's a lot of hunting to be done in the post-game where you experience new currencies and ways to get items. You can hunt specific monsters to find new gear because it's crafted in town, kind of like Monster Hunter. 

So you get that as a post-game activity on your current save. A new game Plus exists and you can also jump into that direction with a new game plus exploring the game in a whole different way.

We think that's awesome, and enchanting because the game world is massive. Another big kind of takeaway when it comes to the graphics and the approach of the game is it has good art direction.

Good art direction, amazing armor design, and great sound design. The soundtrack is not as amazing as the first one, but it still scratches the same kind of itch as the first one.

Ultimately, when it comes to time played and how long you can play the game, more or less, it's 50 or so hours for the main story with well over a hundred hours plus across side quests and end-game content. 

So that is all the good things about Dragon’s Dogma 2. What about the bad things? Let's discuss it below.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 - The Bad

The Bad in Dragon's Dogma 2

Side Quests

The side quest directions are quite vague. So it does require a bit more concentration when it comes to picking up quests because the quest log is very vague. Also, the poor save system has been cited by some reviews as being the cause of replay chunks of time lost after forgetting to save.

And what that means is or what the kind of parse that out further for you, you have two saves. The game has an auto save and then you will save manually. 

Auto Save

That autosave will trigger when you go to do long rests and stuff like that, but it's not necessarily very frequent.

The autosaves are very few and far between and more in like kind of pivotal times that change the state of the world or whatever it is versus your manual saves or you've done them yourself. 

Early Game

Another big portion, and I'm going to bring this all together with some quotes, but another big portion is that early portions of the game can feel repetitive as there are, you know, only three or four monster types that you'll encounter in mass before you hit a few of the rare larger creatures. And that might be at nighttime, which is an entirely different time of play.

It's pitch black. Monsters are way harder. It's a whole different ballpark, ballgame, ballfield.

This falls to the wayside, though, as you move into harder portions of the game, but it can make exploration tedious as you'll be dealing with those weaker monsters without a lot of great return. 

You're not going to get great loot. And some quotes to kind of mirror that here is what we don't enjoy as much is not a very fun early game, terrible save system, and poor mission direction.

UI, Graphics, and Performance

Another big detractor here is the UI. It does have a good deal of clunk to it still. And nothing as egregious as the first one, but you will encounter issues navigating certain things here and there.

And that has been cited by some people, but they've overall said that it's a much stronger step in a better direction.

The graphics though, overall, are not going to break the bank, and they are not over-the-top amazing. The game looks good, according to most reviewers, but not that bleeding edge of needing the top-tier graphics card. A lot of unique landscape choices, but ultimately nothing wild.

The graphical wows come from particle effects in your abilities and less from the actual game world. So more your characters jumping around and doing their abilities and less the actual world going is stunning.

Its game design feels unpalatable old school in some ways. And it's not quite as instantly fun as other emergent games. And another one here, frame rate drops are frequent in cinematic cutscenes and facial animation and cinematic framing is terrible when conversations take place in the world.

It is made worse when the game starts lagging due to an overload of visual effects on the screen. So the things that might look the best are going to be the things that are going to hinder your performance, which is what we're going to talk about now.

Because performance on the Xbox is the lowest performer on the list with the PlayStation hovering around 40 to 50 FPS and the PC being king. But this is going to go down to your hardware. As we mentioned before in our Dragon’s Dogma 2 the Good and the Bad review, we can argue that if you don't have a 2080 graphics card or better, you're probably going to have some good hiccups here.

For the 10xx, you could probably still just turn down a lot of the graphics and be just fine, but we think you're probably going to need a 20 series or higher. And Dragon's Dogma 2 is more of an experience than a game to kind of simply beat.

And what we mean by that is that the game has several things that you have to do. Quests, little side forays, etc. And you'll need to adapt your comfort zone for facing this stuff.

Quests will fail if it's taken too long. Characters will die if not healed in time. Opportunities will be missed if sidelined.

So while that might seem like you'll have anxiety racing to do everything, it's more of a life lesson of not taking on too much of one thing at a time with this game because it's going to punish you. 

Story

There's even a remark here. Ultimately, Dragon's Dogma 2 is more about the stories players make for themselves while on a journey rather than the one Capcom handcrafted for them.

That's really what you should be taking a look at with this game you are creating this narrative for yourself, for your pawns, and jumping into it. And that's not a bad thing, but it is something to be wary of or at least know about. This story may not capture you like Baldur's Gate. Baldur's Gate is a story of stories.

It is a game that's going to tell you the narrative of everyone you interact with and it's going to be very interesting and it's going to have so much meat to it. 

Whereas Dragon's Dogma 2 is more about you being an individual in a world and that world going on with or without you. It doesn't matter.

You have to lean into the directions you want to lean in and pull out the fun you want to pull out. That's not to say that it's going to be bland, but you didn't like playing Skyrim because the story was amazing at first blush. 

So if you're not willing to jump into a game and not feel like you're into it immediately, then this is probably not going to be the game for you. 

The systems are too punishing and they're three, five hours into it and they're just going to do a return. So creating a good expectation for yourself is the most crucial thing about this game. 

Conclusion

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is an overall great game, an improvement over the previous Dragon’s Dogma 1, but it isn’t well deserved for the hype it got. On Steam it has an overall negative review, but some sites, and reviews showcase it to be an amazing RPG. When comparing it with other similar games like Baldur’s Gate 3, there are some missing points like story, build-up, and graphics, but overall Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a good step-up from the previous game.

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