austin_walker

After 12 years of waiting, Dragon's Dogma 2 is finally here and, after 9 and a bit days of playing it, I've finished it! Last year, I replayed the original game via Steam and honestly I thought it was a bit of a mixed bag. Similarly, reception to DD2 has been a bit of a mixed bag too. This is fine - games shouldn't be made for everyone - but what's less fine is the opinion I've seen floating around the internet over the past week that DD2 "doesn't listen to any of the complaints about the original" or "it's basically just DD1 again".

Now, I understand that feelings towards games are entirely subjective, but I think this opinion is demonstrably wrong. It implies either they haven't actually played DD2, or that they played DD1 a long time ago and have forgotten the numerous problems it has. On the other hand, the problems the first game has are still very fresh in my head! So, I thought I'd do a little writeup of what I thought of DD2, specifically in comparison to what I didn't think worked in the original.

Needless to say there are spoilers below.

OBJECTIVELY BETTER

• One of my biggest problems with DD1 is the fact that it's not actually very good at being an open world game. Without wanting to repeat myself, the world isn't that large, but it's just large enough for it to feel very tedious getting around it. Most of the world is a largely flat, sparse field, so you usually end up trudging slowly to your destination as the crow flies. This is not the case in DD2! There are areas of the map that are wide open fields, but much of your time is spent in mountainous areas with tall rocks flanking the path either side, or in dense forests where straying from the path means wandering into areas of very low visibility. This is good! The environments guide you naturally to the optimal path through them, as well as forcing you to actually think about your route when travelling. The route you take can affect your progression, too; for instance, once you reach a certain point in the story, you’ll be given a permit to enter Battahl, the second major region of the game… but there are at least three different ways to get there earlier if you poke around enough.

• Also, trudging slowly around isn't your only option this time, because of oxcarts! They do not take you anywhere you want, but they will take you within walking distance of almost anything you'll need to visit. Plus, since you can be attacked, and the cart destroyed in the process, it isn't risk-free - my favourite sort of fast travel system!

• This emphasis on planning your trips also impacts side quests in interesting ways. Now, it’s the example that always gets brought up, but it’s for good reason - the quest where you need to save the boy from the wolves at the checkpoint town. You don’t actually get told where he is, and the quest is timed, but you’re never explicitly told exactly how long you’ve got. I got the quest near the end of the day, which meant I was presented with a tough choice - going during the night was more dangerous, since it was an unfamiliar area of the map and there are more enemies about at night, but I’d be more likely to get there in time. Waiting to go after sunrise would be safer, since there would be fewer enemies and I’d be more able to see threats in advance… but would there still be a boy to save? The game has quite a few moments like this, and I love when it tries to force your hand and make you think on your feet, especially since you can’t revert to an old save.

• There are actual settlements and towns this time! In DD1, you had Cassardis, Gran Soren and... that was it as far as towns went, which wasn't fantastic for making the world feel lived in. Here, you travel between two distinct, fleshed out settlements before even making it to Vernworth, the first big city! Not only does this make the world feel more ✨alive✨, it also means you can more easily swap vocations and skills (you could also swap vocations at various outposts in the first game, but these were far and few between.)

• Dragonforging equipment is substantially less of a faff than it was first time around. Instead of it being random chance whether any of your equipment would level up on killing a dragon, dragons now just drop crystals which you then use to dragonforge any max level equipment. Because of this, my pawn actually had fully upgraded equipment this time around! Hooray!

• My god it's a good looking game. Do I care that the framerate is wobbly? No, not really. The only time it really bothered me is whenever a sorcerer would do that tornado spell, because the game cannot handle that.

• You don't have to watch your character get rooted to the spot and fiddle with their lantern whenever you turn it on or off, nor do you have to enter your inventory to do this. A win all round.

• Quick item shortcuts! (yes I know recent ports of the original have this too)

• While there are lots of items with similar functions, there at least aren't a dozen different items with identical icons that do slightly different things cluttering your inventory all the time that you have to search through whenever you want to heal.

SUBJECTIVELY BETTER

• I actually don't mind the vocational changes this time around, i.e. vocations getting cut and split apart, and all vocations only having access to four skills at once. Some vocations definitely take a hit from this, mages and sorcerers in particular, but by and large I feel that it evens the playing field nicely, especially for warriors, who were really short changed in the original. Also, while I didn't play every vocation, the ones I did play all felt totally different from one another (fighter, archer, mystic spearhand and thief.) They really cut down on crossover between vocations here, and I think that overall that's a good thing.

• The only version of DD1 I played had the Eternal Ferrystone from the beginning, so the Ferrystone economy wasn't something I ever really thought about. Ferrystones are a lot more expensive in DD2, but again, I think that's good - you shouldn't just be able to warp immediately and cheaply across the map. Open world games are more interesting to me when they force you to engage with and learn the routes around their worlds, rather than treating the journey between destinations as some unfortunate byproduct of their structure.
  I've seen unfavourable comparisons between this and Elden Ring, for some reason, a game whose map is positively littered with fast travel points. The two are very different games, but in Elden Ring you only ever have to make any journey once; there's no need to go down the same road twice because, quite frankly, why would you when you can just teleport anywhere for free? I've seen the complaint that DD2 "doesn't respect the player's time," but I think this is unfair - the journey is part of the experience of DD2. Making sure you have the resources to make a trip safely is incredibly important, trying to work out how long it'll take you, finding places to camp so you don't get caught in the dark, making sure you only bring what you actually need, and (most crucially,) planning ahead so you don’t end up having to make more trips than you need to.
  The "doesn't respect my time" complaint seems to me to imply an assumption that all games should conform to the same expectations of what constitutes a challenge, which I think is misguided. DD2 doesn't have the twitchy, reflex heavy fights that are generally associated with "challenge", for instance, which invites the response that the game is “too easy”. The game provides different sorts of problems for you to resolve, and sometimes failing to solve those problems means you'll have to spend more time doing things. This doesn't mean that the game is wasting your time, or not respecting it - it means you aren't engaging with the game on its own terms.

• I don't mind the save system at all! I kinda like that it's very hard to save scum because it means you have to commit to any mistakes you make in a quest. I accidentally got the Empress of Battahl killed, and there was nothing I could do about it! This is the sort of thing that'll understandably be divisive, but it works for me. It also helps that, while your decisions matter, they don't really matter that much, and the game is fairly short anyway, so you don't have to live with your terrible decisions for too long.

• The difficulty curve wasn't something I found myself thinking about at all the entire time I played, which I count as a massive improvement over the first game where you were either steamrolling everything or finding yourself in fights where you'd basically do no damage and then be killed in one hit.

Okay, these bits didn't change that much

• Yeah the story is still really quite bland. Some of the sidequests are fun, and they intertwine nicely with the main story, but it's still very dry and wiffly. It feels like stuff just kind of happens a lot of the time, and you get the impression that for the DD team most of the story is just window dressing before all the really cool meta stuff happens at the end. DD1 is known for its insane final act, and so I went in with the expectation that there would be something similar here. There is, but going in with that expectation kinda diminished the twist when it came, I think (even though it's easily the most interesting the story gets.)
  There are cool cutscenes, though!

• The "pick episodic quests from a big list" structure is back in the first half of the game, and I'm not gonna pretend I wasn't disappointed when I first spoke to Brant and got presented with a checklist of quests to do.

• Encumbrance is, imo, far less irritating than in the original, but it's still a problem having to constantly go in and out of the menu to move things back and forth between pawns. I was hoping the Logistician pawn specialisation would kind of automate most of it, but as far as I could tell all it did was make my pawn auto-craft stuff for me, rather than actually shifting things around to keep my character light.

• I'm not gonna be one of those people saying the enemy variety is unspeakably poor, but it is quite surprising that most of the large monsters return exactly as they were in the first game, and that it's missing quite a few the original had too. No cockatrices, no different elemental dragons, no hydra... there are new large monsters, but a fair few are only in the postgame, and some of those you only ever fight once. As far as I'm aware, none of the monsters from Bitterblack Isle made it over, either.

• For all the praise I heaped on there being settlements earlier, it does make it stick out all the more that Battahl doesn't have any aside from the main city there. There are no inns, no shops, no armories anywhere in Battahl outside Bakbattahl, which is disappointing compared to Vermund, where there are plenty.

COULD BE BETTER IN DD3

• The music here is good, and there's a lot more diagetic music than there was in the original, which is nice for adding flavour to each location, but I can't deny that the first game's soundtrack has a really unique feel to it that I don't think quite carries over here. DD1 mixes genres and styles all the time, and tends to use short stingers when introducing an area rather than having constant background music, which means lots of areas have a really distinctive audio fingerprint that sticks in your head. For instance...

The Gransys field theme
The Bitterblack Isle hub theme

As soon as I hear those themes the area they belong to is conjured up in my head - there isn't really anything like this in DD2, which is a bit of a shame to me. However, I'd like to make it clear that I don't think the music in DD2 is bad, it's just clearly going for something different.

• Going prone after being hit with a heavy attack sucks and all it does is guarantee that you'll get hit by something else, disappointing - games need to stop punishing you for getting hit once by making you get hit a second time with no recourse, it always sucks

• Character affinity is somehow more annoying to manage here because at least in the first game you got given the Arisen's Band which guaranteed a character would be max affinity with you. Here you just kind of have to hope that of the several characters you've accidentally maxed affinity with, the one in the Dragon's clutches at the end is one you actually like! This is a system that feels as though it’s only here because the first game had it - the game doesn’t do as much with your betrothed this time, and it probably could have been cut without too much fuss.

• The climbing mechanics are still janky as all hell and it still feels like a 50/50 chance that my character's gonna move in the direction I push the stick

• A game this pretty doesn’t deserve a photo mode this ill-equipped. I was at least expecting poses like you’d find in Monster Hunter, but you can’t even pan the camera here. For shame! I hope they patch a better one in.

So, all in all, I really enjoyed my time with DD2, and I'll definitely be diving into NG+ to explore the other vocations and see what other quests and locations I missed. It is far from perfect and it evidently doesn't work for everyone, but it works for me, and for that I'm grateful. Half a year ago I said "if DD2 is less annoying then it will be a big win," and I'm deffo counting this as a big win.

Bring on the inevitable big expansion!