I recently picked up Dragon’s Dogma 2, and it really wants me to know that it’s not messing around. The game is constantly reminding me that it’s not like other games, that it has purposefully designed the game to make you work for it. Fast travel? You can take an ox cart to specific destinations or find port crystals, but the materials needed to use port crystals are rare. So the game says you can fast travel but makes it feel not worth it. I feel like the developers want you to explore this world they made for you to play in and have an adventure. They don’t want you to just jump all over the map and turn the game into a chore list, knocking quests of left and right.

Combat is a bit of the same as there is no lock-on, and battles can feel hectic because of this. You value your NPC companions (pawns as they’re called in the game) to get the job done. When you’re swarmed by goblins, it can feel rewarding to have the dust settle and still be standing.

Normally, I would push back at a game that was designed to put up barriers. But the developers did a good job of making these choices feel intentional. I feel like the game is stating this is the world, and asks if can you handle it. I want to say yes as the world feels lived in, the townsfolk go about their day, certain options are only available at night and for some reason they thought through a whole morgue system if an NPC dies.

I guess the reason why I’m more inclined to exist in this world compared to other games that attempt the same thing is because the rules for this world don’t get in the way of the fun. I backed Star Citizen (a decision I sometimes regret, but that’s another post), and that game has all these rules that get in the way of the fun. It’s not fun to spend around 15 minutes or more trying to get yourself set up to just take off in your spaceship and find something to do. The world of Dragon’s Dogma 2 makes me curious it makes me want to explore, and crucially, makes me understand the intent behind some of the barriers in gameplay.

I don’t mind tough games, I don’t mind games that want to be realistic. I just would appreciate it if the choices behind some of the game design decisions didn’t feel like in the name of realism things need to be difficult for the player, end of discussion.

In my most recent playthrough, I had two quests that took me to the same area. One was to find weapons stolen by some goblins in a mine, and the other was to clear out goblins in said mine. It was a weird feeling as I made my way to the mine, I was excited about the adventure, but nervous. What if I died? What if it was more difficult than I was expecting? The save system in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is almost a gameplay feature in itself. You only get two saves, one is a manual save but is also overwritten when the game autosaves. The other is a save slot dedicated for when you sleep in a bed at an inn or your house. They kind of act as different checkpoints. Your main save is your save while you’re on your adventure, and the inn save is if things really go bad, and you just need to start fresh.

Going through this mine actually felt like I was on a quest. It didn’t feel like I was just consuming content or doing a chore. I felt immersed, and when I was notified that I’d cleared the mine of goblins, it felt rewarding. (Side note: I didn’t get to kill the last goblin he was on a bridge up above us, jumped to attack us, and missed the ledge, fallin to his death.) I then had a new problem though, getting out of the mine. I made my way deeper and ended up finding a dead soldier, I was able to revive him, turns out him, and some friends were also helping to clear the mine at the same time. I then had to make my way back to town, in dead of night, and I’ll admit that I ended up running all the back because the monsters at night are on a different level. So now, I was worried about getting back to town safely. My inn save was from hours ago, and my autosave was most likely from when I exited the mine. The game forced me to push forward and  try to make it to a safe space.

So overall, this is a game that needs to be enjoyed at a slower pace. It shouldn’t be rushed through, you should meet it on its terms, and if you’re not feeling that, take a break. I think if you try to get this game this game to conform to your idea of a different genre or series, you might just end up frustrated.

I’ll end with one final story that I think helps soldify my feelings on this game. I had a quest to go into a prison or gaol as they call it, for some reason. I kept going into the jail and getting attacked by the guards, no alerts raised, no tooltip, just kept getting attacked. Eventually, I had to look online, thinking maybe the quest was bugged. I found one commenter who asked….did you try dressing up as a guard to sneak in? I think other games would have given you a tooltip to try this, made some dialogue around it, or even just given you armor to disguise yourself in. But this game wants you to figure things out, I had found 2 sets of guard armor, but I didn’t think to equip them because the game didn’t tell me. I think unclear or under explained mechanics can be incredibly frustrating. But for some reason this didn’t feel like that, it felt more lik a lesson, the game saying it’s not going to hold your hand, you need to figure it out and I’m very excited to give it a shot.