Dragon's Dogma II - "They’re masterworks, all – you can’t go wrong"

[Alfgart]

Finished the game, ~70 hours, did almost every side quests, true ending and all.

Playing almost non stop since release, trying to ignore all the MTX/performance debacle and internet discourse, I just wanted to play the game and form my own opinion. At first, I was awestruck simply because I was finally playing the sequel to the best ARPG ever after waiting for 6+ years. Then, around 20 hours in, I was dissapointed, because DD2 is DD 1.5. It's the same game. Same story, same writing, same enemies, same NPC interactions. But I could not stop playing, and was still loving it, because I was experiencing the same joy I felt when playing DD:DA the first time. Avoiding travelling in the dark, getting lost exploring some random ass cave, encountering funny pawns on the road. All that with even better combat.

Plenty of people have already explained the big problems this game has. For me, the biggest sins are the dumbing down of the armor system, lack of enemy variety (and fixed spawn points in the map), and no improvements to NPC interactions. I don't care too much about missing vocations, but I do miss some sorcerer skills tho. Everything else is a trade-off, equal, or better than DD:DA.
Now, there is one thing that this game does perfectly and will be unsurpassed for a long time. COMBAT. This game has the best combat in an action RPG ever. No competition comes close. DD2 shits all over Dark Souls/Elden Mid and every other game in existence.

Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen is still better than Dragon's Dogma 2. The dissapointment comes from that. But hey, DD2 is still the 2nd best ARPG ever. Not bad. And with a BBI-like DLC that focus on the godlike combat, who knows.

Oh and I do love that Itsuno decided to retain those byzantine anti-normie systems like forced auto-saves and 1 save file per copy. It serves to filter the peasants from playing this. Games have gone to shit because we have not gatekeeped enough.

So anyway, gg. Here is my pawn, based on Zeta from Granblue Fantasy. Rent her. Give her some clear space and she will snipe any mob with a .50 cal. I'm working on grinding her NG+ equipment

 

[Yosharian]

Yeah archer pawns do some serious damage against bosses if they can hit weak points

 

[Dishonoredbr]

At first playing as Archer is strange because R1/RB being Manual Aim but once you play a little bit, it make so much sense and feels really good.

 

[Yosharian]

When I was dipping archer to get the Stam augment I never even bothered to manually aim and still did ok

 

[Mortmal]

I cant believe they fucked up the story.....again

What's with people saying story is fucked up ? It was pretty straightforward to follow and imho good enough.

The story completely falls apart past Venworth. Everything you did there is of no meaning, and nothing makes sense. It's as if they omitted half of the story, and then it goes to an abrupt end. It's not the only half-baked thing; there are lots of bugs, some game breaking. Obviously, no quality control; Japanese games used to be very polished. Now, we have a 70 euros game, minimum 85 euros for the deluxe edition. There's no piracy, no loss of money, as it has Denuvo and console versions. Most people are unable to pirate on consoles. But the result is something half-baked with a serious lack of care, and there are microtransactions to boot. There's nothing to justify the state of this game besides extreme greed from Capcom.

 

[Dishonoredbr]

. It's not the only half-baked thing; there are lots of bugs, some game breaking. Obviously, no quality control; Japanese games used to be very polished

I played for a good 25+ and never saw game breaking bug.

 

[Yosharian]

Yes I would agree with that, I saw plenty of minor bugs, such as quest items not appearing until the game was reloaded, but never anything that bricked a quest or prevented progression. I also never experienced a single crash.

 

[Old Hans]

I cant believe they fucked up the story.....again

What's with people saying story is fucked up ? It was pretty straightforward to follow and imho good enough.

The story completely falls apart past Venworth. Everything you did there is of no meaning, and nothing makes sense. It's as if they omitted half of the story, and then it goes to an abrupt end. It's not the only half-baked thing; there are lots of bugs, some game breaking. Obviously, no quality control; Japanese games used to be very polished. Now, we have a 70 euros game, minimum 85 euros for the deluxe edition. There's no piracy, no loss of money, as it has Denuvo and console versions. Most people are unable to pirate on consoles. But the result is something half-baked with a serious lack of care, and there are microtransactions to boot. There's nothing to justify the state of this game besides extreme greed from Capcom.

im convinced game director Hideaki Itsuno is completely insane. there is no other explanation

 

[Sentinel]

They chose to shit out DD2 before the end of the fiscal year to buy pragmata more time. Gonna have a laugh when Pragmata flops just like Exoprimal or becomes vaporware. It's already giving me Deep Down vibes.

 

[Shrimp]

I cant believe they fucked up the story.....again

What's with people saying story is fucked up ? It was pretty straightforward to follow and imho good enough.

The story completely falls apart past Venworth. Everything you did there is of no meaning, and nothing makes sense. It's as if they omitted half of the story, and then it goes to an abrupt end. It's not the only half-baked thing; there are lots of bugs, some game breaking. Obviously, no quality control; Japanese games used to be very polished. Now, we have a 70 euros game, minimum 85 euros for the deluxe edition. There's no piracy, no loss of money, as it has Denuvo and console versions. Most people are unable to pirate on consoles. But the result is something half-baked with a serious lack of care, and there are microtransactions to boot. There's nothing to justify the state of this game besides extreme greed from Capcom.

It's not just the story, there are also fairly clear cases of last minute additions or things they quickly slapped in because they didn't want to think too hard about it.
For instance

Spoiler

the vocation maisters for the 'regular' vocations all have a (small) quest or something else you need to do in order to unlock the master skill for those vocations. Once you unlock Magick Archer and Warfarer at the tail end of the game you're also given the master skills alongside the unlock. To me it seems like they either didn't have the time to require something to unlock it or they had to deliberately prioritise spending time elsewhere.

 

[Fedora Master]

All in all I have to say, despite a few rough edges, the game is very enjoyable. It isn't particularly hard but the exploration and combat are very fun nonetheless. The world is designed to just venture into and find new stuff.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

Everyone seems to want to ride the Sphinx. Both literally and metaphorically speaking.

 

[Mortmal]

. It's not the only half-baked thing; there are lots of bugs, some game breaking. Obviously, no quality control; Japanese games used to be very polished

I played for a good 25+ and never saw game breaking bug.

Play more...

Yes I would agree with that, I saw plenty of minor bugs, such as quest items not appearing until the game was reloaded, but never anything that bricked a quest or prevented progression. I also never experienced a single crash.

Shadowed Prayer quest does this if you had the misfortune to rest at your house instead of an inn. Then, worse, it bricks your use of ferrystones. As the NPC quest giver is still considered as escorting you, and that's not the only instance it can happen, with important NPCs dying on you when escorting you. Better have a lot of wakestones for those. Then the Mage Master quest can bug too, guards getting aggro for no reason. The list is quite long.

 

[Anonona]

Play more...

I finished the game, 100+ hours, not a single bug. Seems I got very lucky.

 

[Zariusz]

So in practice this means that every time you see a furry in Vermund, there is a high chance that you just meet a product of literal bestiality.

Interesting lore you have there Itsuno...

 

[Sentinel]

So in practice this means that every time you see a furry in Vermund, there is a high chance that you just meet a product of literal bestiality.

replace furry with "black person" (or niggers as I like to call them) and your sentence still applies.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

Lol @ these people bitching about the story. Nobody bought it for that. The game is great because over 90% of it feels completely unscripted and that makes for true immersion. This is how RPGs were always meant to be. A little fine tuning here and there and this will be one of the greatest ARPGs ever made. It's already up there.

 

[Anonona]

Even if I know it would never happen, I would like if the added 2 new difficulty modes:

- Hard mode similar to DD1, enemies are a lot stronger, harder to kill and to knockdown. If possible without nerfing the player, but if they must, nerf the pawns too, unlike DD1. Also gold drops shouldn't be increased as to avoid screwing the game economy (although in this case it may not matter, in DD2 only humanoid enemies seem to drop gold and not that much at that).

Spoilers for a mechanic on endgame

- "True Arisen" mode which is similar to Hard Mode, but if you die, you have to go back to the last time you rested on an inn/your home, so if you die on the field you lose progress. It would go great with the camping and loss system. Endgame already has it, made for quite the intense experience, almost feel like the game was designed around this. Probably will try it by my own one day, perhaps I will turn my current run into this challenge.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

My post was rated retardred by two BG3 faggots. Fuck off back to the hell you came from, bear fuckers.

 

[abija]

Stumbled upon some goblins fighting harpies. I rope one of the harpies and one of the goblins starts pointing and laughing at it. Nice touch.

 

[Haplo]

So it seems I finally found a game, which interests me, that makes me want to retire my trusty, 9 year old GTX970. Worked fine for Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, Elden Ring. But not for DD2.

If I only care about FullHD and 60 FPS and somewhat value good work culture, does it make any sense to buy any other new card then 4060 nowadays? ... To connect it to an ancient pc...

 

[Sentinel]

So it seems I finally found a game, which interests me, that makes me want to retire my trusty, 9 year old GTX970. Worked fine for Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, Elden Ring. But not for DD2.

If I only care about FullHD and 60 FPS and somewhat value good work culture, does it make any sense to buy any other new card then 4060 nowadays? ... To connect it to an ancient pc...

Your card doesn't matter as much as your CPU. The game has a severe CPU-bottleneck. You'll have to get a new CPU as well (which implies changing mobo most likely).

CPU would have to be anything above a ryzen 5600/i5 12400. GPU can be anything above the level of a RTX3060/RX6700.

 

[Haplo]

So it seems I finally found a game, which interests me, that makes me want to retire my trusty, 9 year old GTX970. Worked fine for Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, Elden Ring. But not for DD2.

If I only care about FullHD and 60 FPS and somewhat value good work culture, does it make any sense to buy any other new card then 4060 nowadays? ... To connect it to an ancient pc...

Your card doesn't matter as much as your CPU. The game has a severe CPU-bottleneck. You'll have to get a new CPU as well (which implies changing mobo most likely).

CPU would have to be anything above a ryzen 5600/i5 12400. GPU can be anything above the level of a RTX3060/RX6700.

That's really surprising. What intensive calculations does it make?

Anyhow I guess 3 GB VRAM are holding it back a lot regardless...

 

[mediocrepoet]

So it seems I finally found a game, which interests me, that makes me want to retire my trusty, 9 year old GTX970. Worked fine for Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, Elden Ring. But not for DD2.

If I only care about FullHD and 60 FPS and somewhat value good work culture, does it make any sense to buy any other new card then 4060 nowadays? ... To connect it to an ancient pc...

Your card doesn't matter as much as your CPU. The game has a severe CPU-bottleneck. You'll have to get a new CPU as well (which implies changing mobo most likely).

CPU would have to be anything above a ryzen 5600/i5 12400. GPU can be anything above the level of a RTX3060/RX6700.

That's really surprising. What intensive calculations does it make?

Anyhow I guess 3 GB VRAM are holding it back a lot regardless...

Seems to be NPC AI and possibly other calculations related to their mass, reach, etc.

 

[ADL]

I just wish there was a little more to the open world than friendlies, bandits and monsters because it's already feeling a little stale.

Update: Fifty hours in and it grew stale for me about fifteen hours ago. Toying around with different vocations is the only thing keeping me playing. Aside from a snow area, there's nothing I want more than just quadrupling repeatable monster encounters at minimum. If they had to lower the scope of the expansion to accomplish that I'd be totally fine with it. Only reason I want a snow area is to have snow monsters. Map size is not the issue. A harder difficulty mode would be nice to have too.

Did the original game have such little enemy variety before Dark Arisen? I only played the PC release where it was included.