[Video Game] Dragon's Dogma

I agree that the demo was a little underwhelming. No choosing classes or abilities, no choosing pawns, only two big enemies to fight. And I'm just guessing that your characters were a bit OPed just so you could take down the monsters more easily and not get frustrated with the demo.

 

Holy Bejeezus!

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Don't think I've ever seen a boss fight like that. Seriously, the scale of some of the monsters in this game is insane.

And here's the launch trailer while I'm at it:

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I'm gearing up for Diablo 3 tomorrow night, but I'm sure I'll be taking a break from it on May 22nd to try this one out. I can't remember a time when two games that I've been looking forward to this much came out within a week of each other. Craziness.

 

I meant to play it right at release, but Diablo 3 has grabbed my attention and hasn't let go yet. I'll probably put some time in with it in the next few days.

 

Okay, so I was finally able to drag my ass away from Diablo 3 long enough to actually put some time in with this game. I'm nowhere near to finishing it, but I think I've played enough to be able to comment intelligently on its strengths and weaknesses.

Dragon's Dogma is a very good game, but it is not for everyone. They've made some decisions that will strongly appeal to one set of gamers, and strongly discourage others. I'll start off with a short general description, and then move right on to some of these polarizing features so you can tell if this game is for you or not.

For the game description, I'm going to steal Tim Buckley's, since I think I probably couldn't do it any better:

The easiest way to describe Dragon's Dogma is as the game you'd get if you put Demon's Souls, Monster Hunter and Skyrim into a blender. The deliberate, powerful action combat and difficulty/danger level is reminiscent of the what Demon's/Dark souls offers. Take that and put it into a gorgeous open world with a day/night cycle and tons of places to explore, and various quests similar to Skyrim. Finally, toss in the huge roaming monsters that take 15-20min to down, and drop pieces you can use to upgrade your gear like Monster Hunter. That's Dragon's Dogma.

Now, on to some of the polarizing features.

One of the biggest ones is that there is no enemy scaling in Dragon's Dogma. In Bethesda's games, as you level up the monsters will scale up with you, so that you're free to go anywhere knowing that you can expect a similar level of challenge everywhere, or at least that all enemies are surmountable. In Dragon's Dogma, if you go somewhere where the enemies are too tough, you're going to die. Full stop.

Example. There's a seemingly simple and innocuous mission in your starting village to explore a cave down in the village well. Easy, right? Wrong. There are six or seven giant lizard-men down there who will clean your clock for you. If you go down there when the mission first becomes available, any one of those lizards will kill you in 1-2 hits, while they'll absorb at least 50 from you and your companions. The better part of valor here is to run away and come back later.

Likewise, there are what amount to random bosses simply wandering around in the wilderness, like Chimeras and Ogres. If you run into a Chimera in the early going, you should run away, or you're going to die. The end.

Some folks will find this unabashed lack of any scaling to be really irritating. I love it. In Oblivion or Skyrim, enemy scaling meant that it sometimes felt like you were treading water by leveling up, since your new abilities are offset by higher enemy health and damage. In Dragon's Dogma, the sense of immersion is much greater, because there are actually things out there that are very dangerous, things that you simply need to avoid until you're ready. This means that you're naturally more wary as you wander the world, because you never know what beastie is around the corner ready to kick your ass. And hell, even the frequent packs of bandits on the road really are no joke. I've died fighting bandits more than once. But it's oh-so-satisfying to go back and do a mission or kill a foe that was previously insurmountable, because it actually feels as if your character has progressed, and that you've actually accomplished something.

Another polarizing feature is that there is no fast travel option. That's right, if you want to go somewhere, you have to hoof it. This has some obvious advantages and disadvantages. The biggest disadvantage is that not ever city/resting place has all the amenities you want. For instance, so far I only know of one city (the big main central one), where you can change your vocation/class. If you want to change your class, but happen to be far away from that city, well, you just have to travel all the way back. This can indeed be annoying.

However, like the lack of enemy scaling, no fast travel makes the world feel much more realistic and immersive. Skyrim is a huge game, but being able to warp anywhere at anytime makes it feel small, because you rarely have to actually walk anywhere yourself... you just warp to a location right near your objective, walk for two minutes, and you're there. Dragon's Dogma probably has a smaller world than Skyrim, but it feels larger because you actually have to traverse the roads rather than just skip around.

In fact, Dragon's Dogma stresses preparation and survival in your travels. Resting at an inn will take you to dawn of the next day. This is important, because you really don't want to have to finish whatever your mission is at night. Not only does it actually get very dark (you'll need to use a lamp which consumes fuel, and even this won't save you from ambushes in the darkness), but there are tough enemies which only come out at night. And even if it's just a pack of bandits, well, you try fighting a group of people when you can't see anything. In any case, the day/night cycle ends up providing a sort of natural time limit to missions, encouraging you not to tarry too much and move along before you're enveloped by pitch blackness and attacked by marauding ghosts.

Moving on to characters. First of all, there's a huge amount of depth to character customization, both aesthetically and gameplay-wise. You get to customize yourself and your main pawn, who is your constant companion during your travels. As far as creating the look of your characters, it's as detailed as you could want. There's something like 40 different noses, 40 different sets of eyes, 60 different hairstyles, etc etc, and then you go in and tweak every one of those things further, by adjusting the nose up and down, or adjusting the nose angle, widening or narrowing the eyes, making the eyes bigger or smaller. You get the idea. Moreover, some aspects of character creation actually have a gameplay dimension. Making a larger character will make them less prone to being staggered, and more able to lift and throw heavy objects, while being smaller will grant you more stamina and make you lighter on your feet. Even your gender can affect gameplay -- I ran into a pack of bandit women whose leader fanatically hated all men. When I approached her, she immediately attacked and killed me. Fun times.

You can start out with three basic classes -- Fighter, Strider, or Mage. Standard RPG fare. But when you reach the main city, six more unlock. And while each class costs a small amount of ability points (called discipline points) to unlock, once you've unlocked a class, you're free to switch back to it at no cost. All you need to do is make sure you've got the right equipment for whatever new class you'd like to try. I started off with a Strider, then changed to one of the hybrid classes called a Magick Archer, who fires arrows that home in on enemies, and some other really nifty abilities.

Your pawn can change classes as well. The only difference is that pawns can only use six of the nine classes which are available to you. But in all other ways your pawn is the same. He/she will level up with you, gets ability points, and can change classes as needed. Some abilities that you learn with one class can be retained when you switch to another, so it's actually to your advantage to invest in more than one.

You can also hire two additional pawns for your party. These are either created by the game, or -- if you're playing online -- created by other people. You can use other people's main pawns, and they can use yours. In fact, in the single day I was playing, my pawn got used by other people twice, and returned with little gifts to give me, along with some quest knowledge. If someone uses your pawn and does a mission you haven't done yet, your pawn will learn about it and give you advice, or be able to show you the correct path. Likewise, you can look to hire pawns with good quest knowledge, and they'll be able to tell you where to go.

Unlike in other games where companions can be quite stupid and generally unhelpful, your party in Dragon's Dogma is extremely important. If they're higher level than you, and fighting enemies who aren't too tough, they may very well kill everything with you doing minimal work yourself. Likewise, if you have underleveled pawns going into a hairy area, you may find yourself in trouble. Pawns at your level and below are free to hire, while pawns above your level can only be hired by using rift crystals, with an exponentially steeper fee the higher level they are. Rented pawns don't level up with you, so it's important to switch them up as you progress.

Party diversity is important. Generally, your main pawn should be the polar opposite of your own class as a complement, and you'll want to look for companions who complement you both, as there are enemies that are weak to magic, or weak to physical, etc. The different classes are really all designed to help offset each other's weaknesses. For instance, I've got a Mage in my party who can heal, as well as enchant the party's weapons with fire. My main pawn and a second pawn are fighters who can stand toe-to-toe on the front lines, supported by the mage's healing and fire enchantments. As a magick archer, I can sit in back and fire arrows at things, or, as a nimble class with high stamina, I'm the best-suited of my party to start climbing all over the big boss monsters and stabbing them in the face with my daggers.

And boy, those big boss monster battles are epic. You might find yourself hammering away at one for ten or fifteen minutes, climbing on top if it as it tries to throw you off, trying to find weaknesses and deplete its eight full health bars.

In any case, I really like this game. It's about as immersive an open world as you can imagine, with real danger and real preparation required, and a real sense of accomplishment when you complete a challenge. Th exploration and combat is top-notch, the graphics are good (particularly in the monster animation department) although not the best I've seen, and even the voice acting stands out.

However, the game does have its shortcomings and annoyances.

First, and this is important, don't accept any escort missions in the early going. Why? Well, the game really isn't good about telling you when a particular mission is beyond your means. When it's just an ongoing mission like "Slay 20 of X monster," then this isn't a big deal. But with an escort mission, it's a problem. I ended up accepting an escort mission that took me to the far northwest corner of the map. Since the game autosaves at certain points, like at inns and riftstones, I ended up with no way to un-accept the mission after I realized how tough it was going to be. Not wanting fail it, I was forced to go through areas where there were big packs of enemies roaming around who could kill me in a few hits, meaning I had to run away from almost everything. And when I finally reached my destination, I had to walk all the way back, running past all those same enemies again. That one big long waste of time really hindered my enjoyment of the game. I would've liked for the game to either allow me to tell the escort target to go bugger off and I'll help him later, or at least tell me from the get-go how difficult this was going to be. Instead I was forced to do an insanely difficult mission that really didn't give me much return.

Item management is also a headache. The developers wanted to create an effect where if you were hauling around a lot of items, you'd run slower and your stamina would drain more quickly. That means that each person in your party has their own separate inventory. If this sounds like a pain, it is. For instance, if you pick up a piece of armor and want your main pawn to use it, you have to have your character "give" it to your pawn, then tab over to his inventory to equip it. This is not to mention that your companions will pick items up in the world in order to save you the trouble and the item burden, but you'll then need to spend time in the menus transferring everything. Argh. I really think they would've been better off limiting the item burden idea to equipped items. That way you'd move slower and use more stamina with heavy weapons and equipment, but you wouldn't be left with the item management headache.

The autosave is also kinda finicky. Sometimes I couldn't quite understand the logic of it. One time I hired new pawns because my old ones were getting underleveled, then I went off and died, and was started back before I hired my new pawns. This seemed particularly odd since I then had to release those same pawns again. What does this look like when it's your pawn that this happens to? They come back and tell you that they were hired once but released twice by the same person? Hmm. In any case, my advice is to manually save frequently and not rely on the autosave.

There are also some smaller more aesthetic things wrong. For instance, the voice acting is actually quite good for the most part. But sometimes the character animations don't match very well when someone's talking. There was a scene of talking to a witch's granddaughter, and she was making all these gestures with her hands that were inappropriate to what she was saying (like waving her hands all over the plece as she says "yes"). They've also made some effort at medieval-style speech, some of which works, and some of which doesn't work so well. For example, I like that everyone in your home village calls you "cos" (as in, "cousin"). That works really well. On the other hand, there is a great overabundance of the word "aught." Someone on the localization team really loved that word, because it's everywhere, and it's so frequent that it becomes the source of unintentional comedy. Your pawns will say things like "We might find aught of use in this area!" The word even gets used in item descriptions in your inventory. I can't help but roll my eyes.

Two final pieces of advice. First, turn off the pawn chatter subtitles, otherwise they way, way overclutter the screen, since they're talking all the time. Second, turn off the "cinematic" camera. What it does is zoom in at a dramatic angle on big monsters whenever you manage to temporarily disable them -- like when you light a griffon on fire and it temporarily falls to earth so that you start hacking it to pieces. The problem is that the game goes on real-time when this happens, so that you lose time you might have spent running towards it or starting to climb on it.

That's about it. I'd be happy to answer any specific questions, as there's a lot I haven't covered. Overall, it's a great game with some rough edges, as might be expected for a new IP. But if there's one thing you have to appreciate, it's the ambition of the project. It really is a mix of games like Skyrim, Dark Souls, and Monster Hunter. And even if the execution is less than perfect, you have to admire the scope of the game's vision. In the final equation, I'd say that folks who enjoyed Dark Souls should give this one a try. If you didn't like Dark Souls, you might want to give this one a pass.

 

Thought I'd bump this one more time with an update after my last ridiculously long post.

This game has pretty much taken over my life right where Diablo 3 left off (finally starting to get bored of that one). I will say that the game has gotten considerably easier now that I've leveled up a bit and got some better equipment. Ogres that used to take me about 5-8 minutes to kill now take me about 30 seconds to 3 minutes (depending on whether it's the armored or unarmored version). And I'm just generally finding the big wandering boss monsters a lot less threatening now.

But the game still surprises me every now and again. Today I was walking back from a mission and was beset by some sort of uber-ghost. I wasn't initially worried, since ghosts generally aren't all that threatening... and then it killed me in about 5 seconds, and I lost 20 minutes of progress. The game seems to enjoy humbling you that way. I feel like that's the "From Software effect," even though this is a Capcom game. And for me, saying a game feels like a From Software effort is about as high praise as I can give it.

It really is a good one, guys. I'll repeat that people who liked Dark Souls should pick it up. It's a little more frilly than DS, and somewhat lighter in tone -- but that doesn't mean it's worse, just different.

I dearly hope they make a sequel. This is already a pretty special game, and if they can smooth out a few of the rough edges in the next round, it could be an all-time great sort of game.

 

Holy Bejeezus.

So I just beat the final boss (really cool fight by the way, even if it's heavily scripted), and suddenly the entire world map is covered in super-powered monsters. This is AWESOME. I have to admit it was getting a little boring slaughtering everything after I had leveled up a bunch and got some great equipment. Now the game is f-ing EPIC.

I just got slaughtered on one of the first roads by some fire-spewing hellhounds. These aren't even boss monsters at all. They ganged up on me, getting me to about half-life in a few seconds with fireballs, then one grabbed me in its teeth, ran away from my companions who might have helped me, and proceeded to chew on me until I was dead.

All kinds of replay value now that all the monsters are this tough. My goodness, I love it.

 

Hmm, somehow I missed this thread getting bumped.

As you can see from all my posts in the thread, I enjoyed the heck out of this one. My problem now is that I'm way over-leveled and nothing is a challenge anymore (I think I'm like lvl 115 or something!). What I really need to do is wipe my save and do the whole thing again from scratch.

It'll probably be a while, though, between Borderlands 2, Torchlight 2, Dead or Alive 5... too many good games coming out all at the same time...

BTW, the ending is awesome. One of the most intriguing I've ever seen in a video game.

Now I just hope they can put out an awesome sequel that fixes some of the piddly issues I had with it.