2 DRAGONS 2 DOGMA

Valmond said:
The world was small enough that the travel was not that bad, and eventually you did get the port crystals making it possible to basicly put a teleport option to most remote corners of the map (which i always found disappointingly small) reducing it even further.
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It wasn't so much the world size as much as how there was basically nothing of interest along the way, once I've gone through the path for the seventh or eighth time. So much of the gameplay ended up being sprinting (with the odd-looking sprint animation) until my stamina ran out, pausing as the stamina recovered, repeat, then take cover in the exact same places as I anticipate the enemy bandit ambushes in the exact same spawn locations.

The populated world was indeed basically the starting village Cassardis, and the capital Gran Soren. I wouldn't have minded as much if, say, between Gran Soren and the more distant healing spring, there were a couple of villages where I can interact with NPCs and resupply if needed, rather than just wilderness and abandoned mines and bandits.

(I'm considering the military fort near Cassardis as part of the same settlement, because there's really only the one path back and forth.)

Also the lack of meaningful interactions with most of the NPCs, which got silly when the game went "see, I have kidnapped the princess, whom you hold dearest" and I'm pretty sure I've only talked to her like twice outside of quests.

But despite all my complaints, I really liked the combat. So I'm undecided if that is enough to get Dragon's Dogma 2, while having to tolerate the rest of the game.
 
Adloquium said:
Also the lack of meaningful interactions with most of the NPCs, which got silly when the game went "see, I have kidnapped the princess, whom you hold dearest" and I'm pretty sure I've only talked to her like twice outside of quests.
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That's like twice the amount of dialogue/interaction you need for average hero to be smitten, such debth. :V

I get your criticism, i even agree with them for the most part.
Personally, i have bought this game 3 times now (base game, dark arisen, dark arisen again on PC).
And if this is just the old game, but better, my money will have been well spent as far as i am concerned.

I genuinely enjoyed everything about the game, except the travel (and magic immune enemies (and the way stat allocation worked)), which i could tolerate.
But it always felt like the game came out too early, there was so much more it could have been, and while i admit DD2 will no doubt fall short once more, i do believe it will be basicly Dragon's Dogma, but more, which is what i want.

I am buying this at launch, but for anyone who did not love original game, or the Dark Arisen, the way i did, maybe give it a week or two and see how it is before spending money on it.
 
I'm getting the game. I did look a lot of stuff up online when playing the first one, since I was afraid of missing stuff. I am looking forward to playing this quickly so I can go in blind, so I'm probably looking forward to kicking myself after doing some very stupid things. I'm a bit curious about what they've said about the relationship system in this game, though.

Hopefully I won't have a dragon giving me a judgmental look because he's convinced that my one true love is actually a kid.

(Mr Grigori, sir, I'm going to rescue her because of course I'd rescue a small child from a kidnapping, but I am afraid that you have completely misread the situation... no I'm not particularly fond of her father either where are you even getting this from?.)
 
I don't think it is meant to be literal love, romantic or otherwise, just whomever you care the most.
Might be your best buddy, might be a business partner, might be a kid you are fond of as a little siter/brother, or might be your romantic love interest.

It's fairly easy to game if you know the mechanic, but it can come up with some silly outcomes if you just play without thinking about it.
 
Valmond said:
It's fairly easy to game if you know the mechanic, but it can come up with some silly outcomes if you just play without thinking about it.
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Yeah, it took me checking the wikis (via Google) before I finally learned why, as mentioned, I kept getting the princess as my "beloved", despite actively going for Quina.

For those wondering, if there's a tie in affinity levels (eg if more than one person is at max affinity), the game picks the alphabetically first character. Hence, Aelinore.
 
I don't know where all this negativity regarding travel is really coming from, I was under the impression that they added new travel methods like being inside Ox-Carts and as for boredom during said journeys that the world is much more densely populated than the first game?

It feels like just assuming that things will be identical to the launch of DD1 despite evidence against this being out there.

Not being able to teleport everywhere for free effortlessly and safely doesn't mean one can't enjoy journeys or move quickly in general.
 
16 characters said:
It feels like just assuming that things will be identical to the launch of DD1 despite evidence against this being out there.
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Personally, it's because I don't trust the game. Or at least not yet.

There was an article interview with the director (or producer? "Main creator representative", certainly) some time back where they said "fast travel means a failure of game design", meaning if a game has fast travel, that indicates the devs do not have confidence that their game world is interesting.

To which I immediately thought "well, then Dragon's Dogma has utterly failed that criteria with or without fast travel", and to see the director of the game say something like that made me wary of their ability to self-reflect, in the context of game design.

"Ox carts" makes me think of NPC travel taxis in MMORPGs, which are faster than being on foot, but kind of leads to "now go do something else for a couple of minutes" gameplay. And I don't know if "more populated" means "more interesting", because it's not like the various camps in DD1/DDDA are interesting.

Traversal through the world should be fun, regardless of world size. The Insomniac Spider-man games are the go-to example, and I didn't take the fast travel options there, despite their availability.
 
I mean from what I hear the carts can get ambushed,but otherwise one can sleep one's character through the ride, it sounds like sitting around chewing the scenery is made optional in either case. Though I'm with you on waiting for the game to be out to see how well this is actually implemented vs how it's described in the previews.
 
Reviews have been coming out, and it looks like in terms of gameplay, Dragon's Dogma 2 is very good.

The worrying part is in terms of performance, it's really heavy on the CPU. Apparently a major culprit is the increased density of NPCs, and the game having to calculate their AIs all the time they're on screen.

Which would be a little unfortunate, if the devs had tried to solve the criticism in DD1 of "there are too few people, the world feels empty" and went too far in the other direction, without considering whether existing hardware can keep up.
 
Well, time to crank the graphical fidelity way down i guess.
Nothing new there really.
Good thing i built a new computer last summer, my old one was, well, old, and probably would not have managed, the new one should, just not at highest settings.
 
Valmond said:
Well, time to crank the graphical fidelity way down i guess.
Nothing new there really.
Good thing i built a new computer last summer, my old one was, well, old, and probably would not have managed, the new one should, just not at highest settings.
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Yeah, my primary worry is my CPU, which also seems to be the big bottleneck for a lot of reviewers. Many of them go "I have a 4090" or some such high-end graphics card, while also reporting framerate slowdowns in areas with lots of NPCs. I believe IGN did some comparisons and research, and found that the CPU is the issue rather than the graphics card.

My CPU is a little old, because I don't dare replace it myself, in case a new one doesn't work with my (also old) motherboard or some such.

In general, the common points of all the reviews I've seen (mostly because they're from people I follow anyway, eg for Monster Hunter stuff) are how Dragon's Dogma 2 makes the good parts of DD1 "much better", focusing particularly on the combat and skills. Meanwhile, the actual story and questing is described as "fine", which seems like damning with faint praise; some reviews (eg Arekkz) mention the voicelines being only "okay", rather than particularly good.

So it also sounds like the bad parts of DD1 are not as improved as might have been. I've seem forum comments say DD2 should be thought of as a "remake" of DD1 (and not necessarily including Dark Arisen either), rather than a sequel.

And the other common point, as mentioned, is how performance-heavy the game is. Framerate drops happen a lot in towns (or "the one city", which implies there's only Gran Soren as a meaningful city again), but gets much better outside. Again, speculation is this is due to NPC AI and poor optimization of such.

People are speculating this is the sort of thing that is either alleviated with a day one patch "band aid", or might require a whole expansion to redo the engine.
 
Are they actual noticeable framerate drops or just going from 60 to 50?
Because plenty of gamers can get dramatic over ever going below 60.
 
My habit of playing mmo's on computers with budget cards has made me quite happy when the fps stays above 20, most of the time.
Good ol Molten Core boss fights with 4 frames per second, if lucky.
 
Hykal94 said:
So uhhh you can't have New Games apparently? You're stuck with one game, per game, and need to delete files in the program to make a new one?

Why.
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It's very weird, because DD1 definitely allowed for simply selecting "New Game" from the main menu. So this is a notable step backwards.

The method to force a new game appears to be to exit the game entirely, disable cloud saves (because otherwise the cloud saves will just restore themselves), find and delete the save files, and then enter the game again with cloud saves still disabled. (Once the game creates that new save, cloud saves can be re-enabled and the local saves used as master.) Which is a much more tedious method than "select New Game".

I can't think of a technical reason why a New Game option appears to be missing. As mentioned, even DD1 had the New Game option. And Monster Hunter (Capcom's other popular series) not only has New Game options, it also has multiple character slots.

If this is a deliberate design decision, I can't think of a good reason for it either.
 
Yeah, I think we can all agree DD1 is a game of compromises but we were willing to overlook all that. But this, this is kinda silly.

It's currently got a 40% on Steam at mostly due to excessive micros and poor performance. I think I'll wait till the end of the month to pick it up.
 
I can't get worked up over the microtransactions, it's no different to Devil May Cry V and the Monster Hunters in that regard.
 
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Hykal94 said:
Yeah, I think we can all agree DD1 is a game of compromises but we were willing to overlook all that. But this, this is kinda silly.

It's currently got a 40% on Steam at mostly due to excessive micros and poor performance. I think I'll wait till the end of the month to pick it up.
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The thing about the poor performance is based on reviews and reactions, most of it has a very clear cause: the NPCs in cities.

As in, the game runs quite well in the "open world", assuming you have enough base hardware power. Some people have reported (with proof, including literally while streaming) technical problems like sudden crashes or textures not loading, so that's something that should be looked into, but overall the world exploration and action combat are very well-received. (One caveat appears to be that the "ox cart" travel options can get waylaid by accidents without any player input or presence, so players have no choice but to spend an hour or so to get to the main city on foot.)

But once in a large settlement with lots of NPCs, suddenly frames tank by 20 fps or so. As in if you have 60 fps in the open world, you'll get 35-40 fps in town. And it's not a consistent framerate, but rather something that stutters and hiccups.

So it's clear something is up with NPCs causing a CPU bottleneck. And players have to go into these large settlements for the main story and vendors. It's something that must be fixed, but I don't think anyone knows whether it can be fixed in a patch, rather than a complete overhaul of the game.

As for the microtransactions, I did find it a little odd that none of the reviews I've encountered had mentioned them, while all the reviewers have said that Capcom did mention there would be microtransactions in their review guide. The reviewers just didn't think to mention it for... some reason. Reasons I've seen include "I didn't read the review guide because I was afraid of spoilers", "The microtransaction store wasn't up at review time so I thought it was irrelevant", and "I forgot to mention it". It's just strange that so many reviewers simultaneously and spontaneously left that out.

To be clear, I don't think the microtransactions alone would have been a deal-breaker for many, but it's coupled with the poor performance, causing disappointment.
 
Capcom clearly knows their own RE Engine in and out, and they've probably fallen for the mistake that a lot of devs do: assuming they're super good and build for the game machines could handle it.

I'm also pretty damn tired of this MTX shit. They couldn't wait at least a couple of weeks like RE4Make? I can't help but feel we are gonna get that ONE game where they Ubisoft it up and make the game worse to get the money. I'm kinda surprised it hasn't been that yet. I know Street Fighter atm is very anti-mods and I'm worried that DD2 will be following down that road.
 
Pretty sure you could buy CR in Dragon's Dogma, or you could just play the gime and eventually earn it.
I would expect same to be the case here.

Only 4 or 5 hours played now, took time to download and get my character from creator in, but so far i am happy with everything.
 
It's fine

Game's good

Having fun

Lot of neat little touches I like

Like when you finish a battle, if you immediately walk by a pawn you give them a hearty high five, it's great
 
18 hours played, the game continues to be amazing.
I'm no really noticing any performance issues (apart from single game crash, lost maybe 5 minutes of playtime, if that), though it honestly might just be me being used to poor performance and not noticing it.
Writing is decent, only really done side quests, not brilliant, but not bad either.
The number of enemies on the main roads are a bit much, but that might just be me rusahing to places before i am ready at times.
 
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