Dragon's Dogma review

[Neon Ignition]

I've only had time to do the opening sections and can already sense I'm going to have to approach this cautiously. There's great joy to be had from curling up in the winter dark nights with a fantasy title and losing hours to travel lands and take down legendary beasts... trouble is it isn't winter so I'm going to have to see how my attention span does. From the bits I've played so far I'm quickly getting used to and enjoying the combat and movement of the character, it looks good but the framerates a bit sketchy (PS3). The inventory looks a bit messy but that's probably just because I'm not used to it yet. So okay so far, but if I don't gel before the difficulty spikes it won't bode well. See how it goes

[fuse]

I'm now onto

->Open Spoiler<-

new game plus

and am level 58; trying to max out a few more vocations and get some sexy gear. Having a main pawn at level 50 for release day worked out nicely for me, I logged in on Sunday and received over 500k rift crystals

[Tobal]

anyone found how to force a pawn to use a health item, would be useful after a fight or during it to max up hp bar, instead of finding myself with half max HP 15 mins after leaving the castle

[Adam]

Can try giving them items and pressing left or right on the dpad. Seems to trigger their healing mode. I'm wondering if there is healing abilities later that recover the lost HP aswell?

[jimtendo]

Pro-tip:
Just a little north of Gran Soren (past the bridge/ river) head North, but sway a little North-West, there's a healing spring which is not too far near some rock formations. Grab 100 or so empty bottles and fill your boots. Have each member carry around 30-40 and yourself a few and you'll be set for some random ambushes by boss types/ boss battles. It acts like a mega potion as it heals the whole group.

[rmoxon]

Getting bored with this now.

Its poorly paced and all over the place, even for an open world game it all just feels really pointless.

The story is virtually non existent, which would be fine if it wasn't for that fact that the game also lacks anything else to help you become immersed in it's world.

The combat is Bizzare... On the surface it seems quite fun and action orientated... But then you realise that the combat is entierly about what level you are in comparison to whatever your fighting. Soon you realise thatthe game actually has very little depth. Also mobs are placed really randomly, you sometimes come across a bunch of low level enemies with a massive mob of high level enemies placed between them.

The dialogue makes me incredibly angry... Everyone goes on and on and never has anything interesting to say. Plus even though I told my main pawn to be quite most of the time she still never shuts up... And she's an utter bore.

The are loads of quests, but you never know if you're a high enough level to go for them, which means you often end up traveling miles only to discover you shouldn't have bothered.

Its a bit crap really.

[Munkhee]

Definitely a case of each to their own and all that, but I couldn't disagree more with rmoxon - this is the RPG I've been waiting upwards of 20 years to play. Combat is great, the monsters (especially the larger creatures) feel truly 'alive' and are immensely satisfying to take down (and are MUCH better than Skyrim's dragon's), and - most of all - the world has a real sense of *adventure* to it, sorely lacking in these days of hand holding and auto-leveling enemies etc.

I can't overstate this last point enough - the whole draw of an RPG should be about growing in power from humble beginnings to an ultimate badass, which most modern RPGs just don't provide anymore. Yes, you get more skills and spells to play with, blah blah blah, but fights are always around the same difficulty, no matter what level you are or what experience/knowledge you have gained, because developers want to make sure you expereince stuff in the right order. Dragon's Dogma is different in that you never know what you may face when setting out on an adventure. What you DO know though, is that if you are forced to turn tail and run from a more powerful foe, you can be damn sure you'll have the satisfaction of returning there later once you're suitably better equipped and totally owning them :-) Only the Souls series has attempted to address this issue of late (which I also love), but it does so with (IMO) a big compromise - with set placement of enemies and traps, requiring the player to learn level layouts, and keep trying until you eventually overcome them.

Yes, DD has has some rough edges (both technically and in the lore, story etc), but IMO these are FAR outweighed by everything it gets right. Easily my game of the year, and I can't see anything else coming close.

Truly, truly superb.

[rmoxon]

Yeah... Definitely to each his own.

Maybe some people like a game that seems to have been put together with so little thought, that's plagued with technical issues, and where you spend 75% of the time running away from enemies becuase the developers have very little clue how to make an RPG that is set in an open world, but I clearly don't.

One thing is for sure, this game complelty shows why Japanese developers like to make linear RPG's. They have no grasp of the open world concept.

Also, I feel that even mentioning this in the same sentence as a masterpiece like Dark Souls is a cruel joke. In regards to things like combat and level design, everything Dark Souls does right this game gets so very very wrong.

[Munkhee]

But that's where I disagree - IMO they've got the open world concept *so very right* in this game, where Skyrim and others (don't even get me started on Dragon Age...) have failed. I want an open world that is just that - open - where I'm not spoonfed the right quests to take on, or where and when I should or shouldn't go. I want to take on quest, gear up as much as I'm able and then set off not knowing exactly what will happen. Where I have to weigh up whether to press on into the unknown or head back towards town as the sun starts to go down. That's a true definition of an open world to me.

This is the game I wanted Dark Souls to be (though I should clarify that I did enjoy that game too!). If you could take the best elements from DS and DD and mash them together, I'd be a very happy man indeed.

As you say though, horses for courses :-)

[rmoxon]

But that's where I disagree - IMO they've got the open world concept *so very right* in this game, where Skyrim and others (don't even get me started on Dragon Age...) have failed. I want an open world that is just that - open - where I'm not spoonfed the right quests to take on, or where and when I should or shouldn't go. I want to take on quest, gear up as much as I'm able and then set off not knowing exactly what will happen. Where I have to weigh up whether to press on into the unknown or head back towards town as the sun starts to go down. That's a true definition of an open world to me.

This is the game I wanted Dark Souls to be (though I should clarify that I did enjoy that game too!). If you could take the best elements from DS and DD and mash them together, I'd be a very happy man indeed.

As you say though, horses for courses :-)

But an open world game still sends you on missions and those missions shouldn't be uneven. Do you reallly believe RPG's should have dungeons where you can kill half the enemies in one hit but have to run away from all the other enemies becuase you haven't levelled up enough yet. Maybe it's more realistic, but as a game this does not make it fun to play, all it does is make the dungeons boring.

Its basically like if you start playing world of Warcraft and in your characters starting area half the enemies are level 1 and the other half are level 50. It makes absolubtley no sense from a gameplay standpoint. The whole concept of an RPG is that it's a character building experience. A huge part of that is levelling up by killing enemies and questing so you can level up. This game does not require any of that, becuase it asks you to run through 75% of it. You won't be going back to these dungeons, so the fact that they are full of enemies you have to run past is a waste of time.

Its a bad game.

[fuse]

Yeah... Definitely to each his own.

Its a bad game.

You are hilarious.

[rmoxon]

Thanks.

On a serious note though, it's called an opinion, which incidentally is my own.

Hence "to each his own".

[ItsThere]

No fighting please.

[rmoxon]

Another fault i have found with this is the over reliance your A.I. Teammates, they're useless at managing their abilities and are constantly being downed. So not only do you have to spend 75% of the games dungeons running away from high level enemies that you will probably never actually get to fight, but you also spend much of all that time which you are running away from things reviving your idiotic pawns.

Infact I'm really not sure what the pawns bring to the table. Are they suppose to make the game feel like you're constantly doing MMO style group quests? Becuase they dont, they just make things feel far too chaotic. Maybe if the developers had just removed the pawns from the game, thought more about enemy levels and enemy placement, tried to give you a clue about the quests you were undertaking, and concentrated on making combat dependant on skill level rather than character level, they might have had a much more enjoyable game. Although even then it still wouldn't have been that good a game, as everything else about it is pretty poor too.

[Goemon]

But an open world game still sends you on missions and those missions shouldn't be uneven. Do you reallly believe RPG's should have dungeons where you can kill half the enemies in one hit but have to run away from all the other enemies becuase you haven't levelled up enough yet. Maybe it's more realistic, but as a game this does not make it fun to play, all it does is make the dungeons boring.

Its basically like if you start playing world of Warcraft and in your characters starting area half the enemies are level 1 and the other half are level 50. It makes absolubtley no sense from a gameplay standpoint. The whole concept of an RPG is that it's a character building experience. A huge part of that is levelling up by killing enemies and questing so you can level up. This game does not require any of that, becuase it asks you to run through 75% of it. You won't be going back to these dungeons, so the fact that they are full of enemies you have to run past is a waste of time.

Its a bad game.

but you could same the same about Dark Souls...

I don't know exactly how this game works but you have A LOT of situations in Dark Souls where you're walking along and then you suddenly run into something that wipes you out instantly