Dragon's Dogma 2 - Review After 100%

[Music] what's going on everybody morm here this time bringing you my review after 100% for Dragons Dogma 2 the highly anticipated sequel to A cult classic from several years ago by which I mean more than a decade in 2012 and while the game is a definite Improvement in certain areas I also think other parts of it leave me with mixed feelings which will dive into obviously to get my usual stuff out of the way first though I review games after 100% to set me apart from other reviewers on the platform and while that does include the achievements it also includes a lot more than that there's a link to everything I covered down in the description below as well as a link to my public steam profile now in the case of this title in particular a few extra notes one I did not get a review copy so this is coming out a bit after its initial launch a week or so and during this game's launch it got hit pretty hard by performance issues and people upset about the micro transactions now we're going to get into both of those things of the two I think the performance issues are more notable but make no mistake I'm not a fan of the microtransactions either we're going to talk about the microtransactions specifically a bit more towards the end of the review as it makes more sense to cover them once I've talked about how the rest of the game works and performance we'll get into shortly but besides those two things I will say that Dragon's Dogma 2 was an overall shorter game than I thought it was going to be my initial run came in at just under 27 hours and and that was with me doing most everything I could then hopping into New Game Plus to finish off everything else including the other ending now broadly speaking Dragon's Dogma 2 is an open world action RPG where we take on the role of the Arisen the one destined to either stop the dragon or die trying who is accompanied by other worldly Travelers known as pawns that aren't exactly human or anything they lack a lot of self-determination if you will and they comprise the rest of our party one of them being your permanent Main Pawn and the rest of them changing in and out pretty frequently with other characters pawns which forms this game's version of a multiplayer though it is largely a single player game you don't even need to be connected to the network at all for that as the game will fill them in with generic pawns instead and using this formula which was also present for the original title I would say they improved upon the bulk of it Without Really Trying to expand or broaden their Horizons really if anything I still think the scope of dragons dog matu is a bit Limited in what it tries to accom especially with things like side content which is what gives me those mixed feelings so let's actually dive into the rest of the game and start breaking some of that down first up we have the technical state of the game I'm sure many people have heard about the performance issues this game has and I can share some of my own experiences with those things some of which has been confirmed by the publisher Capcom themselves personally running on a very high-end PC I'll have the specs in the about section I should remember to do that but just about the best computer you could buy on a consumer level I still ran into issues primarily in town hubs it would kind of tank the FPS and I would get a lot of stuttering in towns and apparently this has to do with each individual NPC taking up more of your CPU usage than it actually should so hopefully they get that fixed but it's a very confirmed and prevalent problem otherwise running around the rest of the world was usually pretty Flawless from a performance standpoint with most of what I ran into being minor bugs like minor visual glitching things going into walls stuff like that but occasionally I would run into a more serious problem typically with very large enemies Dragons Dogma as a franchise sees you battling often very large enemies and I noticed that if you got them into a space where they shouldn't be or if you're near a small confined space sometimes those large enemies would try to enter that and it would just mess the game up as you can see with this footage where I was fighting this dragon and it got stuck in this building this went on for a few minutes before it finally just glitched out and stopped moving and let me beat it to death I also ran into an issue with the Fast Travel Ox carts in the game sometimes glitching out and just like freaking out in the middle of the road type of thing those aren't a huge deal as you can usually skip that kind of thing or just you know get out of it but still the kind of thing you might want to expect however I was playing this on PC and I've got to tell you that the keyboard and mouse control isn't bad by any means I play pretty much everything with keyboard and mouse even if it suggests using a controller which is the case here my my main gripe is mostly that all of the keys are not fully rebindable and realistically I think they would fix all of their problems with PC controls if they just fully let you rebind the keys you're only allowed to use certain Keys which makes using things like my custom keypad more difficult and while it's still very playable it's just a minor thing they could do to really help out the PC version of this because if you're going to bring a game to PC I do think you should be making an effort to properly utilize the controls for that platform but I admit that's mostly a Mii problem so not a huge deal mostly though there are some performance issues that you do need to be aware of before purchasing this I think and with that let's keep it moving next up let's talk difficulty and New Game Plus now this game does not technically have any sort of difficulty I just wanted to mention this that the game is set enemies are what they are but as this is an RPG you're going to be progressing through the game increasing your stats leveling up so there is a bit of a break point for the difficulty of the game as a whole for me that was around level 40 New Game Plus does not increase monster stats or anything it's just the same game again with all of your previously acquired stuff which actually makes it easier while also allowing you to run through and see the things you haven't seen before I'm fine with that the big monsters have a ton of Health anyway and there's a lot of room to optimize and really craft your build but I will say that this game doesn't really have an endgame like the original titles Dark Arisen expansion gave it with bitter black aisle and thus the point at which you're playing this game and going like oh I think I've seen pretty much everything comes faster than you might expect moving right along to character creation though so when you fire this up and start a new game after a quick intro you'll be given the Character Creator right away though I want to explained that as of right now you can only make one character Capcom has taken note of everyone's displeasure of this and has working on allowing you to do things like start a new game after you've already began the game but right now at the time of this view once you create a character you're locked in which I'm not a big fan of I don't mind the Single Character save for each character but only being able to make one character or not be able to start a new game really sucks for an RPG the original title while also only having one save per character would let you start a new game though as an example nonetheless when you get started with character creation you can start from an initial template or you can fully customize a new character they released a character creator separ for this game and it is pretty impressive you can do just about anything you want with this thing and really customize the granular detail of the Cosmetic portion of character creation you can technically pick between being human or beast Ren though because the Character Creator is what it is I think it would be pretty easy to role play that you are one of the elves if you really wanted to as they also make an appearance in game and while I don't really want to belabor this point because honestly it's not that interesting to me personally as cosmetic character creators go I think they did a really good job here the most important choice from a role playing perspective you're going to make here outside of just you know visual interpretation is your starting vocation you'll be able to pick between fighter Mage thief or Archer and this is going to determine your starting experience and thus it's a pretty big choice this determines what kind of equipment you're going to get what skills you can use the usual stuff if you want to pick the easier to play options you probably want to go thief or Archer as fighter is going to see you up in The Fray a lot and while I enjoy personally it's not for everybody and then Mage is really more of a support role until you get the advanced sorcerer vocation which is more damage focused magic though Mage can certainly do damage in the beginning I just find it's usually better support than damage now technically speaking this doesn't happen at character creation but a short ways into the game you will also be able to fully customize and create your own Main Pawn this is like your direct companion or assistant if you will and they will also be with you for the rest of the game they can cover any basic gaps in your coverage for instance I like to pick Fighter for my main guy and then my Pawn I like to keep as a mage for all of their support magic we're going to talk more about the pawn system here in a little bit in a more dedicated fashion though I did want to mention it here that you will create a pawn as well that though brings us to our story setup and my thoughts on it now initially I thought they might manage to do something cool here but truth be told while the setup is interesting and I liked the initial premise I do think the back half of the story gets really bad bad to talk about the story of this you need to understand the universe of Dragon's Dogma a little bit simply put there's a big old Dragon it marks the orison which is you in this case and it is the arisen's job to track down and kill the dragon or die trying being marked as the Arisen causes the pawns to see you as their leader and do basically whatever you tell them to do I don't want to spoil this for anybody else who hasn't played the original title and know where this winds up going so you might just want to skip ahead from here if you haven't but But ultimately that dichotomy between the Arisen and the dragon leads to a choice which makes up the core of how this universe works as a result of that the story of Dragon's Dogma 2 can really only go so many places and the initial setup I thought was interesting and might try to change something but it devolves into something pretty bland pretty quickly now Dragon Dogma 2 starts off with you in jail being called upon yourself and not the Arisen a short ways into the game you find out that you were marked by the Dragon and the current ruler of the realm vermund finds out about this has you cursed to lose all of your memory and sent to prison so people would forget about you so she can install her son as the ruler as well because typically the Arisen takes the throne and while the dragon's been around nobody could find the Arisen until you show back up after escaping prison and reclaim your memories learning about all of this as such you spend a pretty significant portion of the game dealing with that exact situation there's a false Arisen on the throne you need to deal with that so you can then deal with the dragon and like I said I thought they might take this someplace interesting or do something new with it but they don't this entire setup that I've just mentioned to you winds up not being a factor at all you get to the end of the game it's the exact choice you knew was coming if youve played the first game and while there is a true ending with an extra section I'll touch on briefly here in a moment nothing I just mentioned has any impact on that particular moment so what little bit new stuff they did add to the universe isn't Ed by the bulk of this game's story which means why am I doing this which felt like this huge wasted opportunity and then that comes in with some pretty bland storytelling towards the back half anyways for instance and this is marketing so I wouldn't even consider this a spoiler but the big enemy they showed off in the marketing giant walking statue you've got to fight the fight itself is whatever it's cool knew it was coming from the marketing obviously but what bothered me about this scenario is that what they didn't tell you in the marketing is that this statue isn't fighting you it's not even after you it's after your enemy the antagonist of the game so when this thing initially appeared and I realized what it was doing my very first thought was why would I want to kill this thing it is only helping me in fact it runs into people and my first thought was oh maybe they want you to like save these towns that are going to be collateral damage but no the towns that it's destroying are the people that imprisoned you at the start of the game so as a character what is my motivation to kill this thing in this narrative that they're trying to spin other than oh look at that big enemy which is what the pawns do they're like oh my God we got to stop this giant enemy and they just keep repeating that over and over again and while this makes for a great set piece narratively I thought it was very stupid and what's more having played video games for quite a while I noticed that this thing was legitimately marching across the map so in my head I was like I bet I don't actually have to fight this thing I bet there's some sort of scripted event that keeps this from getting out of control so combined with the fact that I just didn't want to fight the thing initially at least on my first playthrough as there is an achievement you need to get for it so on my second playthrough I did that but first playthrough I was like I don't want to fight this thing and I bet I don't have to so I just went and rested at a camp at which point a scripted event plays where this thing dies as a plot point I hated this now the other part of the story I wanted to touch on was the bit at the end again not really going to spoil anything but just some general notes Here There are two endings to this title primarily a bad and a good ending if you will the true ending if you want to put it that way gives you a sort of epilogue that you have to play through that sees you trying to accomplish a few specific objectives however unlike the rest of the game if you die right here you have to start it over from the beginning now every few days as an event passes you'll start from that checkpoint but there is no saving and so I learned that the hard way because there's some gear that only pops up in this specific portion of the game that I purchased only to die to one of the fights here and find out that I didn't just restart from my last autosave I restarted from the beginning of this event which a little bit of warning about would have been nice I would have played a little bit differently and obviously I did afterwards but it was an incredibly annoying mechanic to approach what was effectively the end of the game and suddenly change how I can load and save so all in all with the story it starts off well enough but I was just not a fan I didn't go into this expecting some Grand story again I've played the first game I knew how this was probably going to end because of how the universe works but the story is just not good here they very much so missed the mark in my opinion that though brings us to the progression systems as we're traveling through the world fighting off all sorts of monsters we're going to be making some pretty standard RPG progress in the forms of levels vocations gears and upgrades in addition to just ourselves our main Pawn will also be accumulating these things more on them in just a moment now levels are pretty straightforward as you gain experience you will gain levels which leads to increased stats just like the pre previous game the vocation that you level up in determines some of your stat growth this is important because later on you can change vocations pretty freely and master them to get extra permanent abilities that you can use Whenever However what vocation you level up in does affect your stats which brings us to the vocations not so much on the individual ones we'll talk a little bit more about that in combat but I want to speak a little more broadly about how they work now every vocation and there are quite a few of them beyond the starting ones that you'll have to track down and find offers a play style it determines what weapons and armor you can equip alongside what skills you can use but first let's talk about the skills and everything as you play in the role of a vocation you'll earn ranks for it as you rank up you'll earn more and more access to the abilities and augments available for that particular vocation as you kill enemies you'll also gain a secondary currency called discipline this is what you spend to earn those augments skills and abilities you spend them typically adding an in but not always sometimes it's like the vocation place in individual towns but you find the NPC that can do this for you and then you spend discipline on the things you want of the skills available to your vocation you can have up to four of them equipped and that's going to lead to your play style within your individual vocation then we have augments augments are permanent passives that once earned can be used in any vocation these are how you're going to get the permanent upgrades and Buffs to anything you want to do and incentivizes you to mix up and try different vocations here and there now you can only equip so many of these at once as well which means there is a limit to how useful these are and thus generally if you want to see if a vocation has anything useful for you in the long term you just want to check out their list of augments and see if it's better or does anything extra that you want specifically and then you can level up that vocation till you get that augment and then you know move on as I mentioned though your vocations determine what kind of gear you can use which comes down to your weapons and thus how they attack and fight or in the trickster's case you don't deal any direct damage gear obviously increases a bunch of stats though I will say gear progression is pretty linear As you move through the map you're going to be kind of moving around the coast if you will and each town as you go has progressively better equipment that could realistically be organized into like tiers so despite there being an equipment upgrade system the best items obviously come in the late game and outside of just general better stats they also have other side effects as well for instance some weapons for the fighter have more knockdown power which means they're more likely to knock down down enemies and some particular types of armor prioritize one type of Defense over another such as magic or physical but because all of this is limited by your vocation anyway there tends to be a best-in slot type of situation here however you can still upgrade all of your gear you go to either the armor vendor or the weapons dealer and you can enhance your equipment this is actually a little interesting there are three I would say main settlements in the game vermund sacred Arbor which is the elves and Bal which are the Beast depending on where you get these items upgraded the exact stats of the upgrade will change a little bit I didn't find this noticeable enough to Really Care much about it but technically speaking you can customize exactly which stats are getting increased via this option now the very last upgrade you can give your equipment which requires the three previous upgrades is worms fire once you get to the point in the game where you find the dragon forged which is a specific NPC they can upgrade your weapons to this tier this requires a special material that you get from battling the dragons out in the world that material plus already upgraded equipment allows you to upgrade it to that last stage which is the most important one because it does things like half the items weight which can affect your carry capacity which is huge as a result the best gear in the game is of course the stuff that comes at the very end of It upgraded and forged in dragon's fire as it were which gives you a nice sense of progression I think now a form of sort of side progression if you will are the pawns which means it's time to talk about those so if you're unfamiliar with this system basically instead of traveling with a party of other people you travel with their pawns your party is made up of you your main Pawn which is always with you and then two extra pawns these can either be generic pawns filled in by Capcom themselves if you're playing with your network turned off or if that is not the case they can be pawns from other players at Rift ston scattered throughout the land you can pick these characters up though they do share a few differences between your main Pawn your main Pawn is going to level up and be customize with you other characters pawns will not level up which means you'll have to change them out occasionally if you want them to be effective what's more though and the biggest feature from the previous game is that as these pawns go on adventures with other Arisen they pick up on what what happened they learn about the environment the quests that they've completed and gone on the fights they get into tactics you may have not tried and so when you bring these pwns along they'll often shout messages that can lead you to things they know about or point you in the right direction for a quest as an example now Dragon's Dogma 2 takes this a little bit farther and adds specializations and quests it's possible for pawns to pick up a specialization for instance the probably most notable one really is that your character does not speak Elish which means if you want to interact with the elves of sacred Arbor you need a pawn that does but they can also do other things like reveal the location of crafting material hubs on your map and other useful things though these specializations will tend to make your Pawn act a little more independently which isn't necessarily always a good thing because they might just behave a little unpredictably whenever you hire a pawn to take with you it might also come with a quest basically if you do this thing with that pawn you'll get a small reward from the person whose Pawn that is pawns can also earn Badges and things like that so make interacting with them fun now the reason you might want to interact with this system is that the reward is rift crystals Rift crystals are needed to hire pawns that are higher level than you as anything above your own level costs an increasing amount of these Rift crystals but they can also be spent on helping to customize your Pawn your Pawn comes with their own personality and things that you set when you make them but that can also be customized and changed later with items that will affect all of this which you can buy at the pawn Guild in major hubs so the more people use your particular Pawn the more Rift crystals you'll gain and the more you can spend and interact with that system a bit so overall I would say pawns are a bit better than they were in Dragon's Dogma 1 and it's a relatively novel system period as you don't really see it anywhere else and how those pawns learn and change and respond to the people they've been running around with I think is pretty cool and that remains the case here which brings us to the game play and World section of the game and you're going to be spending a lot of time running around this world if you play it to its full so it's a good thing to know about now I will say right away that in the marketing they were talking about how this world was four times bigger than the original but that's not really saying much because the map for the original one was very very small I would say that the open world for this game is also not very big but it is definitely a lot bigger than the original which is important when we talk about fast travel here in a bit now the world itself is divided up primarily into two areas vermund and B Hall vermund is this sort of sweeping grassland foresty areas with the occasional mountainous feel to it whereas batal is this Rocky Sandy almost desert esque area you're free to explore and go as you will and while there are occasional gates to places farther in you can work your way around those if you learn about them and the open world is dynamic every character you run into and major hubs is a set character with a name and outside of town hubs they have NPCs wandering around they can get in trouble with monsters and you'll also see ponds wandering the roads as well and this makes the entire world feel a bit Lively especially when you look at things like the ox cart system which at certain times of day the ox cart will go from one end of the map to the other and if you run into one either by waiting on it at its starting location or just out in the wild you can hop on and fast travel to wherever it's going if you pay a small fee so things like that add to the world feeling a bit more Alive Now each of these NPCs you run into has in Affinity with your character which is how much they like you which can lead to them doing things like giving you gifts at your home which you can purchase in vermund and some of those interactions can be humorous it also plays into the end a tiny bit now because each of these NPCs is their own personality and everything and the fact that some of them are directly tied to quests you might be wondering if you can kill them and the answer is yes however some of them being tied to quests means you might break something and that's where the morgs or the charnal houses come in using an item called a wake Stone which you can also use on yourself in combat if you die you can revive these dead NPCs if you've left the area where they died they'll eventually be moved to the morg and you can go find them revive them and then carry on with whatever Quest it is they had for you now if you go massacring a town you can of course expect the guards to react accordingly though depending on how powerful you are maybe that doesn't really matter and a lot of stuff like that leads to a dynamic feeling World especially in the main Hub areas and it's it's a shame I think that they didn't involve more interesting side content as a result the game does not have a lot of fulfilling side quests that would have utilized this system which means while all of that stuff I mentioned is cool it can feel a little paper thin at times now let's talk about getting around this world or fast travel broadly speaking I actually like the improvements they've made from the original title here the original ones saw you Gathering Port crystals dropping them at certain areas around the map and then using a separate item called A Fairy Stone to travel there the second title has Port crystals in specific locations on the map and if you find and interact with them you can fast travel to that area at any time without having to find and move a port Crystal on your own however the port crystals are also in the game as an item for you to pick up and you can do what you did in the first game so there are set locations where there are permanent ones and then there are also optional ones that you can pick up and go drop somewhere and then you use your Fairy Stones to travel in between them Fairy Stones are a little more Uncommon than I would have preferred which to a lot of running around but this system combined with the oxcart system which is also fast travel gives you plenty of ways to move around the map once you learn about what and how and I think that's a reasonable compromise from the original titles method which is probably necessary because of how much larger this world is than the original one now that's more of a I would say functional breakdown let's talk about the other side of it the gameplay portion of running around this world mostly you're going to be running around fighting enemies as you go taking taking on the occasional side quest and that looks pretty much like what you would expect you're just running around fighting monsters and interacting with them though it does have some Dynamic elements there are parts of the world that can be broken such as destructible Bridges and things that after a few days in game will eventually respawn also helps with that sort of dynamic feeling there are also all sorts of optional Dungeons and things you can find throughout the world and the world itself has a day night cycle the night cycle in particular being very very dark you can obviously change this a bit with your brightness settings but it's intended to be very low vision and also more dangerous enemies come out at night and this can lead to a few fun secrets to find such as the headless horsemen fight or the Sphinx now I will say the Sphinx is very well tucked away but because this game has been out a little while already it's very easy to find VIA guides I'm not going to show it personally because YouTube is not a fan of nudity but my point being there's secrets and things to interact with on the map that the first game kind of lacked but I will say also that Bal in particular has way too many enemies you cannot move in the areas of Bal without just tripping over enemy after enemy that makes it hard to move anywhere and for a game that limits fast travel I think they could have called the enemy density a little bit there obviously you want it to be a bit dangerous because that's the kind of world we're dealing with here but when I can't walk like five steps without tripping over enemies in one section of the map in particular you probably need to take a second look at it the second one one fight is over you're immediately thrown into another one and it gets very annoying very fast especially if you're just trying to walk somewhere because even the regular old road is not safe whereas the other part of the map ver Mund where you start it's a little more spaced out and you don't run into that issue as often all of that said though as I mentioned not a fan of the side content in this game I don't think the game has a lot of compelling quests or anything to go deal with and while there are certainly quests most of them are just very generic fetch quests or go kill this specific monster or escort this person and it's interesting to me that they built and made this really Dynamic world with this NPC system the death system the Affinity system and then they did basically nothing with it most of the interesting quests are tied to the main story with just a couple of interesting side quests most of it was pretty boring and while that's not a surprise given the big focus on combat and everything it's still a bit of a shame to see nonetheless though moving through the world interacting with its Dennison fighting off monsters camping out in the wilderness is a decent enough experience that though brings me to the combat section now largely speaking this is just the combat from Dragon's Dogma 1 in fact I would argue that this is probably where they changed the least and given that it's the bulk of what the game is if you've played the original title you should feel right at home here many of the vocations their skills Etc is just pulled directly from the original title even the enemies how you approach them their weak spots which I will say does lead to a few instances where I think they played it too close to the the original title in fact outside of a couple vocations that you're not going to get until the late game it feels nearly identical which I don't think is great for a seel you want to improve not just make the same thing more broadly speaking though combat is stat-based with a bit of skills so there are action elements to this you obviously need to know what skills to use when you need to know when to swing when to block if you're playing a fighter or how to use your vocation special ability so it does absolutely have a skill threshold but there is also a stat threshold like I mentioned way earlier there's going to be a break point with your stats that you're just better than everything else you're running into which is going to make combat much easier for you enemies though I would say can be divided up into small versus big small enemies are just kind of human-sized things really that you'll fight off in a pretty standard manner utilizing the skills available to you these are things like actual humanoid Bandits the undead goblins of their many size and varieties these lizard people called Sans and each of them has little unique things for instance you can cut off a saran's tail Bandits come in all forms that you have basically Mage Archer Thief Etc which can lead to some Dynamic fights but mostly these characters are pretty easy to mow down then you have the big enemies the enemies that you need to climb and grapple and hid in specific locations to deal the most damage as they tend to have very large health bars with multiple instances of said health bar most of these big enemies are also pulled directly from Dragon's Dogma 1 so if you know how to fight them there you know how to fight them here it works identically the main exception being a couple of dragon types introduced in the very late game generally though big enemies you want to Grapple find their weak spot and hit it at the time it was released grappling and climbing up these enemies and hitting specific portions of them was pretty novel but as this is a sequel It's not exactly breaking new ground but it is still pretty fun to mess around with and that grapple and throw system can lead to many a funny moment I will say though that enemy variety is not great you're mostly going to be fighting the same things constantly and for a game that is all about combat I think that's a real bummer and given that most of these monsters and things are just pulled directly from the original it really doesn't feel like they added much in terms of enemy variety it feels like they didn't do much new here at all really but luckily the combat itself is pretty fun now as you're engaging in combat and take enemy hits you will build up what they call your loss gauge which is basically just a reduction of your max health and obviously that makes you less effective in combat so so in order to replenish your health up to its actual maximum you can rest which will restore this which is what incentivizes you to Camp or go to an in every once in a while which is usually where your Pawn will report back any travels with other people from a more functional standpoint depending on your vocation a little bit of this will change but your basic attack is obviously just that a basic attack that doesn't eat stamina every character does have a stamina bar which is what they're going to use to activate their special abilities based on their vocation which brings us to the vocations I mostly just want to talk about the new stuff here because a lot of this is actually just repeats from the original and there isn't much to say that isn't immediately obvious so I'll sum it up very quickly outside of the four starter vocations which we discussed earlier there are two Advanced vocations Warrior and sorcerer these are different vocations entirely from the starter they are not strictly better for instance the melee version sees you charging up melee attacks and can deal incredible damage but is very slow and lacks some of the defensive features from the fighter vocation sorcerer does fantastic charge up AOE abilities that can debilitate enemy foes and hit large groups the downside here being that they lose access to their healing magic and Buffs for your party which is a very basic example of how every single vocation is different there is not a singularly better vocation simply which one suits your play style better now what's especially interesting are the new vocations that they brought in such as the trickster or the wayf farer that are a bit different than their counterparts in their entirety trickster is more of a support oriented vocation where you don't deal damage directly but you'll have the ability to get specters and things summoned in that can deal damage or distract enemies that kind of thing generally I like the concept of trickster actually playing it wasn't really my thing and then you have something like the wayf farer the wayf farer is able to equip weapons from every other vocation but has lower base stats as a result pretty much your stand standard can do everything but less effectively than someone who is specialized and everything I just mentioned combines to make a combat system that is a lot of fun it feels great just like the original did jumping onto enemies hacking away at their weak spots or just dominating little enemies through a use of interesting party comps and minmaxed builds using your augments and Stat growth charts if you will if you want to take it that far though it's not necessary at all leads to a combat system that is as engaging and min max as you want it to be or if you prefer as simple and straightforward as a general hacken slash and in that way the combat of this game is very versatile I really just wish they had given us more enemies to fight and that the enemy density in certain areas was toned down a little bit because there does come a point for me it was around 10 to 20 hours where a lot of fights were just like a nuisance and in the way more than they were an engaging experience but the overall system is pretty fun now moving right along let's finally talk about the mic mic transactions of this particular title I have a few things to say here but I want to kick this section off with this all of the microtransactions are things that can be acquired in game I would not generally consider any of them pay to win but what a lot of them are are pay for convenience which I still don't think is great I also don't think $70 full price AAA Games should be shipping with microtransactions to make things easier to accommodate for systems that the game developer already made so as an example one of the things you can buy are Port crystals which enable an extra form of fast travel beyond what you'd be able to get normally which means you're paying for a convenience option and while you absolutely don't need those things that existing incentivizes the developer to develop those things to give you a reason to buy them for the most basic example I don't need to buy Port crystals if I have access to free and abundant fast travel they've effectively created a problem so they can sell you the solution to it and I think things like that are exceptionally unfortunate because realistically this game has an online component via its Pawn system if you were to tell me hey here's some cosmetic microtransactions because we have to support the cost of these servers over time that's perfectly reasonable I I wouldn't really have any problem with that but these pay for convenience options effectively just help people get around the system you as a developer designed to begin with aren't great and I don't like seeing them in these games I also though have seen a lot of I would say misinformation about them they are definitely not pay to win and everything about them can be obtained in game you can edit your character's appearance at barber shops around town but that costs gold and you would be incentivized to buy something that lets you do that because you can't just create a new character or start a new game at the moment and while yes you can absolutely just get the gold to go do it and it's not that crazy expensive either you can see what I'm talking about when I've said that they've tried to push people into those purchases through these design decisions so while these micr transactions don't bother me as much as say the performance issues do I also still don't think they should be here and it's really easy to say yeah well you know just don't buy them and that is the correct thing to do you definitely shouldn't buy them you don't need them they become an issue when the game starts being developed around them so while they are not nearly as bad as some of the initial rumors and speculation I saw running around the internet I still don't think they should be here at all just on principle that though brings me to the steam deck section of this particular review and generally I would say don't you're going to run into some problems potentially not least of which because of how demanding this game is which is a little beyond what a steam deck can generally pull off anyway another portion is that this game uses anti-che software both denuvo and Enigma I believe which is a problem specifically because the steam deck is a Linux based system and sometimes Linux based systems will trigger those anti-che things as some sort of third party software which can be a problem if you want to play with the network features enabled specifically so while you could probably play this on the steam deck simply put I personally wouldn't especially if you're playing it online with the pawn system enabled because if you Tinker with any of the settings for the steam deck like the exact version of proton you're using to get around some of the performance issues the game has suddenly you might find yourself banned so a pretty bad time all around that though brings me to our positives negatives and then we will wrap this thing up now on the positive side of things I like what they did with the dynamic elements of the world the NPCs the Affinity systems the ability to either kill or resurrect them and generally just exploring around and seeing what the world had to offer in terms of beautiful Vistas set pieces and stuff was really cool even if it is let down by a lack of side content in a meaningful way combat itself also very good no surprise there it's the core focus of the game so it better be good to be honest and it is very much so it's a very good experience I think they took the original improved upon it if nonetheless playing it a bit safe but the world is cool and the combat is a lot of fun but then we have the negatives which are a bit on the Hefty side for me the performance obviously is not great and while that might be patched eventually right now it is what it is I also think the story was incredibly poor like I didn't go into it expecting some Grand reimagining of the entire universe because again I know how Dragon's Dogma one works I know how that panned out but the story for this game is just not good in my opinion I was not impressed most most of it doesn't matter at all and then that leads to some in my opinion truly terrible writing towards the end there's the lack of good side content most of the quests and everything just aren't that interesting there's not a ton of it to begin with most of it is front-loaded and while there's a couple of decent quests in there none of it's going to blow you away and I was really let down since that was also the case for the first game I was hoping they would expand upon and really dive into the universe a bit which just didn't happen then there's the lack of enemy variety most of this stuff is just pulled directly from the first game works identically and all of those things together really made me feel like this was more of like an anniversary edition or a remaster or something to the original rather than a full-blown new game which brings me to my conclusion Dragon's Dogma 2 has its good moments there are times I was having a lot of fun with it I think in many ways it is a step up from the original title and improves on some pretty key features but it's also a game that has some pretty glaring negatives even if you IGN the microtransaction stuff which I am entirely for the sake of this conclusion Let's Pretend those microtransactions don't exist at all I'm stuck with a game with performance issues a poor story lack of engaging side content poor enemy variety and speaking for myself at least that's just not a game I would pay full price for and while I didn't get a review copy of this I actually did get gifted a pre-order of it for Christmas because this was one of my most anticipated games this year and needless to say I'm a bit disappointed in it frankly because for all its good moments and the times I was having fun I think it's outweighed by the negatives so as a recommendation I would personally say wait a couple months buy it preferably on sale when they get some of the most egregious problems cleaned up but that is pretty much going to do it for this particular review so I certainly hope you enjoyed it I hope you found the video informative if you did don't forget to like comment subscribe let me know how you feel about all of these things down in the comment section below but regardless of any of that truly just thank you so much much for watching I really do appreciate it may you wander in wisdom and have an amazing [Music] day

Channel: Mortismal Gaming

Views: 392,514

Keywords: Mortym, Mortismal Gaming, dragons dogma 2, dragons dogma 2 review, dragons dogma 2 gameplay, dragons dogma 2 mortismal, dragons dogma 2 character creation, dragons dogma 2 character creation guide, dragons dogma 2 microtransactions, dragons dogma 2 classes, dragons dogma 2 builds, dragons dogma 2 release date, dragons dogma, dragons dogma 2 vocations

Id: RLVAdZWwotw

Length: 40min 46sec (2446 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2024