I love Dragon's Dogma's environment

one of the most immediately striking things to me when I first left the gates of cadis was just how familiar I was with the environment in front of me granis takes the realistic approach unlike many games of having the biome in the game pretty much be uniform throughout so right off the bat the world is cohesive and doesn't feel like it's artificially shrunk down for the sake of a navigable video game sure you'll come to Rocky bits thicker Woodland wider Plains darker caves but I always got the feeling that Gris is a plausible location that anyone could just go to it's very similar to the feeling I got with Mula when I first played Dark Souls 2 where I felt like I'd been to that Coast before seen those ruins looked out over that ocean and so on the terrain roads beaches and brush of granis all feel reasonable none of the walkable Hills are too Steep and speaking of steep The Valleys there are parts of the game where you'll find yourself looking into the distance either side of you and seeing the Towering faces of an enormous Valley surrounding you you can't go up there of course because you pretty much have all the traversal options of a real person walk jump run climb Ledges and ladders so on yes there are Fairy Stones you can use for for fast travel but you need to walk to those places first and every time you take a walk in this world you'll feel more at home in it even with fish beasts and bands of thugs prowling the roads it would feel wrong to hop on a horse and Gallop past everything you will walk through every path this game gives you and you will experience it all as a person on the ground just as tied to this land as everyone else in it who has no place to call home occasionally you might find something more interesting a standout feature in the land like some nascal lines depicting a hero without a heart much like yourself and oops would you look at that Capcom just tied the story to the environment isn't that nice of them the history of the Arison Your Role is etched into the very Earth of granis which begs the question of why and how many of you have there been but we're jumping way too far ahead here questions like that are for when I talk about the story not the environment your exploration of grantis will be consistently tough I'd argue partly because of the previously mentioned limited movement options but also just how frequently you'll end up having your attention drawn From the Path a lot of the time it'll be some kind of enemy encounter you'll need to defend yourself from but sometimes you might see something in the distance and head over there to check it out now you're on A New Path discovering new places getting wrecked in the early game by a chimera or something it's because of this that I'd say despite how grantis is technically quite a small open world it can actually feel quite big due to the difficulty that manual travel poses when you want to go somewhere in breath of the wild for instance you can take whatever path you like you can climb down every mountain and stay clear of every enemy along the way now even run up a mountain and glide off if you really want to take it further in tears of the Kingdom you can make a machine and drive or even fly there those games are great in their own right but forcing your player to walk through through your world every time they want to get somewhere means they have to engage with everything you put on their path to some degree maybe there's a group of harpies eating a dead ox and they grow agitated when you get closer go around them okay now you're off the beaten path and may find yourself at the mercy of goblins and bandits in the area where are you going again you better get back to that path before nightfall because you won't be seeing [ __ ] when the Sun goes down hope you've got a lantern with you you'll need it and does it have oil so yeah moving from point A to point B is almost always something more than just that even if it is just enemy encounters that get you the game presents a s of discovery that somehow differentiates itself from many other games and it's so refreshing speaking of Discovery how about the structures one comparison I will draw to another game you might have heard of is that I had a similar sense of curiosity looking at the blue moon tower in the distance as I did in Elden ring when I saw the forge of the Giants all the way from Lim grave you can see this huge Stone thing at the distance from the very start of the game desperately want to go there but you need to develop as both a player and a character in order to do so that's one of the great things about really good open World Games their ability to organically show you something cool from later in the game stripped of its context then just let you go about your business there's no cut scene introducing the blue moon tower until you get there but you see it and want to go there anyway the most you'll hear about it before then is your porn simply pointing it out in the distance I had no idea how far away it was on my first playthrough or what road I'd have to take to get me there there a tower in the distance what say the map ISM set pieces like this serve a great role in creating an engaging and curious world since they act as an easy hook for the player I'm sure I'm not breaking any new ground when I say teasing your audience with something important from a latest section of your media will drive them to find out more by actively engaging more show your audience something cool early on so they'll feel even more excited about the prospect of learning about it organically and will be measurably more satisfied when they do that is of course if you get the payoff right and my Gog when you do go to that Tower in the story it's exactly the right payoff I love that Quest oh and for a minute there I almost forgot to talk about the everfall and other underground bits and the Witchwood in a way you could count the everall and the catacombs and bitter black Isle as other ruins but they're sort of their own thing in my mind honestly I'll probably go into much more depth about these things when I talk about the story but here I'll just talk about them in a vacuum the Witchwood is a curious area to me it's somehow both an incredibly claustrophobic Place helped in that by the fog amulets and weirdly comforting despite the wolves and spiders around every corner there's of course a witch at the heart of it right where the forest connects back to the first part of the open world and she herself has a pretty cool story this wood is Serene untarnished by the destructive hands of The Men Who prow around just outside its entrance now the everall is before you kill the dragon and likely an area you'll visit at once it's a huge spiral staircase around a central hole under the Earth it's clearly not a natural structure but it seems nobody in the world knows its true Origins at the very least the base game's mystery surrounding this area both before and after it turns into a boss select endgame section is very intriguing it has some connection to the porns and as we'll find out from bit of black Isle the one in gr saurin isn't the only one that said the one under Grand saurin certainly adds a certain attenion to that place when you know that some unknown Untamed power rests down there and the catacombs get another area that gets its tone spot on if you thought the Witchwood was claustrophobic I'd love to see how you deal with this although the catacombs are a lot more linear than most other areas including the Witchwood so it's not as easy to get lost as you might imagine that said it consists of dark narrow corridors that all look similar lined with countless sarcophaga you'll recognize from outside opening each of them could give you riches nothing a curse a rarity or Wake the Dead within speaking of the Dead within there are unsurprisingly a lot of zombies and skeletons roaming around this place thanks to the Perpetual Darkness there are even bits where the human-made architecture stops and you're exposed to open caves really adding to the ancient feel of this place when you're looking at the locations in a game it's easy to accept the Trope that loads of bioms are all connected in one walkable world I mentioned Elden ring earlier but even that game forces me to suspend my disbelief about the size of the world you're telling me that the areas we explore which do admittedly have a great sense of scale from the perspective of a person-sized person are meant to be seen as vast lands that were ruled over by actual demigods it can take under 10 hours to thoroughly do everything in limb grave available at the start of the game without hurrying there's plenty of game and it's a great world but sometimes I can't take the size of it seriously oh man I don't like how familiar that sentence sounded some games do the biome thing well like a lot of monster hunter games where the biomes are mostly their own separate Maps but I do think that Dragon's Dogma 1 stands out for not doing that at all you don't get a Snowy Mountain a volcanic hellscape or a Barren desert you get granis a realistic medieval setting in exactly the type of environment you would find in the real world somewhere with that kind of history behind it and of course how it all ties into the story Hil fig null which I mentioned earlier is direct directly connected to an important character and the everall adds a literal depth and mystery to the world as small as the open world is by modern standards I would say this game's location Rivals any I've seen in any game for just how immersed I was able to get and there was one last aspect I wanted to talk about regarding the environment and that's the explorability and how Bloody well it clicked with me for a little context growing up I would go on holiday every year with my immediate family to somewhere else in England usually near the coast but always with some history that my parents were interested in as a kid I never really found the information boards that interesting but I was over the moon when I saw a castle or other ruins depending on where we were I was able and allowed to run through the fields and climb on the ruins of ancient structures I would sometimes Envision what it would look like in a less ruined state but I'd be lying if I said the most fun part was anything other than the climbing itself so now I'm legally an adult and I'll be judged by more adult standards than when I was a prepubescent little monkey lad ignore that my profile picture is me at 18 years of age sitting inside a tree stump pretending to be a Coro I'm not in much of a position anymore to just climb everything I see so having granis be designed in such a way that I can explore freely in castle ruins and find chests by doing so and accidentally stumble upon a compulsory Quest item without first seeing the hints that the game was ready to show me thus heavily incentivizing me to continue climbing things made me very quickly connect with this game possibly more effectively through this system than any other I mean for God's sake you can even climb around the upper parts of grand saurin so yeah in conclusion granis was made by people who know what it's like to see a ledge and want to climb it and it was made by people who understand the seemingly endless Joy of discovery

Channel: TammyWacha

Views: 13,165

Keywords: capcom, dragon's dogma, dragon's dogma 2, dragon's dogma dark arisen, dark arisen, gransys

Id: jyzUZdJ6A6g

Length: 8min 25sec (505 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2024