Dragon's Dogma Review

Here’s something to make you feel old. It’s now been more years since the release of Morrowind than were between the release of Morrowind and Doom. That has a particular poignancy for me because I distinctly remember playing Morrowind and marvelling at the enormous, 3D game world and thinking how far things had come since those 2D sprites. For that reason, I have in my own internal scale on what constitutes a good open world RPG, a Morrowind shaped slot that other games need to meet. However when I look back on it now, I would have to say it is not the RPG I enjoyed the most from that time. That honour would go to Gothic 2 by German developer Piranha Bytes. While Morrowind was great at world building and exploration, Gothic 2 followed through with its own, distinctly combat focused gameplay. In true German fashion, this mainly consisted of being tough as nails. No handholding, no simplified combat and definitely no level-scaling. This game was hard caps all the way. While the game wasn’t as polished or as large as Morrowind, it had character in its carefully handcrafted world that was more memorable than the empty plains of Vvardenfell.

Unfortunately, sequels to Gothic 2 had a patchy record. Gothic 3 was held to be a decent alternative to Oblivion (although I could never get it to run properly). Gothic 4, made by a different studio, didn’t make much of a splash. Piranha Bytes meanwhile went on to the solid Risen, and more recently Risen 2 (which has been getting some poor reviews). All the while the Bethesda juggernaut rolled on apace with Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim. Each one of them serving up that Morrowind style gameplay I loved.

In the non-Bethesda universe, a new open-world western RPG has recently been released called Dragon’s Dogma. It was developed by Capcom, the Japanese company behind Street Fighter and Resident Evil. If you’re asking what a Japanese company that specialises in fighting games knows about how western RPGs are designed and played these days, the answer is ‘not much’. The game has no fast travel between locations, if you walk somewhere, you have to walk back. Quests aren’t dynamic, nor do you get a map marker telling you where a quest is located (edit: actually there is! It’s hard to spot and I have been playing without it). Conversely (or perversely), one thing the game absolutely tells you is there are places you can’t go until you hit a high enough level.

But maybe that’s what the genre needs. A non-US based company to come along every now and then and look at the current tropes with new eyes and say ‘what’s the point of creating a massive open world if you just fast travel everywhere?’ If you set out on a journey in Dragon’s Dogma, there’s a real weight to your action. Especially for long journeys because night doesn’t just fall in this game, it slams down an inky, impenetrable blackness. All you have to beat it back is a small lantern that you need to keep refilled with oil. The upshot is sometimes you just have to find somewhere defendable to bunker down until sunrise, Minecraft style.

The weight of the world carries on into the combat. This is where Capcom’s fighting development background shows through as the system is very Devil May Cry, (you will no doubt notice some of Dante’s signature moves while you’re fighting). It’s a system which is located somewhere between the mushy hit box combat in Skyrim and the sharp, pinpoint combat in Dark Souls. Dragon’s Dogma gives you access to 8 different attacks which can be strung together in combos. When it comes to fighting larger monsters, like Cyclopes or Griffins, Capcom have realised hacking at a monster’s knee is pretty boring. The result is every so often you encounter a Shadow of the Colossus boss battle that has you jumping all over some huge creature for half an hour before it finally comes down. Even the regular monster fights can be epic as dozens of enemies will turn up at a time to take a chunk out of you.

Other than the combat, the main feature of the game is the Pawn system. When you start a game, you get to create a companion character called a Pawn. In game terms, a Pawn is an extra dimensional being who has come to your world to help you fight the big bad. Once you have created your own Pawn, you can recruit two more. The conceit of the game is the other Pawns you recruit are in fact copies of Pawns created by other people playing Dragon’s Dogma. If you take them on adventures with you, they gain experience and loot, which they then share with their creator. Similarly, a copy of your personal Pawn can be recruited likewise. So for example, my arrow shooting Pawn, Ruthier, recently notified me that while she was palling around with me, she had also been recruited in another world and had brought back experience, as well as knowledge of an upcoming quest. When I got to that quest she was able to offer me some hints on what to do.

All in all its a pretty neat little twist on integrating multiplayer into a single player game. Like the Souls games, you never interact with someone in a normal fashion, but through a quirky game element. If there is one problem with the Pawns it is that they do not shut up. Ever. The concept of them giving me hints about the world is a really good one, but giving me the same hint over and over again is pretty frustrating. For example, when fighting wolves, your pawn will tell you they are weak to fire. Then they will tell you that again every ten seconds until you’ve killed all the wolves. You can turn off their subtitles which helps, and after a while it’s not too hard to ignore. The other issue is if you are looking for a game world to role play in, then this one isn’t it. The plot hasn’t done much for me yet, and the NPC’s are forgettable. Which is kind of a shame because for a game which invests so much in making you live in the world, it doesn’t create a world which seems that believable. Contributing to this is the lack of production values as compared to Skyrim. The textures are a bit muddy on my PS3 version, and there are clipping and frame rate issues.

The good news for Dogma fans is that the game has been something of a success for Capcom, and a sequel has been confirmed. Although amazingly for such a successful game, I was unable to find a copy of it in either EB or JB Hifi when I went looking for it. I was even told at EB that they were only ordering it in if people actually requested it.

That’s kind of disappointing. Because the more I play of Dragon’s Dogma, the more the game reminds me of my time playing Gothic 2. What’s more, it has made me realise that maybe the Morrowind benchmark I had wasn’t an open world RPG benchmark, it was a Bethesda benchmark. Dragon’s Dogma has changed my own internal landscape on what a large, expansive open world RPG can be. It bets heavily on some unconventional designs and decent combat which for me, pays off. It combines the crunchy combat of a Souls game without restricting you to long hallways. Choosing your fights, and more importantly, learning how to fight, is crucial. Progression isn’t just measured in better stats and gear (you keep the same gear for a surprisingly long time, enhancing it rather than changing it). You progress because you become better. But no matter how good you get, you must always remember that in Dragon’s Dogma the night is dark, and full of terrors.

4 stars.