Overview
This is not how I would normally stage a review. However, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is utterly broken thanks to its scaling system, or rather, lack thereof. I find it impossible to talk about any other part of the game in isolation because the scaling issue impacts literally all of it.
Dragons Dogma 2, should be a great game. For the first six to ten hours, it certainly is. But there is a threshold you will reach fairly quickly that ends the fun in an instant. Once you hit around level 30, the game becomes exceptionally easy. Once you level a bit more, you barely even get to play it, as everything dies so quickly.
You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!
This isn’t a skill issue or something that can even be debated. With some games you could argue that it’s still challenging for some people. In Dragons Dogma 2, it’s impossible to find it challenging. If you can set your controller down, you will win because your pawns will eviscerate everything for you.
The thing is, this isn’t just about the game being easy. Power fantasies are a thing. In the case of Dragon’s Dogma 2, however. It causes every mechanic the game is centered around to completely fall apart. The pawn system, the combat, the exploration, all of it.
It affects the entire game to such an incredible degree that many of Dragon’s Dogma 2’s design decisions leave me baffled in ways I’m not sure any other game ever has. Such as the fact that the game has a level cap of 999, and nothing scales with you, even into New Game Plus. Equally amusing is Dragon’s Dogma 2 launched with no option to start a new game, until naturally Capcom faced a huge uproar and patched it in.
This means that the initial design intent was for you to begin stomping through the game within a handful of hours, and never stop, even in New Game Plus. You have a level cap of 999, when you begin one tapping enemies as early as level 20. And were never, ever going to be able to start a new character. Thankfully a new game option was patched in.
The media uproar centered around the game’s admittedly stupid microtransactions, but they failed to bring attention to the fact that Dragon’s Dogma 2 is fundamentally broken. Fine, I’ll do it myself.
| Gideon’s Bias | Dragon’s Dogma 2 Information |
|---|---|
| Review Copy Used: No | Publisher: Capcom |
| Hours Played: 80+ | Type: Full Game |
| Reviewed On: Xbox Series X | Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S |
| Fan of Genre: Yes | Genre: Open World Action RPG |
| Mode Played: N/A | Price: $79.99 |
It Breaks the Combat and Pawns
For the first few hours, the combat in Dragons Dogma 2 is a sight to behold, and aside from Dragons Dogma 1, there is nothing else like it. There is a physicality to it that’s rarely present in a video game. The physical impact of your blows, the ability to clamber onto massive monsters, and the entire concept of momentum.
In one of my first combat encounters, I accidentally fell off some scaffolding because I’m used to my game characters breaking the laws of physics to stop moving the moment I let go of the thumbstick. Instead, the momentum of my movement led me to fall off and comically faceplant into the dirt. A nearby Goblin actually stopped, pointed, and laughed at me. I’m not embellishing either, that happened.
It’s not just how great the different moves, spells, and various vocations feel that matters. It’s how they interact with the game world, the enemies, and your pawns. For example, it’s a common tactic that if you knock a large enemy off balance, you can grab or jump onto them and knock them over. What I didn’t expect, however, was for the Cyclops I just knocked over to realistically bash his face on a tree on the way down and knock himself unconscious.
I didn’t expect to be knocked down in combat and a wolf to drag me off, away from my pawns, and rip me apart. I didn’t expect to see the perfect timing of a pawn coming to wake me up from a sleep spell, only to watch her get plucked away right before she got to me as a harpy carried her off.
The way the pawns fight together and work with you is incredibly surreal. They are flawed, make mistakes, and learn over time, but they utilize tactics and teamwork as well as any player reasonably would. I’ve seen a fighter pawn launch a dagger-wielding thief into the air so she could latch directly onto a Cyclop’s face and stab it in the eye.
I’ve seen them run up the frozen stairs of a leftover ice spell to clamber onto a beast. In a battle with Goblins, I watched them straight up tackle goblins to the ground, pick them up, and throw them off a cliff. When Dragon’s Dogma 2 is at its best, the combat is an emergent tug of war between your party and the enemies, where both you and your pawns adjust your tactics on the fly. It looks like a cinematic spectacle straight out of a fantasy film and leaves you feeling good about your victory.
And the lack of scaling ruins it all.
Those scenarios I mentioned are only visible in the early hours of the game. You can’t see or enjoy any of it when the enemies melt in an instant. There is no tactical reason to trip a Cyclops that dies within 20 seconds. Your pawns aren’t going to be chucking goblins off of cliffs when they are dispatched in a swing or two. When I was playing a sorcerer, many combats ended before I could channel a single spell.
All of that beautiful spectacle and emergent gameplay is gone the moment every enemy you face is wiped out in the blink of an eye. And that moment comes very early in the game. Sure, you could technically make it more challenging by taking fewer pawns, but you would be sacrificing one of the core elements of the game and it would only delay the inevitable anyway, as eventually the numbers tied to your level will still overcome everything in your way.
It Breaks the Exploration and Progression
The world of Dragon’s Dogma 2 begs to be explored and it’s laid out in such a way that you will want to explore it. Trails that lead off the main road, tucked away caves, and all manner of interesting details await to be found. The world of Dragons Dogma 2 is one of grounded beauty where it’s always fun to see what’s beyond the next hill or around the next corner.
You are meant to explore. The game’s main quest line is actually quite short, to the extent that you can accidentally enter the end game with no warning. While there are a great many side quests, most of which you have to find on your own, much of the game exists to simply be found on your own. It’s refreshing, as far as open worlds go.
And the scaling ruins it.
In addition to the fact that you will just blow through whatever enemy you find while you’re exploring. The very act of exploring makes you reach that crippling level threshold faster. Worse yet, the game’s poor game balance ties the exploration into the game’s progression.
Weapons and armor can be upgraded, not only that, there is a very cool system where the blacksmiths of different cultures upgrade different statistics. The problem is, none of that matters because you don’t need to upgrade anything in the game. On my first go around, I reached the end game without upgrading a single item because I didn’t need to (and I also didn’t know I was close to the end of the main story)
The vast majority of the loot you find while exploring is material for upgrading your gear. What possible use could you have for that type of loot when you’re one tapping most enemies, and your pawns are cleaning house with the rest?
Then there is the vocation system. The game offers a variety of classes for you and your pawn that have a wide variety of playstyles. You can also mix and match augments from vocations to get the right type of spice you want. One cool thing is, you can switch vocations at any time when in a town. This means you aren’t locked into playing an Archer, or a Fighter just because you start as one.
However, if you take the time to max out even one of them, and then switch. You really aren’t going to get a feel for how your new vocation even plays because everything is dying so fast. You would have to start a new game for that (something Capcom didn’t even allow us to do at first)
To add salt to the wound, there are a few vocations that aren’t unlocked until the latter half of the game. So you never really get to play them the same way you do the early vocations, since everything you touch melts anyway. It doesn’t make any sense for Dragon’s Dogma 2 to be designed this way.
It Breaks the Friction and Enemy Variety
Most games are terrified of friction, anything that may rub against a player and invoke negative feelings. The thing is friction is honestly a great tool for a game to use to prod players into having the experience the game wants them to have. Dragon’s Dogma 2 isn’t at all shy about using friction to guide you.
You can’t fast travel except with a rare set of items you have to prepare beforehand, or by Oxcart which is only between certain locations, and you may have to get out and defend it at some point. This works because it incentivizes you to explore the world as you travel. And, it lets some of the emergent gameplay shine. I was running between destinations when I got jumped by an Ogre, and then a Griffon interrupted the fight and made it an interesting free-for-all. Something I would have missed by fast traveling.
Inventory management is a big deal, and if you do die and reload a save, the game takes away a chunk of your health until you manage to make camp or sleep at an Inn. NPCs can die permanently, and lock you out of questlines. Your pawns can even catch a disease capable of wiping out entire towns if you don’t stop it in time. You’re saves are limited in a way that makes saving scumming difficult, so you have to live with the consequence of your actions and choices.
And the lack of scaling ruins it all.
With that level of friction, it’s even more strange that Dragon’s Dogma 2 throws away that design philosophy by letting you walk through enemies so quickly. Inventory management becomes frustrating because it’s not important to your success. The lack of fast travel is impacted because, sure, you are encountering a billion fights between destinations. But is it truly engaging when they all go poof within 10 seconds, and you have to mindlessly repeat this process a hundred times during your journey?
If the enemies actually posed a challenge beyond the game’s opening hours, it would work, as each fight would be one of attrition. By wearing you down and eating away at your resources until you could rest. But as it stands, it just gets repetitive.
This is especially true because the game’s enemy variety isn’t the best. Be prepared to fight thousands of goblins, saurians, and wolves between destinations. But the real kicker is, the lack of scaling makes the enemy variety feel even worse than it actually is.
There are a lot of variant enemies. Something like three or four types of Goblin, Saurian, Harpy, etc. They aren’t simple reskins either. They have their own tactics, new combat moves and are weaker against or more resistant to some elements than others. However, it’s difficult to actually notice this fact, because by the time you reach those variants, you’re already at a level that you can wipe them out super fast.
You can’t actually see the different things the variant enemies do when they go down so quickly. So they end up just feeling like goblins with green skin or harpies with owl heads.
Verdict
Dragon’s Dogma 2 feels unbalanced to such a degree that the game feels rushed. The lack of scaling impacts every facet of the game so much that I hardly have space to address the other negatives which also make the game feel rushed.
Like the fact that a good 50% of the game’s main quests are janky stealth missions that feel awkward. Those missions are centered on political intrigue, and once they are done, they never come up in the story again. I could talk about how the game abruptly thrusts you into the end game. Seriously, when you reach the game’s second region you only have around three main quests left.
I could talk about how the spell-casting vocations feel neutered compared to the first game with far less variety. I could mention how it’s strange that the archer vocation is the only one that requires physical resources, like special arrows, in order to use their abilities. This of course means, that very few people want to hire archer pawns because they have to supply them with arrows.
We could go into the slapped-on microtransactions and how dumb they are. You can buy rift crystals, seriously? The main use of rift crystals is to hire higher-level pawns, and why in the ever-loving hell would you want to do that when the game’s balance is broken, to begin with?
The thing is, I could look past all of that, easily. Because the high points of Dragons Dogma 2 are really really high. When I first started playing, I thought for sure I had a game-of-the-year candidate in my hands. If Dragons Dogma 2 wasn’t such an unbalanced mess, it would be one of the best games released this year.
The good news is Dragons’s Dogma 2 can be fixed. We shouldn’t have to wait or hope for it to be fixed in the first place, but Capcom could certainly address the issue in an update. I sincerely hope they do, because Dragon’s Dogma 2 is begging to be a great game, the awful lack of scaling is the only thing standing its way.
