Waste of Time? - DRAGON'S DOGMA 2 No Spoiler Review

In my opinion who's already spent around 86 hours into the game that Dragon's Dogma 2 is an improvement from DD 1 not the dark arisen just the base game overall... yes the unmoored world can count as the everfall but the thing is you can only access umoored world for a limited time if I recall you only have 7 days before the smoky cloud take over the world you can destroy the pillar and stop it but the monster after 1 week won't respawn... it's lacking the Bitter Black Isle vibe and endgameness to it... in bitter black isle you get the sense of "VERY HARD" content but in drgon's dogma 2 it's just dd1 base game but improved when I say improved I mean like improved a lot, but the things I don't like about DD 2 is that the chest is not respawnable T.T it's annoying but whatever... other than that the game is great for content wise, combat, etc... . THE BAD THING is PERFORMANCE ... OMG I cna't tell how much I stressed about this stuff ... okay so I have RTX 3060 12GB VRAM, i5 13400F, 16GB RAM, SSD Gen 4 you know that my pc is not a potato at all ... this game is somehow capable of performing worse then RE 4 like gosh ... okay so here's all my complain about the performance, and graphical issue in this game, ray tracing is good but there's this smearing when I turn around especially it's very noticable on grass... the shadow ... I look at the PS 5 version of the game and I see the shadow is crystal clear even at distant but in the steam version is not unless you set the shadow at max but that thing is not stable, very unstable... and again u need at least run this game at 1440p to look good... I don't know why but AAA game for the couple last year is not fit for 1080p at all like 1080p is always blurry even tho u're not using upscaling at all. I will recommend this game to anyone until capcom fix the performance issue in this game. if they're not fix it I will just tell them to go buy the PS 5 version instead.

As far as fast travel points…drop a port crystal!

Game is not perfect, lots of things to improve but I'm having fun. Like trying to explore everything. I'd give it a good 7/10.

best review. Disappointed I bought this trash

I can accept basically every downside of this game OTHER than the NPC AI. It's ATROCIOUS and their capacity to suicide just put me off to the point I'm no longer playing.

FINALLY!!! Someone see's the game the way I do. Thanks for your rewiew. As a final word...The game is fun(a few hours at a time), but it is not FUUUUN! Way to many issues and the story is boring for the most part( its DD1 with a makover and yes I did play it....47hours logged in DD1) This should have been a 50 buck game but is not worth 70 or 80 for a Deluxe. My opinions. Peace

Love the game, but it loves wasting time. Stamina is bullshit in the game. Tired of the dark souls shit being shoved in everything. Game needs free fast travel. Don't care what their vision was. Its annoying now. Same stun lock bs every 3 feet for 23 miles to turn a quest in. Unacceptable. No, shoving Lords of The Fallen amounts of shit enemies every 3 feet isn't immersive. Its annoying.

I know this is subjective but I don't like how we had more abilities in DD 1 and the ability to swap between them but In DD2, this was removed. You have 4 main abilities. If you pick Wayfarer, you lose 1 skill to have the ability to swap and the other 3 are split between whatever 2 classes you want to play with. No no no. IMO, they should have given you the ability to have at least double that.

I couldn't enjoy the first game mostly because of how companions worked, just created pawns, no personalities, no personal quests, no interactions to each other. Just lazy design, can you imagine playing Baldur's Gate with companions like that? Not going anywhere near the sequel with all its added flaws

I will wait for the dark arisen version to come out in a couple of years, I got too many games on my backlog to pay full price for this!

Very accurate review.

The addition of 3 portable port crystals to the game and the fast travel system is completely fixed. Add to that even one more variety of each kind of standard enemy and the two main shortcomings of the game are resolved. The thing is, these two problems feed off each other in such a way that they both seem worse than they are. Capcom please do these simple things in your hopefully sizable dlc and I rate this game in the same company as greats like Skyrim

I didn't even get the game yet and there's already a fast travel mod on nexus 🤣

and another doesnt like the dd formula and chalks it up as a bad game. welcome back to 2012 where everyone and their mother and father did this. and they are back with their subjectivity.

After 30 hours of DD2 I miss playing Dark Arisen.

Dumbos should understand that we don't want microtransactions at all, not because we don't wanna pay money, but because just the simple decision of having microtransactions DIRECTLY affects your game design. Devs WILL build the game in a way that will incentivize you to spend money, and it just ends up ruining the experience just like it did with DD2.

It has the same issues that dd1 had . Fast travel unlocked at end , empty openworld , repetitive enemies, boring quests. stamina limited

I don't like JRPGs. I think they are complete shit compared to Western CRPGs. I didn't like Dark Arisen and, surprise, I didn't like this. The story and writing/dialogue are comically bad. Like, honestly the worst I can remember in any CRPG. Instant turn off for me. I played the Steam PC version and the HDR didn't work. The game looked awful, partially because of the broken HDR but also just because the graphics are terrible for a AAA 2024 title.

I fucking hated this game and I have no idea how so many people seem to like it. Metacritic has 88 from critics for the PC version. If this is not evidence of pay to play reviews I don't know what is. 88! The user reviews are 63 which is far more believable to me.

In my opinion it's fair review , people may hate it but many haven't played dragons dogma 1

Majority of the story still does suck, I agree. nobody remembers what the original Vernworth Arisen (your character) of looks like besides mostly Bryant? All the city people just all somehow forget you entirely and accept this Arisen from Wish smh.

The game is amazing

The open world design is stuck in 2012. Fanboys and whales are no good for gaming.

70 hours in got the best ending and I feel relieved that its over. They haven't done shit with "NPC AFFINITY", no romancing main pawn, story doesn't loop properly and we don't even get to see what happens after we "stop the loop"... The worst part is they took all the flaws of DD1 and amplified it to 11. So dissapointed....

Can’t believe I waited 10 years for this shit 😢

Love your honest reviews as always keep it up my friend

After 80 hours mostly spent exploring and maxing vocations, I actually uninstalled the game before even finishing the first few missions from Brant out of sheer, unbearable boredom. And I'm the sort who will put hundreds of hours into games I hate just to make a point. The thought of having to run around doing yet more busywork just to get some old man to get the hell out of jail was a hard nope.

No game sequel has ever disappointed me to this degree. If I'd known about the changes from the first, I wouldn't have bought DD2 at all. That's how different it is from what I'd expected.

Maybe I wouldn't have felt my brain leaking out of my ear while playing had the game not felt like a gutted, version of DD1, worse in every way except graphics:

- simplified equipment
- single weapons only
- fewer available skills
- fewer enabled skills
- somehow more skill overlap within vocations despite having fewer skills in total
- more useless skills, again despite there being fewer skills in total
- audio/video feedback on attacks and spells so bad you have to watch life bars just to see whether something connects
- hyper-aggressive hopping over obstacles making precise movement painful
- removed mobility skills (e.g., no double jump or levitate for Magick Archer)
- inability to sell from storage
- inability to even equip from storage
- pawns that actually push you off ledges
- forgettable score other than the callbacks to DD1
- unreasonable NPC pop-in
- mind-numbing quests
- pretty but sluggish movement
- tiny enemy variety
- inability to heal loss gauge except through rest, leading to time-wasting trudging to campfires
- pointlessly hidden vocations and "maister" skills
- fucking annoying pawns that you don't dare mute because their dialogue is one of the primary ways to recognize the potentially game-ruining dragonsplague
- wtf is the point of Pinpoint Volley except to make yourself worse?
- baffling design decisions like Quickcast and Galvanize
- aiming your bow shouldn't count as an ability

And so on and so forth.

To go into more detail, Galvanize and Quickspell are wasted abilities, because you always use them, so they might as well be static abilities. Casting times are just too goddamn long otherwise. Strictly dominant strategies make for boring gameplay, and so the Sorcerer would have been more interesting had Quickspell and Galvanize just actually been static. If casting times had been universally decreased, stamina costs increased, and stamina regeneration rate improved while not moving, then Quickspell and Galvanize could have been replaced with genuinely interesting abilities that actually do something. Like, I dunno, more spell slots, like we had in DD1. You could even have the design space to play around with different ideas, such as having every Sorcerer pick a theme, and those buttons can only be assigned spells from special lists specific to the chosen theme.

Let's not forget that most vocations in DD1 could simultaneously equip melee and ranged weapons. The variety in combat this fostered was one of the things that kept the first game so fresh for so long. One moment, you're using one of your three dagger skills, and the next you're using one of your three bow skills, and this alternation kept going through every combat. It was fluid and dynamic and fun. In DD2, by contrast, you just spam whatever your best ability is most of the time, every moment of every fight along every road. The combat decision tree is basically a straight line.

Gah! Just thinking of all the wasted potential makes me angry.

Mostly it makes me want to go back and do yet another playthrough of DDDA.

So many comments saying the combat in DD2 is improved over DDDA. Now, you may find the sequel's combat exceptionally fun, but fun is a purely subjective, normative judgement. We can yell at each other until the heat death of the universe without making any headway on that front.

What we can talk about meaningfully is combat depth, and DD2's combat is objectively, numerically provably shallower than DDDA. Unless you've developed new Peano axioms under which 1>2 and 4>6? No?

Didn't think so.

Honestly, it's like people are conflating flashy animations with quality gameplay. I actually saw a video posted on Reddit supposedly showing how awesome and definitely-not-boring DD2's combat is, and the video was of a fight against a gryphon in which the gryphon did absolutely nothing. Literally. It got immediately knocked out of the sky and then wailed on for nearly a minute before dying.

Huzzah. Such drama. Much excite.

Couldn't agree more.

I finished it yesterday... the half cook boring story is unforgivable. The quest are infuriating, everything to make you lose your time and makes the SHORT games looks longer. It's just fillers. I'll never buy a game again from Crapcom. Lazy unambitious devs! The map.. 40% water, 40% inaccessible mountain, 10% circular hallways, 9% deadend 1% shit loot. What a scam. they called this an ''Open world'' ? Hahahahaha. Combats are easy as shit, the game plays by itself, you gotta be really bad to die in this game. You can pause to heal!!!!! Games are designed for casuals first, not for experienced players. So us, experienced player can finish this game blindfold with a finger in the nose. Low armor choices, low weapon choices, no transmogs, can't even change the armor's basics colors. Horrible performancem Is this 2006? I expect more from games in 2024, a lot more than this lazy shit. Full price game? NEVER EVER again. Video games is just a business based on hypes, they don't need to make a good game to sell it, they just need to hype it good and fuck us after.

Standing Ovation!! Thank you for speaking the truth.

Im a Huge fan of DD1DA, one of my all time favs, however i have two seperate view points on games,movies ect.

1 side is my personal Opinion
Other is critical trying to look at an objective lense

DD1 is like a 7 honestly, but i love it dearly, after 13 freaking years i expected DD2 to be like a 9 on a critical lvl to me and have so much more to offer then it did.

I still love DD2, i prefer certain aspects over The first game primarily around Combat, World (like How there is actually rain weather etfects lol) and Character creator but I'm disappointed that it has SO MUCH lacking over the first game ranging from Enemy variety to less skills and holy crap the story is hot ass and much worse then DD1 story imho, sigh...

I put 126 hours in DD2, i give it a low 8 personally.
I do hope the DLC and patches over the year improves it alot but we shouldn't have to wait for Fixes and DLC to realize a game at its full potential.

Stellar blade demo stole my hype from DD2 and Unicorn overlord is absolutely stealing my Gaming soul in the meantime lol which i didnt expect cause DD2 was one of my most hyped games for a decade.

This game could have been Skyrim level good with a few changes. More good loot in chests rather than shops, more enemy variety, and increased difficulty in later regions. I don’t even care about the story or fast travel.

I recently played Dark Arisen on Hard from a new save and it elevated the experience. Those bandit/goblin fights that are tedious on Normal get turned into life and death until quite a ways into the game. There were times where I was going around enemy groups because I was low on resources. Having a harder difficulty setting would raise the stakes of travel in DD2 and help with the realism of monsters being able to kill you.

this is a damn shame. once i heard enemy variety and pacing was shit i was a little disappointed. i was excited for this game. even arguing players to give it a chance even if it has limited fast travel and unnecessary micro transactions. ironically those two big topics that people have been arguing about are not the real main issues of the game. and one of my fav enemies cockatrice is not in this game from what i can see.

That’s it. It’s beyond ridiculous how good this game could’ve been. 99.99% of chests are just useless shit. I’m currently leveling thief. I’m level 40ish and pretty much full cleared the entire Vernworth map(north area above Battahl) and the strongest daggers I have, can you guess where I got them ? Way back at level 13 from the seekers tokens. I have several pairs but they are all weaker than these snake head daggers. I think there were 3-4 chests that were worth going after. Mostly wakestones or ferrystones being the best loot. This game could’ve been so fucking epic instead it’s just another rpg that will never be anything other than mediocre

Also let’s not forget how you can be in the middle of move (Skullcrusher or whatever it is thief has-the flip) that hits enemies (goblins/other humans) multiple times and they can just stop being staggered and start staggering you. That’s not how it works. If im hitting another person over and over they aren’t going to just stop taking damage and start staggering me. That’s the point of STAGGER. You’re supposed to be fucking staGGERED

I dunno I think the enemies pose no real threat due to the nature of the combat system. It's built around enemies doing a move instead of spinning around to just hit you. Downside is that there are just blindspots you can stand in where no enemies could possibly hit you. I found that to be true of all enemies except for maybe the Sphinx, but I had Mystic Spearhand for that fight with predictable results.

The challenge disappears because the monsters don't really improve at all. At first, some enemies are very hard (and by at first I mean in the first 20 levels or so), but once players have some idea of what they are doing, get vocations unlocked, start getting gear and levels, as you mentioned, it all snowballs. It is very likely on a standard playthrough, you will be level 40 or 50 by end game, and well before then, you will have trivialized every combat encounter. I stopped dying in DD2 around level 25, unless it was environmental (fall damage and the brine are the game's actual bosses). So plainly put, the options for powering up your character quickly outpace what the monsters are capable of challenging, and there isn't a hard mode, or difficulty sliders, or anything. The newish monsters in Unmoored world are largely just reskins, and even they are no match for the power output levels that skills and gear provide. NG+, unlike many other games, doesn't get any harder either, it really is just restarting with all your gear and skills etc. So the game lacks challenge, and by the end, it becomes mindless because players are so strong they don't need any tactics to win any fight (thief literally can kill anything easily with just Skullsplitter spam, and Magic Archer is like a cheat code to the game).

So to sum up, players and the options they get, vastly overpower even the most challenging enemies in the game, there isn't any difficulty really, and the fights become so short and so mindlessly easy, they lose any value pretty fast because they are all foregone conclusions. No risk of loss demolishes combat interest.

I enjoyed DD2 warts and all, but I am not gonna pretend it doesn't have those warts. I spent over 100 hours with it, and had fun, so I can't say I didn't get my moneys worth, but I can definitely see areas to improve upon, and potential unrealized. While it isn't fair to judge it for something it is not, it doesn't exist in a vacuum either, and released to an audience that have played games like Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate, and Monster Hunter, it will be compared to those. So while I liked it, and had fun with it, I absolutely can also see that it could have been so much more, and the potential untapped is a damn shame.

I agree with RPG Divisions score, it could have been an 8 or even a 9, but for me the biggest detriments are: that it doesn't have enough challenging content to match the power of the player, it doesn't have much replayability, most if not all of the quests, and storylines, don't mean anything in the long run, only getting to the dragon really means anything, and too many designs waste player's time for no reason. Fast travel should have eventually become commonplace (eternal ferristone) by the end of the game. There needed to be a lot less travel for its own sake, passing time for no reason (sitting on benches to advance quests that just told you to "come back later" for no reason), and the ever terrible escort quest should be forgotten to game design forever more. With all of those, it does land in the D+ - C- range which would be a 6 or 7 out of 10.

the story could have been better a lot better, if anything if the story was better little issues like stamina and fast travel wouyld not be so bad, there's just no follow through even with the final big bad at the very end it should have been a fight like how it was in the 1st game, they have all the animations and resources from the old game you see that from all the reused enemies. Capcom insisted that the game be 70 - 80 usd but then gave the team 390 people to work with. that's just beyond stupid and very unacceptable. However DD2 is one of my favorite games it captured me people saying it's bad is fine I like hearihg differing opinions because there is plenty I agree with or can learn. Also like your accent awesome guy xD

You are great man. We really need more people like you

it truly shows the sad state of the gaming industry when people are talking about such an absolute sh$t house game

after this game I feel bad for calling out Elden Ring for reused enemies.

They really need to add more to the game, quests are disjointed and literally all the hours you put in for Brant at the start was pointless. I really loved dragon dogma 1 and even got the deluxe edition... kind of let down. It's by no means a "bad" game, but it does nothing new from the first, and magic was actually dumbed down.

Thank you very much for your honest review it was well-worth every minute. Dragon's Dogma 1 was a simple mediocre game with wasted talent. BBI and Dark Arisen saved DD1 but Itsuno (I'm not hating on him) wasn't part of that. You would think he wouldn't destroy 5 of 9 vocations and the BBI concept which lifted the popularity of the game, but he did. This was terrible and negative reviews are coming in now. I played over 6000 hours of Dark Arisen and Ryota Suzuki, and Kinoshita allow me to play many , many ways on 12 accounts on 3 platforms. It was a combat game first and foremost that was loved by hardcore players. I wasn't alone being immersed in all game possibilities. Keep up with expressing honest evaluations.

Completely agree with your review.

I could say Dragon's Dogma 2 is the perfect poster child for nu-Crapcom but actually i could say that for every single one of their games save for maybe Monster Hunter (which i have no experience with). A soulless parody of what was once effortless greatness. This is Crapcom ever since "RE"7 with one or two outliers.

Edit: So much time spent whining about no fast travel. Gross

Ah yes let’s “streamline” abilities and vocations. Go from 8 abilities to 4 and take away from the player experience. Gotta love these reviewers sometimes

If the game kept the same skill system, and added more monsters i would have been happy. This game is fucking infested with goblins and griffins. Not to mention being timed in end game was fucking garbage. I unistalled this trash and started another playthrough of the first.

While playing it, I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that Dragon's Dogma 1 was better "at least in my memory". It's not that the new game is bad or that the first one was objectively superior. Instead, it's more about the fact that the first game was released so long ago that its mechanics were easier to overlook at the time. However, in 2024, with so many great games that push the limits of open-world travel and mechanics, it's hard to defend those same outdated elements. And the story "wow". I’ve always known Capcom’s storytelling isn’t their strong suit, but this time, what a boring mess, lol.