Capcom Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen

I mean that simply exploring the world doesn't usually result in anything other than some of the same monsters you can easily stomp past level 20, or the occasional treasure chest with shitty loot inside. The main quest takes you to most interesting locations, and the rest are covered by a handful of sidequests - and it's the same in Infinity Engine games, which used overland maps with discrete locations. Only thing you'd really miss would be the free roaming boss monsters, like the Gryphon or the Drake at Devilfire Grove.

 

the way i see it, there are two kinds of exploration:
the easy one, where you pretty much just have to go down the right holes or down the right invisible path behind some obstacle, which is the kind of exploration featured in traditional rpgs with fixed perspective. since it's easy, it needs to reward you with something at the end, like item, lore or nice scenery. stuff you wouldn't see otherwise.
then there is the difficult kind of exploration, like jumping backwards up a certain slope of a mountain to see what lies on top or using movement based abilities to get to areas that don't look reachable but are if you get perfect timing. with this kind of exploration reaching the area you wanted to is already a reward in itself and anything you find there is just a bonus.
dd has a lot of the latter and it is usually rewarding in some form, like static items for pickup, gathering spots or chests, which is good.

 

Incidentally, I'm going through Bitterblack Isle right now, and it reinforces my suspicion that the open world doesn't really add anything meaningful. BI is better than the vanilla game in practically every way - level and encounter design, art, atmosphere, even the combat music is superior. If they scrapped the open world in favor of an overland map, and poured their resources into developing multiple elaborate dungeons like this instead, the game would've been better for it, in my opinion.

In any case, I am now looking forward to a sequel, since BI clearly shows the dev team can learn from their mistakes. Hopefully Capcom won't be stupid and releases it on PC this time.

 

bi would be better if it didn't reuse the same rooms for everything. as it is now it's just a rehash of everfall with more room variation.

 

You'll be happy to know that the developers seem to agree with you. Dragon's Dogma was originally planned to be three times as large but the director reportedly said that the game ended up being better by cutting the size of the gameworld. Evidently, it got even better when that open world went away in DArisen. On a side note, this may explain why the Duke declares that 'all roads in Gransys will be open to the Arisen henceforth' -- at one point you were supposed to leave it.

Though, to be fair, an open world game is an aesthetic in itself. It exists beyond the needs of exploration and quite a few people like manually walking from place to place. Ideally, I think, it would be best to just improve the open world instead of cutting it. Not necessarily to make exploration more interesting but reducing the running back and forth with better placement of locales and the proliferation of shortcuts as well as making sure that the truly important parts of the game, the dungeons etc, aren't hurt at all by this.

 

I bought this game for PS3 somewhere last year, a little after that the new edition got released.

Never touched the game, bought the newer edition digitally on 360, gonna give it a try now.

 

i am playing this while waiting for dark souls 2 and so far i am having a fucking blast. first game where night is dark, intimidating, fucking night and. any build tips? better to play a fighter with mage pawn ? or the other way around?i am not going to play some faggy archer

 

The one build tip I can give you is not to care about that. Building characters in DD means to level one type of class specifically in order to maximize one type of statistic (magic for spellcasters; stamina for archers; hp for fighters; strenght for assassins -- you can find all that here) which is fine in case you actually want to play that class over the game. Not so much if all you want is a high hp mage after 200 levels. Instead just keep switching classes, that way you'll be able to combine many different augments and you'll also get a feel for what are the more interesting attacks your pawn could take.

If you're not going to play an archer you best keep your pawn as such. There's one optional boss that requires archers and pawns are very good at aiming. Do keep in mind that if you like climbing monsters, archers do it best.

Well, finished a playthrough as Mystic Knight sometime ago. Really slick. And overpowered. Probably the easiest way to take on Ogres head on.

 

The only time where character build matters is after you complete BitterBlack Isle one time. The second form of the end boss is different and more difficult. Having a well built character will make farming up his loot a LOT easier. Hence, you are best off prioritising a main stat, and sticking with a base class till around level 100, then switching to a specialty to maximize the stat you want after level 100.

Also, I would buy this game a second time if they released it on PC. This and Demon/Dark Souls were fantastic console games this gen.

 

I went out and bought this shit. It better be good muthafuckas.

 

Welcome to our internal joke.

 

we got him boys

 

i shall edit all your posts about how hard it sucks to maintain the charade and have more gullible fools buy it

 

Xbox or PS?
If Xbox I'll take your pawn around and get your mad rift crystals. I can't stop chasing the dragon, man. I need a hit.

Anybody else need some rift crystals? If I'm going to be smoking crack playing DD as much as I seem to I might as well make some of you degenerates happy. And in return maybe you'll let me pimp my ho out to you?

 

The order of the day is tha dragons dogma is a better torment than motb ever was and that it has the best c&c since arcanum.

 

PS. I went full consoletard.

Anyway I won't be playing it for a while since I'm not finished with Demon's Souls yet.

 

PS has jRPGs, whle Xbawks has only sports, racing and popamole, thus PS is the console fag choice.

 

I bought DD knowing full well that I was unlikely to get much out of it but I pulled the trigger anyway based on the fact that the praise was so effusive and ubiquitous (I don't mean on here). As the quip goes, "I know me"

Even beyond my personal reservations though, I couldn't figure out what distinguishes the game enough to merit such hype.

 

open world, emergent gameplay thanks to varied terrain and the ability to climb on your enemies, enemies with weak spots, pretty damn awesome magic, surprising amount of c&c for a jrpg thanks to being able to keep quest items for yourself or even better make forgeries and turn those in and so on.
it's simply fun.

 

On an unrelated note, what's the codex consensus on Resonance Of Fate ? It has some remarkably high prices in the net (about 35 euros new, probably because it's pretty old) but I found it used for 18 euros.

 

it's weird and takes some getting used to both in terms of the weird mixture of mechanics as well as setting/mood, but is pretty neat if you can stomach the weirdness. does have some annoying things, though, like having to run in combat mode through dungeon rooms you already cleared.

 

Xbox has Risen 1, and initially Mass Effect was Xbox exclusive, which the release of, incidentally, coincided with my Xbox purchase.
Funny that

And I was over jRPGs by the middle of the PS1 cycle. I just can't do that shit anymore.

 

Well, I guess lobbing opinions back and forth is kind of pointless. You close with "its simply fun" and I counter with "I didn't find it fun".

 

Your post isnt fun.