Dragon's Dogma II - "They’re masterworks, all – you can’t go wrong"

[Yosharian]

Game is really fun and addictive. Having a blast with it.

One question about "augments". I have seem to have read somewhere that after you unlock an augment it can used by any of your character of any vocation. It doesn't seem to be the case(i.e: can't give my fighter augment to my archer pawn). I am missing something?

No no your pawn needs to unlock the augment.

 

[Yosharian]

Do monsters fight each other?

I haven't seen evidence of this unfortunately. I tried to lure a griffon into a golem and they just ignored each other

 

[DJOGamer PT]

Still love the game but man so far it doesn't quite feel the same as DD1, especially the lack of enemy variety is very noticeable.

This seems so weird to me. Why didn't they just use all the crap from Dark Arisen? There was pretty decent enemy variety with the expansion.

Probably two reasons.

1) It takes resources to update the art and animation of the creatures into the new game.
2) Because they want to give people more reason to want to buy DLC that adds stuff in.

Given the number of additions to the game in other ways, I don't feel like it was intentionally hacked out.

The most likely reason is that they probably couldn't reuse most assets from MTFramework, so they had to re-create everything from scratch
It was the same thing for DMC5

As for why ditch MT Framework
Basically according to Capcom, MT Framework while still technically capable was developed for the 7th gen hardware
Once they moved to newer hardware it was not working efficiently enough, so they had to create an engine that would both work better with the newer console gen and more importantly would also be more extensible and modular in case they needed to rewrite some aspects in the future.
That ended up being the REngine.

 

[Nikanuur]

This is the Monster Hunter World dlc:

Why are people suddenly mad? Nobody seemed to give a fuck about it in MH.
That's why I think here it's mostly tourists that just want to rage about something and don't really care about the game.

Likely because it's enticing to share the 'privileged' sentiment with others, and the 'ruling privileged herd' says it's in to hate the microtransactions at this moment.
And, of course, the ruling privileged herd's sentiment is clumsily based off of the few shady business models such as Battlefront 2 loot boxes or Fortnite's addictive skin acquisition.
Few make the effort to discern anything.
Like in this case; gameplay-wise one doesn't need to buy anything through microtransactions in DD2 because everything they offer is sooner or later unlocked by simply playing the game.

 

[Barbarian]

Game is really fun and addictive. Having a blast with it.

One question about "augments". I have seem to have read somewhere that after you unlock an augment it can used by any of your character of any vocation. It doesn't seem to be the case(i.e: can't give my fighter augment to my archer pawn). I am missing something?

No no your pawn needs to unlock the augment.

I can't use augments unlocked by my pawn either.

I mean the wording of what I read implied that if your pawn unlocked an augment you could use said augment(and vice versa)

 

[Renfri]

Thanks for the rotten mean, whoever it was from among you.

 

[Yosharian]

Game is really fun and addictive. Having a blast with it.

One question about "augments". I have seem to have read somewhere that after you unlock an augment it can used by any of your character of any vocation. It doesn't seem to be the case(i.e: can't give my fighter augment to my archer pawn). I am missing something?

No no your pawn needs to unlock the augment.

I can't use augments unlocked by my pawn either.

I mean the wording of what I read implied that if your pawn unlocked an augment you could use said augment(and vice versa)

....no, dude. The augments your pawn can use depend upon what they have unlocked. The augments you can use depend upon what you have unlocked. There is no sharing of unlocked augments between characters.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

Do monsters fight each other?

I've seen them wipe out goblins and shit, probably on accident. It's fine. That's a Monster Hunter World type thing. I don't need to have it in this.

 

[cvv]

You can also do a hard save from the menu, either save and return to title or save and continue.

Afaik you just force an autosave by doing that.

Autosave corrupted, inn save 3 hours back.

I'm dreading this happening.

Was it a crash?

Yep, loading the autosave crashed, then got corrupted.

Before I ended my session I rested in a camp, then saved and quit. I thought the rest save is akin to a hard inn save but nope, it's just a basic bitch autosave again.

 

[cvv]

Do monsters fight each other?

I've seen them wipe out goblins and shit, probably on accident. It's fine. That's a Monster Hunter World type thing. I don't need to have it in this.

I could swear I watched a video where two cyclops duked it out with a gryphon.

 

[Yosharian]

Inn saves cost a little too much in my opinion considering how important they are for not losing progress

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

Inn saves cost a little too much in my opinion considering how important they are for not losing progress

Does owning a house and saving there count as a Inn save?

There for sure needs to be an additional warning when you click load at Inn. Something like "are you SURE you want to load at Inn?"

 

[Tyrr]

Like in this case; gameplay-wise one doesn't need to buy anything through microtransactions in DD2 because everything they offer is sooner or later unlocked by simply playing the game.

Also most of the dlc are just the items from the deluxe edition, sold separately.

 

[Shrimp]

Inn saves cost a little too much in my opinion considering how important they are for not losing progress

Does owning a house and saving there count as a Inn save?

There for sure needs to be an additional warning when you click load at Inn. Something like "are you SURE you want to load at Inn?"

My pawn some times returns from the rift when I sleep in my house. I don't know if it updates/uploads your pawn data, but since it comes back from other worlds I assume it works as saving at a regular inn.

 

[cvv]

Inn saves cost a little too much in my opinion considering how important they are for not losing progress

Does owning a house and saving there count as a Inn save?

There for sure needs to be an additional warning when you click load at Inn. Something like "are you SURE you want to load at Inn?"

Fucking this. I misclicked at the start of the game and this game loads your inn save and then immediately fucking autosaves, thus wiping out whatever progress you made. I lost only like 15 minutes but you can lose a lot more that way.

 

[Saark]

Well, finished the game and post-game.

Spoiler

Post-game was fairly nice, sending you to the four main cities to evacuate them. There's a fuckton more enemies, the world changes in an interesting way, but it quickly devolves into a slog of just fighting the same enemies over and over. There's no new enemies in post-game besides 2 bosses. Boring.

The game also suddenly gives you a shitton of Ferrystones and unlocks Portcrystals in all major cities, making it very easy to just do all the remaining quests in just a few hours. Frankly, this should've been a thing from the start, I don't know why there's no port crystal in each major hub, instead relying on Oxcarts and Ropeways for traversal, which is just wasting time. Initially it seems like there's a time-limit for post-game, but there's a "hidden" quest to stop the time limit as well, which is nice. Not like it's needed, since you basically do all of it in like 2 ingame days.

It seems dragons in the post-game can drop best in slot gear, at least I had some yellow-colored armor drop from one of them. Might be farmable for better gear than what Wyrmfire Crystal vendor sells, I couldn't really check.

Overall the story in DD2 is pretty weak I think, and while it does get a bit more interesting post-game, it doesn't last nearly long enough. I'd definitely rate it worse than DD1. It starts out strong with Vernworth being a very tight and cohesive experience, where multiple questline coalesce and tie into each other. Once you get to Battahl, there's really no coherence anymore, and you jump from one objective to the next with little explanation as to what's going on, why you suddenly ally with person X or Y, or why they would even trust you. The first half of the game definitely spends a lot more time on building up character relationships than the second half does.

It doesn't help that Battahl is a pain in the ass to traverse, since you'll constantly get backstabbed and dragged into pointless fights that you can't really get out of. And there's a lot of running. So much running. Fuck me, there's just so much running. Not like there wasn't a lot of that in Verrnund too, but in Vermund there was a lot more caves and other areas to explore and you got distracted by more and more shit to do, and before you realized, you did 2 side quests you didn't even mean to, got some new gear out of it, and somehow made your way to the other side of the fucking mountain. It was easy to get lost for hours just exploring new things. Once you reach Bakbattahl, the capital of the second zone, that feeling was completely gone, as the game is pretty much on a railroad after that. After how much the elves and the language thing were hyped up, their actual implementation was also a pretty big disappointment.

Overall the game is a solid 7/10 (where that actually means it's a good game, not like those Game Journos who only rate from 6 to 10).

Took me ~37hrs to finish, which is definitely on the short side, and I don't get the feeling that I missed many quests either. Maybe 5 or so in Battahl. Didn't do Sphinx. Game didn't feel difficult at any point, Pawn AI is worse than in DD1 I feel (but that might just be due to all pawns being basically blank slates at the moment without any knowledge or Pawn badges). They run around aimlessly or get stuck a lot though, and I've had multiple fights where a big enemy is downed, with the fighter and thief characters just running around not even attempting to stab them.


Why 7/10? What points are missing? The game could easily be a 9/10 experience with a few minor changes:

1) The game is too easy. Like, ridiculously easy. I started as Archer, swapped to Mage, and then played Sorc. I dipped toes into Trickster and Magic Archer, but eventually went back to Sorc again. Finished the basegame at ~35, finished Post-game at 48 (you get bombarded with XP, it's ludicrous). Main issue: Enemies just afk for way too long. The few times that they don't, you get jumped by some Thief, Wolf, Harpy or Goblin, and you fear for your life. Then you remember that after they've done that, they stand there looking at you for 2-5 seconds before they attack again. I died 24 times total, used 7 Wakestones (6 of them in post-game), and most of that was during the last hour of the game where I just deathrushed into a few areas to see if there was something hidden in Post-game (there never was). I think I died like 5 times total during the main game. Which is ridiculously hard to do, because eventually I realized that even if you hit 0 HP, you still have a second or two to use a consumable that restores health, and not die, before the death-screen actually pops. Booooring.

2) The save system is beyond dogshit. Like, seriously, it's awful. Not having any control over manual saves is abysmal, and the forced choice in post-game is even worse. I now finished post-game, and would like to go back to it to farm some dragons and see if there's some special gear I can get. But nope. I finished the game, so now my only choice is to start NG+. Guess I gotta go through another 20+ hours of running-simulator to get to post-game again. I think I'll pass on that. Or not, idk, I get paid to play games so maybe I'll play some more NG+ tomorrow to see if it actually has new and upgraded loot.

3) Performance. I didn't really have any issues, but I'm also running a fairly beefy PC, and only play at 1080p. Even then, sometimes my FPS would drop to 30-40, which is more than fine because I'm used to playing games at awful performance (only got my new PC last month). Still, it's easy to see that many people would be running into serious performance problems, and that's not acceptable because the game isn't that good looking.

Like mentioned before, enemy variety is seriously lacking. I didn't find a single Medusa in my entire game, and I only encountered a Dullahan in the last hour of my play. And then I immediately found 2 more. Might be RNG, but in general it feels like you rarely run into big monsters outside of dungeons. I had more random attacks from monsters after Oxcarts, with a hilarious visit of a Dragon in the middle of Vernworth, and a Gorechimera in Bakbatthali.

Anyway, enough writing. Good game, looking fowrard to what Mods and some patches will do, but for now I think I'll pass on playing more. Wouldn't have minded starting over with a different vocation with new gear, but since I can't go back to the post-game save to buy some gear to take with me into NG+, I think I'll just sit this one out for a while. Or not, idk. It's fun enough and there's no interesting new games coming out anytime soon.

 

[Fedora Master]

I broke down and bought this (from a reseller, fuck Capcom) - If I don't like it I'll blame all of you.

 

[Volrath]

Well, finished the game and post-game.

Spoiler

Post-game was fairly nice, sending you to the four main cities to evacuate them. There's a fuckton more enemies, the world changes in an interesting way, but it quickly devolves into a slog of just fighting the same enemies over and over. There's no new enemies in post-game besides 2 bosses. Boring.

The game also suddenly gives you a shitton of Ferrystones and unlocks Portcrystals in all major cities, making it very easy to just do all the remaining quests in just a few hours. Frankly, this should've been a thing from the start, I don't know why there's no port crystal in each major hub, instead relying on Oxcarts and Ropeways for traversal, which is just wasting time. Initially it seems like there's a time-limit for post-game, but there's a "hidden" quest to stop the time limit as well, which is nice. Not like it's needed, since you basically do all of it in like 2 ingame days.

It seems dragons in the post-game can drop best in slot gear, at least I had some yellow-colored armor drop from one of them. Might be farmable for better gear than what Wyrmfire Crystal vendor sells, I couldn't really check.

Overall the story in DD2 is pretty weak I think, and while it does get a bit more interesting post-game, it doesn't last nearly long enough. I'd definitely rate it worse than DD1. It starts out strong with Vernworth being a very tight and cohesive experience, where multiple questline coalesce and tie into each other. Once you get to Battahl, there's really no coherence anymore, and you jump from one objective to the next with little explanation as to what's going on, why you suddenly ally with person X or Y, or why they would even trust you. The first half of the game definitely spends a lot more time on building up character relationships than the second half does.

It doesn't help that Battahl is a pain in the ass to traverse, since you'll constantly get backstabbed and dragged into pointless fights that you can't really get out of. And there's a lot of running. So much running. Fuck me, there's just so much running. Not like there wasn't a lot of that in Verrnund too, but in Vermund there was a lot more caves and other areas to explore and you got distracted by more and more shit to do, and before you realized, you did 2 side quests you didn't even mean to, got some new gear out of it, and somehow made your way to the other side of the fucking mountain. It was easy to get lost for hours just exploring new things. Once you reach Bakbattahl, the capital of the second zone, that feeling was completely gone, as the game is pretty much on a railroad after that. After how much the elves and the language thing were hyped up, their actual implementation was also a pretty big disappointment.

Overall the game is a solid 7/10 (where that actually means it's a good game, not like those Game Journos who only rate from 6 to 10).

Took me ~37hrs to finish, which is definitely on the short side, and I don't get the feeling that I missed many quests either. Maybe 5 or so in Battahl. Didn't do Sphinx. Game didn't feel difficult at any point, Pawn AI is worse than in DD1 I feel (but that might just be due to all pawns being basically blank slates at the moment without any knowledge or Pawn badges). They run around aimlessly or get stuck a lot though, and I've had multiple fights where a big enemy is downed, with the fighter and thief characters just running around not even attempting to stab them.


Why 7/10? What points are missing? The game could easily be a 9/10 experience with a few minor changes:

1) The game is too easy. Like, ridiculously easy. I started as Archer, swapped to Mage, and then played Sorc. I dipped toes into Trickster and Magic Archer, but eventually went back to Sorc again. Finished the basegame at ~35, finished Post-game at 48 (you get bombarded with XP, it's ludicrous). Main issue: Enemies just afk for way too long. The few times that they don't, you get jumped by some Thief, Wolf, Harpy or Goblin, and you fear for your life. Then you remember that after they've done that, they stand there looking at you for 2-5 seconds before they attack again. I died 24 times total, used 7 Wakestones (6 of them in post-game), and most of that was during the last hour of the game where I just deathrushed into a few areas to see if there was something hidden in Post-game (there never was). I think I died like 5 times total during the main game. Which is ridiculously hard to do, because eventually I realized that even if you hit 0 HP, you still have a second or two to use a consumable that restores health, and not die, before the death-screen actually pops. Booooring.

2) The save system is beyond dogshit. Like, seriously, it's awful. Not having any control over manual saves is abysmal, and the forced choice in post-game is even worse. I now finished post-game, and would like to go back to it to farm some dragons and see if there's some special gear I can get. But nope. I finished the game, so now my only choice is to start NG+. Guess I gotta go through another 20+ hours of running-simulator to get to post-game again. I think I'll pass on that.

3) Performance. I didn't really have any issues, but I'm also running a fairly beefy PC, and only play at 1080p. Even then, sometimes my FPS would drop to 30-40, which is more than fine because I'm used to playing games at awful performance (only got my new PC last month). Still, it's easy to see that many people would be running into serious performance problems, and that's not acceptable because the game isn't that good looking.

Like mentioned before, enemy variety is seriously lacking. I didn't find a single Medusa in my entire game, and I only encountered a Dullahan in the last hour of my play. And then I immediately found 2 more. Might be RNG, but in general it feels like you rarely run into big monsters outside of dungeons.

Anyway, enough writing. Good game, looking fowrard to what Mods and some patches will do, but for now I think I'll pass on playing more. Wouldn't have minded starting over with a different vocation with new gear, but since I can't go back to the post-game save to buy some gear to take with me into NG+, I think I'll just sit this one out for a while.

Sounds like decline compared to Dark Arisen. And if so, what's the point?

 

[Yosharian]

I can't even with this 30-FPS-is-fine spiel, lmao. The best I get is usually 80-ish unless it's an underground area or something, and even that feels horrible because I'm used to 120+. Dropping below 75 feels awful. 30 is just absurdly bad.

 

[Fedora Master]

I can't even with this 30-FPS-is-fine spiel, lmao. The best I get is usually 80-ish unless it's an underground area or something, and even that feels horrible because I'm used to 120+. Dropping below 75 feels awful. 30 is just absurdly bad.

Consoles lmao

 

[Saark]

Sounds like decline compared to Dark Arisen. And if so, what's the point?

It's kind of hard to say. I think if we remove BBI from the equation, then DD2 beats DD1. Neither game was very difficult, but I played Strider in DD1 and Sorc in DD2, so maybe that's part of the reason why I found fights to be much easier and less exciting. Or maybe it's just cause I've gotten fucking old since I first played DD1.

It's definitely just more of the same, there's no real innovations or exciting new features in DD2, and that's exactly what I expected, and the reason to play it. Because DD1 was good, and so is this. The lack of guidance for quests is great, although I wish it would at least be easier to find NPCs that give quests, instead of having to randomly check 20 different NPC in case you met a new requirement for one of them to hand out quests. I definitely missed a bunch of stuff compared to friends, i.e. I never had the

Spoiler

Dragon Attack in Melve

happen.

 

[Perkel]

I can't even with this 30-FPS-is-fine spiel, lmao. The best I get is usually 80-ish unless it's an underground area or something, and even that feels horrible because I'm used to 120+. Dropping below 75 feels awful. 30 is just absurdly bad.

Consoles lmao

I have RTX3090 and 5800X3D aka almost the best you can get and i get often drops below 30fps at random times, in cities etc. Most of the time it runs 80ish for me.

 

[Saark]

I can't even with this 30-FPS-is-fine spiel, lmao. The best I get is usually 80-ish unless it's an underground area or something, and even that feels horrible because I'm used to 120+. Dropping below 75 feels awful. 30 is just absurdly bad.

I get that, I do. But it's just an issue of what you're used to. My previous PC was from 2015, and it wasn't next-gen back then either, so I ran most games at 20-30fps, less if it was GPU intensive. Some of the more modern games I simply couldn't run at all (but then I also didn't want to, modern gaming sucks ass). I jumped from an i7 4790k/2070 Super and 16 GB DDR3, to an i5 14600k/4070 Super/64GB. So for the next few years, I'll likely experience all games at max settings without any FPS issues (except DD2, lol). Long story short, I'll get used to no FPS issues soon enough, and then I'd be just as upset at the performance issues as you are. But with me having played games at shit performance for years, I simply don't care at the moment if it's more of the same, even with a new PC at my disposal.

Once you're used to having smooth gameplay and no FPS issues, experiencing them for the first time again is jarring and disgusting. But when you're used to no game running above 30-50fps for years, and having to run all games at lowest settings while still getting shit FPS, then you're just so used to it that it doesn't bother you anymore.

 

[S.H.O.D.A.N.]

I haven't seen evidence of this unfortunately. I tried to lure a griffon into a golem and they just ignored each other

They do. I've seen a Cyclops try to fight a drake. He continued to do so even after I joined the brawl.

 

[Yosharian]

So I just found out that some Core Skills are shared between vocations and nowhere does the game tell you this and nobody is talking about it.

Levitate and Quickspell from Mage are both available while using the Sorcerer vocation.

I also got to keep the three elemental mage spells in their upgraded form which is less unintuitive but still a nice surprise.

Still, not having Empyrean sucks, it's really good against Undead and it's also VERY useful for fighting boss monsters at nighttime.