With over 7.9 million copies sold, Dragons Dogma 1 was quite a hit. The recent sequel, however, with about 40,000 reviews, of which only 54% are positive, has received mixed reviews on Steam. Even though the storyline is appreciated by fans, some fundamental issues related to performance have caused some disappointment.
Key Takeaways
Although I enjoyed the game, I consider it important to highlight a few notable issues that Capcom needs to deal with to facilitate the fans.
Micro-Transactions
Micro-transactions have been a part of modern gaming for quite some time now. I mean, If you can afford to pay for a better gameplay experience, why wouldn’t you do that?
However, why would I pay for it if I can acquire new things by giving some time to the main story? Especially the things that don’t improve my experience significantly.
Yet, what baffles me is that while you can find most things by roaming around, they come at very later stages in the game, making it more reasonable to just buy them instead. This is one way of teasing the players to perform these micro-transactions. It just sounds silly and, honestly, Capcom could have done better.
Performance Issues
Even with a good PC setup, the frames are constantly dropping. The developers, acknowledging the problem, blame it on the NPCs demanding more CPU power for rendering.
It is weird that a game with an uncapped frame rate barely makes it to 30 FPS on a PC with above-average specs. Although, you can get between 60-90 FPS in an open space on a PC where there are no NPCs. However, these fluctuations in frame rate significantly spoil the overall gaming experience.
The situation is altogether different on console where you get a consistent frame rate of 30 FPS throughout your voyage. Even though the FPS is significantly lower considering modern gaming standards, at least the gaming experience remains the same throughout the game.
While players have found a unique hack into maintaining a good frame rate by killing the NPCs, an update is required almost immediately to resolve these issues. Fortunately, an official update has been announced, promising some major improvements.
Limited Fast Travel
Not that much of a problem but not being able to fast travel through the vast map makes me annoyed. Before the game’s release, the developers had already announced that there would be no conventional fast travel options.
“Travel is boring? That’s not true. It’s only an issue because your game is boring. All you have to do is make travel fun.” This is what Hideaki Itsuno, DD2’s director had to say to IGN.
Now this might be a personal preference but I highly doubt most fans would prefer it this way. For example, out of the three available travel options, only Portcrystals allows you to fast travel. However, these crystals are extremely rare, and good luck finding them.
Autosave And Poor Optimization
Seems like the developers were in some hurry to launch the game and forgot to completely test the game before releasing it. I agree though, that every newly released game comes with bugs that are manageable at some level. However, the situation is a bit more strange with Dragon’s Dogma 2 where the bugs are not the only problem.
I had to bear the tragic loss of my progress as the autosaving option failed to load the previous save. I don’t know if I’m the only one facing this issue or if there are many like me out there. And this is not the only problem with the game’s unconventional autosaving mechanism.
The game’s autosave feature is given priority over the manual save option. What it means is that even if you make a safe manual save in a better tactical position, the autosave might load you in a worse position. It has caused me significant trouble and even forced me to load some third-party inn saves, resulting in the loss of lots of progress.
Similarly, the settings menu is also poorly optimized where well-needed options and tweaks are missing and miss-placed. I hope the upcoming updates will resolve these issues on a priority basis as, besides these technical issues, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a great game.
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I have been into gaming since my childhood and have been writing about it for three years now. Pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Communication Studies side-by-side, I spend lots of time reading books, learning new skills, playing chess, working out, and engaging in Reddit threads related to gaming.
