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[Derek]

Anyone played it yet? I was looking forward to it as a more focused, more action-oriented, better-looking alternative to Skyrim.

 

[eigenbom]

vidya, wow, looks like it's got some shadow of the colossus monster-climbing action in it too...  :handshakeR:

[Blademasterbobo]

Yeah, I've been playing it. So far the combat is pretty fun (especially compared to oblivion [I haven't played Skyrim]), but the world isn't as expansive. (It's big, but not nearly as big.) This is probably a good thing, because the game's quick travel is super expensive. Plus, it has day night cycles, and when it changes to night, it's impossible to see shit outdoors. You end up having to plan your trips so that you actually get to places before nightfall. And while it isn't HUGE like Skyrim, there are a lot of little nooks and crannies to explore, with hidden ogres / bandit caves / etc. This can suck if you get distracted and nighttime comes before you finished the main thing you set out to do, but it's cool if your main thing was just exploring shit.

A lot of the quests are in dungeons, and there aren't quite as many outdoorsy fights as I thought there'd be (so far, at least.) Along with that, while the bigger monsters are fun to fight, they aren't the primary focus of the game like the demo/trailers kinda suggest. When there is a big fight with some large monsters, though, it's pretty rad. The monster climbing is fun, but do not mistake this for a SotC like, it is still very much an arpg. The monster climbing is just a different way to approach some foes: you risk getting pulled off / taking a huge amount of damage in order to hopefully avoid its main attacks and get easier access to the monster's bits. It feels pretty cool to climb onto some giant ogre's face and stab its eye out, but you can also just shoot at it or use spells or hack at its feet, etc.

The nonlinearity is kind of a pain before you realize that they expect you to run away from shit, especially in the beginning. Most of the sidequests have just been "kill x of y," so I just take all of them on the off chance that I accidentally do whatever they ask for. It gives you a bunch of "main" quests at once after a certain point, though. (And you don't have to complete all of them to move forward, although if you move forward before you have, you lose the ability to finish them.)

Finally, the fucking pawns, aka your idiotic helpers. You create one yourself, and then you can (should) hire up to two pawns that other players have made. (You have to switch the two extras out once in awhile, as they won't level up with you, since they're tied to other people's accounts.) They help out in fights, and mostly you (assuming you went one of the melee capable classes, which, why wouldn't you?!) end up taking two magic dudes and a sword guy or something. (The rogue/archer pawns are useless.) They "learn" about enemies and areas and stuff, and your pawn gets hired out and can learn about stuff you haven't encountered yet. Basically they give you tips and start using their abilities correctly the more they "know" about a certain thing.

All of this is cool and all, but the pawns have one major negative aspect. They just won't... fucking... shut the fuck up. They literally never stop talking, to the point where they even talk over one another!

"Ser, there's a cliff here! There is treasure over there! Sometimes you can fall off of a cliff! This foe is weak to fire! (repeated 20 times by all 3 pawns) This foe flies! This foe sings! The water has monsters! The forest has monsters! Sometimes roads have monsters even though they're roads!" etc etc and you WILL want to murder them after awhile, and there is no way to shut the fuckers up short of muting the game. You'll definitely want to turn the pawn subtitles off (and the tutorial tips, which are just about as inane) along with the cinematic camera thing, which zooms in on a pawn whenever they want you to do something.



Basically, it's pretty cool, but it has a lot of annoying parts in between the cool parts.

[C.A. Silbereisen]

I'm about 10 hours into it (and mostly playing on the overworld btw). I'm surprised howngood it is and how much fun I'm having.

The game isn't much like Skyrim or any other Elder Scrolls tho. As a Japanese dev's attempt to make a "Western" style RPG it's actually pretty much a failure because everything about it feels VERY Japanese. It even has an anime-style theme song. I'd say it plays like a faster-paced Monster Hunter crossed with Xenoblade's open world/quest setup.

Combat is a ton of fun (though like Bobo said, go with a melee character). You often fight large groups of enemies and/or a tough boss monster so battles tend to be pretty tense and challenging. The controls take a bit of getting used to (you use L and R as "modifier" buttons to switch between normal attacks and skills) but once you get the hang of them everything flows nicely. The climbing mechanic works well too and doesn't feel a gimmick they just put there to get reviewers to namedrop sotc. The game thankfully doesn't do any level scaling bullshit so you're likely to face actual danger exploring the world which is a plus.

[Derek]

Sounds good, thanks!

With open-world American/Western games (Skyrim, Fallout 3, GTA 3+, Just Cause, etc.) I tend to enjoy them only until I've found every which way to cause mischief (e.g. kill/anger everyone/myself in as many strange ways as possible). The actual quests/missions always tend to bore me very quickly due to how repetitive they are (and how samey most of the locations and NPCs are).

I'm hoping that Dark Souls and Dragon's Dogma will be games where I can get my fill of epicness and not just make my own fun.

[C.A. Silbereisen]

welp dark souls isnt really "open world" in the modern sense at all its set up like an old metroidvania (metroid 1, maze of galious) before the genre became all railroaded.

dragon's dogma has more of a "singleplayer mmo" feel and IS a make-your-own-fun game to a certain extent. right now im mainly just exploring the world and doing quests as i go along. tho as i said, the exploration is actually challenging so

the game is definitely no demon's/dark souls both mechanically and aesthetically. the setting is p much cookie cutter medieval fantasy and everyone talks in a dum faux "ye olde englishe slange"  but there a few nice touches here and there. the world looks decrepit and wartorn w/o resulting to obvious "post apocalyptic" or "dark fantasy" cliches so thats a good thing.

[Blademasterbobo]

The quests are split into main quests and shitty side quests. The main quests are mostly interesting and have set pieces and "epic" battles and so on.

90% of the side quests are shitty "kill 100 skeletons" or "collect 100 breads" type things, and you can mostly just take all of them and then forget about them. They end up being free gold / xp for doing things you naturally do while exploring.

I think you can attack most people in Dragon's Dogma, although you get put in jail pretty quickly and the NPCs just respawn a few weeks later. In Dark Souls you can kill anyone, but it usually fucks you over pretty bad, since most of the NPCs are the only source of whatever it is they do. (Whatever it is usually being something fairly important.)

[brettchalupa]

I played through the demo twice when it was released, and I really enjoyed it. I will purchase the game when I get through whatever I have left to play still.

From what I've been reading and from the demo, it seems like this game could benefit from being ~4 person multiplayer. Can anyone who owns the game agree with this? It seemed like it'd be fun to work with friends rather than the poor AI.

[Inane]

I played this a lot over the weekend, won't be able to again for awhile since my girlfriend has the disc; it's really good, and also has a completely insane design philosophy behind it. I read a little bit about it before it was released, the director was talking about how important freedom was to his vision of the game, and it really shows through. The game doesn't  go out of its way to show you anything, you can miss almost every genuine side quest in the game really easily (the one's Bobo are talking about are notice board quests), and quests that seem really linear often have multiple solutions if you do things like use a really rare item to resurrect a bad guy you just killed or something ridiculous.

The downside is that as a result the game is really esoteric, trying to explore early gets you killed (unless you run away from enemies ) but you need to explore within certain time frames to get side quests. There are 2 merchants in the main city and 3 notice boards across the world I didn't know about until I decided to explore each city really thoroughly about half-way through the game. Even combat has a bunch of unstated rules, like you can only grapple small enemies while they're staggered or knocked down. I personally like this kind of thing, but you really need to drop any completionist impulses you have to play it because there's a big great unknown portion of the game that persists after you've explored the entire world and beaten the game. On the equipment side I heard there's over 200 weapons, but you can only buy about 60 of those across every merchant in the country and equipment drops from chests are relatively rare.

The plot is also a lot better and more... tangible than other open world games like Gothic 2 or Skyrim. There's a couple oddities here and there in the game that tarnish it it, but the last 3-4 hours of the game are excellent. It's also not objectively a great story, but it is told cohesively and is a lot more personal than Skyrim. CA Sinclaire is right about the language, even if it's not really 'olde English' as much as it is 'Why the fuck do you keep saying aught, my pawns!?'. It's not Shakespearean, it's find+replace a bunch of words with aught.

I really do love the game, though, I'll probably play through it several times and even then I'm not sure I'll see all the interesting things it has in it. There's also a ridiculous amount of character customization and combat is full of hilarious physics carnage (there's an ogre early in the game that is near impossible to kill at the level you're supposed to fight it, but it's pretty much guaranteed to run off a cliff and kill itself if you fight it for more than 30 seconds because ogres like to hulk out and charge around). GOTY 2012, throw bandits off cliffs like it ain't no thing and accidentally have a gay romance.

[C.A. Silbereisen]

The plot is also a lot better and more... tangible than other open world games like Gothic 2

what

but yeah they use the word "aught" in like every other sentence. at least it isn't the usual thou, thy etc crap vidgame writers normally go for when trying to emulate "medieval" speech.

[Blademasterbobo]

GOTY 2012, throw bandits off cliffs like it ain't no thing and accidentally have a gay romance.

I thought this was neat, although it's probably a laziness thing more than a statement of any kind. The same cutscenes / plot type things happen regardless of gender for some romance-story-bits, and they don't change any characters based on what sex you choose. I think the only changes it makes are replacing female pronouns with male pronouns or vice versa.

[TeeGee]

Sorry for reviving this thread, but I just started playing it and it's fucking awesome (though not perfect).

- Combat if fantastic. Battles with large monsters, with climbing and shit, are truly epic in the pre-internet meaning of the word.
- Each class feels different and actually exciting to play. Melee is cool, but so is conjuring huge fucking meteors or placing magical cannons on the field.
- Story is nicely understated but has enough mystery to keep me interested. Exact opposite of Skyrim which insisted I spend a lot of time listening to dialogues outlining a shitty story with no hooks.
- It's possible to create a cool looking character.
- My first encounter with a dragon made me hate Skyrim.
- Those moments when you get caught by the night while exploring and try to reach the nearest safe place are amazing.
- LOVE the oldschool design with the non-leveled enemies, no fast travel, no hand-holding. I didn't realize how much I missed it.
- The mechanic with max health getting lowered after each hit is brilliant. Ensures that the end of each longer trip is going to be a struggle.

From flaws:
- Pawns chatter is annoying. They could really prevent them from repeating basic tutorials every 5 minutes.
- It's actually pretty small, with not-so-open world and few enemy types.
- It's a bit too easy.
- Graphics aren't very good and the design is very generic.

Still, it's the third franchise by Capcom I can see myself being a total fan of (other two being Monster Hunter and Ace Attorney).

[C.A. Silbereisen]

Pawns chatter is annoying. They could really prevent them from repeating basic tutorials every 5 minutes.

I agree but I think the idea is actually pretty cool. Basically it's an attempt at "narrating" the entire game and not just the "story" segments. It could be really immersive if it wasn't so poorly executed. Xenoblade does it a bit better.

Btw I think the pawns' voices are randomly pitch shifted to add some variety. I've had a couple of pawns who sounded like chipmunks lol.

[e_va]

i got to level 35 or whatever and stopped playing cos rpgs are boring but this one was ok 3/5 dums

[TeeGee]

Pawns chatter is annoying. They could really prevent them from repeating basic tutorials every 5 minutes.

I agree but I think the idea is actually pretty cool. Basically it's an attempt at "narrating" the entire game and not just the "story" segments. It could be really immersive if it wasn't so poorly executed. Xenoblade does it a bit better.

Btw I think the pawns' voices are randomly pitch shifted to add some variety. I've had a couple of pawns who sounded like chipmunks lol.

Yeah, Xenoblade did it a lot better. I like the idea too, just not how much they repeat themselves. I swear, if I hear anything about roads and monsters a single time more, someone is going down the cliff. Xenoblade seemed to have a timer implemented preventing same lines from appearing too often. Also, most of the chatter was characterization and not tutorials.

I think pawns' voice is pitched depending on their posture. Large, beefy guys seem to have lower pitch, skinny or small ones sound like chipmunks.

[PompiPompi]

The game looks stunning and fun, but I wonder if the screeshots in the first post are screenshots or are they photoshopped? It's not really important, just from a technical perspective.

[TeeGee]

They are bullshots. The game doesn't look nearly as good.

[Derek]

Mostly agree with you, except that I like the world size and also the graphics - they're much more appealing than Skyrim's, even though it's a similar approach. Mostly it's the character/monster models, I think - I really don't like Bethesda's graphics in general.

But yeah, I'm near level 40 and I'm getting a little tired of it. Still a lot of fun taking down the big monsters but that's about it.

[TeeGee]

For some reason I'm not getting tired of it. Maybe it's because I missed games like this a lot. I can see that it became a bit tedious and repetitive, but somehow I don't mind. Just like in Monster Hunter.

Comparing the art to Skyrim (or any other Bethesda's game) is a low blow, as it's hard to do worse :D. Especially in the animation and character/monster models department. Actually, my girlfriend was watching me playing, and that was the first thing she noticed: "at least in this one they move like human beings".

Though, I still don't think the art is good in general. I have the same impression as C.A. Sinclair - it's a bit too generic. Demon's Souls had a similar sub-AAA feel to it, but at least it created a very unique mood. Dragon's Dogma could use a bit more imagination, especially when you compare it to Capcom's own Monster Hunter. It also has some technical issues like objects popping out or framerate drops.

As for the world, I don't mind the size as much as the fact it's not really open. There are some roads, and you can deviate a bit from them, but it's not like you can pick a direction and go exploring, which was probably the coolest thing about Skyrim. I don't mind it much, because the gameplay is so much better, but it did disappoint me a bit.

[C.A. Silbereisen]

Idk I think the world is pretty open, there's quite a bit to explore. It's just not a Bethsoft style huge open field. It's definitely not anywhere near as confined as something like Fable or Kingdums of Amalur.