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shikamaru317 on 29 January 2024
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VersusEvil said:
shikamaru317 said:

The more I read about Dragon's Dogma 2, the less I like, lots of design decisions that have been discovered recently that aren't great imo. A shame really, the combat and character creation look good, I would have played it if the director wasn't so dead set on bringing back poor design mechanics from the first game which were already outdated at the time, 12 years ago, mechanics which cost it alot of review points at the time.

Guess maybe I will play it on PC where mods will likely drop to fix those mechanics.

You a Bethesda fanboy, outdated mechanics shouldn’t bother you. 

Sure, Bethesda games are outdated in some ways, but most of the areas where they are outdated don't really bother me much, loading screens aren't a big deal when they are so quick due to a modern SSD, lesser graphics aren't a big deal because gameplay and story matter so much more in an RPG (and honestly Starfield was far closer in graphics to other 2023 games than previous Bethesda games were to other AAA games the year they released).

These things I've been hearing about Dragon's Dogma 2 though are a bigger concern to me. Apparently, like the first game, they are keeping only a single save state shared by both manual and autosaves, meaning no save scumming without a much larger time loss. They are keeping the first game's poor fast travel options (fast travel is point to point only with very few fast travel points, and requires an expensive and rare single use item each time), in spite of making the map 4x larger, which means that the issue the first game had with frequently needing to backtrack through areas of the map you already explored, while being slow due to the carrying weight system, fighting the same enemies you have already fought countless times, will be even worse than the first game. Those 2 mechanics were noted in many of the lowest reviews for the first game and it's Dark Arisen re-release, 6 and 7/10 reviews, and were a contributer to Dragon's Dogma only averaging about 77, and Dark Arisen only about 80.

Lastly, we have heard that the final preview build code had major framerate issues, hovering around between 30 and 40 fps mainly, too low for VRR to work effectively leading to noticeable stutter, and one site reported that Capcom has made the decision to lock to 30 fps now on consoles. Definitely disappointing to be locked to 30 fps in 2024, especially since other RE Engine games from Capcom like Res 4 Remake last year offered both Performance and Fidelity modes. Even if they couldn't hit 60 fps it would have been nice if they had lowered the resolution a bit and offered an unlocked 40-60 fps mode as an option in addition to the locked 30 fps, as 40-60 fps would have been high enough for VRR screens.

But, like I said, I'm sure that PC modders will quickly implement both improved fast travel with no item cost and more fast travel points, and multiple save slots. And of course on PC you can always customize graphics settings to get a higher framerate instead of being locked to 30 fps, so I will likely grab DD2 on a sale once I do my PC upgrade,, because the gameplay does look crazy fun, loving that Spear wielding magic + melee class.