Sorry I didn't see this yesterday, I haven't posted in a little while.
Yes, I played it for about two weeks straight. Muchos fun. But it's not for everybody. They've made some decisions that will strongly appeal to one set of gamers, and strongly discourage others. I'll start off with a short general description, and then move right on to some of these polarizing features so you can tell if this game is for you or not.
For the game description,
I'm going to steal Tim Buckley's, since I think I probably couldn't do it any better:
The easiest way to describe Dragon's Dogma is as the game you'd get if you put Demon's Souls, Monster Hunter and Skyrim into a blender. The deliberate, powerful action combat and difficulty/danger level is reminiscent of the what Demon's/Dark souls offers. Take that and put it into a gorgeous open world with a day/night cycle and tons of places to explore, and various quests similar to Skyrim. Finally, toss in the huge roaming monsters that take 15-20min to down, and drop pieces you can use to upgrade your gear like Monster Hunter. That's Dragon's Dogma.
Now, on to some of the polarizing features.
One of the biggest ones is that there is no enemy scaling in
Dragon's Dogma. In Bethesda's games, as you level up the monsters will scale up with you, so that you're free to go anywhere knowing that you can expect a similar level of challenge everywhere, or at least that all enemies are surmountable. In
Dragon's Dogma, if you go somewhere where the enemies are too tough, you're going to die. Full stop.
Example. There's a seemingly simple and innocuous mission in your starting village to explore a cave down in the village well. Easy, right? Wrong. There are six or seven giant lizard-men down there who will clean your clock for you. If you go down there when the mission first becomes available, any one of those lizards will kill you in 1-2 hits, while they'll absorb at least 50 from you and your companions. The better part of valor here is to run away and come back later.
Likewise, there are what amount to random bosses simply wandering around in the wilderness, like Chimeras and Ogres. If you run into a Chimera in the early going, you should run away, or you're going to die. The end.
Some folks will find this unabashed lack of any scaling to be really irritating. I love it. In
Oblivion or
Skyrim, enemy scaling meant that it sometimes felt like you were treading water by leveling up, since your new abilities are offset by higher enemy health and damage. In
Dragon's Dogma, the sense of immersion is much greater, because there are actually things out there that are very dangerous, things that you simply need to avoid until you're ready. This means that you're naturally more wary as you wander the world, because you never know what beastie is around the corner ready to kick your ***. And hell, even the frequent packs of bandits on the road really are no joke. I've died fighting bandits more than once. But it's oh-so-satisfying to go back and do a mission or kill a foe that was previously insurmountable, because it actually feels as if your character has progressed, and that you've actually accomplished something.
Another polarizing feature is that there is no fast travel option. That's right, if you want to go somewhere, you have to hoof it. This has some obvious advantages and disadvantages. The biggest disadvantage is that not every city/resting place has all the amenities you want. For instance, so far I only know of one city (the big main central one), where you can change your vocation/class. If you want to change your class, but happen to be far away from that city, well, you just have to travel all the way back. This can indeed be annoying.
However, like the lack of enemy scaling, no fast travel makes the world feel much more realistic and immersive.
Skyrim is a huge game, but being able to warp anywhere at anytime makes it feel small, because you rarely have to actually walk anywhere yourself... you just warp to a location right near your objective, walk for two minutes, and you're there.
Dragon's Dogma has a smaller world than
Skyrim, but it
feels larger because you actually have to traverse the roads rather than just skip around.
In fact,
Dragon's Dogma stresses preparation and survival in your travels. Resting at an inn will take you to dawn of the next day. This is important, because you really don't want to have to finish whatever your mission is at night. Not only does it actually get
very dark (you'll need to use a lamp which consumes fuel, and even this won't save you from ambushes in the darkness), but there are tough enemies which only come out at night. And even if it's just a pack of bandits, well, you try fighting a group of people when you can't see anything. In any case, the day/night cycle ends up providing a sort of natural time limit to missions, encouraging you not to tarry too much and move along before you're enveloped by pitch blackness and attacked by marauding ghosts.
Moving on to characters. First of all, there's a huge amount of depth to character customization, both aesthetically and gameplay-wise. You get to customize yourself and your main pawn, who is your constant companion during your travels. As far as creating the look of your characters, it's as detailed as you could want. There's something like 40 different noses, 40 different sets of eyes, 60 different hairstyles, etc etc, and then you go in and tweak every one of those things further, by adjusting the nose up and down, or adjusting the nose angle, widening or narrowing the eyes, making the eyes bigger or smaller. You get the idea. Moreover, some aspects of character creation actually have a gameplay dimension. Making a larger character will make them less prone to being staggered, and more able to lift and throw heavy objects, while being smaller will grant you more stamina and make you lighter on your feet. Even your gender can affect gameplay -- I ran into a pack of bandit women whose leader fanatically hated all men. When I approached her, she immediately attacked and killed me. Fun times.
You can start out with three basic classes -- Fighter, Strider, or Mage. Standard RPG fare. But when you reach the main city, six more unlock. And while each class costs a small amount of ability points (called discipline points) to unlock, once you've unlocked a class, you're free to switch back to it at no cost. All you need to do is make sure you've got the right equipment for whatever new class you'd like to try. I started off with a Strider, then changed to one of the hybrid classes called a Magick Archer, who fires arrows that home in on enemies, and some other really nifty abilities.
Your pawn can change classes as well. The only difference is that pawns can only use six of the nine classes which are available to you. But in all other ways your pawn is the same. He/she will level up with you, gets ability points, and can change classes as needed. Some abilities that you learn with one class can be retained when you switch to another, so it's actually to your advantage to invest in more than one.
You can also hire two additional pawns for your party. These are either created by the game, or -- if you're playing online -- created by other people. You can use other people's main pawns, and they can use yours. In fact, in the single day I was playing, my pawn got used by other people twice, and returned with little gifts to give me, along with some quest knowledge. If someone uses your pawn and does a mission you haven't done yet, your pawn will learn about it and give you advice, or be able to show you the correct path. Likewise, you can look to hire pawns with good quest knowledge, and they'll be able to tell you where to go.
Unlike in other games where companions can be quite stupid and generally unhelpful, your party in
Dragon's Dogma is extremely important. If they're higher level than you, and fighting enemies who aren't too tough, they may very well kill everything with you doing minimal work yourself. Likewise, if you have underleveled pawns going into a hairy area, you may find yourself in trouble. Pawns at your level and below are free to hire, while pawns above your level can only be hired by using rift crystals, with an exponentially steeper fee the higher level they are. Rented pawns don't level up with you, so it's important to switch them up as you progress.
Party diversity is important. Generally, your main pawn should be the polar opposite of your own class as a complement, and you'll want to look for companions who complement you both, as there are enemies that are weak to magic, or weak to physical, etc. The different classes are really all designed to help offset each other's weaknesses. For instance, I've got a Mage in my party who can heal, as well as enchant the party's weapons with fire. My main pawn and a second pawn are fighters who can stand toe-to-toe on the front lines, supported by the mage's healing and fire enchantments. As a magick archer, I can sit in back and fire arrows at things, or, as a nimble class with high stamina, I'm the best-suited of my party to start climbing all over the big boss monsters and stabbing them in the face with my daggers.
And boy, those big boss monster battles are epic. You might find yourself hammering away at one for ten or fifteen minutes, climbing on top if it as it tries to throw you off, trying to find weaknesses and deplete its eight full health bars.
No enemy scaling does mean that at some point you'll be overleveled for some areas in the main game, so that there isn't a whole lot that's actually threatening to you anymore. But fear not, because when you beat the final boss, the post-game begins, and parts of the land become covered with super-powered monsters. Regular wolves becomes hellhounds that will spit fireballs at you... not to mention that they will grab you when you're down, drag you away from your companions, and proceed to chew your face off. I've never been so happy to have my face chewed off before; the post-game challenges really added to the experience.
In any case, I really like this game. It's about as immersive an open world as you can imagine, with real danger and real preparation required, and a real sense of accomplishment when you complete a challenge. Th exploration and combat is top-notch, the graphics are good (particularly in the monster animation department) although not the best I've seen, and even the voice acting stands out (though some of the archaic speech can be a little wonky).
However, the game does have its shortcomings and annoyances.
First, and this is important, don't accept any escort missions in the early going. Why? Well, the game really isn't good about telling you when a particular mission is beyond your means. When it's just an ongoing mission like "Slay 20 of X monster," then this isn't a big deal. But with an escort mission, it's a problem. I ended up accepting an escort mission that took me to the far northwest corner of the map. Since the game autosaves at certain points, like at inns and riftstones, I ended up with no way to un-accept the mission after I realized how tough it was going to be. Not wanting fail it, I was forced to go through areas where there were big packs of enemies roaming around who could kill me in a few hits, meaning I had to run away from almost everything. And when I finally reached my destination, I had to walk all the way back, running past all those same enemies again. That one big long waste of time really hindered my enjoyment of the game. I would've liked for the game to either allow me to tell the escort target to go bugger off and I'll help him later, or at least tell me from the get-go how difficult this was going to be. Instead I was forced to do an insanely difficult mission that really didn't give me much return.
Item management is also a headache. The developers wanted to create an effect where if you were hauling around a lot of items, you'd run slower and your stamina would drain more quickly. That means that each person in your party has their own separate inventory. If this sounds like a pain, it is. For instance, if you pick up a piece of armor and want your main pawn to use it, you have to have your character "give" it to your pawn,
then tab over to
his inventory to equip it. This is not to mention that your companions will pick items up in the world in order to save you the trouble and the item burden, but you'll then need to spend time in the menus transferring everything. Argh. I really think they would've been better off limiting the item burden idea to equipped items. That way you'd move slower and use more stamina with heavy weapons and equipment, but you wouldn't be left with the item management headache.
The autosave is also kinda finicky. Sometimes I couldn't quite understand the logic of it. There were times when the game displayed a message that it was autosaving, and then I would die, and I would start back much further back than the game had led me to believe I would. Then there was a time when I hired new pawns because my old ones were getting underleveled, then I went off and died, and was started back before I hired my new pawns. This seemed particularly odd since I then had to release those same pawns again. What does this look like when it's your pawn that this happens to? They come back and tell you that they were hired once but released twice by the same person? Hmm. In any case, my advice is to manually save frequently and not rely on the autosave.
There are also some smaller more aesthetic things wrong. For instance, the voice acting is actually quite good for the most part. But sometimes the character animations don't match very well when someone's talking. There was a scene in which I was talking to a witch's granddaughter, and she was making all these gestures with her hands that were inappropriate to what she was saying (like waving her hands all over the plece as she says "yes"). They've also made some effort at medieval-style speech, some of which works, and some of which doesn't work so well. For example, I like that everyone in your home village calls you "cos" (as in, "cousin"). That works really well. On the other hand, there is a great overabundance of the word "aught." Someone on the localization team really loved that word, because it's
everywhere, and it's so frequent that it becomes the source of unintentional comedy. Your pawns will say things like "We might find aught of use in this area!" The word even gets used in item descriptions in your inventory. I can't help but roll my eyes.
Also, your "beloved" is always the same girl... even if your main character is a girl. I'm quite certain this is just them being lazy rather than any sensitivity toward LGBT issues. Kinda funny, though.
Two final pieces of advice. First, turn off the pawn chatter subtitles, otherwise they way, way overclutter the screen, since they're talking
all the time. Second, turn off the "cinematic" camera. What it does is zoom in at a dramatic angle on big monsters whenever you manage to temporarily disable them -- like when you light a griffon on fire and it temporarily falls to earth so that you start hacking it to pieces. The problem is that the game goes on real-time when this happens, so that you lose time you might have spent running towards it or starting to climb on it.
That's about it. I'd be happy to answer any specific questions, as there's a lot I haven't covered. Overall, it's a great game with some rough edges, as might be expected for a new IP. But if there's one thing you have to appreciate, it's the ambition of the project. It really is a mix of games like
Skyrim,
Dark Souls, and
Monster Hunter. Even if the execution is less than perfect, you have to admire the scope of the game's vision.
