I played a demo of Dragon’s💜 Dogma’s upcoming, highly-anticipated sequel at Tokyo Game Show, and afterwards had the opportun🍌ity to sit down with director Hideaki Itsuno and producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi to discuss all things Dragon’s Dogma 2. And boy, was there a lot to talk about, from the expanded world and improvements made to the pawn system and combat, to the new inclusion of camping and even a whole new race.
For one, the developers have⛄ previously stated that Dragon’s Dogma 2’s map will be four times that of the original – but that’s not what they want you to focus on. “It’s not just bigger and larger,” Itsuno-san tells me through a translator. “We really wanted to put an emphasis on making this a more dense experience.” This means that when you’re walking around the world and something catches your attention, pursuing it will lead you to something interesting that you might not find in other playthroughs. Yes, we’ll likely see new regions of Gransys, but the game’s world will also feel more lived-in.
And then there’s the pawns, one of the most distinctive systems from the original game. While they seem unchanged on the surface, Capcom has actually worked to make them seem more human. About t꧋he concept of the pawns, Itsuno-san says, “When you meet someone, and you’re interested in this person, you wonder what kind of parents raised this person.” That’s what has propelled him to give the pawns more personality. “You raise your pawn and then they interact with other people, and those people start wondering what kind of person created this pawn. Rather than focusing on making the pawns significantly smarter, I wanted to try and give them way more personality and individuality.”
Itsuno-san then revealed that while they haven’t specifically announced this new system,ꦛ this will play into how pawns are created. You will be able to choose from four different base personalities, and each will have a different style of talking and communicating. Of course, then I had to ask about pawn phrases, which have become something of a meme because of their constant repetition in the game. Itsuno-san notes that they recognised this, and that it was partly caused by limitations in hardware. “This time, we made a plan to try to prevent this as much as possible, to make it feel like the pawn is talking about different things under different situations, to try to further expand their vocabulary and make it feel less AI-ish,” Itsuno-san says. “And also another thing that we tried to implement this time is how pawns communicate with each other.” And yes, if you were wondering, there will be some phrases that are a throwback to the original. There’s your fan-service.
Your pawns will also be more useful, and they’ll bꦜe able to do things that they couldn’t in the first Dragon’s Dogma. “Many of the tasks that felt like a burden that might have driven away some players… we tried to focus on allowing the pawns to do that on behalf of the players,” Itsuno-san told me. That’s apparent in the demo I played – one of my pawns helped to guide me on the right path towards my objective, minimising the amount of time I had to spend staring at a map to figure out if I was going the right way. This allows players to spend more time focusing on the actual adventure. “We internally refer to it as being about the thrill of making it or not, of life and death,” Itsuno-san says. “We’re trying to stay aligned in that fo♎cus, to reward those who try to get a thrilling experience out of it.”
The combat, like the pawn system, has evolved in the sequel. Now when clinging to an enemy, you can stand on any surface that isn’t horizontal. Before, your stamina bar would drain quickly 💝while climbing or clinging to an opponent, leading you to eventually fall off them, but in Dragon’s Dogma 2 your stamina can recover when you’re standing on an enemy. “If you’re clinging to an enemy and they’re not moving too much, you can stand on them,” Itsuno-san told me. “That has a lot of application to other things, like you can use the custom abilities you can only use when you’re standing and that you can’t execute when you’re clinging.”
Another thing that’s been added is the camping mechanic, a feature that Dragon’s Dogma players have wanted for a long time. During my playthrough I followed a random man to go look for his missing brother, and came across a campsite with a camping kit. While I chose not to rest there, my colleague Meg Pelliccio stopped and cooked a meal, and found a sho⛎cki🦋ngly realistic cinematic of a steak being grilled. I had to ask: was it real footage, or just a really good rendering? Both men began to laugh. “No comment,” came the response, which was the funniest possible thing they could have said. “Huh,🌳” I said, dumbfounded, to a൲nother bout of laughter from Itsuno and Hirabayashi-san.
I tried a different tack, asking: why make the food look so good? Why the focus on the food? “To be honest, I don’t think that we’re focusing that much on the food,” Itsuno-san said. Where the inclusion of food came from, he said, was from members of his team that loved to camp. He questioned them about what t♚hey liked about camping, and one of theꦗ things that kept coming up was getting to cook. “I have to say that the team members that are fans of camping put some effort in there,” he said. I still have no idea if the steak is real or not.
If those c⛦hanges weren’t enough, there’s also an entirely new species. The Beastren have existed in Itsuno-san’s head, and Dragon’s Dogma documentation, since the first game, but they had to be cut for technical reasons. “When I started working on Dragon’s Dogma 2, this was one of the first things that I set out to include,” Itsuno-san said. “We’ll have a nation of Beastren and a nation of humankind, with their differences of ways of thinking and beliefs, and these differences tie into the game’s story.”
I also asked them about the end of Dragon’s Dogma, and the phenomenon of many players finding that the game had decided Fournival was their most loved NPC because they interacted with him the most. “That was a miscalculation,” Itsuno-san admitted. “I honestlyꩲ didn’t expect people to go to him that frequently.” He revealed, though, that there will be a similar system in Dragon’s Dogma 2 where you can develop relationships with NPC, and that the system has been balanced. Here’s hoping that the game will differentiate between people we sell things to and characters we actually like this time.