Dragon's Dogma II (2024)

Interesting to see these updates coming to the game streamlining the fast-travel system.

Fast Travel/Movement Adjustments

Added the fast travel item Eternal Ferrystone.
* The Eternal Ferrystone will be automatically acquired after talking to Brant during the quest Seat of the Sovran.
* If you have already completed this quest, the item will be placed in your inventory.
Added Portcrystals to Melve, Checkpoint Rest Town and Volcanic Island Camp.
Added a Portcrystal as a reward for the quest Monster Culling.
* If you have already completed this quest, it will be placed in your inventory.
Added Oxcart Stopovers.
Reduced the time until the Doze Off command becomes available when riding an Oxcart.
If an Oxcart happens to be close by, an Oxcart icon will be displayed on the mini map.
Extended Oxcart Station departure hours. Oxcarts will now depart from morning till evening.
Decreased the amount of stamina used when dashing outside of combat.

https://www.dragonsdogma.com/2/en-us/topics/update/

I have a feeling @bmo will find this interesting.

You’ve gotta be kidding me. I played the first game years ago on the Switch and loved it, and while I waited a good year for Capcom to bug out all the poor performance issues, I finally picked this up and started it last night. I played for an hour, and I could not believe how weird and awful combat felt. For some reason switching from attacking (I picked Mage) to being able to move out of the way takes about 3 seconds, so I keep getting hit? And what’s this button mashing to attack? I picked up some rocks and then fought some huge Medusa like character, and after pressing square about 75 times I tried grabbing her tail. Well the game bugged out and I ended up kind of stuck in the middle of her tail and the floor, where I kept, you guessed it, pressing square until it was over. Didn’t take a single bit of damage.

Yeah.. this is not going to be for me. I’m so happy I bought it physically, as I just returned it and got my $54 back. I would have been livid if I paid $70 for this mess digitally and couldn’t return it. This is strange to me as Capcom games are among the most popular on my shelf, but what’s the deal with this? Nothing about it felt fluid in the slightest, just buggy and unintuitive. It’s almost as if I was playing an early early alpha version before they set up the animations or added any additional buttons, because nothing seemed to be working as expected. Feeling in control of your character is pretty damn important for a third person action RPG, and my god this was the worst hour and a half of anything I’ve played in years.

Anyway, back to 7 Days to Die.

I just finished the main game and I am now the Sovren of all Vermund!

(OR AM I?!)

Right before I sat on the throne, I spoke to a spooky ghostly figure called The Pathfinder. They rewound my existence to a point where I didn't originally realize I had a choice. After a series of events, I found myself waking up in the REAL WORLD, a world where I chose to break out of the DD cycle, an make my way in an 'unmoored world'. It lives outside the will of, uh, effectively 'the creator' or 'god'.

I made my way to reconnect with my pawn and learned there was a chance the world could be saved - I just had to figure that out myself while running around convincing everyone to evacuate this world. I survived a few big fights, and then ultimately fell. When I woke up, I had taken the place of the 'crazy' fisherman.

I'm choosing that as my canonical ending my for my character and I'll come back to play the game some more at some point to try out all the classes I missed.

What a disappointing fight. The colossus didn't attack and I destroyed all its weakpoints well before this location, but since it was scripted to die here, it just went on walking as if nothing had happened.

As was this one. A one on one fight in a game where the core gameplay is managing a balanced party. So fuck the player if they had a support build or chose to be a squishy Sorcerer that needs a tank to keep enemies away. Not really important, though, since the pathfinding AI broke and he got stuck on the geometry as I filled it full of magic arrows.

WE
HAVE

TITLE DROP!!! 🎉🎉🎉

Oh, boy. Voice acting and writing in this game is pretty bad in general, but the elves really get the cake. I appreciate the idea of them literally speaking in a different language, but the authors sound like reading the words for the first time and certainly not as native speakers. The woman that supposedly is speaking English for the first time, on the other hand, has flawless English pronunciation and uses extremely complex words.

On vocation news, I'm still using Archer. At higher vocation levels it's a but more fun to play, but I still don't feel like I have an active role in combat. It puts the game in easy mode, though. It's pretty durable, relatively high damage, has a neat jump-kick to run away from enemies and it's usually very far away from actual events anyway, mostly sniping from safety.

To complement me better, I changed my Pawn to Mage from Thief. For some reason she feels much more competent than recent mages I hired. It's funny how you can grow fond of your main pawn, even though they have no personality and are all completely interchangeable.

I had to take the Archer vocation for a quest and decided to give it a try. I can say that it is effective. Usually away from danger, picking at the enemy from afar. But it's not super fun to play.

I other vocation news, Warfarer is pretty cool for fashion, but a bit limited in practice. You need to spend one skill slot to change weapons so in the end you're left with only 3 slots. On top of that some skills are not equippable.

I'm extremely disappointed about the dig site. The only NPC that arguably the player has any motive to hate and who obviously has a staff that controls pawns is just a non entity. He doesn't even recognise you and you can kill him without anything happening at the site. You can't try to take the staff or destroy it or anything.

What the hell, Capcom. This should've been one of the climaxes and instead the game doesn't even acknowledge what I did.

I think that really encapsulates how the narrative in this game simply doesn't work.

I think my main problem with this game is that it gives you this great character creator that is even better in-game thanks to buying dyes. And then the best armour covers it all up and/or makes you look like a bag of potatoes.

A lot of RPGs are guilty of this, but I feel that in this game there's a particularly lack of clothing options. They are all class-based so neither you nor your pawn can use 70% of what's on offer, and as far as I can tell there is always a best overall option in terms of stats, so wearing anything else is suboptimal. I've yet to find a good outfit for my Mystic Spearhand.