Dragon's Dogma 2 is starting to sound more and more like the kind of emergent sandbox I'm going to fall in love with.
In Edge Magazine issue 391, director Hideki Itsuno tells the story of an unfortunate encounter with a cave troll that left his pawn companions dying in a field. Itsuno simply turned away and ran. "I was just running away for lack of anything better to do. But it kept following me. I didn't know how I was going to survive," Itsuno said.
Itsuno ultimately dove into a nearby village, hoping to lose the troll in the chaos of the panicking villagers. But the villagers didn't panic - instead, just like the playable hero can do, they started clambering up the creature's sides, and eventually overwhelmed it purely with numbers and determination.
"It felt like a scripted event. But Dragon's Dogma 2 doesn't have scripted events," Itsuno said. "There are no invisible flags or triggers that cause certain events to occur. Everything that happened that day happened dynamically, because of how the game's rules and systems interact with one another."
That sounds incredible to me. A lot of excellent action RPGs build their combat around intricate combos or precision attack windows, but for me the joy of Dragon's Dogma has always been the chaos - the ways the game's systems interact with each other to offer deeply varied encounters that can constantly surprise you. It sounds like the sequel is doubling down on that joy.
When the team was developing a 15-minute demo of Dragon's Dogma 2 for events like Tokyo Game Show, producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi said that even that little demo is enough to see the chaos of the game come to life. "15 minutes is a relatively short amount of time, but when we were playtesting this brief segment, team members kept coming up to me and saying: 'Come and see what just happened to me!' Even within such a tiny portion of the game we keep being surprised by what's happening, even though we're the ones who originally designed the possibility space."
While the wait for Dragon's Dogma 2 continues, check out our guide to the best RPGs out there.
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