I'll never understand how they managed to introduce new issues that were perfectly fine in the first one, without solving the most crucial faults of DD1. It is bizarre.
Priorities. Capcom truthfully has always struggled with this to some extent and the only reasons it doesn't hit all games the same way is because of the directors behind it. When that individual doesn't change or what they deliver doesn't surmount the dictates of the suits, the game suffers.
@@franciscor390 Some of the leads on DD2 didn't work on DDON, and might well have dismissed aspects of the latter game they didn't personally like. A lot of DD2's design seems to be focused on emphasizing the overland journey aspect of DD1 that DDDA and DDON downplayed.
the original game was not considered successful when it was released... it was only years later that it had accumulated a "cult following" - and arguably, its only an average game that has potential, and maybe a unique feel to everything..... ultimately the developers had no clue what made it a "cult following" and they already proved they couldnt make this game the first time - from what i understand the development was cut short, so maybe thats why they were just trying to do the original thing fully complete.... but perhaps it was cut short for a reason, because perhaps these developers dont really know what they are doing both now and also in the past
@@1nvisibleAcropolis I think it's also possible that the game seemed too complicated for many people at launch, and it's kind of hard in beginning for many new players. It was for me, then I got the flame sword in the stone and I found a liking to it. Nowadays I don't even take the sword and want to stay a little underpowered at beginning, as I love that part most of the game. The endless portal stone doesn't help people to stay powerful either, gotta kill a bit in beginning :)
Remember when the gameplay lead was making a big deal of how traveling would be so fun and this game wouldn't need fast travel for that reason? Turns out what he meant by that was there are 9 goblins per square foot in the open world.
Open world travel is only boring if your game is boring. Totally unlike our groundbreaking travel system of running across a big ol field, fighting the same mobs 5000 times along the way. Incredible.
They should make that in the first half of the game without fast travel. And at some point after that, fast travel is unlocked so that the player can complete sidequest easily.
"Abandon all delusion of control" is such a sick line from Grigori, really set the tone. Grigori felt so much more like a philosopher in the first game, and testing you not only physically but psychologically at the same time. In DD2 bro is almost asking you to put him out of his misery, its much more on the nose.
Dogma 2 was suppose to correct all the errors in the original, instead it amplified them and even removed a few of the great qualities the original had, like dual classes.
@@leightimm2537Except Warferer is the most dissapointing feature of the game and it barely executes it's premise. Warferer was sold as the _create a vocation_ vocation. It lets you equip all weapon types in the game but the issue is that it only allows you to pick *three* skills to use, not per weapon but globally, so you can't really come up with any interesting combination. It's so underwhelming folk just equip the vocation with all the skills from their preferred one in order to take advantage from the feature that the Warferer allows to equip any armor piece, so it's just used due flair and not gameplay. Pc players are in luck since there's a mod, _True Warferer_ that modifies the vocation so skills are tied to it's equipped weapons like it should have been and it actually feels like creating a custom vocation.
@@shidderalpha2293my hopes were so high for DD2. I really thought it could've went toe to toe with ER, as I preferred the progression system in Dark Arisen over the Souls progression system Add to that a world that's like 4-5 times larger, needless to say I was insanely excited (Dark Arisen is one of my favorite games of all time, right next to Dark Souls 1) DD2 was such a massive disappointment in so many ways. removed popular classes removed # of equippable abilities removed save scumming/Godsbane inventory system is way worse removed the ability to fully heal with items implemented a timer that locks you into finishing the end game in a set amount of time (this was awful) game runs terribly removed easy methods of obtaining ferrystones
@@joesaiditstrue i actually liked the new inventory system, since in DD1 every time you had to heal (very often) it paused the game and therefore also halted the flow of the combat. But to add to the negatives there was only maybe 3 new large enemies compared to DD1, if you want to count the Sphinx who you're supposed to use the 1-shot arrow to defeat. And many of the large enemies in DD1 didn't even make a comeback. I don't think I would have been as dissapointed if the in-game list of "large enemies" on your pawn didn't hype you up for 20+ mysterious enemy types that ended up being 50% reskins. Your portcrystals don't carry over to NG+ like they did in DD1 so you can no longer avoid the incredibly fun backtracking/hiking part of the game (the majority of the playtime) with careful planning. The story was somehow both a complete retcon and rehash of DD1. But TBF no one liked DD1 for the story outside of it's ending (which is now non-canon ig?)
Tbf there are 2 perspectives to that, 1. Is the game gets too easy 2. I've gotten very strong. Level scaling tends to make it feel like you are never gaining any strength or power
@@puppetgamer239 You want to avoid the Skyrim issue with "everyone scales to you" while at the same time, don't design the same enemy type for 90% of the map. The thing about Monster Hunter is that bosses are plentiful and unique. While Dark Souls 1 made every enemy a pause for consideration. Where Devil May Cry was all about holding the SSS Style with free express through combat. It seems DD2 missed what Capcom succeeded in with regard to DMC5 and Monster Hunter post World series. The fact that one tier 3 class is literally locked into 1x Weapon with 3x Skills when it can access other weapons, is disappointing in DD2.
Yeah that criticism nails the target so hard. They explicitly say they want us to explore. Fill the game with backtracking, silly ideas about fast travel and spamming monsters on the roads... tada! Your level 100 in a single playthrough. Congrats on accidentally achieving story-mode difficulty.
Capcom saw that DD:DA gained some fanbase and decided to repeat the first game's strength and weaknesses and dial it up to to proportions that it's not cohesive anymore
yeah and its frustrating bc they didn't listen to all the valid criticism for the 1st one and the game seems not finished , i hope it was a budget/time thing bc that can't be the full vision of Itsuno for this game..
if we are lucky, they're working on another Dark Arisen-esque DLC, that fixes everything and brings back all the stuff from DDDA that they chopped out for literally no good reason bring back Godsbane jerks
@@esawakita3043 From what I've heard from many talks about the issues was that. Time constraints and budget. For someone like me this game was perfectly fine. 100% it on Steam, had 2 full weeks of fun and I can't wait for the DLC.
One of my biggest disappointments with this game was the overly-restrictive quest design, especially after people claimed that the quest design was intuitive and often had many solutions. I have three examples: 1. The Vernworth Castle Vault - the guard there is scripted to stop you no matter what if she is at the door, including if she is asleep or you are invisible. The real solution to this quest is to cause a commotion and get her away from the door which is a much less elegant solution. 2. The Phantom Oxcart - The only solution to this quest is the default one. If you try to follow it or hitch a ride by climbing on top of it, it will suddenly teleport out, even if you remain undetected or invisible. 3. Myrddin - Myrddin doesn't use the grimoires, he only has them for collection purposes. You can tell this because he doesn't realise that fake grimoires given to him are fake. So, when you learn that there is someone else who wants and needs the real versions, why isn't it possible to steal them back. After all, you know where he keeps them, and that they aren't very secure. These are just the ones off the top of my head, but this hardly conforms to the "if you can think it, you can do it" philosophy of game design that I was repeatedly made to believe this game would have. On top of that, I feel you missed some very glaring issues with the game, like the fact that everything in the game would have you believe that there is a whole separate elf kingdom which turns out to be a 3 building village where they all stay in the same inn. Also, the promotional material made me believe that there would be more than two dwarves. The game is wholly uninterested in its own peoples. All of the pawn specializations suck: Logistician doesn't autocraft what you want and will waste ingredients on garbage. Woodland wordsmith is only relevant for the shop NPCs since all quests related to the elves provide an NPC who translates for you Chirurgeon doesn't activate enough and requires you to send curatives to them which will largely remain unused in crutial situations Forager makes pawns do what they did in DD1, gather items, which is what they should be doing already Aphonite just makes them shut-up Hawker sells items when you are getting too loaded The game director claims that he limits fast travel in order for people to become immersed in the world, but I beg to differ. After traveling by road from very close settlements hundreds of times, I have come to the conclusion that literally no one could survive the trip. The amount of trash mobs that harass the player seem like a way to keep the player engages but only serve as large annoyances when trying to chill out while also destroying immersion. Between Melve and Vernworth there are about 14 groups of enemies, a trip which could only be survived by people with well equipped guards, yet we see people traveling these roads all by themselves. It isn't immersive to be hassled by goblins every 2 minutes. It also isn't immersive to be ambushed by a girffin every single time I leave bakbattahl.
Exactly, it’s all just a haphazardly woven facade that at the slightest tug is undone. Why are there no other towns outside of Bakbattahl? What’s the point of having the trolley system if you’re just gonna waste it on ruins? It’s as if the devs couldn’t have cared less about the world they built. It’s all just an empty sandbox for the player to have some fun in and then once they get wise to how nonsensical it all actually is they quit and go play something else. I hate to compare the two but it’s the complete opposite in Elden Ring. Everything in that game has a history and it’s not just a meaningless playground in which you bring your toys to and then leave once you get bored.
I heavily agree with all of this, especially the last part about the game's world being impossible to live in, I felt that almost immediately as soon as the tutorial section was over and we were let loose to explore, and then when I witnessed and tried out the oxcart system for the first time that feeling became even worse. The oxes are absurdly slow, with seemingly no ability to move faster whatsoever, heck they even stop dead in their tracks when there's a threat rather than try to speed up and get away, which would have realistically made them go extinct in this world where gigantic predators roam around everywhere that would eagerly have them as a meal. Then there's the guards the carts travel with, which already struggle to fight off goblins and wolves, let alone any of the large enemies you can encounter during a cart ride, which are basically guaranteed to kill everyone and destroy the cart if the Arisen doesn't fight them, which if you think about it would mean that like 50% of all oxcart trips they make without the Arisen would likely end in all of their deaths, which realistically makes it an absolutely impossible system to keep up, as nobody would want to do the job.
this kind of lazy design was what made me dislike cyberpunk so much too. solving any problem was always super generic and had nothing to do withe your characters particullar skillset. the ingame systems do not connect to each other, or react in any way, unless you do the quest in the right order and exactly how the developer wanted you do solve them... it's boring. meaby they should conzentrate on writing an interesting world and fun unuque ways to interact with it, instead of making a HUGE world that is empty and in wich you can't really do anything. just an idea😅
That part about how it makes no sense that normal people can survive at all when even the world saving heroes are challenged by walking to the next town has bothered me in so very many RPGs. Yeah, I get that there needs to be challenges, it's a game and all, but proper world and scenario design can both make a plausible world AND a good game exist together, if designers can be bothered.
The entire time I played DD2, I just kept wondering what the fuck they were thinking. The first game was an unpolished gem, elevated by DLC. Literally everyone and their mother knew what the game did right and did wrong. The hype for DD2 was predicated on the idea the devs also knew. But they just…did the same fucking thing again, while taking some weird steps backwards and adding some other unneeded bullshit. Being a game dev must be a trip.
This happens a lot with Capcom. The self-aware devs who know what works and doesn't are all gone. So you have a bunch of producers who only vaguely understand why the things they make are good, and then the Monster Hunter and Street Fighter teams where people seem to know a bit better as *why* those games work. I also don't think portioning off half the company to just remake stuff is really helping to develop new talent so much as make the talent they have more risk averse.
@@MidlifeCrisisJoe I'd also add the Phoenix Wright and Resident Evil devs. Most of the time, they also know what they're doing, and they haven't fucked up as much as other teams. The sales and reviews of the games they make speak volumes about their quality
@@MidlifeCrisisJoestreet fights 6 is good design and fighting wise but everything is dogshit the story is trash and gets boring real quick and the microtransactions and battle pass make the game worse just give us a fun story to go with the create a character bs without having to fight Gimps with boxes over thier heads and stop asking for microtransactions and battle passes from a 70 dollar game that’s already been bought and paid for
@@MidlifeCrisisJoe It's DD devs are out of touch with it's pretty small and niche fanbase. Calling MH team just know *a bit* how it works is a huge downplay on them. Especially from my experience with how they took stuffs from what fanbased liked and added those to the game, tons of QoL and fixes in both Iceborne and Sunbreak tbh, from small stuffs as light pillar for dropped materials... I just watched Rurikhan video after gamescom and MH devs are really the GOAT
Knowing Dragons Dogma will most likely never see its full potential come to fruition hurts so much, literally inches away from being the perfect action rpg adventure game
@@ICon415 they see it as a money maker NOW. Clearly not during development, which is the only reason it released this half-baked, and legitimately worse than the previously, unfinished first game.
@@ICon415 Nah this is on Itsuno. He had 10 years worth of criticism to address and somehow made the same game, if not regressed in some aspects. If _this_ is what he claims is his vision realized and what Dragon's Dogma's full potential is, then I have no faith in the next installment.
@@ICon415Itsuno is a hack. He can only make DMC, anything else and he’s proven to be lackluster at delivering on his promises. Like a Japanese Peter Molyneux.
This game was worked on through the pandemic, and on an entirely new engine so they couldn't just rework assets from DD1 and DDDA 100% got rushed with a final set in stone release date by Capcom board of directors.
Not having all the same enemies would be fine. What's weird is that it outright has fewer enemy types. Dragons Dogma 1 had 61 enemies (counting variants) at launch, and about 92 counting Dark Arisen. Dragons Dogma 2 had 57.
@@lozm4835 I agree that we needed more, but at least DD2 variants of common enemies behaved more differently than their DD1 counterparts, like some harpies favour range attacks with sleep, other actively try to poison you, the Gore harpies just want to kick your butt face to face, same with saurians and goblins. The big monsters are the same though, or maybe I'm dumb but common ogres feel the same as Dire Ogres, just with higher stats. The dullahan is super fun to fight
Adding scaling wouldnt fix anything. It would just make leveling up pointless, and you would also have to follow a curve to minmax stats, or else you fall behind and monsters become sponges. Enemy variety is the real problem.
This is the way. All of these video game rpgs are originally based on tabletop games. When you're level 1, a pack of goblins is a challenge and a gryphon will wipe out your entire party. By the time you rise in level you would expect to steamroll goblins and have a rousing battle with a gryphon but even a young dragon will send you nope-ing away. The idea of raising up in level is to eventually be able to fight against an ever increasing difficulty and intricacy of enemies, not to just keep fighting against tankier goblins...
couldn’t agree more. the problems are variety and also density, which i am surprised was not brought up in this video. you can hardly walk anywhere without getting into a fight. scaling would make that so much more painful.
You can scale the game in many different ways. For example you can add scaling for NG+ to match your current level when starting the NG+. That way the first areas will be still fairly easy but end game content will become challenging again and will make level worth the while. If you have no scaling at all you end up with what most people experienced in DD1, when you started NG+ and punched everything into oblivion. When I wanted to get the third star for hydra knowledge for my pawn, I had to choose mage vocation for him and take his staff because even with fists he kept decapitating the hydra... Just to make it clear, I'm not saying scaling is "fix all", and definitely it shouldn't be just doubling health of enemies.
Yeah, I thought that autoscaling would turn the game into worse version of Oblivion where fucking scaling bandits clad in finest Daedric armor were robbing you of pitiful hundred septims.
Yeah, 2nd game is just the 1st game stretched super thin. It has a couple of meaningfully different enemies and all of them are locked in the limited world, or are tied to 1 location(so really aren't a part of the world).
When that ruined castle emerged from the sea, I thought: "Oh hell yes. Here we go. Finally I get to explore a proper dungeon. Now the game is really underway." After that, my hype for this game which I'd waited years for was so utterly derailed that I began to question if I was too old and jaded for video games altogether.
I too thought we'd be doing some delving, and when I saw the remnants of the Everfall, I was pretty hyped. Then it turns out you just take an elevator and have no reason to go back. Big sad.
@@iiReaperv2 Luckily the PS5 gameplay at gamescom seems fairly optimised for its current development state. Smooth and stable framerate and no stuttering whatsoever. This before they put in proper optimisation, so I'm very hopeful on that end.
0:50 a huge thing that's worse in DD2 is the music. Just listen to this, it conveys such emotion for an area you'll likely spend less than an hour exploring. The entire DD1 OST is incredible, meanwhile DD2 has the most generic "fantasy game" music ever. They even got rid of the electric guitar that added so much personality to the original. Compare End of the Struggle from both games, DD1 just feels better. It kind of sums up the entire comparison between the two. DD1 feels like an indie game with heart, lacking in content but brimming with ideas and soul. DD2 feels like a clone of the first, but without the same heart to it.
Eh tbh I didn't really care for the music in the first game that much, I liked Daemons theme and the dark arisen menu theme but that was about it, 2 had a lot a more tracks I liked with some of the bosses.
Nailed it. DD1 music had a lot of soul and feeling put into it. Theres nothing like Cassardis theme in 2, or the character creation song, in 2 it sounds like it could be from any generic medieval fantasy mobile game. It just wasnt made with the same 'heart', the same creativity. as a huge fan of 1, i was really disappointed
Ho lord, i didn't even think about the music. The sound design has better parts but i cannot recall a single song of the 2 Meanwhile DD1 ... THE WIND IS PUSHING MEEEEEEE T.T
The soundtrack for ddda is one of the only video game soundtracks I own a physical copy of and I regularly sit down and listen to it. There isn't a single song that comes up that bores me or feels uninspired and the quality of the music is incredible. The second game had some decent tracks but overall I just couldn't get behind it the same way that I got into the first.
Its ok till the repetition kills it. The enemies locations and types should have been random to an extent but its the same enemies in the same places at the same time with maybe 1 or 2 being somewhat random and that is at night
@@coltonwilkie241 for me, its the awful worldbuilding that makes DD2 travelling boring. Barely any civilization outside of the towns. And the roads are packed to the gills with enemies, 99/100 of which are the same exact enemy type as the one _10 _*_feet_*_ before._ As a result. The potential for sidequests and lore is shafted since no NPC lives anywhere else. And combat gets boring very quickly and you overlevel without even trying to since you naturally fight the same enemy types over and over again. Skyrim has better travel and exploration. *_And I hate Skyrim._*
Itsuno said that with DD2 he was able to implement his full vision for what Dragon's Dogma is. But I just can't believe that is true. DD2 just feels so incomplete and thin. Especially compared to DD1 + DA
It's basic developer who could be fired and wanna remain friendly with his boss talk to me "It's not what i wanted but ... thank you for the opportunity i am proud of what i made" (as he is literally immediately forced to go back to making other games he's said he wanted to stop so he could focus on his own project)
Of course he lied. What else was he supposed to say? He still is nothing more than an employee of a big Company. Stop listening to what developer's tell you, even if they wanna tell you the truth they won't because it will ruin thier career. Would you throw away you perfect job for internet honor points ?
tbf there was probably a lot restrictions in terms of what he could say from Capcom. I don't think he's lying per se, its more so that dd2 had a release date they had to make and as the dev of a game saying that this game is not everything you wanted to make would be absurd. So again i feel like we should blame capcom more than anyone else.
My biggest problem with the game is the utter abandonment of the beautiful vocation system of the original. The system of having basic jobs represented as simple colors, with each base color having an advanced counterpart represented by a deeper shade. These "advanced voctations" were slower, more hard-hitting variations of their counterparts that sacrificed general utility for hyperspecialization into that niche. Then, on top of that, you had hybrid vocations that mixed elements of each base vocation for even more general utility, and there was one for each possible combination of base vocations. It was a beautiful, genius, symmetrical system and one of the best features of an already fantastic game. The sequel, before its release, teased a step away from this system by making it so that each base vocation was already pre-specialized and the advanced vocations would merely be harder-hitting, slower versions of them. This, of course, would require the game to have more total vocations to compensate stripping all the vocations of their generality, and with twelve years of work put into the game, it was a no-brainer that it was what they were going for. This was an incredibly exciting time to speculate on what they weren't showing us. The hybrids they introduced also seemed to follow this formula, as instead of simply having access to the weapons of its constituent vocs with a few unique skills, they seemed to instead only have access to a completely unique weapon, and a totally unique skillset. With that in mind, what would the other hybrids look like? Would the thief-fighter hybrid be a ronin with a katana similar to the MH longsword, combining the high dps of thief with the precision counter playstyle of the fighter? They even introduced a hybrid with two unknown constituent vocations with completely new colors! It was a monk with a censer who would manipulate aggro and buff allies with their drugged smoke! What could the constituent vocs be? Maybe an alchemist and a priest? Because religious aspect brought by the censer and the poisonous flavoring brought by the drugged smoke? The priest might be able to heal your reduced max HP, which the regular mage can no longer restore, and the alchemist could utilize the crafting and item-throwing system to poison and debuff enemies! Maybe the priest-mage could give you the light boon they removed from mage/sorcerer, and the alchemist-mage could be a warlock that can cast dark boon alongside exequy and other curses they removed from sorcerer! The priest-fighter could be a tanky paladin with a greatshield and spear! Infinite potential!! And then we got..... no advanced thief/archer. No martial vocation hybrids. A hybrid vocation with nonexistent constituents. And before I get the replies saying: "You just want assassin back, you just want mystic knight back." No! I don't! I want mystic spearhand and maybe the aforementioned samurai! I want them to be consistent with the formula they chose to establish! Forgive the schizopost. Great vid rata.
Fair points, but I'd like to counter that the new vocation abilities do a great job of differentiating abilities. Sorcerer, getting a "Quick Regen" button drastically improves the class. Though Warrior and Fighter, I'll admit were downgraded. Magick Archer got my favorite upgrade by making its terrible default attack a multi-attack lock-on
Trickster probably should have been given a solid color to temper expectations. However, I don't resent Capcom for not providing the 28 vocations some people seemed to expect they get at one point (6 basic, 6 advanced, 15 hybrid, 1 warfarer). It's easy to come up with broad concepts for vocations, it's much harder to design distinct niches and playstyles, and harder still to implement them as real game functions with unique animations and gear.
@cyberninjazero5659 That is all tangential to my points, not a counter. I agree that they increased the identity of the vocations they chose to make, I actually think that's a good thing. The problem is that they didn't complete the formula they chose to establish.
@IAMUtubeSockPuppet it is a tremendous task. You're right. But if they didn't want to do all that work, they (like you pointed out) should have abandoned the color system entirely, instead of baiting us and leaving us with this shattered mess of a system. They invited this criticism upon themselves, as they had a myriad of ways to avoid it without making *28 vocations* and still chose this path.
Like someone else already said, I get it...28 vocations must be an impossible task to design and implement, and an argument could be made that we shouldn't have to expect that many....but the color system was so prevalent in DD2 that you couldn't help but expect it to happen. They should have removed or heavily altered the color system in a way that the expectations were more closely resembling of what we got. Before it launched, DD2 seemed to be a dream come true, because you would in theory have the means to play in so many different ways, you couldn't ever get bored of it . And the only reason we imagined things to this degree, was by the implied meaning within the color system... What a bummer it was when it came out. I said I get it, and I do...but I also don't lol
• Low enemy variety • Low enemy complexity • Too many combat encounters • Hollow worldbuilding • Extremely few choices, with even fewer consequences, exacerbated by a main narrative that's written with the ethos of "Nothing Matters."
Also overly lenient inventory system. I mean healing items weight almost nothing and you can chew them even with 0 HP, there is no interesting ressource-management here, which could've made long travels all the more interesting. Though mages healing spell also made eating out of combat obsolete, the game has pretty bad balancing.
Happens alot. People get overhyped sometimes to the point of toxic positivity against all criticism and then the games comes out and they're disappointed. Cyberpunk before the rehaul comes to mind.
the game had a mixed reception from the start. not to mention the huge backlash against the crystal dlc's at launch. it's gone quiet because there's not much to talk about besides minor patches. people are just despondently waiting for dark arisen 2 and wilds.
@@TamdinSol I understand that, but even the original Dragons Dogma had a huge following awhile after it released. I was in the community for both games and people still mostly prefer the original. Maybe it’s my own experience but my little brother played 2, beat it and never was interested in replaying it. Unlike the original where he replayed it many times. I honestly felt the same as well.
To add more info on character interaccion, on the duel shown on this vid, you have a say on the outcome, you can stay still and let the girl be beaten, step in to fight the guy yourself (the girl is humiliated as she is unable to protect her own honor) and you kill the guy or, you can kill him and revive him using an item.
The choice is still empty imo. The girl feel defeated no matter what and go back to her country, never to be seen even though promise to do something to aid Arisen (I do understand she is just a fail helper because her nation want so but still), that guy we beat also do nothing, either stay in dungeon if we revise him or announce his victory and do not affect the story anymore. It just an illusion that you have a choice in DD DA.
It's cool that you can revive him and all, but like he said in the video itself, in the end nothing matters because it was always about just you and the dragon so Itsuno didn't have to actually write a RPG story with meaningful choices and branching paths, and that's not a japan problema since Romancing Saga exists, it's a capcom problem.
When they pulled all the devs from DD2 to make MH wilds. You can very clearly tell there were some story acts skipped, lack of a good ng+, a BBI equivalent, and a second freaking skill bar.
Same thing happened with Xenoblade Chronicles 2 iirc. Devs were pulled to work on other more valued Nintendo IP’s and what we got was a result of that. I wonder if the reason why Torna was overall higher quality was because they had an actual full dev team and not a skeleton crew?
You can tell that happened exactly half way through bakbattahl, the quest to expose disa abruptly stopped and the guy that gives you quests just stuck loop the same dialogue option, the third continent is two villages with nothing, and you literally get two new vocations right before the ending.
After seeing the MHWilds video, it's become clear that DD2 was just treated as a testing ground. Even the physics feels slow and weighty like a MH game.
@@CALAMITY0FHYRULE it's still a sequel and it knew bbi was the big savior of the first game. It's not their first game anymore, they don't get to say oops we'll fix it in dlc. They didn't even put out as fleshed out and coherent story as base dd1. They had a decade of feedback and didn't follow any of it. It's clear they just wanted a test game for mh wild and didn't care enough about dd2 itself to make it a complete game
Dude. I fucking loved the first 20 to 25 maybe 30 hours of this game. It felt epic. I didn't know the enemy variety was weak yet. The combat was great. It felt hard. Gear looked fucking great. The story wasn't great, but I didn't really play dragons dogma for story. Then I got overpowered. Every enemy dropped like a fly. The only enemy I hadn't seen yet was the lich (when I finally saw it I killed it in like 5 seconds) every gear shop (which their is like 4) is just 1 or 2 obvious gear sets that are the best in the game you have access to. And then I realized man most of the loot in the open world sucks. This game could be so amazing. And I'm worried a dlc won't fix it.
This is literally my story 😅 I actually didn’t beat the game because I became bored from being so powerful after taking my time exploring and maxing vocations.
That's true, but in the original he shows up throughout your journey leading you on, almost like a guide. You can tell that he doesn't hate nor like you he just does his part in the cycle. Also talking dragon cool, and VA has a silky smooth voice.
Bro developers genuinely cannot deliver on the hype, like it’s pretty reasonable to assume sequels will be an improvement over the original. Totk and dd2 are good example, bros just did the same shit but worse.
@@lucasLSD Tear of the kingdom was definitely a worse experience for me. It was bloated with the same problems as breath of the wild. I had a much better time with breath of the wild than I did with tears of the kingdom for the simple fact that at the time it was new and it innovated on the Zelda formula. Tear of the kingdom doesn’t feel new, and just doubles down on the problems I had with breath of the wild. Lack of enemy variety, poorly designed dungeons, Ubisoft levels of exploration, overly reused assets such as the islands in the sky, no real story cohesion with progression, and an emphasis on freedom which is a detriment to the design of the world and dungeons in general. One because it’s a reused world and two because you can easily exploit the dungeons.
It isn't though. It only is when the devs don't understand *why* something works. Ideally, a dev team tests the hell out of a game to figure out what they like, releases it to see where the players agree and disagrees, then in the sequel, shaves down or rework the things the players didn't like and pump up the things they did. You can hone an idea to a fine sharp point with this strategy and look no further than the Dark Souls games for a great example.
@@MidlifeCrisisJoe Speaking of Souls i think Shadow of the Erdtree is an amazing example of taking the best elements of the base game and refining it to almost perfection. It took the elements i liked and refined them. It’s not as exhausting as the base game map and it has more unique non reused dungeons. Dragon’s Dogma should honestly learn a thing or two from it.
@@wallacesousuke1433 Ok then name exactly what DD2 does better than Elden Ring and SOTE? It certainly isn’t enemy variety nor is it level design as ER has a far more in-depth world than either DD1 or DD2. If you want to argue about how empty it is i can literally go in a direction and find a 100 more interesting locations than i can in DD2. In ER you have stuff like Siofra River and locations like the Cerulean Coast in SOTE.
@@paulettecasey44 LMAO I'm not defending DD2, screw that pile of crap, just dont bring the lame copy-pasted games From has been repackaging and re-releasing for over a decade lol And again, even if you disregard that, many people (aka From fanboys) are far from blown away by that DLC, so dont ever use the word "perfection" when referring to that DLC
100 percent. BBI and Dark Arisen's whole end game in general still holds up I personally liked the grindy dungeon crawler stuff that they completely removed in DD2 Trying to make Dragons Dogma into "a game for everyone" made it a game for noone, tbh
@@joesaiditstrue if they still had the grindy dungeon crawler stuff the game still would have been a letdown. It was a mistake to not make a real DD2 and instead make a remake of DD1 essentially. They basically released the game with modern graphics and thats it. Which isnt enough. We shouldnt be asking for the same game but a improved version of the same game.
@@joesaiditstrue I don't think it's "trying to make Dragon's Dogma into 'a game for everyone,'" it's that Itsuno didn't like Everfall or BBI to begin with. The endless grind made DDDA and DDON into games that weren't *for him*. I think DD to Itsuno has always been about the base game experience in DD1, traveling overland from place to place. Many more people than one are responsible for a game, of course, but Itsuno had a lot of creative control over DD2 that he'd delegated for Dark Arisen and DDON. At any rate, a game where the closest thing to a fast travel system can fail and strand you in the middle of nowhere is *not* "a game for everyone." Nor is a game where (on launch) you had to run back and forth between the inn and the armorer to make sure you had the right upgrade materials.
@@RikuV4 What is there to explore? Your 570th cave!? That’s my problem with DD2, there’s no incentive. There’s rarely ever any good loot in chests and often you can find better stuff being sold by merchants. I’m willing to give Elden Ring plenty of flack for how it also reused enemies and dungeons but at least it had dungeons. Even if you compare it to DD1 that game had the Watergod’s Temple.
@@paulettecasey44 The fact that you can stumble on a side quest just by going around and even from buying something from a shop is something that most RPG should copy, tired of chasing marker around
@@paulettecasey44 the caves are so bad in dd2 that in the dlc, i want them to go back and replace half of them with actual dungeons. a BBI 2.0 or snow region isn't enough. the game basically needs to be remade AND have an expansion.
About monster scaling: Dragon's Dogma has wild battle math. Like, the way you can deal chip damage, upgrade a weapon once, and then do 10x the damage per hit... It's like, Dragon Quest-level rudimentary battle math. It's insane they didn't change it, or at least normalize the values between the strongest and weakest attack/defense stats, or introduce damage floors... If anything, DD would be way more fun if it was just about increasing your options and the skew of your stats, not about raising your stats linearly, because that'd better suit all the specific monster interactions and behavior manipulation of the game. Or at least the range between the least and most damage you can do should be brought much closer.
Yeah, there's this magical point for enemies where they are still challenging but can be beaten with effort for a satisfying victory, but the difference between going into a fight you are underleveled for vs overleveled is of polar opposites in difficulty. For a game that prides itself on the quality of its combat, stats have an oversized impact on whether a fight will be nigh impossible or a cakewalk, compared to tactics. It was there in the original, but feels somehow worse in DD2.
I do agree with you, one of the reasons they removed item slots was cause it would clip through clothes, but here in this video we can clearly see a cap always clipping thorught the shield when it's on your back... Also clipping armour in DD1 was fine you could do some fun things with it
I play a fighter and my cloak is never not clipping into my arms. It’s quite infuriating if you want to use a badass cloak only for it to clip like crazy.
@@Tyanus2 Yeah i don’t trust Itsuno or Capcom to pull a Phantom Liberty or a No Man’s Sky and fix it. They might release a dlc but it won’t correct the fundamental mistakes of the game and it’s likely they’ll just leave it to die. I’m also doubtful that they’ll release a DD3 now as DD2 really just proved to Capcom that this series isn’t worthwhile for their resources. If there is a DD3 don’t expect it come out anytime soon.
I wouldn't call DD1's story bad. It's simple. That's what it is. It's simple and tells what it wants to well. DD2's story on the other hand has too many lost threads that went nowhere for no reason. There's no reason why we don't go back to stop Disa, there's no reason why we help the bad guy all of a sudden. There's no reason to even stab yourself on the dragon.
"There's no reason why we don't go back to stop Disa." Either we become Sovran, and presumably did so off-screen, or we go to Unmoored World and all her plans are irrelevant anyhow. The world is ending after all, who cares who gets to be king. "There's no reason why we help the bad guy all of a sudden." But we don't, aside from optionally assisting with taking down the Gigantus. Phaesus certainly isn't thrilled to see us and tries to have us killed. We never give him the godsbane. The journal objective "bring the godsbane to Phaesus" is misleading. The real reason we're driven to get the godsbane, seemingly by the Pathfinder, is so we can overcome the godsway and not lose control of our pawns to it like nearly happened at the coronation ceremony. "There's no reason to even stab yourself on the dragon." The game does a poor job of explaining why this is the solution, but the core idea is that we're derailing the Pathfinder's intended narrative by simultaneously killing ourselves and the Dragon before the final encounter properly begins. DD2 does have a clear core plot in retrospect, which can be presented as an analogy to a TTRPG table. A railroading GM chooses you to be the next hero of his "masterful story," the same one he *always* tells and everyone is thoroughly bored of. The rest of the players then try to derail the game while the GM tries to get it back on track. Eventually you tell the GM you think his story sucks too and he tries to pull a "rocks fall, everyone dies." If certain plot threads seem to go nowhere, it's because the plans of various schemers are anticlimactically undone. The Pathfinder's story about the true king overcoming an usurper is mucked with by Phaesus' godsway making it impossible to safely confront the false sovran at the coronation ceremony. Phaesus' and Disa's schemes are then derailed when Phaesus cannot control the true Dragon with his godsway, the true Arisen and the Dragon meet again, and one way or another Disa's power grab is foiled.
Grigori is absolutely the best depiction of a Dragon in any medium, Smaug is the only other one that stands with him (Im no expert on all medieval fantasy so Im sure there are other great ones)
This. I figured that over a decade after DD.DA's release, they would've had plenty of time to research player opinion of the game to narrow down what worked and what didn't in order to improve things for the sequel. But instead it feels like they didn't so much as open a single review thread or community forum to check things, or worse, they looked at all the valid criticism and ignored all of it in favor of their flawed "vision".
@@kangtheguardian1214 I don't believe Itsuno's vision was a support class with 2 colors that have no bases at all, I do believe this game was undercooked, Capcom has a precedent of it with Resident Evil 3 after all.
It is without a doubt, but even if you judge it based on the original it’s still lacking a solid endgame. You have the unmoored world but to me the whole of the everfall was more engaging in terms of content.
this game is like if dmc4 was the only game released after dmc1, but instead of all the things dmc4 added it was mostly a graphics upgrade with basically the same story, gameplay and bosses, 2 new enemies type, 1 new weapon and they still removed some stuff
I so desperately want Capcom to keep working on Dragon's Dogma 2. I love the game, even though it doesn't surpass the original. I want them to spend time to fix the game, to truly realize a vision that was clearly pushed out early. I want a Dark Arisen tier expansion to breathe life into the game. But we won't get that. Monster Hunter Wilds is on the horizon. Capcom will forget about Dragon's Dogma 2 in favor of the game it was a test for.
Agreed, it’s honestly disgusting. I think MH:Wilds will be great and i’m actually looking forward to it but using DD2 as a tech demo for their golden goose IP is scummy.
they won't or rather it can't be fixed its a over priced game with egregious microtransactions, if they keep adding to it it'll just get more scummier in design and even if they did a Dark Arisen version it just be inferior the first game still
Cant believe all i got after dropping 20,000 gold at the brothel was a fade to black and Mormon-tier intimacy with a woman for 20 seconds and then i was back in the room with my armor back on
I don’t think the issue is that there’s no level scaling. I think the issue is in the difficulty pacing. For example, Skyrim has level scaling and it makes the experience worse. You don’t ever feel like you’re getting stronger. Dogma two has no level scaling, but has terrible difficulty curve mapping.
well, it was a huge financial success despite the disappointment, and as a result capcom now sees dragons dogma as a "key brand", which hopefully means future DLC and games will be better. the fact that we even have that certainty of more dragons dogma is a miracle.
Crazy how in big 2024 this game still has the most archaic of all rpg mechanics in PAUSE HEALING. The ultimate tension breaking and unimmersive way in a game to respond to your character taking damage. I have to wonder if Capcom thinks this is some kind of iconic feature of the original game and that deviating from the norm of every other action game made in the last 10 years is some kind of novelty rather than just being straight up inferior. Yes you can heal in the quick menu but why would I when I can heal from the safety of the pause screen
i was really hoping they'd address this too. i remember getting sucked into a tornado in ddda and pausing every frame of the way down to heal to survive the impact. really took me out of the experience of being in a tornado.
Which is confusing as hell since their flagship game Monster Hunter has no such system. Damn near every combat related mechanic in that game is done with real time animations that leave you vulnerable. Drinking a healing potion actually plays an animation of your character drinking that potion.
Regarding the point you make at 22:35. Whilst dragonforging being on par with endgame gear would increase variety, it wouldn't even need to be considered if the devs just added a transmog system to begin with.
I think about 1300 hours across three platforms is enough, thanks. I'll wait for DD2 DLC if it happens to give the franchise more time. Two thick playthroughs at total 185 hours on DD2 is enough for the release year of the game.
I'll be honest the weapon/skill reduction was a deal breaker for me, I played ranger in the first and it felt so bad having a bow and no backup daggers to use... Plus reducing the amount of skills made my character feel so limited it just felt bad to play. Glad I played it from steam family share and didn't have to get it myself
Same, this archer sucks ass compared to the ranger, I only feel powerful by stocking plenty of explosive arrows, something you weren't required to do in the first one.
DD2: -Graphics -Gameplay -Combat DD1: -Lore -Characters -Effort -Passion -Music -Bosses -Grigori -Seneschal fight -Postgame world (I HATE the unmoored world, it feels so weird. First game’s apocalyptic postgame was SO much better.)
As a day 1 enjoyer of the original Dragons Dogma, the original game utilized a level cap, RNG chests, and the Everfall to entertain players for a longer amount of time. The base game is practically built to be speedrun, that they even gave it a hard mode and speedrun mode. There was a point to doing NG+, and instead of getting every chest in the game world, the game simply rewarded you exponentially for knowing their locations on your runs. The UR-Dragon especially represented a community challenge that felt fulfilling to participate in. Without even mentioning Dark Arisen, the base game is leagues above DD2, a game that has yet to receive any real patches lately. It's pretty clear that there is little to no support coming for DD2. Even if they did, the base game is frankly too much and too cumbersome in comparison to DD1 in a pre-Dark Arisen state. The fact that DD2 feels like a step backward in both gameplay loops and story is the writing on the wall for veterans. Heck, DD2 completely lacks a true final boss. The only real challenge for a character who even moderately made themselves powerful are the unrevivable enemies from the Unmoored World. Even those are just simple re-skins, nothing like facing the Hydra or beholders in the Everfall. The "bosses" are similarly just a bunch of unique, albeit anti-climactic fights that are more tedium than challenge.
I really thought unmoored would be a fun, repeatable, almost rogue-like mode I'd be able to do multiple runs on only to lose my option to start unmoored from day 1 after "completing" it. Unbelievable
We need hardmode and a reason to play it. Maybe more gears, more stats or cosmetics or lore or whatever. Or they could just port DDO over, make it singleplayer and I'll still buy it.
Now I want to make a video on what would make DD's potential real. I'm glad you got to include the Grigori speech in a video finally. Also, on the story, I expected them to, and they SHOULD HAVE, just kept the mythos of the first one. Zelda does this just fine. There's so much room to play around within the confines of DD1's basic idea.
The way they butchered Grigori in DD2 is the primary reason I was so disappointed in it. It didn't help that the 'final boss' was two walking segments and a cutscene. None of the drawbacks of the seconds game came with anything to make up for those drawbacks. It's a prettier version of a far superior experience.
The combat issue is such a big one for me. Didn’t finish DD1 so I didn’t know where the story was going and honestly didn’t care but I really enjoyed the combat of DD2. But once the challenge went away and I started to realize that the enemy variety was extremely low the combat became rote and I completely lost interest. Honestly crazy to me that they came up with a combat system this fun but did very little to keep it engaging after for the mid and late game.
Next biggest issue: exploring caves is useless. Wish they’d added more weapons to the game and put those weapons in the caves. Still wouldn’t fix the difficulty issue though.
I had to push myself to roll credits on DD2. Fighting the same goblins that die in 1 hit every 5 seconds when going from point A to point B was driving me insane. Hard agree on the exploration point, there’s zero incentive to do it when there’s no reward. Even if there was, the game is already so easy that it would hardly matter…
Honestly i got bored of the story quite fast. Exploration and combat carried a lot of my enjoyment for the first 50 hours. Personally i explored and got to Battahl/The Volcanic Isles before i was probably supposed to. I think the only vocation i don’t have is actually Wayfarer and that’s mostly because i simply couldn’t be bothered to slog through the mind numbing main story. I can’t stand how obtuse and annoying they went with the quest designs. It’s not even like the first game where it was kinda obtuse yeah but it was far more manageable. In DD2 i honestly straight up loathe the quest design, it feels padded out and awful.
i remember when the dd2 trailers showed green goblins jumping out of bushes at the player, people were commenting "look! dynamic enemy spawns!!!" but nope, those goblins spawn in the same exact bushes. every. single. time.
Agree 100%. DD2 was so much fun to during the first 20 or so hours. I pretty much ignored the main questline and just explored. I still look back on it as my top 3 gaming experiences this year. However, once the honeymoon phase ended and I took off my rose-tinted glasses, I (and a lot others) saw the game for what it is. Dragon's Dogma 2 is really Dragon's Dogma Remake. A lot of the same good...but a lot of the same bad. I still haven't finished the game because I'm coping that they'll release a hard mode or BBI like expansion that can address these problems.
@@omensoffate And most of all, it was very hands-off. A lot of the story was implied through optional dialogue and through in-game actions, intending for the players to roleplay the story out through gameplay and their own minds rather than through in-game dialogue choices. That was way too subtle for most of the audience, though. Personally, DD1 has one of my favorite video game stories.
I didn't care for the story, but the lore was special. The eternally looping worlds, eternally looping "faith" of the arisen and the themes of inescapable loop in general, tickled my brain in all the right ways.
Yeah this game was AMAZING for the first 30 lvls, then it just fell apart. Imagine Elden Ring but you go Limgrave -> Weeping Peninsula -> Caelid and it just ends there. This is how this game feels to me.
Could you give a good example of where Scaling was done well? I always feel like Scaling removes the feeling of progression and turn enemies into damage sponges, Skyrim being an example.
Well fighting games change the enemy AI up, but that ends up with input reading or flat out hyper aggressiveness. Dark Souls 2 did add different enemy placements alongside upping the stats. Most of the time it is just upping the stats.
You feel that way because it does, because most hardcore RPG fans agree that scaling is an arbitrary system for balancing enemy difficulty, rather than a cohesive RPG mechanic. Dragon's Dogma 2 doesn't need scaling, it just needs to slightly lower the EXP gains per-monster, *maybe.* Arguably, the balancing is fine if you're playing the game as an RPG, and not a collectathon where you do every quest consecutively instead of progressing with the plot as-recommended.
They released the game March 21. The end of Capcom’s quarter was march 28… This tells me everything I need to know. This game was pulled from the womb, made functional, then rushed out the door to appeal to corporate overlords and shareholders.
The tell that this game was rushed is the vocation system: they kept the same nomenclature: base, advance and hybrid vocation but in the context of the game it doesn't make sense. Thief and Archer are missing it's advanced counterpart and hybrid ones can't use any weapons from their supposed bases but the Trickster doesn't even has base clases. One of the main reasons for taking away two skill slots, separating the Strider from the first game into two different classes and limiting one weapon type per class was done since they felt the base Strider and Magick Archer were too versatile overpowered, so the changes were supposed to make every vocation more specialized, balanced and the Warferer would offset the rigidity of being limited to just a single weapon type. But it was all for nothing then because in DD2 the Thief (Melee Strider) and the Magick Archer are still the most broken vocations in the game and since Warferer only let's player equip three skills instead of four it's not worth to use.
all those things you just said except also -fire the guy that allowed unhired pawns to initiate conversations with you on the road -the OST is worse across the board -groups of 4-5 goblins every 20 feet doesn't make the overworld engaging -doubling down on how bad all the dungeons are and how bad loot is as the primary worst thing about the game
Yeah… honestly I couldn’t help but feel sad that I literally just forgot about the game after how much I enjoyed it. It really feels like just everything was ever so slightly underwhelming. Lack of variety of enemies, annoying amounts of health for some enemies, NPCs spout the same lines over and over again and have basically no personality other than wanting to worship you, etc. I look forward to DD3 but I really hope they have more things to do and more variety
I don't really care about any of the mechanical or game design failings of DD2. I simply care that it lost its soul, its personality, the very essence of what makes it stand out in a sea of mediocre fantasy games, and in my mind and my heart. The Cassardis theme is all I need to hear to remind myself that these two games are the same in name only, and that all the talented people and circumstances that made DD1 unique are gone with the wind, forever.
The best part of DD2 was the hope and journey of discovery you had at the beginning before it slowly fades and you (being a fan) still try to find the good in it..that fades too
I think mainly the only thing I was disappointed with in DD2 is the soundtrack. The first game had such a unique feel because it had the type of music you wouldn't expect to be in that kind of game. Like the track whenever you are in combat and exploring at night and there's like an electric guitar playing. It made the game so much more unique memorable
Somebody said once that DD2 was just an RE engine tech demo, to iron out flaws before they moved on to Monster Hunter Wilds. I may even have heard this from this very channel. And honestly, the way the Unmoored World dragon variants feel exactly like that.
I really think Capcom misread the signs here. DDDA is like a 7/10 at best but the reason people were so excited by the prospect of a sequel was because of how much potential the game showed in its stronger moments. However Capcom seemed to think players wanted it ALL back, the endless running through vacant landscapes, the idiotic pawns, the vague and repetitive main story missions, and doubling down on the clunkiness of it all without even having the saving grace the first game had in Bitterblack isle.
The armor simplifying dev response is BS but I think he was TRYING to argue that fewer item slots means you can't cover too many bases and you're forced to swap out depending on context.
Yeah, avoiding the endgame DDDA scenario where you're immune to every status ailment because the Arisen's underwear can fill in for their armor's weakpoints.
I dont care what the naysayers say I love DD2 and find it alot of fun. There are 6 issues I do have with it however - 1) pawns stopping my gameplay to sell themselves. 2) Enemy variety is indeed quite limited. 3) Less skills to use which really affect vocations like Sorcerer. 4) Grigori and his dialogue is no-where near as interesting and seems very rushed to get to a conclusion (in the original you can really tell he enjoys dragging things out and questioning the arisen's principles/commitment to their duty/mankind's nature). This might seem small but I agree it's a big issue as he is an iconic antagonist. His fight sucks too. 5) The dragonforge effect... I mean... its really ugly. 6) Dragonsplague would be an interesting mechanic except it's so easy to get rid of.
Most naysayers are bitter and jaded Dragon's Dogma fans. We waited 10+ years for ultimately what amounted to be just the same game but worse. Itsuno talked about how rushed the first game was and how Capcom gave them a smaller budget. He and the marketing led us on to believe that *this* would be what the original DD1 should have been. Instead all we got was the same rushed, half-baked mess that DD1 was. Of course a lot of fans are rightly pissed. What is the legacy of this series? One cult classic, a failed MMO, and a disappointing sequel/reboot.
I feel like we didn’t get a video like this around the release, pointing out the problems in the game. I, for one, was super disappointed on what how the game turned out to be. Story, Narrative, Enemy Scaling and Variety, Lack of Build Variety. Was kinda shocked I didn’t see alot of heat towards the game after my playthrough.
Dragons Dogma 2 to me is if a young underdog athlete from the early 2000's that many adored was now in their 40's, no longer in as good of a shape and got a facelift surgery.
The game is obviously rushed and unfinished. It's why there are so few sidequests in the final area and every cave is identical. It's the reason the dragon fight is so short and rushed and the dialogue is awkward.
A sack of potatoes placed on a high-up shelf has a lot of potential. When people speak about potential very few seem to consider the cost of realizing said potential. A blank canvas has highest potential to become the best painting ever drawn and statistically speaking every stroke decreases that potential without realizing it. The cost of realizing said potential is literally the cost of drawing the best painting and by "cost" I don't just mean money. Development cost of complex software grows exponentially with complexity. I suspect it's why you can get 4 monster hunter games in the time it take to release 1 Elder Scrolls or GTA game (and the length of sandbox game development cycle only keeps increasing).
Also, another fun detail about edmond and another small hint that he took the bargain is that he's losing hair due to stress from "something," which is why you can find hair behind his throne.
Who was scared to tell the truth? Pretty much all the reviews said something along the lines of 'it's fun at times but with a lot of flaws'. The hype was huge for the game sure, but when it came out people criticised it a lot.
Sorry for the long reply Overall I agree with you on DD2s story, I think it could’ve been handled much better however there’s some things I’d like to defend. Personally I found Disas plot with the false Arisen really intriguing and a much better set up to push you on your journey. Which makes it more disappointing when it doesn’t go anywhere special or have any real payoff. It’s not great but I still prefer it over the first game where you’re mostly doing busy work for the Duke until you confront the dragon. Sure I might have skipped some details that happens along the way but all of the intrigue with the games story mostly comes from optional side quests that you could miss if you’re not paying attention. Like the cutscene with Mercedes confronting Julien is great but if you didn’t do “Chasing Shadows” or “Seeking Salvation” most first time players are going to be more confused about why this character is even here. Which is why I appreciate DD2s base plot because in the beginning it seemed like they wanted to convey their story to the audience in a more straight forward way. That is until they give up on that and everything goes down a hill. One last point I wanna talk about is when you say trying to understand the world of DD1 is interesting and DD2 is not because of how similar they are so you know what to expect and personally I disagree. Like if you see DD2 as a literal remake of 1 then I can understand where you’re coming from. However it’s kinda not, you’re purposefully on the same path as DD1 but there is a twist. The cutscenes may not be as memorable than DD1 but almost on purpose like the game knows you’ve been through this before hence why scenes are directed to be more straight to the point. Biggest hint for me (spoiler) is finding out the kingdom of Vernworth is literally built on the remains of Gran Soren. I may not fully understand it all but it comes off as a cycle within a cycle perpetuated by the Pathfinder who just expects you to go along the story of DD1 as it should go. Which is why DD2 doesn’t become Dragons Dogma 2 until you break out of that first games cycle to break the world from the storyteller. At least that is my interpretation of the games events, personally I found that really intriguing and wasn’t expecting they would build off the first game like this.
Last thing about gameplay…. Honestly all I need is a hard mode with an endgame dungeon equivalent to bitter black isle and maybe one new vocation and I’d be set for another decade tbh.
The story feels mishandled. If they really wanted to go that route they did it in the worst possible way. You don’t subvert a new story in the opening act. Most people who played DD2 didn’t play DD1 and so treating it as if they did only ends up making the story confusing and bad. There’s no proper call to adventure because you started them in what should be a halfway point storywise. If the story had just played it straight and you started out by getting your heart taken it would have been better paced. It should have been whenever you get to the coronation that things go sour and you are spirited away to the volcanic isles as a political prisoner. No contrived amnesia plot just you being taken captive and hidden by Disa. Then you can play out that whole first act but instead it’s you going through Battahl and whatnot. That sets up the other plot beats that the game has far better. It also fixes the problem of Disa and her whole story being sidelined as you’re instead actively working to get back into Vermund and figure things out.
100% agree with everything. After playing DD2 I immediately went back and played DD:DA because the only thing I could think about at the end of DD2, was that DD:DA had one of my favorite dragon fights of all time. The build up, intro, and combat spectacle really made me feel like I was fighting for my life. In DD2 the dragon came out of nowhere and then that was basically the end of the game. I really thought that this surprise visit was gonna be more of a tease and show off just how much stronger the dragon was compared to those cancer dragons. To show that anything that mankind arrogantly summons to usurp or destroy the cycle could never hope to do so, save the Arisen. Then the dragon would say some shit like "get stronger and then come to this secluded castle when you're ready." But no. Honestly, everything felt abrupt in its completion, especially the whole trying to become sovereign part. I was literally thinking the whole time I was in Bahtahl "So when will I have enough evidence to go back, claim leadership, and prepare to slay the dragon?" Also, I feel like it's actually reasonable to compare this DD2 to DD:DA. I feel like the fact that it was a dlc/expansion doesn't discount it from being a fair comparison. Capcom should have learned from the mistakes of their previous game, along with all the features that DA brought to it, making it more of a complete game. Just because the first game had a rough launch that was made better with a dlc, doesn't mean that it's ok for the next game to have a similar issue. I really think that Capcom should have looked more closely at what made DD so good beyond its combat and made it their goal to meet or exceed what they had achieved in the first game and its dlc. I still really love DD2, but it feels like I'm playing DD1 that just looks better, has arguably better combat, and a story that doesn't take its time. I can only hope that if a dlc does come out, that it'll make the game better. I may not have written down my thoughts clearly for everyone to understand so if you wanna discuss, I would be happy to. (Please, no one else that I know cares about this game anymore lol)
DD2 is absolutely a game of unrealized potential. So much of it wants to approach greatness but never gets there. Meanwhile I finally finished Dark Arisen and Bitter Black Isle for the first time this year, and even in 2024 is one of the best video game experiences I've ever had.
I really liked it but the performance is what killed my enjoyment. I can sometimes stomach some sub par performance in certain games but this was ridiculous.
I'll never understand how they managed to introduce new issues that were perfectly fine in the first one, without solving the most crucial faults of DD1.
It is bizarre.
And for those who have seen or played DD online you'll know they managed to fix and learn tons of cool things, where did that experience go?
@@franciscor390The Monster Hunter series?
Priorities. Capcom truthfully has always struggled with this to some extent and the only reasons it doesn't hit all games the same way is because of the directors behind it. When that individual doesn't change or what they deliver doesn't surmount the dictates of the suits, the game suffers.
@@ryanbauer3680 😐 probably yeah.
@@franciscor390 Some of the leads on DD2 didn't work on DDON, and might well have dismissed aspects of the latter game they didn't personally like. A lot of DD2's design seems to be focused on emphasizing the overland journey aspect of DD1 that DDDA and DDON downplayed.
"Remade the unrealized potential of the original" - Pinpoint accuracy there.
the original game was not considered successful when it was released... it was only years later that it had accumulated a "cult following" - and arguably, its only an average game that has potential, and maybe a unique feel to everything..... ultimately the developers had no clue what made it a "cult following" and they already proved they couldnt make this game the first time - from what i understand the development was cut short, so maybe thats why they were just trying to do the original thing fully complete.... but perhaps it was cut short for a reason, because perhaps these developers dont really know what they are doing both now and also in the past
@@1nvisibleAcropolis I agree wholeheartedly, unfortunately for us.
@@1nvisibleAcropolis I think it's also possible that the game seemed too complicated for many people at launch, and it's kind of hard in beginning for many new players. It was for me, then I got the flame sword in the stone and I found a liking to it. Nowadays I don't even take the sword and want to stay a little underpowered at beginning, as I love that part most of the game.
The endless portal stone doesn't help people to stay powerful either, gotta kill a bit in beginning :)
Remember when he was shilling this game with his review copy? I do. 🐑
Remember when the gameplay lead was making a big deal of how traveling would be so fun and this game wouldn't need fast travel for that reason? Turns out what he meant by that was there are 9 goblins per square foot in the open world.
Open world travel is only boring if your game is boring.
Totally unlike our groundbreaking travel system of running across a big ol field, fighting the same mobs 5000 times along the way.
Incredible.
They should make that in the first half of the game without fast travel. And at some point after that, fast travel is unlocked so that the player can complete sidequest easily.
@@martk647With port crystals and ferrystones this is basically the case lol
😂😂😂 Yes!
Where’s Goblin Slayer when you need him?
"Abandon all delusion of control" is such a sick line from Grigori, really set the tone.
Grigori felt so much more like a philosopher in the first game, and testing you not only physically but psychologically at the same time.
In DD2 bro is almost asking you to put him out of his misery, its much more on the nose.
Dogma 2 was suppose to correct all the errors in the original, instead it amplified them and even removed a few of the great qualities the original had, like dual classes.
Lack of hybrid vocations doesn't bother me so much because we have Warfarer as a catch all.
@@leightimm2537warfarerer is lame
@@leightimm2537Except Warferer is the most dissapointing feature of the game and it barely executes it's premise.
Warferer was sold as the _create a vocation_ vocation. It lets you equip all weapon types in the game but the issue is that it only allows you to pick *three* skills to use, not per weapon but globally, so you can't really come up with any interesting combination.
It's so underwhelming folk just equip the vocation with all the skills from their preferred one in order to take advantage from the feature that the Warferer allows to equip any armor piece, so it's just used due flair and not gameplay.
Pc players are in luck since there's a mod, _True Warferer_ that modifies the vocation so skills are tied to it's equipped weapons like it should have been and it actually feels like creating a custom vocation.
They ditched the badass chad mystic knight for the Virgin mystic spear hand
Really bad take, embarrasing...
This is the best tech demo I've ever played
That's probably the best description I've heard for DD2. The product we got, while good, should've been comparable to limgrave.
@@shidderalpha2293my hopes were so high for DD2. I really thought it could've went toe to toe with ER, as I preferred the progression system in Dark Arisen over the Souls progression system
Add to that a world that's like 4-5 times larger, needless to say I was insanely excited (Dark Arisen is one of my favorite games of all time, right next to Dark Souls 1)
DD2 was such a massive disappointment in so many ways.
removed popular classes
removed # of equippable abilities
removed save scumming/Godsbane
inventory system is way worse
removed the ability to fully heal with items
implemented a timer that locks you into finishing the end game in a set amount of time (this was awful)
game runs terribly
removed easy methods of obtaining ferrystones
The more expensive tech demo you've ever played
@@shidderalpha2293limgrave is no where near as good as dd2 tho.
@@joesaiditstrue i actually liked the new inventory system, since in DD1 every time you had to heal (very often) it paused the game and therefore also halted the flow of the combat.
But to add to the negatives there was only maybe 3 new large enemies compared to DD1, if you want to count the Sphinx who you're supposed to use the 1-shot arrow to defeat. And many of the large enemies in DD1 didn't even make a comeback. I don't think I would have been as dissapointed if the in-game list of "large enemies" on your pawn didn't hype you up for 20+ mysterious enemy types that ended up being 50% reskins.
Your portcrystals don't carry over to NG+ like they did in DD1 so you can no longer avoid the incredibly fun backtracking/hiking part of the game (the majority of the playtime) with careful planning.
The story was somehow both a complete retcon and rehash of DD1. But TBF no one liked DD1 for the story outside of it's ending (which is now non-canon ig?)
3:33 "The situation gets worse if you actually like the game" is not something you want to hear about any game...
Helldivers 2 😭
Tbf there are 2 perspectives to that, 1. Is the game gets too easy 2. I've gotten very strong. Level scaling tends to make it feel like you are never gaining any strength or power
@@puppetgamer239
You want to avoid the Skyrim issue with "everyone scales to you" while at the same time, don't design the same enemy type for 90% of the map.
The thing about Monster Hunter is that bosses are plentiful and unique. While Dark Souls 1 made every enemy a pause for consideration. Where Devil May Cry was all about holding the SSS Style with free express through combat.
It seems DD2 missed what Capcom succeeded in with regard to DMC5 and Monster Hunter post World series.
The fact that one tier 3 class is literally locked into 1x Weapon with 3x Skills when it can access other weapons, is disappointing in DD2.
@absolstoryoffiction6615 all I mentioned is that scaling enemies is a boring way to keep a game difficult nothing more nothing less
Yeah that criticism nails the target so hard. They explicitly say they want us to explore. Fill the game with backtracking, silly ideas about fast travel and spamming monsters on the roads... tada! Your level 100 in a single playthrough. Congrats on accidentally achieving story-mode difficulty.
Capcom saw that DD:DA gained some fanbase and decided to repeat the first game's strength and weaknesses and dial it up to to proportions that it's not cohesive anymore
yeah and its frustrating bc they didn't listen to all the valid criticism for the 1st one and the game seems not finished , i hope it was a budget/time thing bc that can't be the full vision of Itsuno for this game..
if we are lucky, they're working on another Dark Arisen-esque DLC, that fixes everything and brings back all the stuff from DDDA that they chopped out for literally no good reason
bring back Godsbane jerks
@@esawakita3043 From what I've heard from many talks about the issues was that. Time constraints and budget. For someone like me this game was perfectly fine. 100% it on Steam, had 2 full weeks of fun and I can't wait for the DLC.
@@brokemono i know and i love playing that game too but it could have been so much better and my complaint is that it was fairly easy to fix..
Wish they would just let Itsuno cook with this property. He had to fight tooth and nail for it with DMC, and DMC5 is what we got.
One of my biggest disappointments with this game was the overly-restrictive quest design, especially after people claimed that the quest design was intuitive and often had many solutions. I have three examples:
1. The Vernworth Castle Vault - the guard there is scripted to stop you no matter what if she is at the door, including if she is asleep or you are invisible. The real solution to this quest is to cause a commotion and get her away from the door which is a much less elegant solution.
2. The Phantom Oxcart - The only solution to this quest is the default one. If you try to follow it or hitch a ride by climbing on top of it, it will suddenly teleport out, even if you remain undetected or invisible.
3. Myrddin - Myrddin doesn't use the grimoires, he only has them for collection purposes. You can tell this because he doesn't realise that fake grimoires given to him are fake. So, when you learn that there is someone else who wants and needs the real versions, why isn't it possible to steal them back. After all, you know where he keeps them, and that they aren't very secure.
These are just the ones off the top of my head, but this hardly conforms to the "if you can think it, you can do it" philosophy of game design that I was repeatedly made to believe this game would have.
On top of that, I feel you missed some very glaring issues with the game, like the fact that everything in the game would have you believe that there is a whole separate elf kingdom which turns out to be a 3 building village where they all stay in the same inn. Also, the promotional material made me believe that there would be more than two dwarves. The game is wholly uninterested in its own peoples.
All of the pawn specializations suck:
Logistician doesn't autocraft what you want and will waste ingredients on garbage.
Woodland wordsmith is only relevant for the shop NPCs since all quests related to the elves provide an NPC who translates for you
Chirurgeon doesn't activate enough and requires you to send curatives to them which will largely remain unused in crutial situations
Forager makes pawns do what they did in DD1, gather items, which is what they should be doing already
Aphonite just makes them shut-up
Hawker sells items when you are getting too loaded
The game director claims that he limits fast travel in order for people to become immersed in the world, but I beg to differ. After traveling by road from very close settlements hundreds of times, I have come to the conclusion that literally no one could survive the trip. The amount of trash mobs that harass the player seem like a way to keep the player engages but only serve as large annoyances when trying to chill out while also destroying immersion. Between Melve and Vernworth there are about 14 groups of enemies, a trip which could only be survived by people with well equipped guards, yet we see people traveling these roads all by themselves. It isn't immersive to be hassled by goblins every 2 minutes. It also isn't immersive to be ambushed by a girffin every single time I leave bakbattahl.
I don't understand why they didn't really bother with the other races, but put those god-awful catpeople inside...
Exactly, it’s all just a haphazardly woven facade that at the slightest tug is undone. Why are there no other towns outside of Bakbattahl? What’s the point of having the trolley system if you’re just gonna waste it on ruins? It’s as if the devs couldn’t have cared less about the world they built. It’s all just an empty sandbox for the player to have some fun in and then once they get wise to how nonsensical it all actually is they quit and go play something else.
I hate to compare the two but it’s the complete opposite in Elden Ring. Everything in that game has a history and it’s not just a meaningless playground in which you bring your toys to and then leave once you get bored.
I heavily agree with all of this, especially the last part about the game's world being impossible to live in, I felt that almost immediately as soon as the tutorial section was over and we were let loose to explore, and then when I witnessed and tried out the oxcart system for the first time that feeling became even worse. The oxes are absurdly slow, with seemingly no ability to move faster whatsoever, heck they even stop dead in their tracks when there's a threat rather than try to speed up and get away, which would have realistically made them go extinct in this world where gigantic predators roam around everywhere that would eagerly have them as a meal. Then there's the guards the carts travel with, which already struggle to fight off goblins and wolves, let alone any of the large enemies you can encounter during a cart ride, which are basically guaranteed to kill everyone and destroy the cart if the Arisen doesn't fight them, which if you think about it would mean that like 50% of all oxcart trips they make without the Arisen would likely end in all of their deaths, which realistically makes it an absolutely impossible system to keep up, as nobody would want to do the job.
this kind of lazy design was what made me dislike cyberpunk so much too.
solving any problem was always super generic and had nothing to do withe your characters particullar skillset.
the ingame systems do not connect to each other, or react in any way, unless you do the quest in the right order and exactly how the developer wanted you do solve them...
it's boring.
meaby they should conzentrate on writing an interesting world and fun unuque ways to interact with it, instead of making a HUGE world that is empty and in wich you can't really do anything.
just an idea😅
That part about how it makes no sense that normal people can survive at all when even the world saving heroes are challenged by walking to the next town has bothered me in so very many RPGs. Yeah, I get that there needs to be challenges, it's a game and all, but proper world and scenario design can both make a plausible world AND a good game exist together, if designers can be bothered.
The entire time I played DD2, I just kept wondering what the fuck they were thinking. The first game was an unpolished gem, elevated by DLC. Literally everyone and their mother knew what the game did right and did wrong. The hype for DD2 was predicated on the idea the devs also knew. But they just…did the same fucking thing again, while taking some weird steps backwards and adding some other unneeded bullshit. Being a game dev must be a trip.
This happens a lot with Capcom. The self-aware devs who know what works and doesn't are all gone. So you have a bunch of producers who only vaguely understand why the things they make are good, and then the Monster Hunter and Street Fighter teams where people seem to know a bit better as *why* those games work. I also don't think portioning off half the company to just remake stuff is really helping to develop new talent so much as make the talent they have more risk averse.
@@MidlifeCrisisJoe I'd also add the Phoenix Wright and Resident Evil devs. Most of the time, they also know what they're doing, and they haven't fucked up as much as other teams. The sales and reviews of the games they make speak volumes about their quality
@@MidlifeCrisisJoestreet fights 6 is good design and fighting wise but everything is dogshit the story is trash and gets boring real quick and the microtransactions and battle pass make the game worse just give us a fun story to go with the create a character bs without having to fight Gimps with boxes over thier heads and stop asking for microtransactions and battle passes from a 70 dollar game that’s already been bought and paid for
How many devs from the original and DA days stuck around? Probably not a lot.
@@MidlifeCrisisJoe It's DD devs are out of touch with it's pretty small and niche fanbase. Calling MH team just know *a bit* how it works is a huge downplay on them. Especially from my experience with how they took stuffs from what fanbased liked and added those to the game, tons of QoL and fixes in both Iceborne and Sunbreak tbh, from small stuffs as light pillar for dropped materials...
I just watched Rurikhan video after gamescom and MH devs are really the GOAT
Knowing Dragons Dogma will most likely never see its full potential come to fruition hurts so much, literally inches away from being the perfect action rpg adventure game
It's not inches. More like 10s of meters.
Capcom sees DD as a high money maker. Make your perspective herd enough. They may make a some better tweaks.
@@ICon415 they see it as a money maker NOW. Clearly not during development, which is the only reason it released this half-baked, and legitimately worse than the previously, unfinished first game.
@@ICon415 Nah this is on Itsuno. He had 10 years worth of criticism to address and somehow made the same game, if not regressed in some aspects. If _this_ is what he claims is his vision realized and what Dragon's Dogma's full potential is, then I have no faith in the next installment.
@@ICon415Itsuno is a hack. He can only make DMC, anything else and he’s proven to be lackluster at delivering on his promises. Like a Japanese Peter Molyneux.
I think the decision to not have every enemy from the first game be in this one was a choice I would have delayed the game for
The devs working on it probably would've liked to, but i guess capcom executives wanted that bump in sales at the end of the fiscal year
This game was worked on through the pandemic, and on an entirely new engine so they couldn't just rework assets from DD1 and DDDA
100% got rushed with a final set in stone release date by Capcom board of directors.
Not having all the same enemies would be fine. What's weird is that it outright has fewer enemy types. Dragons Dogma 1 had 61 enemies (counting variants) at launch, and about 92 counting Dark Arisen. Dragons Dogma 2 had 57.
@@lozm4835 I agree that we needed more, but at least DD2 variants of common enemies behaved more differently than their DD1 counterparts, like some harpies favour range attacks with sleep, other actively try to poison you, the Gore harpies just want to kick your butt face to face, same with saurians and goblins.
The big monsters are the same though, or maybe I'm dumb but common ogres feel the same as Dire Ogres, just with higher stats.
The dullahan is super fun to fight
@@PrimalDirective
Standard business practice but a shame... It's no GOTY.
DD2 operates on the extremes. It's systems are either a 9/10 or a 2/10.
This is true.
@@SLAMTUCKERc
That is Dragon's Dogma in general.
Nothing about DD2 is anywhere close to being a 9/10
@@wallacesousuke1433 character creator
I've never been more disappointed while simultaneously having fun with a video game.
Seriously lol. DD2 is a really strange game in that regard.
Adding scaling wouldnt fix anything. It would just make leveling up pointless, and you would also have to follow a curve to minmax stats, or else you fall behind and monsters become sponges.
Enemy variety is the real problem.
This is the way. All of these video game rpgs are originally based on tabletop games. When you're level 1, a pack of goblins is a challenge and a gryphon will wipe out your entire party. By the time you rise in level you would expect to steamroll goblins and have a rousing battle with a gryphon but even a young dragon will send you nope-ing away. The idea of raising up in level is to eventually be able to fight against an ever increasing difficulty and intricacy of enemies, not to just keep fighting against tankier goblins...
couldn’t agree more. the problems are variety and also density, which i am surprised was not brought up in this video. you can hardly walk anywhere without getting into a fight. scaling would make that so much more painful.
You can scale the game in many different ways. For example you can add scaling for NG+ to match your current level when starting the NG+. That way the first areas will be still fairly easy but end game content will become challenging again and will make level worth the while. If you have no scaling at all you end up with what most people experienced in DD1, when you started NG+ and punched everything into oblivion. When I wanted to get the third star for hydra knowledge for my pawn, I had to choose mage vocation for him and take his staff because even with fists he kept decapitating the hydra...
Just to make it clear, I'm not saying scaling is "fix all", and definitely it shouldn't be just doubling health of enemies.
Yeah, I thought that autoscaling would turn the game into worse version of Oblivion where fucking scaling bandits clad in finest Daedric armor were robbing you of pitiful hundred septims.
Yeah, 2nd game is just the 1st game stretched super thin.
It has a couple of meaningfully different enemies and all of them are locked in the limited world, or are tied to 1 location(so really aren't a part of the world).
When that ruined castle emerged from the sea, I thought: "Oh hell yes. Here we go. Finally I get to explore a proper dungeon. Now the game is really underway." After that, my hype for this game which I'd waited years for was so utterly derailed that I began to question if I was too old and jaded for video games altogether.
I too thought we'd be doing some delving, and when I saw the remnants of the Everfall, I was pretty hyped. Then it turns out you just take an elevator and have no reason to go back. Big sad.
That was me when the dd2 title dropped, I kinda wish I didn't get the true ending, so disappointing.
Same here. I was thinking it would be like a cool underwater dungeon from Final Fantasy 14. What a disappointment.
Theres still other games tbh, we literally got Elden Ring DLC this year months after DD2 release
No man. The game just sucks.
DD2 not beating the MH wilds tech demo allegations
Allegations? What's going on?
@@AaIsForAaliyasHe’s mostly joking, but some people speculate that DD2 was only created as a testing ground for Monster Hunter Wilds’ tech.
@@stardriver2494 meanwhile DD2 get no demon only character creation kekw
This game's optimisation has me worried for Wilds, and the recent gameplay has done nothing to change my mind
@@iiReaperv2 Luckily the PS5 gameplay at gamescom seems fairly optimised for its current development state. Smooth and stable framerate and no stuttering whatsoever. This before they put in proper optimisation, so I'm very hopeful on that end.
0:50 a huge thing that's worse in DD2 is the music. Just listen to this, it conveys such emotion for an area you'll likely spend less than an hour exploring. The entire DD1 OST is incredible, meanwhile DD2 has the most generic "fantasy game" music ever. They even got rid of the electric guitar that added so much personality to the original. Compare End of the Struggle from both games, DD1 just feels better.
It kind of sums up the entire comparison between the two. DD1 feels like an indie game with heart, lacking in content but brimming with ideas and soul. DD2 feels like a clone of the first, but without the same heart to it.
Eh tbh I didn't really care for the music in the first game that much, I liked Daemons theme and the dark arisen menu theme but that was about it, 2 had a lot a more tracks I liked with some of the bosses.
Nailed it. DD1 music had a lot of soul and feeling put into it. Theres nothing like Cassardis theme in 2, or the character creation song, in 2 it sounds like it could be from any generic medieval fantasy mobile game. It just wasnt made with the same 'heart', the same creativity. as a huge fan of 1, i was really disappointed
Ho lord, i didn't even think about the music. The sound design has better parts but i cannot recall a single song of the 2
Meanwhile DD1 ... THE WIND IS PUSHING MEEEEEEE T.T
The soundtrack for ddda is one of the only video game soundtracks I own a physical copy of and I regularly sit down and listen to it. There isn't a single song that comes up that bores me or feels uninspired and the quality of the music is incredible. The second game had some decent tracks but overall I just couldn't get behind it the same way that I got into the first.
I know, DD1 had such better music
"Dragon's Dogma 2 is not a sequel, it's a remake."
Exactly!
"fast travel means your world is boring" *has 4 enemy types*
Its ok till the repetition kills it. The enemies locations and types should have been random to an extent but its the same enemies in the same places at the same time with maybe 1 or 2 being somewhat random and that is at night
If an open world RPG has less than like 30 enemy types, it's probably a really bad open world RPG.
@@coltonwilkie241 for me, its the awful worldbuilding that makes DD2 travelling boring.
Barely any civilization outside of the towns. And the roads are packed to the gills with enemies, 99/100 of which are the same exact enemy type as the one _10 _*_feet_*_ before._
As a result.
The potential for sidequests and lore is shafted since no NPC lives anywhere else. And combat gets boring very quickly and you overlevel without even trying to since you naturally fight the same enemy types over and over again.
Skyrim has better travel and exploration. *_And I hate Skyrim._*
Witcher 3 enters chat
“The best part is figuring out how to deal with an enemy with your vocations”
Meanwhile, Sorcerer Maelstrom on every enemy go brrrrrrrrrr.
Thief spin to win hurrrrr
I'm sorry I couldn't hear you over the sound of my Magick Archer skill, Ricochet Hunter, killing everything in this enclosed space.
Or Mystick Spear go go gadget bubble
Jedi go HIGH GROUND!
Mystic Spearhand in general would like a word, double when you unlock the maister skill lol.
Itsuno said that with DD2 he was able to
implement his full vision for what Dragon's Dogma is. But I just can't believe that is true. DD2 just feels so incomplete and thin. Especially compared to DD1 + DA
He lied.
His vision is either a worse product than before or he’s a liar. Either way, there’s no point in taking him for his word anymore.
It's basic developer who could be fired and wanna remain friendly with his boss talk to me
"It's not what i wanted but ... thank you for the opportunity i am proud of what i made" (as he is literally immediately forced to go back to making other games he's said he wanted to stop so he could focus on his own project)
Of course he lied.
What else was he supposed to say?
He still is nothing more than an employee of a big Company. Stop listening to what developer's tell you, even if they wanna tell you the truth they won't because it will ruin thier career. Would you throw away you perfect job for internet honor points ?
tbf there was probably a lot restrictions in terms of what he could say from Capcom. I don't think he's lying per se, its more so that dd2 had a release date they had to make and as the dev of a game saying that this game is not everything you wanted to make would be absurd. So again i feel like we should blame capcom more than anyone else.
My biggest problem with the game is the utter abandonment of the beautiful vocation system of the original. The system of having basic jobs represented as simple colors, with each base color having an advanced counterpart represented by a deeper shade. These "advanced voctations" were slower, more hard-hitting variations of their counterparts that sacrificed general utility for hyperspecialization into that niche. Then, on top of that, you had hybrid vocations that mixed elements of each base vocation for even more general utility, and there was one for each possible combination of base vocations. It was a beautiful, genius, symmetrical system and one of the best features of an already fantastic game.
The sequel, before its release, teased a step away from this system by making it so that each base vocation was already pre-specialized and the advanced vocations would merely be harder-hitting, slower versions of them. This, of course, would require the game to have more total vocations to compensate stripping all the vocations of their generality, and with twelve years of work put into the game, it was a no-brainer that it was what they were going for. This was an incredibly exciting time to speculate on what they weren't showing us.
The hybrids they introduced also seemed to follow this formula, as instead of simply having access to the weapons of its constituent vocs with a few unique skills, they seemed to instead only have access to a completely unique weapon, and a totally unique skillset. With that in mind, what would the other hybrids look like? Would the thief-fighter hybrid be a ronin with a katana similar to the MH longsword, combining the high dps of thief with the precision counter playstyle of the fighter? They even introduced a hybrid with two unknown constituent vocations with completely new colors! It was a monk with a censer who would manipulate aggro and buff allies with their drugged smoke! What could the constituent vocs be? Maybe an alchemist and a priest? Because religious aspect brought by the censer and the poisonous flavoring brought by the drugged smoke? The priest might be able to heal your reduced max HP, which the regular mage can no longer restore, and the alchemist could utilize the crafting and item-throwing system to poison and debuff enemies!
Maybe the priest-mage could give you the light boon they removed from mage/sorcerer, and the alchemist-mage could be a warlock that can cast dark boon alongside exequy and other curses they removed from sorcerer! The priest-fighter could be a tanky paladin with a greatshield and spear! Infinite potential!!
And then we got..... no advanced thief/archer. No martial vocation hybrids. A hybrid vocation with nonexistent constituents.
And before I get the replies saying: "You just want assassin back, you just want mystic knight back." No! I don't! I want mystic spearhand and maybe the aforementioned samurai! I want them to be consistent with the formula they chose to establish!
Forgive the schizopost. Great vid rata.
Fair points, but I'd like to counter that the new vocation abilities do a great job of differentiating abilities. Sorcerer, getting a "Quick Regen" button drastically improves the class. Though Warrior and Fighter, I'll admit were downgraded. Magick Archer got my favorite upgrade by making its terrible default attack a multi-attack lock-on
Trickster probably should have been given a solid color to temper expectations. However, I don't resent Capcom for not providing the 28 vocations some people seemed to expect they get at one point (6 basic, 6 advanced, 15 hybrid, 1 warfarer). It's easy to come up with broad concepts for vocations, it's much harder to design distinct niches and playstyles, and harder still to implement them as real game functions with unique animations and gear.
@cyberninjazero5659 That is all tangential to my points, not a counter. I agree that they increased the identity of the vocations they chose to make, I actually think that's a good thing. The problem is that they didn't complete the formula they chose to establish.
@IAMUtubeSockPuppet it is a tremendous task. You're right. But if they didn't want to do all that work, they (like you pointed out) should have abandoned the color system entirely, instead of baiting us and leaving us with this shattered mess of a system. They invited this criticism upon themselves, as they had a myriad of ways to avoid it without making *28 vocations* and still chose this path.
Like someone else already said, I get it...28 vocations must be an impossible task to design and implement, and an argument could be made that we shouldn't have to expect that many....but the color system was so prevalent in DD2 that you couldn't help but expect it to happen. They should have removed or heavily altered the color system in a way that the expectations were more closely resembling of what we got. Before it launched, DD2 seemed to be a dream come true, because you would in theory have the means to play in so many different ways, you couldn't ever get bored of it . And the only reason we imagined things to this degree, was by the implied meaning within the color system... What a bummer it was when it came out. I said I get it, and I do...but I also don't lol
• Low enemy variety
• Low enemy complexity
• Too many combat encounters
• Hollow worldbuilding
• Extremely few choices, with even fewer consequences, exacerbated by a main narrative that's written with the ethos of "Nothing Matters."
Also overly lenient inventory system. I mean healing items weight almost nothing and you can chew them even with 0 HP, there is no interesting ressource-management here, which could've made long travels all the more interesting. Though mages healing spell also made eating out of combat obsolete, the game has pretty bad balancing.
It’s crazy how fast this game was praised and then simultaneously forgotten about at the same time. So odd to me.
Happens alot. People get overhyped sometimes to the point of toxic positivity against all criticism and then the games comes out and they're disappointed. Cyberpunk before the rehaul comes to mind.
the game had a mixed reception from the start. not to mention the huge backlash against the crystal dlc's at launch. it's gone quiet because there's not much to talk about besides minor patches. people are just despondently waiting for dark arisen 2 and wilds.
@@ThatGuy-en2nncyberpunk before Rehaul is so cap. That game was obliterated by everyone even though it was actually still good.
Nothing really odd. It's a singleplayer game. It's played, then people move on.
@@TamdinSol I understand that, but even the original Dragons Dogma had a huge following awhile after it released. I was in the community for both games and people still mostly prefer the original. Maybe it’s my own experience but my little brother played 2, beat it and never was interested in replaying it. Unlike the original where he replayed it many times. I honestly felt the same as well.
To add more info on character interaccion, on the duel shown on this vid, you have a say on the outcome, you can stay still and let the girl be beaten, step in to fight the guy yourself (the girl is humiliated as she is unable to protect her own honor) and you kill the guy or, you can kill him and revive him using an item.
But tgey ended up ex æquo in a video i've seen?
The choice is still empty imo. The girl feel defeated no matter what and go back to her country, never to be seen even though promise to do something to aid Arisen (I do understand she is just a fail helper because her nation want so but still), that guy we beat also do nothing, either stay in dungeon if we revise him or announce his victory and do not affect the story anymore. It just an illusion that you have a choice in DD DA.
It's cool that you can revive him and all, but like he said in the video itself, in the end nothing matters because it was always about just you and the dragon so Itsuno didn't have to actually write a RPG story with meaningful choices and branching paths, and that's not a japan problema since Romancing Saga exists, it's a capcom problem.
When they pulled all the devs from DD2 to make MH wilds. You can very clearly tell there were some story acts skipped, lack of a good ng+, a BBI equivalent, and a second freaking skill bar.
Same thing happened with Xenoblade Chronicles 2 iirc. Devs were pulled to work on other more valued Nintendo IP’s and what we got was a result of that. I wonder if the reason why Torna was overall higher quality was because they had an actual full dev team and not a skeleton crew?
You can tell that happened exactly half way through bakbattahl, the quest to expose disa abruptly stopped and the guy that gives you quests just stuck loop the same dialogue option, the third continent is two villages with nothing, and you literally get two new vocations right before the ending.
After seeing the MHWilds video, it's become clear that DD2 was just treated as a testing ground. Even the physics feels slow and weighty like a MH game.
Dawg BBI was dlc. We haven't heard whether or not there will be DLC
@@CALAMITY0FHYRULE it's still a sequel and it knew bbi was the big savior of the first game.
It's not their first game anymore, they don't get to say oops we'll fix it in dlc. They didn't even put out as fleshed out and coherent story as base dd1.
They had a decade of feedback and didn't follow any of it. It's clear they just wanted a test game for mh wild and didn't care enough about dd2 itself to make it a complete game
Dude. I fucking loved the first 20 to 25 maybe 30 hours of this game. It felt epic. I didn't know the enemy variety was weak yet. The combat was great. It felt hard. Gear looked fucking great. The story wasn't great, but I didn't really play dragons dogma for story. Then I got overpowered. Every enemy dropped like a fly. The only enemy I hadn't seen yet was the lich (when I finally saw it I killed it in like 5 seconds) every gear shop (which their is like 4) is just 1 or 2 obvious gear sets that are the best in the game you have access to. And then I realized man most of the loot in the open world sucks. This game could be so amazing. And I'm worried a dlc won't fix it.
This is literally my story 😅 I actually didn’t beat the game because I became bored from being so powerful after taking my time exploring and maxing vocations.
My biggest issue is the lack of gregori, he made dragons dogma dragons dogma.
Dude shows up 3 times in the original
That's true, but in the original he shows up throughout your journey leading you on, almost like a guide. You can tell that he doesn't hate nor like you he just does his part in the cycle. Also talking dragon cool, and VA has a silky smooth voice.
DD2 treats Grigori like an afterthought. DD1 at least people talked about him and made the knights do things like The Wyrm Hunt.
@@dougefresh2208 and still considered the best dragon in all of gaming by some
Ratatoskr is hyped for a game -> Game is underwhelming -> Ratatoskr makes a video about said game being underwhelming ( *we are here* ).
Bro developers genuinely cannot deliver on the hype, like it’s pretty reasonable to assume sequels will be an improvement over the original. Totk and dd2 are good example, bros just did the same shit but worse.
@@Doodoovessel Tears is a much better what are you even on about.
@@lucasLSD Tear of the kingdom was definitely a worse experience for me. It was bloated with the same problems as breath of the wild. I had a much better time with breath of the wild than I did with tears of the kingdom for the simple fact that at the time it was new and it innovated on the Zelda formula. Tear of the kingdom doesn’t feel new, and just doubles down on the problems I had with breath of the wild. Lack of enemy variety, poorly designed dungeons, Ubisoft levels of exploration, overly reused assets such as the islands in the sky, no real story cohesion with progression, and an emphasis on freedom which is a detriment to the design of the world and dungeons in general. One because it’s a reused world and two because you can easily exploit the dungeons.
@@lucasLSD the same thing can be said about DD2 it just doubles down on the problems I had with the first one.
DD2 definitely shows how important novelty is to a games fun factor.
It isn't though. It only is when the devs don't understand *why* something works. Ideally, a dev team tests the hell out of a game to figure out what they like, releases it to see where the players agree and disagrees, then in the sequel, shaves down or rework the things the players didn't like and pump up the things they did. You can hone an idea to a fine sharp point with this strategy and look no further than the Dark Souls games for a great example.
@@MidlifeCrisisJoe Speaking of Souls i think Shadow of the Erdtree is an amazing example of taking the best elements of the base game and refining it to almost perfection. It took the elements i liked and refined them. It’s not as exhausting as the base game map and it has more unique non reused dungeons. Dragon’s Dogma should honestly learn a thing or two from it.
@@paulettecasey44 SotE is trash, as is Elden Ring
@@wallacesousuke1433 Ok then name exactly what DD2 does better than Elden Ring and SOTE? It certainly isn’t enemy variety nor is it level design as ER has a far more in-depth world than either DD1 or DD2. If you want to argue about how empty it is i can literally go in a direction and find a 100 more interesting locations than i can in DD2. In ER you have stuff like Siofra River and locations like the Cerulean Coast in SOTE.
@@paulettecasey44 LMAO I'm not defending DD2, screw that pile of crap, just dont bring the lame copy-pasted games From has been repackaging and re-releasing for over a decade lol
And again, even if you disregard that, many people (aka From fanboys) are far from blown away by that DLC, so dont ever use the word "perfection" when referring to that DLC
Bitter Black Isle really invalidates this game for me
100 percent. BBI and Dark Arisen's whole end game in general still holds up
I personally liked the grindy dungeon crawler stuff that they completely removed in DD2
Trying to make Dragons Dogma into "a game for everyone" made it a game for noone, tbh
@@joesaiditstrue if they still had the grindy dungeon crawler stuff the game still would have been a letdown. It was a mistake to not make a real DD2 and instead make a remake of DD1 essentially. They basically released the game with modern graphics and thats it. Which isnt enough. We shouldnt be asking for the same game but a improved version of the same game.
@@joesaiditstrue I don't think it's "trying to make Dragon's Dogma into 'a game for everyone,'" it's that Itsuno didn't like Everfall or BBI to begin with. The endless grind made DDDA and DDON into games that weren't *for him*. I think DD to Itsuno has always been about the base game experience in DD1, traveling overland from place to place. Many more people than one are responsible for a game, of course, but Itsuno had a lot of creative control over DD2 that he'd delegated for Dark Arisen and DDON.
At any rate, a game where the closest thing to a fast travel system can fail and strand you in the middle of nowhere is *not* "a game for everyone." Nor is a game where (on launch) you had to run back and forth between the inn and the armorer to make sure you had the right upgrade materials.
@@IAMUtubeSockPuppet based take ngl. This was really Itsuno doing it his way, for better or for worse. I can only respect that
If the eventual dlc is that good, DD2 will be redeemed. But I have a feeling lightening won't strike twice. (sigh)
I'm having that "I'm enjoying the game and going slowly so end up steamrolling everything" thing so hard with Black Myth: Wukong right now.
Wukong is amazing... dd2 blows
i enjoyed dd2 more. fair to criticise the boring mobs, but at least i can explore freely in dd2
@@RikuV4 What is there to explore? Your 570th cave!? That’s my problem with DD2, there’s no incentive. There’s rarely ever any good loot in chests and often you can find better stuff being sold by merchants. I’m willing to give Elden Ring plenty of flack for how it also reused enemies and dungeons but at least it had dungeons. Even if you compare it to DD1 that game had the Watergod’s Temple.
@@paulettecasey44 The fact that you can stumble on a side quest just by going around and even from buying something from a shop is something that most RPG should copy, tired of chasing marker around
@@paulettecasey44 the caves are so bad in dd2 that in the dlc, i want them to go back and replace half of them with actual dungeons. a BBI 2.0 or snow region isn't enough. the game basically needs to be remade AND have an expansion.
About monster scaling: Dragon's Dogma has wild battle math. Like, the way you can deal chip damage, upgrade a weapon once, and then do 10x the damage per hit... It's like, Dragon Quest-level rudimentary battle math. It's insane they didn't change it, or at least normalize the values between the strongest and weakest attack/defense stats, or introduce damage floors...
If anything, DD would be way more fun if it was just about increasing your options and the skew of your stats, not about raising your stats linearly, because that'd better suit all the specific monster interactions and behavior manipulation of the game. Or at least the range between the least and most damage you can do should be brought much closer.
Yeah, there's this magical point for enemies where they are still challenging but can be beaten with effort for a satisfying victory, but the difference between going into a fight you are underleveled for vs overleveled is of polar opposites in difficulty. For a game that prides itself on the quality of its combat, stats have an oversized impact on whether a fight will be nigh impossible or a cakewalk, compared to tactics. It was there in the original, but feels somehow worse in DD2.
I do agree with you, one of the reasons they removed item slots was cause it would clip through clothes, but here in this video we can clearly see a cap always clipping thorught the shield when it's on your back... Also clipping armour in DD1 was fine you could do some fun things with it
I play a fighter and my cloak is never not clipping into my arms. It’s quite infuriating if you want to use a badass cloak only for it to clip like crazy.
@@paulettecasey44 It's really sad hope some mods will fix it or place your shield a little lower so that the cloak goes over it rather than through
@@paulettecasey44 Or I don't know Devs will patch it, though that's the leas likely lol
@@Tyanus2 Yeah i don’t trust Itsuno or Capcom to pull a Phantom Liberty or a No Man’s Sky and fix it. They might release a dlc but it won’t correct the fundamental mistakes of the game and it’s likely they’ll just leave it to die. I’m also doubtful that they’ll release a DD3 now as DD2 really just proved to Capcom that this series isn’t worthwhile for their resources. If there is a DD3 don’t expect it come out anytime soon.
I wouldn't call DD1's story bad. It's simple. That's what it is. It's simple and tells what it wants to well.
DD2's story on the other hand has too many lost threads that went nowhere for no reason. There's no reason why we don't go back to stop Disa, there's no reason why we help the bad guy all of a sudden. There's no reason to even stab yourself on the dragon.
"There's no reason why we don't go back to stop Disa."
Either we become Sovran, and presumably did so off-screen, or we go to Unmoored World and all her plans are irrelevant anyhow. The world is ending after all, who cares who gets to be king.
"There's no reason why we help the bad guy all of a sudden."
But we don't, aside from optionally assisting with taking down the Gigantus. Phaesus certainly isn't thrilled to see us and tries to have us killed. We never give him the godsbane. The journal objective "bring the godsbane to Phaesus" is misleading. The real reason we're driven to get the godsbane, seemingly by the Pathfinder, is so we can overcome the godsway and not lose control of our pawns to it like nearly happened at the coronation ceremony.
"There's no reason to even stab yourself on the dragon."
The game does a poor job of explaining why this is the solution, but the core idea is that we're derailing the Pathfinder's intended narrative by simultaneously killing ourselves and the Dragon before the final encounter properly begins.
DD2 does have a clear core plot in retrospect, which can be presented as an analogy to a TTRPG table. A railroading GM chooses you to be the next hero of his "masterful story," the same one he *always* tells and everyone is thoroughly bored of. The rest of the players then try to derail the game while the GM tries to get it back on track. Eventually you tell the GM you think his story sucks too and he tries to pull a "rocks fall, everyone dies."
If certain plot threads seem to go nowhere, it's because the plans of various schemers are anticlimactically undone. The Pathfinder's story about the true king overcoming an usurper is mucked with by Phaesus' godsway making it impossible to safely confront the false sovran at the coronation ceremony. Phaesus' and Disa's schemes are then derailed when Phaesus cannot control the true Dragon with his godsway, the true Arisen and the Dragon meet again, and one way or another Disa's power grab is foiled.
Yeah DD1's story is fascinating in that it's exceedingly simple and basic right up until the end when it gets wildly meta-textual and avant-garde.
DD1's story is bad because it's badly executed. DD2's story is bad because it's a bad story.
@@Valosken I dont mind DD1's story at all, I kinda enjoy it
@@IAMUtubeSockPuppet So the main villain is a DM throwing a temper tantrum because they aren’t getting their way? That honestly sucks ass lmao.
Grigori is absolutely the best depiction of a Dragon in any medium, Smaug is the only other one that stands with him
(Im no expert on all medieval fantasy so Im sure there are other great ones)
........ bruh
High Instinct and Intellect both in harmony! Terrifying and powerful
Fatalis from MH really does take a close second if you look into the lore
Midir from Dark Souls 3 and Fortisaxx from Elden Ring are two of my favorite dragon designs ever. Dragon Age dragons were really cool as well imo
Not only it's half cooked You can't feel The passion, compared to dogma1
Dragon's Dogma 2 is a collection of assets in the RE Engine.
Should i play 1?
Absolutely @@The_Custos
This game need a 3 years delay for more
-Quest lines
-Enemies
-Endings
-Boss Fights
-Alternate ways to complete the games with complex choices.
Seeing dragons dogma 2 makes me realize what a special gem dragons dogma 1 was.
my biggest disappointment was because there was unrealized potential which was the main reason that I wanted DD2 to happen
This. I figured that over a decade after DD.DA's release, they would've had plenty of time to research player opinion of the game to narrow down what worked and what didn't in order to improve things for the sequel. But instead it feels like they didn't so much as open a single review thread or community forum to check things, or worse, they looked at all the valid criticism and ignored all of it in favor of their flawed "vision".
@@kangtheguardian1214 I don't believe Itsuno's vision was a support class with 2 colors that have no bases at all, I do believe this game was undercooked, Capcom has a precedent of it with Resident Evil 3 after all.
Dark Arisen is a better game, yeah I said it
It is without a doubt, but even if you judge it based on the original it’s still lacking a solid endgame. You have the unmoored world but to me the whole of the everfall was more engaging in terms of content.
Was there ever a debate about this?
@@wallacesousuke1433I mean yeah, going off review scores alone DD2 has gotten more favorable praise, which is insane to me.
this game is like if dmc4 was the only game released after dmc1, but instead of all the things dmc4 added it was mostly a graphics upgrade with basically the same story, gameplay and bosses, 2 new enemies type, 1 new weapon and they still removed some stuff
that's a great analogy actually since DMC4 was also a shat out game where you just retread the same environments but as Dante now.
I so desperately want Capcom to keep working on Dragon's Dogma 2. I love the game, even though it doesn't surpass the original. I want them to spend time to fix the game, to truly realize a vision that was clearly pushed out early.
I want a Dark Arisen tier expansion to breathe life into the game.
But we won't get that. Monster Hunter Wilds is on the horizon. Capcom will forget about Dragon's Dogma 2 in favor of the game it was a test for.
Agreed, it’s honestly disgusting. I think MH:Wilds will be great and i’m actually looking forward to it but using DD2 as a tech demo for their golden goose IP is scummy.
they won't or rather it can't be fixed
its a over priced game with egregious microtransactions, if they keep adding to it it'll just get more scummier in design
and even if they did a Dark Arisen version it just be inferior the first game still
@@marcusclark1339egregious isn't the word I'd use to describe the MTX. Not good, but not something to really freak out over
@@paulettecasey44 Reminds me of Randy Pitchford pulling all assets from Colonial Marines to Borderlands 2
People keep saying that but it's different teams, Itsuno has no involvement in MH for example.
Cant believe all i got after dropping 20,000 gold at the brothel was a fade to black and Mormon-tier intimacy with a woman for 20 seconds and then i was back in the room with my armor back on
i gave away the deluxe membership card to the ugliest pawn i could find in the rift.
I don’t think the issue is that there’s no level scaling. I think the issue is in the difficulty pacing. For example, Skyrim has level scaling and it makes the experience worse. You don’t ever feel like you’re getting stronger. Dogma two has no level scaling, but has terrible difficulty curve mapping.
I actually wish this game didn’t get made because it means we’ll never actually get a Dragon’s Dogma 2.
The new copium huffing is the hope for a DLC because DD2 has great bones, it just needs proper meat
Same as the first DD to be honest
well, it was a huge financial success despite the disappointment, and as a result capcom now sees dragons dogma as a "key brand", which hopefully means future DLC and games will be better. the fact that we even have that certainty of more dragons dogma is a miracle.
Crazy how in big 2024 this game still has the most archaic of all rpg mechanics in PAUSE HEALING. The ultimate tension breaking and unimmersive way in a game to respond to your character taking damage.
I have to wonder if Capcom thinks this is some kind of iconic feature of the original game and that deviating from the norm of every other action game made in the last 10 years is some kind of novelty rather than just being straight up inferior.
Yes you can heal in the quick menu but why would I when I can heal from the safety of the pause screen
i was really hoping they'd address this too. i remember getting sucked into a tornado in ddda and pausing every frame of the way down to heal to survive the impact. really took me out of the experience of being in a tornado.
Which is confusing as hell since their flagship game Monster Hunter has no such system. Damn near every combat related mechanic in that game is done with real time animations that leave you vulnerable. Drinking a healing potion actually plays an animation of your character drinking that potion.
Regarding the point you make at 22:35. Whilst dragonforging being on par with endgame gear would increase variety, it wouldn't even need to be considered if the devs just added a transmog system to begin with.
Damn Capcom watched this and fired Itsuno 😭
The problem with dragons dogma 2 is that it has ok combat, but after like lvl 10 it becomes a mindless hack and slash with nothing else to offer.
TLDR: just play DD1
I'd Play DD Online. some chads revived it and made it playable online despite it being originally exclusive to Japan and servers shutting down
I think about 1300 hours across three platforms is enough, thanks. I'll wait for DD2 DLC if it happens to give the franchise more time.
Two thick playthroughs at total 185 hours on DD2 is enough for the release year of the game.
Also play Dark Arisen
I'll be honest the weapon/skill reduction was a deal breaker for me, I played ranger in the first and it felt so bad having a bow and no backup daggers to use... Plus reducing the amount of skills made my character feel so limited it just felt bad to play. Glad I played it from steam family share and didn't have to get it myself
Same, this archer sucks ass compared to the ranger, I only feel powerful by stocking plenty of explosive arrows, something you weren't required to do in the first one.
DD2:
-Graphics
-Gameplay
-Combat
DD1:
-Lore
-Characters
-Effort
-Passion
-Music
-Bosses
-Grigori
-Seneschal fight
-Postgame world (I HATE the unmoored world, it feels so weird. First game’s apocalyptic postgame was SO much better.)
As a day 1 enjoyer of the original Dragons Dogma, the original game utilized a level cap, RNG chests, and the Everfall to entertain players for a longer amount of time. The base game is practically built to be speedrun, that they even gave it a hard mode and speedrun mode. There was a point to doing NG+, and instead of getting every chest in the game world, the game simply rewarded you exponentially for knowing their locations on your runs. The UR-Dragon especially represented a community challenge that felt fulfilling to participate in. Without even mentioning Dark Arisen, the base game is leagues above DD2, a game that has yet to receive any real patches lately.
It's pretty clear that there is little to no support coming for DD2. Even if they did, the base game is frankly too much and too cumbersome in comparison to DD1 in a pre-Dark Arisen state. The fact that DD2 feels like a step backward in both gameplay loops and story is the writing on the wall for veterans. Heck, DD2 completely lacks a true final boss. The only real challenge for a character who even moderately made themselves powerful are the unrevivable enemies from the Unmoored World. Even those are just simple re-skins, nothing like facing the Hydra or beholders in the Everfall. The "bosses" are similarly just a bunch of unique, albeit anti-climactic fights that are more tedium than challenge.
I really thought unmoored would be a fun, repeatable, almost rogue-like mode I'd be able to do multiple runs on only to lose my option to start unmoored from day 1 after "completing" it. Unbelievable
Dragons dogma remake really was the biggest disappointment of this year for me so far ;-;
We need hardmode and a reason to play it. Maybe more gears, more stats or cosmetics or lore or whatever.
Or they could just port DDO over, make it singleplayer and I'll still buy it.
Now I want to make a video on what would make DD's potential real. I'm glad you got to include the Grigori speech in a video finally.
Also, on the story, I expected them to, and they SHOULD HAVE, just kept the mythos of the first one. Zelda does this just fine. There's so much room to play around within the confines of DD1's basic idea.
The way they butchered Grigori in DD2 is the primary reason I was so disappointed in it. It didn't help that the 'final boss' was two walking segments and a cutscene. None of the drawbacks of the seconds game came with anything to make up for those drawbacks. It's a prettier version of a far superior experience.
I stopped right at "the first problem is that enemies don't scale"
The combat issue is such a big one for me. Didn’t finish DD1 so I didn’t know where the story was going and honestly didn’t care but I really enjoyed the combat of DD2. But once the challenge went away and I started to realize that the enemy variety was extremely low the combat became rote and I completely lost interest. Honestly crazy to me that they came up with a combat system this fun but did very little to keep it engaging after for the mid and late game.
Next biggest issue: exploring caves is useless. Wish they’d added more weapons to the game and put those weapons in the caves. Still wouldn’t fix the difficulty issue though.
I had to push myself to roll credits on DD2. Fighting the same goblins that die in 1 hit every 5 seconds when going from point A to point B was driving me insane.
Hard agree on the exploration point, there’s zero incentive to do it when there’s no reward. Even if there was, the game is already so easy that it would hardly matter…
Honestly i got bored of the story quite fast. Exploration and combat carried a lot of my enjoyment for the first 50 hours. Personally i explored and got to Battahl/The Volcanic Isles before i was probably supposed to. I think the only vocation i don’t have is actually Wayfarer and that’s mostly because i simply couldn’t be bothered to slog through the mind numbing main story. I can’t stand how obtuse and annoying they went with the quest designs. It’s not even like the first game where it was kinda obtuse yeah but it was far more manageable. In DD2 i honestly straight up loathe the quest design, it feels padded out and awful.
i remember when the dd2 trailers showed green goblins jumping out of bushes at the player, people were commenting "look! dynamic enemy spawns!!!" but nope, those goblins spawn in the same exact bushes. every. single. time.
Agree 100%. DD2 was so much fun to during the first 20 or so hours. I pretty much ignored the main questline and just explored. I still look back on it as my top 3 gaming experiences this year. However, once the honeymoon phase ended and I took off my rose-tinted glasses, I (and a lot others) saw the game for what it is. Dragon's Dogma 2 is really Dragon's Dogma Remake. A lot of the same good...but a lot of the same bad. I still haven't finished the game because I'm coping that they'll release a hard mode or BBI like expansion that can address these problems.
A Hard Mode won’t fix the story or the lack of content though. It just makes the hp and damage numbers higher.
The story in the first game wasn't 'good' but damn... there's just something special about it that stays within my mind to this day
It was good just pretty fragmented and easy to miss during a first playthrough
@@omensoffate And most of all, it was very hands-off. A lot of the story was implied through optional dialogue and through in-game actions, intending for the players to roleplay the story out through gameplay and their own minds rather than through in-game dialogue choices. That was way too subtle for most of the audience, though.
Personally, DD1 has one of my favorite video game stories.
I didn't care for the story, but the lore was special.
The eternally looping worlds, eternally looping "faith" of the arisen and the themes of inescapable loop in general, tickled my brain in all the right ways.
We learned that we cant trust the devs in this game, for fucking up the game again. Hopefully there won't be a third game.
Yeah this game was AMAZING for the first 30 lvls, then it just fell apart. Imagine Elden Ring but you go Limgrave -> Weeping Peninsula -> Caelid and it just ends there. This is how this game feels to me.
So... Who wants to create a game company to make a Dragon Dogma but really good and with proper writing?
Theres the game called Eternal strands that looks interesting. Highly inspired by Dragons Dogma with climbing large enemies and physics interaction
I would love to rewrite the DD story so it's done right.
Who cares about writing? It's the gameplay that needs metric tons of improvements
Me
@@wallacesousuke1433What’s the definition of a video game without a story?
Could you give a good example of where Scaling was done well? I always feel like Scaling removes the feeling of progression and turn enemies into damage sponges, Skyrim being an example.
No Rest for the Wicked has amazing scaling. It works by swapping weaker enemies with stronger ones as you progress in the game.
Well fighting games change the enemy AI up, but that ends up with input reading or flat out hyper aggressiveness. Dark Souls 2 did add different enemy placements alongside upping the stats.
Most of the time it is just upping the stats.
elden ring, every enemy has a base stat that is modified based on the area you in.
You feel that way because it does, because most hardcore RPG fans agree that scaling is an arbitrary system for balancing enemy difficulty, rather than a cohesive RPG mechanic. Dragon's Dogma 2 doesn't need scaling, it just needs to slightly lower the EXP gains per-monster, *maybe.* Arguably, the balancing is fine if you're playing the game as an RPG, and not a collectathon where you do every quest consecutively instead of progressing with the plot as-recommended.
Oblivion😂. And I love that game.
At this point I feel like it's up to another developer to realize the actual potential of this type of game.
They released the game March 21.
The end of Capcom’s quarter was march 28…
This tells me everything I need to know.
This game was pulled from the womb, made functional, then rushed out the door to appeal to corporate overlords and shareholders.
The tell that this game was rushed is the vocation system: they kept the same nomenclature: base, advance and hybrid vocation but in the context of the game it doesn't make sense. Thief and Archer are missing it's advanced counterpart and hybrid ones can't use any weapons from their supposed bases but the Trickster doesn't even has base clases.
One of the main reasons for taking away two skill slots, separating the Strider from the first game into two different classes and limiting one weapon type per class was done since they felt the base Strider and Magick Archer were too versatile overpowered, so the changes were supposed to make every vocation more specialized, balanced and the Warferer would offset the rigidity of being limited to just a single weapon type.
But it was all for nothing then because in DD2 the Thief (Melee Strider) and the Magick Archer are still the most broken vocations in the game and since Warferer only let's player equip three skills instead of four it's not worth to use.
all those things you just said except also
-fire the guy that allowed unhired pawns to initiate conversations with you on the road
-the OST is worse across the board
-groups of 4-5 goblins every 20 feet doesn't make the overworld engaging
-doubling down on how bad all the dungeons are and how bad loot is as the primary worst thing about the game
One of those games where I had 80+ hours and still felt like it wasn't worth the money spent on it.
YO, director of DD2 left Capcom! Thoughts?
A remake that doesn’t do things as well as the original is the saddest thing.
magick archer not having daggers pains the most :(
Yeah… honestly I couldn’t help but feel sad that I literally just forgot about the game after how much I enjoyed it. It really feels like just everything was ever so slightly underwhelming. Lack of variety of enemies, annoying amounts of health for some enemies, NPCs spout the same lines over and over again and have basically no personality other than wanting to worship you, etc. I look forward to DD3 but I really hope they have more things to do and more variety
I don't really care about any of the mechanical or game design failings of DD2. I simply care that it lost its soul, its personality, the very essence of what makes it stand out in a sea of mediocre fantasy games, and in my mind and my heart. The Cassardis theme is all I need to hear to remind myself that these two games are the same in name only, and that all the talented people and circumstances that made DD1 unique are gone with the wind, forever.
The best part of DD2 was the hope and journey of discovery you had at the beginning before it slowly fades and you (being a fan) still try to find the good in it..that fades too
That makes it one of the worst games ever made then inline with games like diablo 3.
The problem is this wasn't a sequel, just a remake
but it's called "Dragons Dogma II" should have been "Dragons Dogma another ARisen"
@@marclenraymagdaraog691 that's what I mean they made a remake not a sequel.
I think mainly the only thing I was disappointed with in DD2 is the soundtrack. The first game had such a unique feel because it had the type of music you wouldn't expect to be in that kind of game. Like the track whenever you are in combat and exploring at night and there's like an electric guitar playing. It made the game so much more unique memorable
Somebody said once that DD2 was just an RE engine tech demo, to iron out flaws before they moved on to Monster Hunter Wilds. I may even have heard this from this very channel. And honestly, the way the Unmoored World dragon variants feel exactly like that.
it was a great first hour of the game.
but it never got any better after that.
Happy now?! Itsuno left because of your video and stream😂
I don’t even mourn the potential. I just breath in sadness at the loss of another potentially amazing franchise and add it to the shelf of dead dreams
I really think Capcom misread the signs here. DDDA is like a 7/10 at best but the reason people were so excited by the prospect of a sequel was because of how much potential the game showed in its stronger moments.
However Capcom seemed to think players wanted it ALL back, the endless running through vacant landscapes, the idiotic pawns, the vague and repetitive main story missions, and doubling down on the clunkiness of it all without even having the saving grace the first game had in Bitterblack isle.
The armor simplifying dev response is BS but I think he was TRYING to argue that fewer item slots means you can't cover too many bases and you're forced to swap out depending on context.
Yeah, avoiding the endgame DDDA scenario where you're immune to every status ailment because the Arisen's underwear can fill in for their armor's weakpoints.
On the other hand, by the end of DDDA, maybe my underwear should just be that good.
I dont care what the naysayers say I love DD2 and find it alot of fun.
There are 6 issues I do have with it however -
1) pawns stopping my gameplay to sell themselves.
2) Enemy variety is indeed quite limited.
3) Less skills to use which really affect vocations like Sorcerer.
4) Grigori and his dialogue is no-where near as interesting and seems very rushed to get to a conclusion (in the original you can really tell he enjoys dragging things out and questioning the arisen's principles/commitment to their duty/mankind's nature). This might seem small but I agree it's a big issue as he is an iconic antagonist. His fight sucks too.
5) The dragonforge effect... I mean... its really ugly.
6) Dragonsplague would be an interesting mechanic except it's so easy to get rid of.
Most naysayers are bitter and jaded Dragon's Dogma fans. We waited 10+ years for ultimately what amounted to be just the same game but worse. Itsuno talked about how rushed the first game was and how Capcom gave them a smaller budget. He and the marketing led us on to believe that *this* would be what the original DD1 should have been. Instead all we got was the same rushed, half-baked mess that DD1 was. Of course a lot of fans are rightly pissed.
What is the legacy of this series? One cult classic, a failed MMO, and a disappointing sequel/reboot.
I feel like we didn’t get a video like this around the release, pointing out the problems in the game. I, for one, was super disappointed on what how the game turned out to be. Story, Narrative, Enemy Scaling and Variety, Lack of Build Variety.
Was kinda shocked I didn’t see alot of heat towards the game after my playthrough.
Because we’re not angry. Just sorrowfully disappointed
Same, would’ve saved a lot of money too lol
No endgame, Boring quests, no quest board, just random monster fights in fixed locations.
yeah and gets repetitive so fast.. it's insane.
Dragons Dogma 2 to me is if a young underdog athlete from the early 2000's that many adored was now in their 40's, no longer in as good of a shape and got a facelift surgery.
Best 7/10, Monster Hunter tech demo, true Itsuno vision, game of all time.
70 dollars tech demo
The game is obviously rushed and unfinished. It's why there are so few sidequests in the final area and every cave is identical. It's the reason the dragon fight is so short and rushed and the dialogue is awkward.
its so stupid that capcom dont want to treat this IP the same way they treat their other huge IP. This got so much potential.
A sack of potatoes placed on a high-up shelf has a lot of potential.
When people speak about potential very few seem to consider the cost of realizing said potential.
A blank canvas has highest potential to become the best painting ever drawn and statistically speaking every stroke decreases that potential without realizing it. The cost of realizing said potential is literally the cost of drawing the best painting and by "cost" I don't just mean money.
Development cost of complex software grows exponentially with complexity. I suspect it's why you can get 4 monster hunter games in the time it take to release 1 Elder Scrolls or GTA game (and the length of sandbox game development cycle only keeps increasing).
Also, another fun detail about edmond and another small hint that he took the bargain is that he's losing hair due to stress from "something," which is why you can find hair behind his throne.
20/20 Vision. They need to have their eyes checked next time they follow Itsuno’s.
FINALLY ! Someome says the quiet part outlook. Folks was acting scared to tell the truth at the beginning but better late than never to be honest .
Bruh people have been saying this since the week it dropped you just missed it
I mean everyone has called out the game since release, full of videos, reddit posts complaining about the game
Who was scared to tell the truth? Pretty much all the reviews said something along the lines of 'it's fun at times but with a lot of flaws'. The hype was huge for the game sure, but when it came out people criticised it a lot.
People were being jumped on for saying it is worse than dd1 since day one.
@@jprec5174 People were also being jumped for saying that they liked playing it, there are weird people on either side
Sorry for the long reply
Overall I agree with you on DD2s story, I think it could’ve been handled much better however there’s some things I’d like to defend.
Personally I found Disas plot with the false Arisen really intriguing and a much better set up to push you on your journey. Which makes it more disappointing when it doesn’t go anywhere special or have any real payoff.
It’s not great but I still prefer it over the first game where you’re mostly doing busy work for the Duke until you confront the dragon. Sure I might have skipped some details that happens along the way but all of the intrigue with the games story mostly comes from optional side quests that you could miss if you’re not paying attention.
Like the cutscene with Mercedes confronting Julien is great but if you didn’t do “Chasing Shadows” or “Seeking Salvation” most first time players are going to be more confused about why this character is even here.
Which is why I appreciate DD2s base plot because in the beginning it seemed like they wanted to convey their story to the audience in a more straight forward way. That is until they give up on that and everything goes down a hill.
One last point I wanna talk about is when you say trying to understand the world of DD1 is interesting and DD2 is not because of how similar they are so you know what to expect and personally I disagree.
Like if you see DD2 as a literal remake of 1 then I can understand where you’re coming from. However it’s kinda not, you’re purposefully on the same path as DD1 but there is a twist. The cutscenes may not be as memorable than DD1 but almost on purpose like the game knows you’ve been through this before hence why scenes are directed to be more straight to the point. Biggest hint for me (spoiler) is finding out the kingdom of Vernworth is literally built on the remains of Gran Soren. I may not fully understand it all but it comes off as a cycle within a cycle perpetuated by the Pathfinder who just expects you to go along the story of DD1 as it should go. Which is why DD2 doesn’t become Dragons Dogma 2 until you break out of that first games cycle to break the world from the storyteller. At least that is my interpretation of the games events, personally I found that really intriguing and wasn’t expecting they would build off the first game like this.
Last thing about gameplay…. Honestly all I need is a hard mode with an endgame dungeon equivalent to bitter black isle and maybe one new vocation and I’d be set for another decade tbh.
The story feels mishandled. If they really wanted to go that route they did it in the worst possible way. You don’t subvert a new story in the opening act. Most people who played DD2 didn’t play DD1 and so treating it as if they did only ends up making the story confusing and bad. There’s no proper call to adventure because you started them in what should be a halfway point storywise. If the story had just played it straight and you started out by getting your heart taken it would have been better paced. It should have been whenever you get to the coronation that things go sour and you are spirited away to the volcanic isles as a political prisoner. No contrived amnesia plot just you being taken captive and hidden by Disa. Then you can play out that whole first act but instead it’s you going through Battahl and whatnot. That sets up the other plot beats that the game has far better. It also fixes the problem of Disa and her whole story being sidelined as you’re instead actively working to get back into Vermund and figure things out.
100% agree with everything. After playing DD2 I immediately went back and played DD:DA because the only thing I could think about at the end of DD2, was that DD:DA had one of my favorite dragon fights of all time. The build up, intro, and combat spectacle really made me feel like I was fighting for my life. In DD2 the dragon came out of nowhere and then that was basically the end of the game. I really thought that this surprise visit was gonna be more of a tease and show off just how much stronger the dragon was compared to those cancer dragons. To show that anything that mankind arrogantly summons to usurp or destroy the cycle could never hope to do so, save the Arisen. Then the dragon would say some shit like "get stronger and then come to this secluded castle when you're ready." But no. Honestly, everything felt abrupt in its completion, especially the whole trying to become sovereign part. I was literally thinking the whole time I was in Bahtahl "So when will I have enough evidence to go back, claim leadership, and prepare to slay the dragon?"
Also, I feel like it's actually reasonable to compare this DD2 to DD:DA. I feel like the fact that it was a dlc/expansion doesn't discount it from being a fair comparison. Capcom should have learned from the mistakes of their previous game, along with all the features that DA brought to it, making it more of a complete game. Just because the first game had a rough launch that was made better with a dlc, doesn't mean that it's ok for the next game to have a similar issue. I really think that Capcom should have looked more closely at what made DD so good beyond its combat and made it their goal to meet or exceed what they had achieved in the first game and its dlc. I still really love DD2, but it feels like I'm playing DD1 that just looks better, has arguably better combat, and a story that doesn't take its time. I can only hope that if a dlc does come out, that it'll make the game better.
I may not have written down my thoughts clearly for everyone to understand so if you wanna discuss, I would be happy to. (Please, no one else that I know cares about this game anymore lol)
DD2 is absolutely a game of unrealized potential. So much of it wants to approach greatness but never gets there. Meanwhile I finally finished Dark Arisen and Bitter Black Isle for the first time this year, and even in 2024 is one of the best video game experiences I've ever had.
I really liked it but the performance is what killed my enjoyment. I can sometimes stomach some sub par performance in certain games but this was ridiculous.
It was sloppy, they released it with 0 optimization.
And good luck having a sorcerer in your party (or being one) fps to the gutter