Dragon's Dogma - did it sort of fly over everyone's heads?

[Fsyco]

My girlfriend got this and really liked it, but I tried it and couldn't stand it. The voice acting and writing were atrocious, and I found the pawn's "helpful statements" extremely grating after about an hour, and that overshadowed everything else about the game for me. I don't even remember much about the story, combat, or quests. Maybe I'm not the target audience for it (I also didn't like Dark Souls), and I imagine being in that target audience might let you forgive alot of the game's issues.

 

[Casual Shinji]

The main issue players face is that the *overwhelming majority* of pawns for hire are Guardian or Nexus primary. These are the most useless Inclinations, causing a pawn to do absolutely nothing whatsoever until the PC is hit (in the first instance) or another pawn is hit (in the second). This behaviour can't be altered on hired pawns. It is because of laziness on the pawns' owners' parts, spamming commands that cause their pawns to become primary guardians, pioneers or nexuses.

I ensured that my main pawn has good gear and the best inclinations to behave like a tank. I can't remember exactly but it was something like Scather primary, Utilitarian secondary and Acquisitor tertiary. Extra effort had to be made (using elixirs) to ensure they were just so and if they changed through gameplay, I'd ensure to change them back. Good pawns with the right inclinations are hard to find but the only ones worth hiring. Guardian and Nexus pawns are almost completely useless.

I also found most pawns to have a severe lack of Skills. Even at level 22 I'd still find most pawns had only one Skill each for Primary and Seconday attacks, and maybe one or two Augments.

 

[The Feast]

I would instantly buy and play the heck out of that game ... if it was on PC :/

I simply won't buy a console for the handful of games I'd play on one.

Furthermore, many of the issues that people talk about in this game would be patched out by modders in a week or so. But the Japanese are sadly very iffy about PC games in general, so yeah.

Oh, I don't know about that, just look at all the Japanese visual novel games that are put on the PC. LOL!

 

[Elfgore]

I liked many of the games features. Climbing creatures, slaying giant monsters, nice RPG features, and some other stuff. Too bad I couldn't stand the combat. I'd play like two hours and then just shout done, because the combat drove me crazy. Since the combat is pretty much Dark Souls only easier, I suck balls at it. Even on easy mode I was getting fucked. I usually just end up quitting and never touching it again.

 

[This is re-great-table]

EDIT: So why is no one in the thread bringing up the vanilla game's theme song?!

Spoiler: CAN WE PLEASE DEDICATE A THREAD TO THE GAME'S F***ING WEIRDLY AWESOME THEME SONG?!

THE WIND IS PUSHING MEEEE!!!

Lol! That song is burned into my mind... I need help.
It always bothered me at first now that I remember, but like a lot of people, it seems to grow on you.

 

[endtherapture]

is a problem. Most people hardly have time to play an hour or two a week, needing to invest so much time for it to get good puts a lot of people off.

Really? When NPD's survey defined core gamers as gamers who play "core" games five or more hours a week, people commented that this seemed like a low number.

Anyway, I do find it interesting that this is even a thing. Modern books have to draw you in within pages, albums within a song or two, TV shows generally make their audience in an episode or two, movies have to have some sort of draw pretty early on. But games? People think "it gets good 10 hours in" is a decent idea. And in this case, I mean the developers, not the people talking about it.

I mean, I put more time into the game than the average mainstream game's length and it still didn't grab me, so I get why it's not necessarily a hot title whether people played their time all at once or over a span of weeks. I honestly feel like I gave it a fair shake and if it really is good that far in, then that's a shame. I'm just not sure I have the interest to get to the good parts. Well, the really good parts, since I didn't think it was a bad game.

I think it's based on proportions and the type of media you get. Books, you have usually purchased before reading. Some acclaimed series can take several chapters to get good (The Wheel of Times' first book required about a 100 pages before getting interesting). Films are fairly short media, 1 to 3 hours so they really need to grab you within minutes. With TV, a lot of shows like Supernatural and Breaking Bad have people saying "Oh wait til season 3 that's when it gets really going!".

Games are an interactive media however and proportionally, Dragon's Dogma is a huge game, so the first few hours area teaching you game mechanics. You'll see shorter games grab you quicker, and longer games will have more of a slow burn. RPGs like Skyrim will take a while before getting interesting and exciting, but a shorter game like a shooter will have to blast you with excitement as soon as possible.

The main issue players face is that the *overwhelming majority* of pawns for hire are Guardian or Nexus primary. These are the most useless Inclinations, causing a pawn to do absolutely nothing whatsoever until the PC is hit (in the first instance) or another pawn is hit (in the second). This behaviour can't be altered on hired pawns. It is because of laziness on the pawns' owners' parts, spamming commands that cause their pawns to become primary guardians, pioneers or nexuses.

I ensured that my main pawn has good gear and the best inclinations to behave like a tank. I can't remember exactly but it was something like Scather primary, Utilitarian secondary and Acquisitor tertiary. Extra effort had to be made (using elixirs) to ensure they were just so and if they changed through gameplay, I'd ensure to change them back. Good pawns with the right inclinations are hard to find but the only ones worth hiring. Guardian and Nexus pawns are almost completely useless.

I also found most pawns to have a severe lack of Skills. Even at level 22 I'd still find most pawns had only one Skill each for Primary and Seconday attacks, and maybe one or two Augments.

I always try to keep my main pawn with full augments and stuff in case she's used online. Level 22 is incredibly low level in this game though so I wouldn't be surprised if it was just the pawn of smoeone who never really got into the game.

 

[Dandark]

However the game is riddled with flaws. Some of them are pretty small, some of them are kinda annoying and some of them are HUGE.
My biggest problem is the awful save system. You can only have one file, one character, one playthrough at once. If im playing as a warrior but I feel like trying a mage character for a bit then I have to delete my entire playthrough and start a new game to do it.

It has a lot of other problems that i'll let others list but if they made a sequel to this with the same or similar combat that fixed most of these problems then it could be a great game.

What? You can change your character class whenever you want, its even a good idea to change it as soon as you max out on one of them (its rather fast). I started as a strider, then an assassin, a magic warrior, a warrior and then finally got around to learn some magic as a sorcerer. You can also share abilities so if you learn some skills with the sword as an assassin you can still use them as a warrior.

You can change class but every time you level up you gain stats depending on what class you are at time of level up. So if I spend most of the game as a mage and then decide I want to try playing a tanky warrior and swap to warrior i'll have a bunch of magic related stats and be much squishier than a dedicated warrior.

I also don't want to swap my character from warrior to mage or vice versa, I want to be able to have a warrior character and then a separate mage character who have both played through the whole game rather than one that swaps between everything.

I do like how the level up stats make you plan your build though, i'll usually play a bunch of warrior early on to get a boost in health and then swap to fighter for a lot of the game as I prefer Sword and shield abilities for most fights.

 

[stroopwafel]

I liked DD and played a fair amount but never completed it for whatever reason. The combat was a lot of fun and it's by far the best game Capcom put out in years but I just couldn't motivate myself playing it through. I largely blame lack of fast-travel, bland level design and the one annoying factor: the pawn system. I don't even care that they are there or that they repeat the same lines over and over but their presence just clutter up the fights so much. Most of the time AI companions in games are annoying but pawns take the cake. I also found the fights against the larger enemies somewhat unsatisfying and imprecise with awkward camera movement and jittery climbing controls, becoming increasingly annoying due to the amount of time it took to take them down. Again made worse by the pawns. Loot and combining classes was awesome though.

DD does a lot of things right and I can certainly see why people like it, unfortunately there were too many things in the way for me to really appreciate the good stuff. I enjoyed Amalur way more despite not liking the artstyle of that game and disregarding the entire boring story they put so much work in. Strangely I think with some minor tweaks(get rid of pawn system, improve camera/climbing controls for boss fights and make level/area design a bit more interesting) DD probably would have been one of my fave games of last-gen.

 

[Knight Captain Kerr]

No it didn't go over my head, I just didn't like it. There were some things I liked, making your character's and pawn's physical appearance was pretty good (clothes I found left something to be desired), the main theme kicks ass so much that I still listen to it and there was one time when I was at one of those healing fountains in the woods and night came so monsters attacked and I had to stay in the fountain and hold them off until dawn. Shadow of the Colossus style climbing was sort of neat and being able to pick up and carry and throw people was really funny, remember I had to escort someone to another town so I just picked her up and carried her there.

At the end of the day I just didn't care, I didn't find the game engaging. Exploring wasn't enjoyable, I didn't care about the quests main or otherwise at all and I didn't care about any of the characters. I just found the whole thing to be dull and didn't care. Eventually it got to the point where I'd have to do lots of side quests to level up and get better equipment and I just couldn't be bothered to keep playing the game I wasn't enjoying.