As a huge fan of the first game, I was really looking forward to Dragon’s Dogma 2. For 10 years, fans of DD1 couldn’t even be sure about a sequel ever being made, and here we are now. Just to stress even further how much of a fan I am: I preordered this game. I have never preordered any other game before.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a fantasy RPG game with the base plot of you being the Arisen who is bound to be the one to slay the Dragon. A special feature of Dragon’s Dogma 1 was the Pawns who travel along with you and aid you in all kinds of ways. In Dragon’s Dogma 2, this feature returns and was further improved upon (at least for the most part; I miss some of the old iconic voice lines, for example).

The gameplay is probably the highlight of this release. You can choose from multiple different vocations, falling into the types of physical fighters, archers, and magic-using classes. The combat is extremely satisfying and smooth, no matter if you fight groups of small enemies or big enemies. Every enemy has weak spots, and in case you are wondering how to make use of a cyclops’ weakness on the eye as a fighter with a sword: you can climb on enemies and hit them where it hurts. The combat leaves you a lot of freedom by, for example, letting you throw enemies to the ground or apply certain status effects they are weak against, etc. You can be creative here or just beat them to death if you wish to, I guess…

In order to fight these enemies, you will have to travel the world. This time around, the map is much bigger than in the first game; however, the parts you can actually travel through are not even that big. It’s mostly linear paths you follow and not a huge open field you might know from games like Elder Scrolls. The map itself is split into two regions: Vernworth and Batthal. While Vernworth has forests and hills with an overall green setting, Batthal is basically one big canyon. Technically, there is also a third area with the volcanic islands next to Batthal. In my opinion, this suffices for enough variation when traveling. I personally don’t mind not having that many huge open fields, but a few more ways to travel to a certain place would have been better. Fast travel exists in the form of portcrystals and ferrystones, just like in the first game. You need to acquire a portcrystal first, place it somewhere (so you will have to travel to that spot normally first), and then you can use a ferrystone to teleport there. Because of this, you will end up manually traveling a lot and using the same roads with the same enemies over and over again. This time around, there are also oxcarts to fast travel from one city to another, but those might get ambushed, causing your “fast travel” to stop and put you into a fight.

The story is pretty bad. Can’t say much more about that. The first game already had a gimmicky story which you had to read more into or search for more lore. This game’s story feels extremely unfinished and has a sudden jump once you change the region. The end also comes very suddenly. Doing certain side missions helps with learning more about the world, but it feels weird nonetheless.

The graphics are really good and very much fitting current standards. For fans of the first game, the graphics are basically a dream come true. However, many people have reported performance issues, which apparently got better over time. The issues are apparently linked to the NPCs and cause your CPU to be the bottleneck. In my setup with an AMD 7700x and an RTX 4070ti, I didn’t really have any problems but also didn’t reach more than 100fps usually. Cities with many NPCs are especially bad.

I love Dragon’s Dogma and I love Dragon’s Dogma 2 at least as much as the first game. The first game was saved by the DLC in many aspects. Might happen here too, who knows. I liked the base game enough to recommend it, but I guess I would consider myself a hardcore DD1 fan. I own it on every platform it was ever released on and gifted it to more people than I remember.