Dragon’s Dogma: The Game of Giving Up
If there is any standard experience I can point to in CAPCOM’s Dragon’s Dogma, it is that a majority of players prematurely give up on it. The reasons for this are simple and numerous, and yet the solution to these issues can already accounted for within the game itself.
Recently, I have seen a sort of revival when it comes to Dragon’s Dogma. Many people are expressing their newfound love for the game, whether it be in the form of articles, or videos, or humble forum posts. A number even state that they have changed their tune with the game after a re-evaluation. In fact, I am a part of this renaissance of sorts. My first few forays into the game ended prematurely, and yet in time I, too, had come to honor the game like no other. I find this phenomenon to be deeply intriguing. What is it about this game that inspired so many, including myself, to initialize with preliminary hatred yet return to finish with utmost praise for it?
I was well acquainted with the deep-seated defects within Dragon’s Dogma. And yet, the realization of how to surpass these flaws, almost entirely, was wholly unprecedented.
The first time I gave up can be attributed to a lack of knowledge involving the time-bound nature of quests, and missing multiple areas and special items as a result of this lack of knowledge. This abstruse feature of the game’s quests resulted in strong frustration, as once an opportunity is missed, it is nearly impossible to go back until one starts again. This is often exemplified with the early quest, “Lost and Found.” The path leading to the area of the quest, the Witchwood, is a substantial difficulty spike. The path of least resistance is quite obvious to the player: the road leading to Gran Soren is easily accessible and relatively harmless, so progressing down that path and later returning to the Witchwood when one was better equipped seemed logical. However, once the first main quest within Gran Soren is completed, Lost and Found is no longer able to be completed. Should this quest be missed, the stories of two important characters are lost to that playthrough, and the opportunity to venture into a new area within the Witchwood, containing unique items, monsters, and even additional quests, is also made forfeit. I could see this area locked off but assuredly present. Wondering how I could venture into it, I searched for the answer online. When I learned that it was now impossible for me to do so, I was vexed, but forgave it. I resolved to complete any noticed side quests before progressing the main story, in the hopes of preventing another occurrence, and continued on.
However, this was not a catch-all solution. As my travels progressed, I sorely wished to acquire a Gold Idol in order to upgrade a merchant’s armory, and after searching about it online, I realized that I had completely missed out on the opportunity to acquire it, due to fumbling one small detail of a seemingly inconspicuous escort side quest. Angered at what I had perceived as a fault in the design, I forever put down my Mystic Knight.
With the passage of a few years, seeing an acquaintance try another playthrough of Dragon’s Dogma called me to give a second try of my own. This time, however, I would do thorough research on every quest, to ensure that I would not miss anything essential. When it comes to RPGs, completionism is a ubiquitous and driving force amongst its players, despite it often being not worth the time in retrospect. With my completionist desires secured, the second playthrough progressed slightly further than its predecessor.
However, this eventually proved to be a dual-edged blade. With all this knowledge, a sort of checklist was formed: making sure to do X before Y, acquiring certain items and following convoluted and creative paths on quests to reach for a desirable — yet wholly trivial — outcome. And soon, the flaw of a lack of interest became greatly accentuated with all the various menial tasks I had set upon myself.
At the time, I attributed it to a lack of enemy variety. The enemy variety quickly becomes far too familiar within the scope of most of the main story, with 6 main common enemy types: the simple Goblins and Hobgoblin; the also-simple Wolf and Direwolf; the flying and oft meddlesome Harpies and Snow Harpies; the spongy and mostly boring zombie-esque Undead; somewhat threatening but samey Saurians and Sulfur Saurians; and various types of Bandits and their related Skeletons, which resemble the player and their companions in terms of fighting style. The boss variety also becomes quickly depleted, with Cyclopes, Chimeras, and Ogres (especially the Cyclopes) becoming too commonplace, and exciting fights like the Hydra and Evil Eye getting teased early on, but reserved for much later.
As a result, there’s often a long drought of things that are new. There are new environments and enemy variants which help to keep progression exciting, naturally, but that underpin did not hold long. My previous playthrough accentuated the issue of indifference further, as I was now too familiar with the earlygame cast of monsters, and found any challenge to be nonexistent. Doing all the sidequests and exploring the world was simply a tiresome chore. I distinctly remembering scouring an area of the world I was convinced held a Hydra, desperate to find a new encounter, to no avail. And so, I gave up for a second time.
In both cases, I had barely scratched the surface of the main game. The quest to slay the Griffin at the Bluemoon Tower, a decisive midpoint of the main story, remained incomplete, and I had never experienced the cinematic battle therein. I did not get to see the game evolve into a much grander and complex experience, an experience I would have been satisfied with. But something kept incentivizing me to come back, despite the great contention I had with it.
I was not alone in my initial departure from Dragon’s Dogma.
Steam Achievements offer a glimpse not only into how many players completed certain things in the game, but also how many did not reach certain milestones; these being recorded from the 28th of July in 2021. As a disclaimer, Steam achievement statistics are not an absolute indicator of a playerbase’s behavior and attitudes, as one must make broad assumptions from it. But short of personally surveying players about the exact reason why they stopped, this is the best method of finding out what players did and did not do.
Among all players who purchased the game on the Steam platform, 91.9% completed the introductory prologue in “It Begins”. From here, the numbers of players who reach certain milestone begins to drop off. 82.5% make their character, become an Arisen, and leave Cassardis, a loss of 9.4% of players. 7.6% do not continue on to the Encampment and create their personal pawn. Though it would seem like a universal given that it would be next, 7.2% do not cut off the head of the Hydra. Completing the infamous Ox Cart escort quest and entering Gran Soren, of which 57.8% of players complete, resulted in a loss of 9.9% of players. From here, the drop begins to grow drastically: 11.5% of players fail to complete the first incarnation of The Everfall in “Writ Large”. The greatest loss in main story milestones comes from the tasks in players completing Wyrm Hunt quests: only 29.9% of players meet with the Duke, the beginning of the main story’s midpoint, which stands as a massive 16.4% loss of players. From there, it begins to equalize, with 19.5% defeating The Dragon; a 10.4% loss after the rather long stretch of quests between these two milestones is understandable. 18.6% make their first step into the second incarnation of The Everfall, and 13.3% complete the main game.
What can be gleaned from this information? Most directly, it seems that the infamous Ox Cart escort is far from an immediate killer, though perhaps it is the herald of a downward slide.
The first drastic drop occurs when the player arrives in Gran Soren and is tasked with reaching the bottom of The Everfall. I can only think of two reasons why this would be an unwelcome task. The first is that The Everfall provides a substantial difficulty spike, and demands the player to start to think about the encounter at hand, instead of swinging their weapon away at rudimentary Goblins and Wolves with essentially no fear of death. The second is that this is also the stage at which Gransys is almost entirely opened up, and it is entirely possible for players to never proceed into The Everfall and instead decide to quit after experiencing the world at large. Some other plausible candidates could be the fact that the unending tentacles immediately repulsed the players who did not know to run, or refused to do so.
Yet the biggest single loss in players occurs in the section after: completing the Wyrm Hunt quests. This is the part where the player is forced to venture out into the open world, to at least two of four somewhat distant locales. Here, the bleak realities of the long and often cumbersome travels of Dragon’s Dogma are made apparent. While Dragon’s Dogma may offer many options for how to get to any location, the long walks of early game travel are non-negotiable. While one’s very first adventure out into the range of Gransys offers many opportunities to sate one’s curiosity, there are many cases in which it is not properly rewarded. Of course, there are points of interests; caves of treasure, healing springs, the dens of powerful monsters. Yet in many cases one will find that the world consists mostly of packs of common enemies, sometimes with differing flavors, and small areas to harvest curatives. Are the long travels truly worth it? By and large, the answer is only on certain occasions, and those occasions almost never evolve and persist in their excitement.
But it must be said: the game does realize it must make each travel unique.
The most evident form of evolving the open world comes in the form of travelling by night. In most cases, nighttime evolves an encounter either indirectly, by having the extreme darkness and resource management of light pose a new challenge to a familiar encounter, or directly, such as completely replacing a group of daytime bandits with a pack of varied undead creatures. While this can be exciting for a number of forays, the darkness of night often serves to disincentivize exploration, as one cannot seek to explore what might lie in the distance if they cannot see that distance.
One would think that shuffling the encounters, or having rare opportunities for new encounters, would offer another remedy to the issue of bland travel. The game does have these, in the form of rare ambushes and rescue quests. Yet these suffer from two debilitating flaws. The first is that the chance of encountering them is not only often quite low, but also that the players can, knowingly or not, avoid those areas entirely — the few locations that have a chance to vary are quite sparse. The second is that these encounters are far from unique, and do not often pose a challenge worth combing for. The biggest offender come in the form of rescuing a prisoner of the monsters: though it must be done swiftly before the NPC’s demise, the threat is a trivial pack of Bandits, Harpies, or Goblins, and it offers an immensely paltry reward to the point of these random quests being entirely forgettable. When it comes to having a chance to place new boss encounters, it matters little if the Cyclops on the road is rarely replaced with a Chimera.
When one reaches some story milestones, enemy groups do evolve, but it is often too little too late. Salvation cultists begin to spawn at night once the player begins to attack the cult. Griffins begin to roam the skies once one makes a scripted introduction to the player. A Cockatrice takes up residence in Soulflayer Canyon once its attack on Gran Soren is repelled. Yet the Salvation members only spawn in very select areas, the Griffins are hard to fight straightforward and require preparations to hunt, and that singular Cockatrice’s presence is often entirely unknown to players. The biggest change in the world occurs once The Dragon is defeated, and once-basic enemies are replaced with their substantially more interesting endgame counterparts, but by that time the player should have a robust network of Portcrystals (if playing the Dark Arisen version inherent in modern releases) to freely travel to, and there is little apparent reason to venture back out into the open world, especially when the treasure troves of The Everfall’s second incarnation and Bitterblack Isle are readily available.
Although the developers seemed to have realized that the open world needed to be dynamic, they fell short of meeting this essential element.
When considering that 44% of players have seen 50 points of interest — about 1/4th of the game’s area, I’d estimate roughly— combined with only 29.9% completing the travel-intensive Wyrm Hunt quests, it seems that the likeliest grounds for people giving up on Dragon’s Dogma is that traversing the open world was just too monotonous.
But, is it truly necessary to go out on long treks throughout the world?
It is wholly blatant that the long journey is the developer’s original vision for how Dragon’s Dogma should be experienced, as making fast travel far more easily accessible in the later Dark Arisen version was an intercession. In the original game, before the additions made by Dark Arisen, the only Portcrystal — used in conjunction with a consumable Ferrystone to fast travel to any location in the open world, or Gran Soren, so long as the Portcrystal was placed at that location — available before completing the game was at the top of Bluemoon Tower, which is the approximate midpoint of the main game. By this time, the player should have seen almost all of the main areas of Gransys.
In Dark Arisen, not only are four additional Portcrystals placed within the world’s dungeons, and an immovable Portcrystal placed at the starting town of Cassardis, but the player is given the option of using an Eternal Ferrystone, allowing fast travel without needing to decide whether or not using a rather rare and expensive Ferrystone. Two Portcrystals are received at the farthest locations available in the Wyrm Hunt quest; The Shadow Fort, and the Hillfigure Knoll. Additionally, a single Portcrystal can be acquired at the bottom of The Everfall, opening up fast travel even before traversing the open world becomes a necessity. When keeping these easily accessible Portcrystals in mind, traveling to story-important locations need only be done once or twice, and revisiting them can be made quick by utilizing a well-placed Portcrystal. Though the open world may be monotonous in repetition, it should invariably be at least slightly exciting on one’s first venture into it. After all, 44% of players seeing roughly a quarter of the game’s total area implies that many players went exploring.
Yet it is evident that the game lost favor because of the open world being too weak. A paradox emerges: how can the open world cause a player to lose interest, if experiencing it can be reasonably minimized?
One clear answer is that the Portcrystal/Ferrystone system was too complicated for players to understand, and thus they failed to utilize it to their advantage. This is rather justifiable, as this system is more complex than most video game fast travel systems and can be entirely missed by a lapse in observation, or failing to remember to place the Portcrystal.
Another plausible explanation is that players were, understandably, eager to explore the world for themselves, before the prompting of any encouraged quests. And yet, when they were pressed to venture back out into world at the prompting of the main story, it was already seen as too barren to bother with, and not worth the experience now that much of it had been trivialized.
However, I believe it is more likely that another culprit led to the fast travel system being insufficient: the immense amount of sidequests.
When not counting Notice Board quests, 11 sidequests open up upon arriving in Gran Soren and beginning one’s Wyrm Hunt quests. This does not seem like a massive amount, except that 5 of them generally require some form of extensive travel or backtracking.
For example, in “A Troublesome Tome,” the typical first-timer’s route is to ask around in Gransys as to the location of a legendary grimoire, which eventually leads the player to investigate two locations about equidistant from Gransys, but quite far away nonetheless. The typical location to visit is back towards the starting area around The Encampment, which will take at least five minutes to get to, even if Ferrystoning to Cassardis. The second is deep in the dangerous lands to the north, and the player will not find any answers on arrival if any of the party members are male (and if they are, needing to be dressed in rare clothing outfits), a consideration that a new player will be extremely unlikely to know about. Once the player receives information at either of these two locations, they are then pointed to a stronghold of neutral bandits in the south, another sizable trek. Once there, the player is presented with a few choices about how to finally acquire the grimoire and whether or not to keep it for themselves, before ultimately making their way back to Gran Soren. Without making use of fast travel, and when considering the enemies on the way, this quest could take an entire day’s worth of time to complete. The rewards for this are not immediately interesting, and the journey it offers is more often filled with frustration than real challenge. When opting for the information source near The Encampment, the player is retreading over the same area they’ve already walked, with the same simple enemies they’ve dominated many times by now. And when opting for the information source in the north, they can encounter fiercely difficult challenges in the form of multiple boss creatures that patrol the road leading to it, and could leave empty-handed if they were not aware of the harsh stipulation at their destination. In summary, the journey to complete this sidequest can be unfulfilling, fruitless, and not particularly fun.
But this is barely scratching the surface. When accounting for Notice Board quests, the potential for amount of sidequests to complete raises into the hundreds. These quests don’t really have an associated story, and typically ask the player to kill a number of specific monsters, or fetch a unique item. Generally speaking, these are to be completed in the open world, which requires exploration beyond dungeons and the Portcrystal network. But that’s not all — certain characters will sometimes petition to be escorted from Gran Soren or Cassardis, to an open world location that can range from only a minute away, to on the other side of Gransys and past numerous dangerous monster packs. The locations are varied enough that a beginner’s Portcrystal network will have difficulty covering each of them, even if they knew of all the locations an escortee would ask to be taken to. The rewards range from a paltry sum of gold and curatives, to unique and powerful equipment, depending on who is being escorted. Nevertheless, these escort quests are as unlikable as one would expect.
And then there’s the From a Different Sky quests. Though it is possible for a player to be entirely unaware of their existence, as their Notice Board is relatively tucked away, these quests require an immense amount of travel. To put it bluntly, these are platforming challenge quests, requiring the player to go to a hard-to-reach area within the game world in order to pick up a medallion. There are 100 medallions to collect, but acquiring them is far from streamlined. One can only pick up 6 of the quests at a time, meaning the player has to slowly crawl through the quests, and each medallion is scattered across the world. It is entirely possible for one to finish a set of the quests, then be directed back into the same area the player was just at to pick up another medallion. To make matters worse, some medallions are locked behind game progress, can be in areas that are locked off due to an uncompleted quest, or are locked off due to a completed quest. This can even lower the limit of From a Different Sky quests one can accept, making the task of completing it even more painful and slow.
The amount of sidequests can be absolutely overwhelming for any player seeking to complete them all. Combining this with the wearisome open world serves to severely aggravate the issues of both. After all, this is the primary reason why I had abandoned my second playthrough.
Yet there was another cause of that abandonment, and it was brought on by one last flaw: the game’s challenge dips significantly in the middle of the main game. While all the aforementioned faults contribute to this issue, the game itself has relatively poor balancing when it comes to keeping up with the player.
Perhaps the biggest offenders of this are in the form of humanoid bosses. For instance, although Salomet is lauded as an almighty sorcerer, he can perish in as little as 3 basic bowshots when he is encountered. The Assassins of the “Nameless Terror” sidequest suffer a similar fate — presented as dangerous threats, but are even weaker than an already monotonous pack of Goblins. This trend even persists into the endgame Seneschal fight, which is perhaps the most anticlimactic fight, gameplay wise, in video game history due to how frail The Seneschal is (Yes, it’s even worse than True King Allant from Demon’s Souls).
Putting aside knowledge of the cast of enemies providing ease, the game also readily presents the player with power boosts that can scale exponentially. Exploring not only nets experience for stats and new skills, but also new equipment. This equipment can be further Enhanced to greater effectiveness, leading to additional gains in attributes. This can eventually cause the player to quickly gain stats to the point that most standard encounters become trivial. Not only do they gain enough offensive stats to kill any non-boss monster in three attacks or less, but also enough defensive stats to sometimes take absolutely no damage from the attacks of a majority of enemies. To worsen the issue, these attributes scale linearly, making the balance of most encounters an absolute tightrope: not enough Strength, and the player simply cannot do damage; too much Defense, and the player simply cannot receive damage. This occurrence is made less absolute once the game progresses, as not only do the value of stats in endgame monsters and endgame characters begin to account for a wider range, but the player also gains more available options when it comes to temporarily raising and lowering attributes and making use of enemy weaknesses.
Coupling this with the lack of enemy variety, it can quickly lead to encounters not just feeling trivial, but being definitively toothless. It leads to the thought that in order to retain any difficulty within the game, one must not explore beyond the direct road laid for them, not even in the slightest. And when considering that Dragon’s Dogma is an open world RPG, this thought seems incredibly antithetical.
The reasons for the poor midgame balance are left open to interpretation. Basic enemies are often more threatening than the unique, humanoid bosses. Perhaps it was a concession made for the playerbase who did not wish to explore or grind to gain power outside of the main story, but even then these specific encounters are so powerless that it can be impossible to lose even when not using weapons and armor. The likeliest explanation I can scry is that the developers simply did not have the time to rebalance the encounters and account for the variety of stats between the early and midgame, a claim that is backed up by the game’s open world being considerably cut down in terms of original scale.
When considering all of these issues present within the open world and game progression, it leaves very little wonder as to why the majority of players — once including myself — ended their journey after all of these faults culminated to become too bothersome and overbearing.
Even so, the flaws related to sidequests and the open world are not universal. There are other rationales for giving up on Dragon’s Dogma. Another that I’ve seen is a sort of learned helplessness, especially when it comes to Bitterblack Isle. Though many praise the DLC area of Bitterblack Isle, I have seen some express vehement frustrations with it.
On the few occasions I’ve directly observed a player quit at Bitterblack Isle, much of it seems resultant from encountering seemingly insurmountable enemies and encounters, and resolving to avoid the encounter. Directly, by running through it; or indirectly, by employing a strategy they are familiar with that is guaranteed to work yet is hardly intuitive and fun.
These are best exemplified by five situations, which are presented chronologically here.
The first is the presence of Death itself, a foe that is nigh-immune to assault early on, and proves invariably lethal if not attended to — the natural solution is to run away whenever he makes his presence known, until the player is able to handle this living obstacle.
The second is the surprising addition of Maneaters, a Mimic-like enemy that will swallow and kill anything that opens its trapped chest unless its prey manages to break free — breaking free alone is very difficult, and it forces the player to interact with chests in a new and cautious manner, as the only way to reveal and defeat a Maneater is to open the chest.
The third is the introduction of the Prisoner Gorecyclopes, a towering enemy that is likely to be a player’s greatest challenge yet upon its introduction — but as it resides in a tower, many players decide to slowly peck away at it from above, far away from harm’s reach. The encounter is entirely optional, as the giant is chained and passive unless provoked.
The fourth is the arrival of a Cursed Dragon in an area known as The Pilgrim’s Gauntlet, a very powerful variant of the well-known Drake family — this is another example of the typical answer being to run away, although it can definitely be fought legitimately.
The fifth is the first time a player meets an Eliminator, an incredibly powerful and overwhelming enemy that can quickly pulverize a player who does not pay it the respect it commands— though it is unlike anything one has encountered before, it is dispatched relatively quickly, and makes for an exciting, fast-paced battle once learned.
All of these situations of encountering seemingly unconquerable foes builds upon each other, until the player enters a sort of state of learned helplessness, and run from any challenge presented to them until the frustration swells, culminating into an eventual situation that cannot be run from and has no easy solution. This despair makes thematic sense for Bitterblack Isle, as it is meant to be a place where each encounter has to be sized up and measured, as the more monsters one slays and the deeper one goes, the greater the challenge mounts, to the point where it must be accepted that victory is too difficult to achieve… for the moment.
Yet having the player feel inadequate and helpless to the point of giving up is far from ideal. To diagnose it bluntly, a large reason for this feeling is due to the aforementioned lack of challenge on Gransys. Until just before one fights the Dragon, many quest-based boss encounters are either rudimentary and familiar, are unfamiliar but are presented with opportunities to permit failure or avoid the encounter, or are frankly optional. It is fair to say that most non-optional encounters can be solved by simply swinging away, and putting in at least a small amount of effort in avoiding attacks. In comparison to the world of the original, Bitterblack Isle is host to a vast array of new challenges which demand more than just simple skill — to defeat them requires creative strategies, else substantial skill and equipment. The base game offers very few situations in which the player is encouraged to run from foes that are too powerful, and some cases of fleeing are forced to be so by the script. Though The Everfall’s second incarnation does present some enemies that require strategies, they are piffling in comparison to the menagerie of monsters within the depths of Bitterblack Isle.
This extends to additional factors missed in Bitterblack Isle due to their lack of necessity in Gransys, such as the use of platforming mechanics in uncovering hidden loot, and in one case even an optional area: in Gransys, this can uncover some relatively powerful equipment earlier than when the merchant stocks it, but this benefit is far from essential.
On the whole, the main game places the player in a mindset adverse to the general enjoyment of its DLC area, as the game previously did not demand much more than the player’s patience, and did not instruct them to think deeply about each encounter and to make decisive choices.
I believe it is essential to note that Dragon’s Dogma was a forebear in terms of the modern Action RPG genre, and thus they designed the game with two types of players in mind: those familiar with RPGs, and those familiar with Action games. In my observation, this design philosophy is not entirely obvious, and yet it permeates throughout the entirety of the game.
For an entirely RPG-focused player who, supposedly, would not care much for the game’s action elements, they are offered a myriad of gameplay elements in which to succeed in combat.
The most obvious is in the form of the Pawn system, where a player who loves poring over stats and information can spend a lengthy amount of time searching for the perfect pawn to complement their party. This often works to great effect, as even when a pawn becomes outlevelled they can compensate for this by having superior AI to other Pawns.
Every magic-based class in Dragon’s Dogma can be played without the use of Pawns, yet all of them contain extremely useful synergies when using Pawns. Mages are almost entirely focused on enhancing party members and healing. Mystic Knights can efficiently bolster the entire party at once and produce sigils which one’s Pawns can interact with to devastating effect. Magick Archers are the most independent of the Magic-based classes, but can still use supportive sigils and buffs, and even have the ability to sacrifice a Pawn for immense damage. And while Sorcerers have comparatively little in terms of supportive skills, they are typically reliant on the party to protect their lengthy but omnipotent incantations.
Additionally, magic classes are given effective opportunities to exploit the elemental weaknesses of enemies. The usefulness of this is apparent to almost every player, as the first Pawn the player obtains makes ready use of Fire enchantment. This rule extends deep into the game, as a party that makes effective use of elemental weaknesses can not only deal significantly more damage, but can also interact uniquely with enemies, such as quenching the flames of an enemy by striking them with Frost and consequently weakening that enemy.
Not only are elemental weaknesses at play, but debilitating debuffs can also offer drastic power increases. The potency of these debuffs have a large range: minor damage in the forms of easy-to-inflict Poison and Burning; brief moments of massive damage with Drenched, Tarred, Frozen, and Sleep; substantially weakening a foe with Curse or direct Attribute Lowering; and even drastically reducing a specific enemy’s ability to damage the player with Blind, Silence, and especially Torpor.
It’s not just magic, either. Fundamentally, the core difficulty of most RPGs comes down to making effective use of one’s game knowledge, and experimenting with these elements to discover how best to use it. In many cases, this comes down to finding out what is most broken about the game and exploiting it. This is commonplace when it comes to RPGs: Skyrim’s Stealth Archer is powerful enough to complete the game without ever taking damage, the earliest version of Reckoning in World of Warcraft allowed players to solo 40 man raid bosses, and Fog Breath makes Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne mostly a breeze despite its oft-vaunted difficulty. Dragon’s Dogma has plenty of broken things about it to abuse as well: stacking Potent Greenwarish, stacking Periapts, Throwblasts, Blast Arrows, Wakestone spamming, stunlocking, Rusted Weapons, mass Spell Syncing, Offline Ur-Dragon Farming, Godsbaning, just throwing enemies off of cliffs…
Offering these broken items isn’t bad by itself. As mentioned, abusing certain mechanics is fundamental to how many RPGs play, for better or worse. In fact, the effective utilization of the powerful knowledge the player has gained is one of the core enjoyments inherent to an RPG. Simply, I cannot see how allowing a player to overcome a challenge of mechanical skill by instead using creativity, knowledge, and experience, is something of poor design.
Some of the flaws of Dragon’s Dogma become more understandable when accounting for a player who only seeks action; skipping sidequests, casting out Pawns, and exploring solely on the hunt for new battles. If the game accounts for a player who focuses almost entirely on the RPG aspects of the game, then it should also account for a player who focuses almost entirely on the action aspects of the game. After all, based on what I have seen of other players experiences, neglecting the Pawn system and rushing story progress is far from an uncommon decision. As I had previously mentioned, it seems like the only logical way to maintain difficulty in the base game is to ignore the concept of exploration as well as most of the game’s RPG and progression mechanics, something that a fully Action-focused player would abide by.
When considering only these two types of players, it seems like Dragon’s Dogma did a wonderful job at balancing the game. And yet, these are the two extremes on the spectrum of Dragon’s Dogma’s playerbase, and the majority of players fall somewhere in the middle. And the aforementioned reasons on why the game falls apart is due to these two styles conflicting when they are combined.
If I were asked whether complete game knowledge or absolute perfect skill was more important in beating Dragon’s Dogma, I would instantly answer game knowledge. If one is all-knowing as to the most powerful strategies — both in combat and outside of it — in Dragon’s Dogma, they are not only nearly unkillable, but can topple absolutely any challenge in a matter of seconds. For example, the final challenge the game presents can be defeated in just one minute if it is fully prepared for, fast enough for the enemy to be unable to do almost anything to the player. While one with absolute perfect skill is also nearly unkillable, they are simply less efficient if they do not utilize all of the power the game has to offer.
And yet, the average player will usually utilize both their knowledge and mechanical skill. And so, when a player wants to express that skill in combat, that expression is held back by being already too powerful due to their knowledge of the game; either directly in terms of how to deal with an enemy and their attack patterns, or indirectly in terms of making weighty use of consumables, equipment, environmental hazards, etc.
Though the game could be adjusted and balanced around this, I believe that the heart of the game’s issues with imminent difficulty come from trying to directly appeal to the two extremes of its playerbase, and unsuccessfully believing that this would also suit the middleground of its playerbase.
This can also be seen in those who give up on Bitterblack Isle, which felt like it was attempting to force these extreme ends to their middle point. Players who primarily enjoyed the action felt like they were pushed to utilize select powerful strategies, while players who previously enjoyed mostly the RPG aspects felt like all of their previous knowledge and experience was no longer as effective. But even so, it still suffers from the same eventual problem: complete game knowledge will still turn any challenge into a farce once it is learned, and absolute perfect skill will still defeat almost any encounter despite it often being a slog due to the player character’s relatively paltry power.
As deep-rooted as this issue may be, there is an important element to this issue: whether or not this element is definitively impairing is entirely subjective to the player.
With my third playthrough in 2020, beginning 4 years after the first, I took the decision to not only play on Hard Mode, but also to install a third-party difficulty modification to the game. In a direct sense, this solved many of the issues I had with the game’s open world, especially with enemy variety and gaining power too quickly. I was forced to become deeply versed in the facets of the game — combining skill and knowledge both — not as a method of optimization but as a means of survival. At long last, the game finally ignited the spark of love it had kindled within me so many years before. I was even inspired enough to undertake and complete the grueling task of collecting all 100 Badge of Vows of the From a Different Sky quest series.
However, it was not the modification alone that brought me to the solution of how to fix Dragon’s Dogma. Nor was it finally feeling deep love for the game when its potential was realized. Instead, it was entirely reflective on the choices I had set upon myself.
I had resolved to test myself by battling the intensely difficult Drake of Devilfire Grove, amplified to unforgiving power with the settings I had chosen to play with. Naturally, I died many times. But in my possession were two Wakestones. On my second death, I was confronted with a choice by the game: use it and return to life, or decline and start again from the beginning of the encounter. The obvious choice was to use it, but every time I had failed, I declined to use my second Wakestone. This was hardly influenced by any decision to preserve a rare item, but it was onset by my desire to take down the Drake with some sense of honor. If I used a second Wakestone, I would expressly not be proud of myself, as if I was cheating myself out of the challenge I had chosen for myself. Thus, I had designed a rule for myself: do not use more than one Wakestone per encounter. At the time, I believe I even compared this to the death system in Sekiro.
With my growing knowledge of the game’s systems, these rules expanded further into facets I had deemed too powerful to abuse. No Blast Arrow spamming. No Periapt stacking. Diversifying curatives beyond stacking the most efficient variations. Not abusing monster pathing by plinking away at them with the bow. And so on. Of course, in some situations I broke a few of my unspoken rules when I was not seeking a challenge at that time, but my experience was made all the better that I could choose how I wanted to approach anything the game offered.
Even the establishment of my own set of rules did not directly bring me to this realization, but it was witnessing others designing their own choices and self-imposed restrictions — or failing to do so — that blossomed the revelation as to why people gave up on Dragon’s Dogma.
The grounds for giving up on Dragon’s Dogma have one common, perplexing cause: though the game has its share of objective faults, it is in truth that the player gets in the way of their own enjoyment.
I do not mean to absolve the game of its flaws entirely. They are there, they can be felt, and they can be entirely destructive to one’s enjoyment of Dragon’s Dogma. But for the majority of these faults, the player can adapt to them so long as they are cognizant that they can solve them.
In addressing the oft obscurity of the game’s content, it offers ample opportunities to explain such things, yet it is the player who does not realize it, or take advantage of the information they can have access to. In the context of the quest “Lost and Found”, it makes ample sense that it is time-limited, as a missing person should realistically be found quickly. Dialogue from in-game characters backs up this implication. Simply, the main reason why this quest is lost is either because the player is not fully immersed within the game, or they have chosen to not do it. Though the Pawns are not as comprehensive and direct as a Wiki entry, they can offer a great deal of important information on quests if they are consulted and heeded. In some cases, players themselves can almost directly give information in-game, such as equipping their Pawn with Rusted Weapons so that other players may realize how potent they are.
Sidequests, as necessary as they may seem for any RPG, remain entirely optional despite the player’s instincts on completionism. As poorly designed as many may be, taking them on is entirely unnecessary.
Furthermore, it isn’t difficult for a player to take advantage of the Portcrystal system as soon as they reach the wall of the Wyrm Hunt quest. Though fast travel was far more limited in the original version, Dark Arisen offers a multitude of early Portcrystals and the Eternal Ferrystone. With even one Portcrystal, it is easy for a player to head back to Gran Soren whenever they wish: drop the Portcrystal in the open world, Ferrystone to the city, and once one’s business is complete, Ferrystone back to the recently dropped Portcrystal. The only obstacle preventing the player from doing this is not looking through their stashed items upon arriving at Gran Soren (they receive a notification from the game to do so), or not bothering to experiment with using their Portcrystal. And once the player reaches the midgame, they should have at bare minimum two Portcrystals, but may have up to five if they were sufficiently thorough in completion.
But of course, it is unreasonable for the game to place these expectations on the player. For one, total immersion in a game’s world is a rarity resultant from things that are primarily subjective. The Pawns a player has may simply not have the appropriate quest knowledge to inform a player about the intricacies of a certain quest, and their knowledge is not seen as essential due to a number of quests being very direct. Experimenting on every item and ability is something only a dedicated few settle to answer. And even though I enjoy the depth the game can offer, I would argue it is unreasonable to require the player to think deeply about every difficult encounter they come across, and press them to devise a paramount strategy for each of them. There are many strategies that can work across a vast array of encounters, yes, but the reality is that many games do not force a player to adapt their strategies when they find something that they believe works for every encounter. Even Dragon’s Dogma is particularly guilty of this, as much as it may try to situationally restrict previous catch-all strategies.
And yet, when I reflect upon my past choices to give up, if I simply did not indulge my hunger for knowledge and left the mysteries of the Witchwood and Gold Idol unsolved, the fact is that I would not have been embittered so. The game may be completed while exploring only a fraction of its world, and there is no heavy-handed punishment for not endeavoring to explore its depths — acquiring the maximum possible power is far from necessary in the main story, and there are many ways to alleviate the loss from missed opportunities when going beyond the main story.
Where difficulty is concerned, I had already mentioned many methods available to increase the difficulty of the game. While Hard Mode and difficulty modifications are a direct yet sometimes cumbersome decision, one can get creative and come up with their own challenges. They may choose to travel without Pawns, leaving no option but to come up with creative solutions for certain encounters, as well as leaving it entirely up to the player themselves to find enemy weaknesses and strategies. They may choose to not partake in the shop system, instead forcing themselves to acquire their own equipment and curatives out in the open world, and deeply engage with the crafting system. They may choose not to use curatives at all, or perhaps only using the 5 allowed to be hotkeyed. Whether it is opting out of using powerful tools like Periapts and Blast Arrows, or not using armor, or bypassing the whole of Gransys and experiencing only the challenges of Bitterblack Isle, the game offers a myriad of opportunities to tailor the experience to however one desires. One can even choose to complete the game using only the player character’s fists: it’s been done before. And if the game is perceived as too difficult, Easy Mode is available and easy to toggle on, a max-level Pawn can be acquired from a friend for no cost, and there are countless creative and observant strategies that can quickly resolve many difficult encounters without needing quick reflexes and powerful equipment.
The mindset of the player, influenced by their expectations with previous games, prevents them from perceiving the multitude choices about how to tailor the game to their liking.
It is completely outrageous and unthinkable that, in an RPG, one shouldn’t use the equipment and items they earn until they deem it necessary to use that equipment. Yet it is a completely viable method for retaining one’s enjoyment of Dragon’s Dogma.
It is laughable how mechanical skill can be completely overridden by grinding enough items to practically cheat death infinitely, or just luring an enemy to jump off a cliff. Yet it is entirely the player’s choice to utilize these elements, when they can instead designate to have their experiences be hard-won.
It is puzzling how a player could entirely opt out of the game’s most unique attribute, the Pawn system, yet still find enjoyment in spite of such a core aspect being negated. The game itself even makes concessions for players who reject the entire basis of the game’s development, proving its adherance to allowing the player the freedom for how they wish to play the game.
But personally restricting one’s power is nothing new to the genre of Action RPGs. The Dark Souls series has plenty of options when it comes to self-imposed restrictions, from playing with the bare minimum of attributes (SL1), to restarting the game if a single hit of damage is taken, to even playing the game only using one’s feet. If these are so devised and known of in similar games, the same should not only be applied to Dragon’s Dogma, but it should be readily evident that the option is there.
How to compare the paradoxical demands of Dragon’s Dogma to something that is everyday enough to be understood?
Perhaps Dragon’s Dogma is like Dungeons and Dragons, where the both dungeon master and players have to cooperate and collaborate on the exact game they desire, so that both sides may have an experience unlike anything else.
Perhaps it is like a car: long hours of traffic, accidents, and road rage can make one lose the joy in driving, yet when the proper conditions are met — an empty road, a beautiful day, your favorite song on the radio, the windows rolled down — it can be an absolute euphoric experience.
Perhaps it is like a committed relationship: a constant sort of tug of war to reach a concurrent middle ground, where no one partner can overbear their other half’s needs, lest the entire relationship be at risk.
Whenever the player is presented with a challenge, or a task, or devises a certain strategy, they must ask themselves, “Is this the most fun way to approach this?” They must ask this without regard for anything else but what they feel will be most satisfying, so that they accomplish something profound and memorable. It is not about merely accomplishing the task, but also to think deeply about the possibilities, and come to something that is partially the player’s own creation. In concept, the question appears natural — why play a game if not for one’s own satisfaction? — and yet the failure to ask oneself this question is the reason why so many give up on Dragon’s Dogma. As mentioned, perhaps Dragon’s Dogma is not meant to be played like a videogame, but more like Dungeons and Dragons: the player has to decide how to approach a situation presented to them, under a consensual set of rules, in a way that should ideally entertain them and the others they play with.
But as a final notice, it must be said that embracing one’s freedom is not a cure-all for the ills of Dragon’s Dogma. In truth, allowing such choice can result in the player making choices that ultimately harm their enjoyment.
If the player thinks they will have the most fun exploring the whole of Gransys before taking on any quests, to the point of becoming fatigued with it when they have to take more long adventures into it before establishing their Ferrystone and Portcrystal network, then all the game offers is that the game is made significantly more easy by acquiring the wealth of items Gransys has to offer — a solution that harms it more than helps it.
If the player decides to farm EXP and Gold for hours by cycling usages of Pilgrim’s Charms, reach level 100, then power through the game’s content only to feel underprepared and helpless in the face of the rigorous tests of skill Bitterblack Isle outwardly presents, then the only concession that logic offers is to continue farming.
If the player wants to toggle on Hard Mode for additional challenge and be forced to engage with enemies on a deeper level while still fully engaging with RPG mechanics, but finds that the challenge is quickly negated due to the rushing flood of additional EXP and Gold provided by toggling on Hard Mode no matter what they do, then the fault lies almost entirely with the game itself.
And of course, nothing can be done about the player attempting to make every adjustment to increase the difficulty on their own terms, yet still defeating the final boss of the main game in a single punch.
There are many more choices one can make that result in them not realizing the game’s full potential. It is to the game’s immense misfortune that the most obvious choices a player could make have such intense potential to rebuff and sting, while such abstruse yet personal choices could result in all of it being completely reconciled.
While the game will always have blatant faults that not even third-party modifications can address, the player’s choice on how they wish to handle the game, if done properly, will raise up much of the steep valley of discontent that causes so many to give up on Dragon’s Dogma. No matter what, there will be moments of bitterness and frustration, but once the player begins to change how they play the game on a level not initially expected, they will find that the game’s decision to often martyr itself in allowing the player to do whatever they wish is one of the most illustrious virtues of Dragon’s Dogma.
With all this introspective analysis being tossed around, the question has to be answered: should games be designed in this matter? After much thought, it simply cannot be said with certainty. As I have repeated, this discord of the player having an overabundant yet unseen amount of freedom can lead to the game’s abandonment entire. And yet, it is impossible to deny that this untold offering of freedom is the very reason why the game is host to a cult following. Because I consider Dragon’s Dogma to have the nearly-realized potential to be the greatest gaming experience of all time, I sought to explain this dichotomous phenomenon. I have bent the game to my will, and have thusly been bent by it. And through this, I have developed a love for it like no other.
The decision to give up or continue is yours, Arisen.
As for myself, my fervent scutiny of Dragon’s Dogma is far from over. I have much I wish to commentate upon, so that others may see what is so rarely seen.
And in all of them, the greatness of Dragon’s Dogma returns to the singular root of the great freedoms at its very heart.
