Nag Posted March 22 Share Posted March 22 Started earlier this afternoon around 2ish and got around 4 hours with it... with around half of that mucking around with the character editor... Made my Arisen... Tried to make Fighter Jill Valentine, to be fair I don't think she turned out too bad...🙂 Next up my Pawn... Who turned out to be a hot Elven Archer called Laurana... Although I've made both of them too bloody tall and they both tower over the male NCP characters wondering around... so once i get the chance to modify them I'll shorten them down a bit. As for actual game play it's very familiar if you've played the first game and as far as I'm concerned that's a good thing... it feels really weird feeling lost on the map because of that though as I knew the previous games areas like the back of my hand. It also seems like the Pawns are really ferocious in this as half the time they've demolished the Goblins and Harpies before I've managed to draw a bead on them... It's nice to be back in this world and I can already tell I'm gonna have a ball with the game. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
one-armed dwarf Posted March 22 Share Posted March 22 I took the day off to play, as mentioned. It's good, but so far it sort of feels like it's just replaying the hits from the first one. It's not clear what makes it a new game tbh It did stick out that the title screen does just says Dragon's Dogma, so perhaps that's on purpose. The physicality of fights is improved, they are fraught affairs and modern visuals and physics sell that in a much more convincing way. Night is dangerous, your lantern glints in the eyes of monsters. You can chuck an object, enemy or even your own pawn at enemies to damage and stun them. You can play all out offense as a fighter/warrior, or more long distance support and ranged with a mage (no idea what ranger is like). You can create small platforms out of ice spells, and shield your allies with magic. There are performance issues on PC, but I also doubt there is a better way to play it than that. But so far it has a similar vibe as going from dmc4 to dmc5, in terms of how similar it is (the point being, it's the same dev team on both series sticking to what they know, with a 10 year increment in technology being the main justifying factor here) Hopefully there's something a bit more surprising later on. It's just the familiarity of it has me feeling bored, at the same time if you've never played the first one that will not be a problem for you at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nag Posted March 23 Author Share Posted March 23 I made it to the Capital? today... decided against taking the Oxcart and walked it in the end, regretted it almost immediately once a troll rolled up but at least it was daylight and I could see what was going on... managed to coax him of a cliff in to a lake in the end. 😂 Mucked about in the City for a while and rested at an Inn where Laurana informed me she'd been off fighting Chimera overnight... God knows where she's been as she's way underdeveloped for that shit at the minute. It's this part I love about these games... knowing your Pawn is out and about enjoying life while you aren't even playing...🥰 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nag Posted March 24 Author Share Posted March 24 I was around level 14 and the game decides to throw two Griffin at me... Wow...😭😭 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nag Posted March 24 Author Share Posted March 24 Had a fucking Troll attack the Venworth city centre just before I turned the game off earlier today so it seems you aren't safe there... to make it even worse I'd just dismissed my Mage and Sorcerer pawns and had no healing items on either of my characters as I'd just slept in my house... managed to help out the towns guard and kill the thing but I've no idea if it killed anyone of importance. Also I've been reading (and hearing Pawns mention) Dragon's Plague... the effects of not noticing that sound pretty fucking serious. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
one-armed dwarf Posted March 25 Share Posted March 25 It wasn't part of my plan to have my beastren dress like this, but for whatever reason the armour with the highest stats seems to show off the most amount of boobs and arse, even for the men. I've just unlocked the 'trickster' vocation, which is a vocation all about deception but you are unable to directly damage with your weapons. You create illusions of yourself, try to convince the monsters that they are you by hitting them with the incense and you can do things like astral projection and create illusory walls to fuck with the AI I find this really interesting, as I'd spent a lot of time on mage and was struggling to see what the point of it was. But then I ran into some fights with griffons and cyclops, some taking place at night, and figured out that the way the game works is there's an element of randomness you have to sort of submit to. Nag mentions it with the town attacks, but it's in everything. You have to trust that your warrior pawn is well versed at parrying enemies with its launcher ability*. So you have to manage your stamina a bit, take the cue from your co-mage when they say 'let us cast our spell together and have it come out faster!' that you're good to go for doing just that. The ally AI seems to have a really good knack of knowing how to resolve combat mechanics, usually the deaths that have happened to my pawns are a mea culpa, like not using 'roar' as a warrior to pull aggro off them. They have far poorer survival instinct when it comes to their pathing when exploring, they slip off cliffs. But to me the combat seems like a more impressive and difficult problem that they appear to have solved here. The most interesting thing about the game isn't combat however, it's just one piece of the precarious jenga tower of interacting systems and its always enjoyable, never annoying jank. If a griffon happens to dive bomb you in the middle of a minotaur fight and an ox cart comes tearing through and crashes into them and people fly everywhere like physics objects, well lucky you, you're playing Dragon's fucking Dogma II. That's what you're here for. It's a game with stretches of mundanity punctuated by explosions of random and unexpected events. Some of them they want you to see, others are these kinds of random collisions of different things. The biggest thing about it I think is you've got to try and sort of not bend it to your will. I found the stuff with the MTX news a bit interesting cause a lot of people looked mainly at the cosmetic MTX, which I do agree are gross (you can change your appearance in this, but it's not a trivial amount of in-game gold/RC to do so). But the bit about the furour of the fast travel systems, it's hard to articulate how important the fast travel systems are in this game but not in the way you might expect unless you've played stuff like Morrowind. Or Death Stranding, maybe. Or Gothic. It's about how it all integrates the world together and with your progression. Time is important, in the sense that things need to happen slowly. Ferry stones are the fast way of getting around, but very expensive (early on anyway). Ox carts are another 'fast' way and much cheaper, but in-game hours pass when on them and you can have random monster encounters on them, and those monsters might be a griffon and minotaur tag team (not happened to me yet, but I heard it can). So there's a potential for massive disruption there. Time passes and you can fail quests, so do you really want to take that ox cart which might explode in a fiery mess of feathers and gore? Wasting all that time just to save 9000 gold. But this is also the point, it's what the game is about. At one point I fought a griffon and mounted it, and (im going to spoiler this, because I think it's tool cool to say out loud but it's why Dragon's Dogma is an amazing game) Spoiler the cunt flew me across the map, while I was in the middle of a timed quest to rescue a boy from some wolves in a cave. Flew me to its nest in the middle of nowhere and I had to fight my way back during the night to make sure I was on time, pitch blackness, lantern turned off to avoid detection by ghosts, the eyes of saurians piercing through the darkness. Immersion and danger. Then I bumped into a cyclops, heard only by its roar and the shaking of the earth, its one eye the only thing I could actually see, scarpered from that one. Now I've made sure that if I expect night combat, I try and bring my mage cause I have a light spell that does holy damage to zombies and so the progression comes with the learning how to deal with these curveballs. You want to go to that next city? Take this narrow mountain pass but watch out, beasts be lurking. Sure will be nice when you unlock a FT system to get around it, huh? Or when the story progression might relax getting to this particular area But that's where the game happens, this organic crashing together of crazy shit. It's not a hard game, but it's a very dynamic game. The fact that time matters, that quests send you off to come back a few days later, the way exploring, questlines, fighting/physics/combat AI and resource/survival systems interlock together in such clever ways. It's why 'janky' shouldn't be a pejoratives, cause polished games don't do half this type of shit. You can't curate the outcomes of a game like this. If you want to buy those FT MTX then go ahead, but man you're not even playing the game at that point *(actually, I wonder does the player train the pawn to do that, and if it re-uses DMC5's cameo system? The game doesn't say one way or the other, but I know it was something I was learning to do while playing Warrior). 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nag Posted March 26 Author Share Posted March 26 Saw my first Drake or whatever variant it was today, I'm not sure as I wussed out on that fairly rapidly and took the long route round to where I was heading. I now have a house in the starting city which is nice for the free sleep, doesn't seem to update your Pawn progress to the servers though so I still need to pay to stay at an Inn regularly. 🙄 Laurana is getting rented out regularly and bringing home a steady supply of Rift Crystals. I left off tonight having made my way to the border of Battahl... I don't have the papers to get through legally so I'm gonna try to stow my way through on a Oxcart. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
one-armed dwarf Posted March 26 Share Posted March 26 I got Trickster to level 10 yesterday. I don't know if it's one I'd stick with. The gimmickry involved in making enemies fight each other is fun though, I had two golems fight a griffon, blowing it the fuck up with their magic eyeball lasers. The griffon flew away, limping, and I fought it again later that day. I don't have enemy HUD turned on so I don't know if the game maintained the state the bird was in during the first fight, but I certainly didn't struggle to kill it the second time. Other than that, it has this Elder Scrolls style 'detect evil' move where you can see enemy heat signatures through walls. So it's useful in dangerous caves and dungeons, basically a scout. I sort of feel though it is missing one or two really good skills to complete the class fantasy. I know there's these unique skills you can find from specialists, but I've not found one yet for a vocation that I actually play (or intend to play). I did have a very powerful Squidward mage help me out in that dungeon, but then he got mouthy and I got paranoid and threw him into the pits of mount doom, with scant a rotten apple to return to his arisen. That'll learn ye. Anyway I had the dragon plague mechanic spoiled for me, cause twitter won't stfu crying about it and considers spoiling its consequences a PSA for some reason 🙄 I'm glad a mechanic like that exists though, it's exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for lol. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nag Posted March 26 Author Share Posted March 26 I actually thought my Pawn was showing signs of Dragon Plague... turns out she was just pissed off at being rained on.😂 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nag Posted March 27 Author Share Posted March 27 So I've spent the majority of the day just tracing the Northeastern part of the map and mainly dungeon crawling... while swapping in and out of various vocations for perks I wanted... I think (for the foreseeable) I'll be staying as a Thief and Laurana has switched to Mage (although she'll probably end up as a Sorcerer)... it's probably that I'm way over levelled for the area I'm in but Thief literally melts everything. I also unlocked Trickster but it's not a style I want to play, it's first perk (Discovery... I think) sets up a jingle and flash whenever there's a Seeker Token or Wakestone Shard near you which has helped out in the search of those immensely (still can't remember where I found my first Seeker Token though so I'm pretty boned there) I'm mostly enjoying myself with the game but I've got to say I don't overly enjoy how quests are handled, I much prefer the speech bubbles and I'm also kind've missing the Quest boards which handed out stuff you could work toward while travelling (kill 50 wolves, kill 3 liches that kind've thing) The fact I've not touched any other game even though I'm part way through two others says it's obviously doing something right though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nag Posted March 29 Author Share Posted March 29 I found my Finder's Token... thank fuck.😁😁😁😁😁 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nag Posted March 29 Author Share Posted March 29 Level 38 now, I've gone back to Archer class as I think it makes the gameplay more exciting as opposed to Thief just running up and wailing on things... also I've realised you can use skills in tandem with the zoomed in view so you can actually aim skills at weak points. For my last three sessions (and they've been lengthy sessions) I've literally been wondering around the map trying to find optional Portcrystals and such... Laurana is now a fairly strong Sorcerer who can translate Elven... I can handily take on a Drake as long as it's not situated somewhere stupid. I've managed five of ten Sphynx puzzles the next five are on hold... Next port of call is trying to get a Preserved Medusa head. Not sure why I never clocked it before but playing as an Archer makes this in to a better version of the Horizon games. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
one-armed dwarf Posted March 30 Share Posted March 30 I've killed a few drakes. This game has a tendency to do things with its physics where one moment you feel like Stylish McCoolguy, doing Kain Highwind and/or Guts stuff, and then you trip over a rock and look like Dummy McFuckface who can't even walk properly. The Mystic Spearhand is all about this, like playing DMC with RDRII controls. All part of it though Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mfnick Posted March 30 Share Posted March 30 This game isnt for me at all but watching some videos I’ve got to say I fucking adore the physics and animations. They’re so damn good. Being able to pick up and throw people and enemies so easily is chefs kiss good too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mfnick Posted March 30 Share Posted March 30 Holy shit this is one of the best things I have ever seen. Apart from Brad being a bore as usual. Still, absolutely killed me. Fuck it, I’m going to have to try this game now. Going to give it a go with the Vinny not giving a fuck attitude and hopefully the parts of the game I’d normally hate will be a lot more tolerable. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
one-armed dwarf Posted March 31 Share Posted March 31 The harpy stuff is a good demonstration of the way things could get systemically interesting I suppose, I wonder if you immediately activate mage's levitate when it lets you go could you access some areas where it would be difficult otherwise. They give you an item which can summon harpies to you, but it seems really rare. I've a complaint, I think the difficulty doesn't scale well later on. DD1 had this issue too, you got too powerful and the enemies would not keep up. There's some mods on PC I want to investigate but they seem very buggy. The issue was I was in the woods somewhere and had no ferrystones, and thinking like an immersive sim brainy boy I figured I would scare a griffon into leaving its nest and using it as a taxi. Unfortunately, what actually happened is I set it on fire and it died in 20 seconds, so I was still stuck in the woods looking at a long walk back with a roasted chicken horse that I couldn't even eat. But yeah, I dunno, need a bit more adversity from the enemies specifically, cause it sort of has knock on impacts on how interesting the decision making gets venturing out if you aren't threatened anymore. I did all that sphinx stuff, got 2 of the riddles wrong. I'm sort of taking it slow now cause I think I've probably seen the best parts already. Would very much be interested in what the expansion will look like Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nag Posted March 31 Author Share Posted March 31 I got the Sorcerer maister skills earlier so Laurana is rocking Maelstrom and Meteoron now... she literally kicks any large creatures arse. I've also finished the Sphinx questline... I cheated 😉... out of interest @one-armed dwarf which ones did you fail? I've also got the preserved Medusa head and then turned her to stone... paybacks a bitch. In regards physics in this game I had a Griffin land close to me from out of nowhere earlier which caused Jill to stumble in to a tree and then fall on her arse... that got a chuckle out of me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
one-armed dwarf Posted March 31 Share Posted March 31 Spoiler Parent, but largely due to a misunderstanding of the mechanics it wanted me to answer with. I clicked 'answer' thinking it would take me to a thing to provide selections but instead it meant 'answer' with the beloved I brought for the other question. Did not understand the mechanics there Also I presented her with a rotten apple. The others were fine. Anyway I don't want to know what the actual answers are here, the parent one is one I'd like to chew on a bit. I guess the one with the rotten apple was supposed to be the vial that was hidden right above the entrance, that I put my beloved in (who I haven't seen recently, maybe some harpies grabbed her. Was getting fed up of her anyway, going on these boring walks for 1500G). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nag Posted March 31 Author Share Posted March 31 There is literally no way I would've got the right answer for the one you want to think on without cheating... it's something that I would never of noticed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nag Posted April 3 Author Share Posted April 3 Just wondered @one-armed dwarf how far you've made it in the game? You in post game yet? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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