Anyone else excited about Dragons Dogma and the upcoming Dragons Dogma 2 game?
I am trying to get some people who want to talk about either Dragon’s Dogma game to join the Lemmy version group in the Fediverse. I am currently playing through the first game on my Linux gaming PC. We can share news there. We can share pawns too, if anyone is interested.
I fuckin love Dragon’s Dogma. I love NPC companion systems in general in games, and DDDA was one of the only games I’ve seen where you can have a party of NPCs that autonomously interact with the world. They’ll engage in fights of their own volition, buff or heal you on their own, will open chests, destroy boxes, and loot on their own, and the ways you can modify their behavior by teaching them is very interesting.
Granted, they were never smart enough about buffing or healing, which often made me want to go Mage because I could do the job far better than them, but playing a game where I can play support and healer for an NPC party is another thing I love about DDDA that you don’t often see in other games.
Very stoked for the sequel.
Fighting hydras when it goes right is just so damn satisfying.
Yea and the hydra is really the first boss. It is an easier hydra.
It was an easy hydra but you have no idea it is the first time the cutscene starts, felt very dark-soulsey there confronting you at low levels with a boss that fills the screen.
Agreed. I think it swallowed my pawn the first time.
You had to train them quite a bit to make them effective at magic, there were some good pawns you could find from time to time
They learn how to react. Some were more guarding you, or more aggressive, or will pick up and mine stuff, etc. You can pay to retrain them if you don’t like their behavior.
Sometimes, but casting has a lot of run up in DD, and sometimes the pawn might know to cast the right thing, but not have the forethought to cast it at the right time, or they’d give you a buff that was good in a current fight, then weak against the next monster, but because you can’t dismiss a buff you have, you’d just be stuck weak like that.
Little things like that compounded and because I could always just do all of it myself better, instead of incentivizing me to spend a lot of time retraining a pawn without very much feedback on where their tendencies were, it was far easier and immediately gratifying in so many ways to just become mage and do it myself.
I’m hoping DD 2 will have much more transparency in the pawn behaviors and personalities, and allow even more customization of what abilities they use and when, but I do still want it to retain some of that organic learning feel, I’m definitely not advocating for a Final Fantasy 12 programmed AI routine, as much as that’s cool in its own right, the organic feeling that your pawn is learning is part of the charm of DDDA.
I know pawns will learn the best way to fight a monster by being shown by you, have another pawn show them, or knowledge scrolls you can use on your pawn. You can check their knowledge on a monster and it ranges from 1 to 3 stars.
I will end up on a sorcerer and my pawn will end up a mage for healing. And I will hire fighter and ranger pawns then.