After over a decade of waiting, fans of the first Dragon’s Dogma finally got a sequel on March 22, 2024. However, Dragon’s Dogma 2 was review-bombed pretty hardcore on release due to some pretty shady performance and business tactics.
As reported by Windows Central, the game launched on Steam to an “Overwhelmingly Negative” score from thousands of players, though is currently at a “Mixed.” This is because of two big problems: microtransactions and performance.
Launch day performance on Dragon’s Dogma 2 was pretty pitiful. Many players reported very low frames-per-second, along with severe FPS dips when entering some areas. Given the exceedingly complex nature of the NPCs in the game, it’s going to be very CPU-dependent, but it’s also clearly not optimized well. There are tons of stuttering issues, as well. That being said, performance issues are fairly common for the first couple of days or weeks after a big game release nowadays, unfortunately.
The second-biggest problem is the way Capcom implemented microtransactions in Dragon’s Dogma 2. For starters, you have to pay to re-customize your character’s appearance after starting the game if you ever change your mind on something. You can change things like hair and makeup in-game, but to go back to the character creator, you’ll have to pay $2 for an Art of Metamorphosis voucher.
Another microtransaction item causing quite the controversy is the Portcrystal (Warp Location Marker). This goes for $2.99 on the shop and allows your character to set up a fast travel point at various locations on the map. Given that fast travel is pretty difficult to do in-game, many have called foul on Capcom for intentionally designing the game that way to entice purchases.
Despite all that, it seems like many people are still enjoying the game. As reporter by PCGamesN, it is the most successful single-player Steam launch Capcom has ever had. At launch, it was also sitting at over 200,000 concurrent players. As of this writing, there are over 113,000 players in-game.
And game critics seem to love it, too. It is currently sitting at an 85% score on Metacritic, with plenty of 8s and 9s across the board. Of course, not everyone’s in love with it. The Jimquisition, as per her review, gave it a very scathing 3/10 score for its numerous problems and corporate greed.
If you’re new to the Dragon’s Dogma series, it’s a fantasy roleplaying action game where you create a character of your liking and set out to complete quests, kill monsters, and find loot. Your character is called the Arisen, who was marked as the chosen one to rise up and kill a powerful dragon.
Given the enormous success of the game, it’s highly unlikely that Capcom will learn anything and will most likely repeat the problems for future games. As the video game industry goes …
(featured image: Capcom)
