Dragon’s Dogma is a game of little problems. Little insecurities, little misses. The problem of course is that all these add up to a game that’s just good, and only rarely great. The problem with Dragon’s Dogma is not in the concept, but in the copious amount of small problems eventually adding up to be a problem of structured annoyances. Despite constant complaints about not having fast travel, it too is a small mistake, like so many, never rectified. Other problems include poor artificial intelligence, many disconnections to the game world via bugs, and a large number of interactive and interface problems. Fixing these would likely not take a lot of time, but due to missing them the experience is gradually ruined by their constant interference.
Firstly, let’s have a discussion about artificial intelligence. In a game with artificially controlled allies, any mistakes the allies make will be glaringly obvious, because the mistakes will continue to build as the player moves through the game. The result is a set of artificial allies who feel extraordinarily disconnected, and while disconnection is not problematic in an artificial world, in the case of the AI here, the problem relates entirely to annoyances. The player is given access to command these allies, yet the commands do not work. The player is given the option to attempt to make the ally be less chatty, yet again, such chattiness is part and parlance of the entirety of the game. Instead of feeling connected, the constant discussion simply feels overwrought. Granted, this is also a problem of interface as well, giving the player quite a few options at the beginning of the game to turn of many other interface annoyances, the annoyance of their constant discussion is not available to be rectified.
To a certain extent, such a lack of rectifying problems occurs frequently in the case of bugs. In my case, this meant a corrupted save file and many quests which were simply lost, eternally stuck in the quest log, never to be finished despite having met the conditions. Similarly, there are many problems with the physics engine, where on more than a few occasions, passing through walls and falling through world occurred, seemingly with no reason at all. Without the ability of your artificial allies to warp to you automatically after a certain distance or passing into a new instanced area, it’s quite likely they would be completely unable to cope with terrain, given that they are prone to getting stuck behind rocks and even more minor discrepancies such as odd hills or falls. Worse perhaps, is that despite their ability to warp to the player, terrain will frequently kill them, whether from getting stuck to it and unable to interact in a situation, or from simply falling to their deaths, and depending on the fall, it may make them disappear forever, forcing you to recruit a new ally.
The problems with allies however are just one of a multitude of interactive problems occurring in the game. The construction of a vast array of options at the beginning of the game makes it seem like there is a great deal of customization in the game, though in reality it mostly involves turning off the huge amount of visual cues on the screen, almost all of which will prove to eventually be unhelpful. These aside however, there are more serious problems relating to the interface and pausing, as well as item usage generally. To begin with, there are many items which are virtually useless, and there are far, far too many items to begin with, so many in fact that finding a use for them all is difficult, if not impossible. Luckily at least, despite your character having weight capacity and requirement for various functions (such as lifting items, holding heavy weapons, etc.), there is a place to conveniently store the wide multitude of junk you and your artificial allies will inevitably acquire.
Items are not really the only problem though, usage of those items is also problematic. A game such as Dragon’s Dogma, which hopes to take on the moniker of an action-role playing game, takes on far too many opportunities to pause the game. Whenever the player accesses their items, the game is paused, and the player may do so at any point, during any fight, during any dangerous situation. Even falling to one’s death can often be averted by pausing in the middle of the fall and using a curative item. Problematically too, there is no consumptive process for curatives, and instead they all simply work automatically. The game could take a lesson here from Dark Souls, where the game is never paused. Even if it did not wish to go to this extent, the game could at the very least make curatives assignable to button presses, so that the game need not be interrupted in the middle of an action sequence, and make curatives a more accessible way to play the game without interrupting the action. Similarly, having a risk/reward process to using curatives would also be helpful, as there is currently none involved whenever a player decides to use a healing item, despite the fact that there is serious risk when attempting to use a curative spell, which neither works automatically nor pauses the game when cast. A time required to consume a curative would also make better curatives a more useful proposition, rather than all curatives being equally effective due to the lack of risk and reward associated with their use. The same is true of access to the map, which should likely be a button press as well and simply expand the minimap, rather than pausing the game and interrupting the flow of action. Despite the complaints about no fast travel, simply allowing the player to always have the ability to run when not in combat would easily fix the problem until the player had access to other options.
Despite these flaws, Dragon’s Dogma is a genuinely enjoyable game when the player is inside the action. Combat is fast-paced, intuitive, and has a variety of options that the player is allowed to deeply customize to suit their style and approach to any given fight. Fans of action-role playing games will likely enjoy these factors, but will learn to be fairly miserable whenever they aren’t fighting, and will likely become particularly frustrated at the constant necessity of pausing for pathfinding or curatives, and at times exasperated with the overabundance of items they are constantly receiving, at points necessitating a place to stop to store all the extra weight being carried. The bugs are certainly problematic as well, though some have been rectified, there are still very real problems with more than a few of the game’s quests and only having one save file makes that single save very volatile to being ruined. On the Playstation 3 in particular, due to the nature of their saves and their encryption, backing up a save file is impossible without Playstation Plus, which certainly shows off the new nature of videogames and their bureaucracies. To end on a high note, Cassardis is one of my favorite game towns, and despite Dragon’s Dogma being a game for genre fans, there are probably many who will enjoy it regardless of its obvious flaws.