Strength in numbers, Arisen?
Dragon’s Dogmawas the action-RPG for people who wanted to play alone, but didn’t want tofeelalone. By far its most charming feature was the Pawn system, whereby you’d create an AI-controlled sidekick and hire two others, shared online by other players, to accompany you on your journey through a fantasy wilderness of tumbledown castles and goblin campfires. Pawns make dependable companions in many respects - pinning enemies for you to tag-team kill, healing or resurrecting you, opening chests you’ve missed, and enchanting your weapons at the outset of each skirmish. But what makes them fun to be around is that they’re a bunch of massive buffoons.
The big thing I notice is that they now talk to each other more. “Rare materials!” one yells as I amble through a forest. “Well-spotted,” another replies. I go hunting for the resource outcrop in question and promptly wander into a flock of Harpies, who sing my character to sleep and try to fly off with our group’s wizard. Later, two Pawns have a slight tiff about my decision to drop the monster-culling quest at hand and investigate some promising ruins. “It is not for us to gainsay the Arisen’s judgement!” one reproaches the other. A little further down the road, the crew start bickering about our combat performance, with one Pawn remarking that there’s always “room for improvement”. All this, plus some familiar one-off lines and feats of accidentally brilliant comic timing, like Pawns moaning about travelling after dark (the game’s nights are once again impenetrable, obliging you to equip a lantern) or getting bitten in the face while warning you to watch out for the wolves. They hunt in packs, remember?
I’ve tried out three classes, or “vocations”, so far, each with a signature move on top of three equippable special abilities. The Archer’s class abilities include spreadshots for evasive predators, burst fire for stationary toughies, and the ability to autoaim from the hip or snipe in over-the-shoulder view. The Fighter can perform daisy-cutter haymakers, bullrush ranged opponents, and bash turtling enemies with their shield. The Thief can throw smoke bombs to daze the hordes and perform homing strikes and vertical spin attacks, likeSonic the Hedgehogcosplaying as Legolas. All are a joy in the hands, thanks to springy, theatrical yet believable animations. But again, I’m pretty sure all these tricks and flourishes exist in the original game or its Dark Arisen expansion, in some form. I’m hoping Dragon’s Dogma 2’s more advanced, hybrid vocations will mess with the template quite a bit, drawing on the sillier components of recent Monster Hunters. In particular, I’d like to hear more about the just-revealed Mystic Spearhead, a fancy melee vocation who can block enemy movement with magic.
I’m conscious that complaints about the game being overfamiliar might not mean much to readers who, God,possibly weren’t even alivewhen the original was released, so let me reiterate: however old hat, fights in Dragon’s Dogma are absolutely glorious and often, mad as a bag of adders. At one point I did a nocturnal quest to rescue somebody’s herb-gathering brother, the luckless Norbet, which led to me and my Pawns fighting a ghost that fed on light, making our lanterns a wonderful liability. It was pandemonium. My wizard Pawn immediately levitated and started belching thunderbolts everywhere, my thief Pawn got a bit carried away with blink attacks and aggroed a passing wolfpack, and here’s me, standing in the middle of it all, firing holy arrows at health bars in the dark.
Regular combos and specials aside, you can pick up objects, friends and enemies and throw them around, whether to dunk goblins in usefully conductive water, or to “encourage” your fighter Pawn to lead the charge. The new game seems to put slightly more emphasis on physics-based interactions than its predecessor - both you and NPCs can trigger cave-ins, for example, or break dams to flood positions - not that the physics are exactly “high fidelity”. At one point, I managed to KO myself into a crevice by hurling a small boulder at my own leg. While boss monsters are a challenge, often breaking into a frenzy with new attacks when you lop away the first health bar, there’s a sandboxy absurdity to Dragon’s Dogma that is closer to Zelda: Breath Of The Wild thanSkyrim. Again, a lot of that’s down to the insistence of your Pawn chums on taking it all seriously.
If Pawns are the source of Dragon’s Dogma’s charm, the heart of a game that leaves you without one, they’re also, by virtue of being player-devised and shared, its communal memory. I’m not sure how extensively Capcom have been maintaining the first game’s asymmetrical online features, but in theory, if you fire up Dragon’s Dogma right now you’ll be able to rub shoulders with Pawns spawned and trained up a decade ago, forgotten clay figurines bearing the fingerprints of both developers and players, surfacing from the rifts of data alongside Forza’s ancient Drivatars, to do the Arisen’s bidding once again. The development of a sequel is both a tribute to those hardy bespoke heroes and an attempt to supersede them. Which brings me to the other, final thing I’d like Capcom to do with Dragon’s Dogma 2: find some way to port those beloved original Pawns into the new game. If you’re going to stack the board with old pieces, you might as well include the best.
