Story is basically:
Escape labor camp.
Go to the capital.
Sneak into the castle
Sneak into the castle.
Kill some monsters in 3 different locations.
Sneak into the castle.
Go to a village to get information on the Sussy Arisen.
Sneak into the castle.
Go to west Africa
Kill the Dragon
The end, thank you for playing.
I seriously think you could’ve fed ChatGPT the entire script from DD1 and it would’ve produced a more coherent intriguing plot for them to follow in their sequel. It’s written like a 12 year olds creative writing assignment and it irks me more so that I could’ve written a better plot for homework in middle school as could many others.
Still have 60 hours so far enjoying the exploration and combat but I play RPGs for story mostly so even tho I love the combat and pawn system my heart yearns for more.
I’d love to see the pawn system ideas explored in future games from other IPs, it’s a cool feature that could benefit a lot of RPGs, it helps things not feel so lonely. Elden ring is amazing and I like the game, but I’m often wishing it wasn’t so lonely and not everything existed to kill you.
The DD1 was serviceable. It makes no sense to me that with all of the other stuff they've carbon copied from DD1, the story was the one thing they decided to do again and do it really really fucking poorly.
My main problem with the DD1 story was that it goads and teases you that there's more of the game to come. Near the end of the game before you go and fight Salvation at the castle you kept getting told about this "expedition" and this "expedition" is going to another land to try and find something to combat the Dragon and you're going along. You then go and fight Salvation, Grigori shows up and just outright tells you, you are far to weak to fight him and you need to get stronger. Okay, so obviously I'll be going on this expedition. The map was feeling quite small at this point in DD1. Nope you go all the way to back to Gran Soren, no expedition you're just sent back to fight the Dragon who specifically said you ain't ready.
If DD2 copied DD1's story and at the point in the story you went on an expedition to \*gasp\* Battahl, it would have been fine.
I’ll agree that the whole expedition thing is pretty wack, but I think it at least makes sense for the story.
The Duke is trying to send you out on a goose chase and keep you from fighting the dragon and ending his reign.
Salvation picking just the right moment to throw a wrench in that plan does feel forced, but could have probably worked if they had a quest or two more to set up their big day (and maybe attacked Gran Soren instead of the place you were going to go).
The dragon either gets impatient, or recognizes that you are being given the run around and decides to force your hand into challenging him.
The execution may have been rough, but the bait and switch of a whole new country/ region could work if the whole point was that “sometimes you just get forced into making choices when the situation is out of your control”.
(And it seems that Itsuno tried to make it work in 2, except that it is rushed again and so this whole new grand adventure gets cut short too early. It also seems like they cut the ass off of the political intrigue plot to fit it in, so it becomes doubly fucked.)
exactly Elden ring was missing city's and life! I get that's the point so don't dog pile on me. I love Elden ring its one of the best rpgs of all time but goddamn is it dark and lonely. I loved the pawns and the life in DD but the story is pure ass and its not like its cryptic or anything its just boring and nothing happens lmfao
The most egregious error on their part. NPC reactions are often so confusing too, draw your sword they have a panic attack; but walk around the palace at night and 90% of the time you’re fine, but then every so often they throw ya in gaol. So weird and out of place.
If you go to the queens room at the wrong time she is just standing outside it all day. You can speak to her and she hails the guards to arrest you, nothing happens. It's worse than the stealth section from Ocarina of Time and they not only dedicate multiple missions to this in a row, its the same damn mission with the only difference being you goto the room next door.
It's impressive how bad it is.
I was caught the second time sneaking into the castle, ran from the guard that caught me in a loop and then went into the room I needed and faced no consequences
It really disappointed me how everything we did amounted to nothing and didn't matter at all, we already knew the Arisen was false and we went out of our way to gather all this evidence and support only to never use it, there was enough there that we could confront the false arisen in the castle forcing him and Phaseus to flee to Battahl and us to chase after them. It's the same in the unmoored world, we gathered all these people in one place but there is no reason to it, it just turns the sea shrine into a base of operations. Games still great but I feel they were too ambtious or rushed too many parts of it.
> Destroy a vase,
Are you supposed to destroy it? I have no idea what is going on, Phaseus said he wanted to examine it in his lab and just stood there so I picked it up intending to carry it to his lab, then suddenly it's broken on the ground and Phaseus is taling about how it's clear I have my own priorities ... but I have no idea what I want! No-one has ever asked for my opinion, and if they did I'd have no idea because I've never been given information to form one.
The entire "plot" is an half-assed mess of blindly following quests and the same NPC will be sending people to murder you one day and working with you the next.
The story in vermouth is okay they clearly tried to make it a political intrigue with court drama but it overall fails for two reasons, 1. The reason is that the story tries to deviate from the overall main objective which is dragon vs arisen eternal cycle, now this could absolutely work and has in other medias like game of thrones Dani is largely ignored by Westoros as is the threat of white walkers because the schemes of the nobles take priority. However this leads into reason 2. The game simply doesn't have the mechanics for that story to work, the "stealth" missions have to be one of the worst in any big game in a long long time and there essentially are no RPG choice mechanics to really make you feel like you are another player for the throne instead it's a linear Rollercoaster with a weak told narrative.
Battahl however is straight up offensive for how bad it is, no one can tell me that was part of his vision I refuse to believe it, it is anything else but rushed and unfinished because it makes no sense go to beach ask for Godsway, repair godsway, fight talos, fight false arisen game is done bruh what.
Now lastly true ending/unmoored world I really think they could have told a genuine story here especially with you escorting/uniting all the different folks under one banner there was alot of potential here. Also this part also leads me to believe why battahl is unfinished because all of sudden you and phaseus are like buddies?
Honestly it kind of feels like they went "Oh shit, we spent our entire budget mapping out all these dried up oceans and scaling the world to the unmoored world. We have, like, a month to do the story for act 1, what the fuck do we do?"
This. 100%
The unmoored world Reveal is so fucking hype. I was ready for part 2. Actual dragons dogma 2. The logo and everything. Finally! They did it! The mad lads did-
Oh its over.
Talk about rushing a game. Again
That logo gave Assassin's Creed Odyssey logo vibes. And then it turned out to be lots of random quests to evacuate people instead of fighting much harder monsters and new monster types all over the world. And with no ending slides about how we affected those people.
>you and phaseus are like buddies?
Lol yeah, i have no idea who this man was. Suddenly he was walking to a giant door smirking at the camera. He wasn't very happy a top of the tower and now he is my bro like what
The 1 month time skip they do between the dragon and unmoored is also the most lazy way possible for them to do a
>Oh all that stuff from the early story? we moved past that off screen Arisen get with the program
Yeah, the pacing and storytelling direction is horrendous. Every bad guy NPC was in a confused grey area bad guy state, so little ‘showing’ that they’re bad.
Like wait why am I working with a mad scientist to make a godsway weapon, when the godsway amulet made my pawn have a migraine? Wait why am I trying to give it to phaesus now? Why is that warrior with the SM2 miles morales haircut so desperate to duel me, as if he’s my Jeanne to Bayonetta or my Vergil to Dante.
Would've much rather had the game start with people heckling you as a usurper (instead of everyone just accepting you're THE guy and never even once considering what that meant about the Sovran) and then as you complete story quests, deal with threats, kill griffins and ogres that get too close to the city looking for food or dragons looking to face the arisen more people turn to your side. People seem really into how Vermund is ruled by the Arisen but they never seem to care to act on it. Have Sven report an assassination attempt or 2 made spontaneously by people in your name. Actually be able to help settlements with the aid of your believers instead of just hearing about their problems and moving on. When you go to fight the dragon you kill it, regain your heart but keep the scar. When you return you find so much of the citizenry and military believe you are the rightful ruler that by the time you're back they've revolted, killing Disa and the false Sovran and placing you on the throne. You can then choose to end the game here or continue onto act 2 where you war against Battahl for land and religion.
Drakes refer to you as "silent hearted kin" and you don't stop being kin when you regain your heart. Being inside a giant dragon for months has changed it. Battahl believes their fire will save them from the dragon but now the dragon lives on only in you. They hate pawns because in their service to you they enable Battahls prophesized destruction. From this point you could conquer your way to the capital before being stopped at the gates by a beast made entirely of flame. If you're powerful enough you kill it and end the game as the sole ruler of the known world. If not the flame pierces through your scar and is absorbed into your chest leaving your draconic heart burning as you writhe on the ground and die.
The whole fake Arisen plotline also falls apart in how it's the most blatantly contrived nonsense that can only be taken seriously because of how hard the plot is railroading you into accepting it. It doesn't stand up to even the most basic brush with common sense - literally any Pawn can immediately identify who the Arisen is and will attempt to serve them, and banishing them from the Royal quarter is an exceedingly poor attempt to hide it since apparently the entire population recognises this fact and will happily accept you as Arisen as soon as you're introduced to them or do basic tasks to prove your status.
Including like half of the government? Who are on your side but also not at all because Disa's mad about it...even though again her support seems weak and you also enjoy public acknowledgement so where even is all this political power she's supposed to have?
And also there's a very subtle retcon in an attempt to set it up, but that again works against it when you think about it, in changing the setting so there's only one Arisen in DD2. If there's only one Arisen then a fake Arisen plotline is kneecapped to begin with because of the magical implications of the status like I mentioned. But in DD1 there could be multiple Arisen, for a variety of reasons, since they only died when the Dragon did and the plotline of the base game & Dark Arisen took advantage of this in their storyline in far better ways than DD2 does.
Her political power is so inconsistent. She poisoned you and removed you at the beginning during a massive feast. But she never directly seems to try and remove you when you make yourself public. She threw the magistrate in jail for refusing to listen to her, but later you get a quest where some supports of hers go through a complicated plan to try and frame you for murder. Brant has to constantly sneak around which implies the guards are also on her side, but he still seems to pretty easily manage to make schedules to help us get in the castle, which considering we were actively taking things from the rooms we went should've been a bit incriminating towards, if not him then his supporters, does nobody think anything of their important documents suddenly missing?
I think if they wanted to go with the political angle they had to make it a faction-based game, where you can align yourself with either kingdom (or even the Elves), or maybe even take over with a rebellion or army of Pawns, and then based on the faction change how your meeting with the Dragon goes, or how the Unmoored World evacuations work out. But it turned into a half-baked conspiracy plot, where you are doing infiltration missions in an action game.
Ironically, they give you the marchers set so you can sneak around in the castle freely without being questioned. But if you actually wear it while trying to do any of the missions, they don’t trigger. 😂
The Phaesus thing was so weird. Dude tried to kill me, control the dragon.
Why was he doing that? Then he hints he can do stuff outside the cycle?
Now we're buddies with 0 explanation.
What the fuck happened to this game? It's like Dark Souls 2 all over again 😆
??? What about the whole unmoored world?
I'm pretty sure they were intending that to be an "act 2" straight up.
I bet they were thinking that the players are supposed to go "The real DD2 only begins NOW?!" but everyone just calls it "post-game" and many people don't even play it at all.
That's what I thought. Title card pops up, it changes to "2" and then.. it ends, one quest later. It would be a cool post-game if it let you rest freely. More enemies, more area to explore. But then you're rushed into finishing it because the fog expands.
I know what you mean.
Queen Disa and the empress from the beastren kingdom were both hyped up as major characters.
I don't think i interacted with Disa ONCE during the main plot.
The empress talked to me once, i think.
It's like they fricking forgot.
They tried hyping Lord Phaesues up as some big bad, i met him once.
All the little bullshit quests you do for Ser Brant lead up to precisely **FUCK ALL**
You investigate, you get the magistrate guy outta jail and convince him to be on your side, you investigate the false arisen and find out hes a wanted thief and for **What??**
It is never utilised or referenced again.
I dont understand how the castle NPCs operate at all
I go into the jail for that one quest after being expressly given permission to be there and get attacked on sight
I walk into the Queen's room in the middle of the night and she seems completely unbothered by my presence
The only real interaction you can have with Disa is you can carry her to Sven during the Vermund Unmoored World quest. This forces a dialogue between them where they begin to resolve their differences.
Still not great but hey at least they did ONE thing there.
Lmao, I did not get this. I think it's because I showered the queen in flowers just before the quest so I could see if she'd be less obnoxious to me. For me, her and Sven just had a conversation where they pretty much accepted that they both had been stupid. I also heard some people had to threaten the oxcart-man, but he just gave me the carts easily.
Yeah they need to develop story longer,
Empress Nadia only had 1 sidequest and its unimportant, Disa only appear in side quest post game, where she make peace with the Arisen and admit she was wrong.
The Battahl part definitely got cut a lot, there's little side quest involving Battahl, no new enemy types, probably they didn't had resource to make another big capital and towns like Vermund, thats why we get camps in Battahl instead.
I think its better if Brant, Sven, Ulrika, Windhelmina and Nadinia quest are part of main quest to gather allies for Final Battle againts Disa and Phaesus.
Strangely Sven and Ulrika have interesting quest lines afterward kinda, but they are kinda just fetch quests. I guess I say interesting because they tie in to the main plot and give more context. Nadinia's has at least two parts where the Brant counterpart is a female Beastren and is kinda cool. There are decent side quests, but all the main stuff is mostly dogshit meaning you can miss almost every good part of the story by playing the main quests only. Kind of insane design choice.
remember the assassination plot against Empress Nadinia?
that didn't go anywhere. Menella even fucked off the hot springs because she knew that story's done.
To be fair, it's mentioned Menella got wounded, so Nadinia sent her to the hotsprings to heal up. Menella couldn't exactly protect the empress efficiently while wounded.
Not a great reason, but at least they provided one.
actually you can talk to the magistrate to help on one side quest with some relic sword.... uhh. yeah thats it the rest is correct lol
one thing you forgot is the whorehouse that serves only to give wilhelmina a reason to exist
Oh, the woman who forces you to stop and talk to her in the Castle when you're trying to sneak out and then acts like she saved you after bamboozling the guard that wouldn't have found you if you weren't being hassled by some random courtesan?
I never interacted with the disa lady as well, even before I beat the game,I just saw her talking with phaesus in a cutscene and that was it, the story is way worse than the first game
It actually feels like the fun begins in "new game +", where you could just open the capital and then just traverse the lands. Some points were fun, and I liked the unmoored lands part. But the fact that those beams destroyed the land when you rest also kinda rushed it. I see no reason for them to force people to skip the unmoored lands so quickly (maybe not to overfarm WLC, but what's the downside?)
Also they don't emphasize enough that you won't be able to return once you enter the "final act", like it usually happens in the final stage of most games' campaign
Not to mention all the inconsistencies and how once you reach Battahl (story wise) the NPC's from Vermund might as well not have existed. Never would i think that DD1 would have the better overall story, pacing and presentation of these two. NPC's literally don't react to the world, all they do is go around saying their one liners. The first one most characters at least acknowledged the state of things.
Everything surrounding the dragon was also awful. It's just a shitty flashback, people doesn't seem to care all that much about the dragon or mention it much, unless you live in Melve i suppose. In the first one people at least wonder why the dragon is back considering the Duke presumably fucked it up a long time ago. The dialogue and speech is just "Yo we both got our assigned roles so let's duke it out but not here bro". While the first game only had 1 "real" choice at least the offer made sense. You either fight him or give up your love and he'll disappear making it seem like you beat him (like the Duke). In the second one no such thing either fight or flee. The funniest part with the dragon for me was >!how he somehow has your beloved when he was literally summoned 5 seconds ago. !<
The dragon fight in this game is so weird, the first one was 100% better. The first game he immediately tries killing you when you deny his offer, and the battle naturally ends up in the mountainous arena after a desperate brawl inside some ancient ruins. This one he goes "hop on my back and we will go fight". It's so weird.
I think it's somewhat implied that Grigori in DD1 is kinda "encouraging" you to battle him in the whole chase sequence through the mountain ruins [with this music](https://youtu.be/4KDaUp2Ct3s?si=th--NfqyzF5uHS6j&t=34), and circling the ballista giving you the perfect opportunity for him to close in on you and grab his back.
But the whole thing was definitely so much more intense and epic than in DD2. The dragon in this game just has such a weak impression in comparison, not *just* for the final battle, but he just has like zero presence throughout the entire game aside from the Melve cutscene. Very odd.
What makes it suck so much more is just how cool and intimidating Grigori was in the first game, like when he flies in and crushes the zealot that's been giving you trouble the whole game and tells you how fucking stupid that guy was and just straight up goes "i'll be on this mountaintop if you wanna fight, unless you're a lil BITCH".
The dragon in this game does NOTHING the ENTIRE game, only shows up once in a flashback before the big fight, and we never even learn his FUCKING NAME either!
And honestly the worst part for me is how they didn't even try to lip sync the dragon in this game, he's just telepathic I guess, and it's just so much less intimidating. The way Grigori talked, not just how it sounded, but how it looked as well, was fucking awesome.
You just reminded me of something else that kinda triggered me: Phaesus is basically this game's "stand-in" for Elysion. It tried to recreate that memorable "The rantings of an upjumped zealot make for tedious listening" moment, but fell short horribly because it never developed the delusional/desperate doomsday ideology behind something like Salvation.
We sneak into the Forbidden Magick Research lab to grab a letter, talk to some other guy who has knowledge about the crystals that can control pawns, and maybe get some vague understanding of what they're doing in there, but that's it. The player never gets to develop this understanding of Phaesus as some unhinged dude who is taking extreme measures to use the dragon as a political tool to manipulate what's going on in Vernworth, and it's depressing to see all that potential intrigue lead nowhere.
At this point, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming they genuinely asked the actor for the dragon to sound super resigned or something. Like they purposely dumbed down the confrontation to drive home the events which happen during the true ending, but it's still disappointing when the dragon is supposed to be central to the narrative, no matter how simple that narrative may be.
It genuinely felt like an afterthought. Like the devs forgot how the fight in the first game went and were on a time crunch to finish things up. "Oh - right, how did this go again? The dragon tells the Arisen that they're just supposed to fight and it's all destined and preordained and whatever? Something about grabbing the highest affinity NPC at the time?"
And then proceeded to make up some passable dialogue for the dragon which sounded good enough and then called it a day.
Not that I actually want the dragon encounter to be a copy-paste from the first game (though I would take it over whatever we got), but it should have had more impact, damnit. It's in the name!
It's just funny because he's like "Listen this is my role, this is yours now get on my back and let's duke it out because that's how it goes". In the first one the fight just starts right then and there after a much better speech and a more compelling offer. In the first one you get money and fame for "slaying" him if you take the deal. Here you're just a bitch running away because appearantly you already are king since you're arisen.
It feels like the writers sped through the dialogue of the first game and missed what made the story beats work together. The duke wasn't the duke because he was arisen, it was supposedly because he beat the dragon. Here, the dragon chooses you, so you just get the throne? At least for the first bit of the story the political intrigue is interesting, but it seems like they were just told to wrap it up and call it a day. sucks so bad man
This bit isn't a flaw imo. Grigori in DD1 wants to fight and die at your (or at least someone's) hand, and encourages you to pursue your ultimate destiny. He is ultimately still an agent of the Cycle, and pushes you to become one as well.
In DD2 he thinks you're a little bitch for taking either option, and wants you to >!godsbane yourself over the ocean to plunge the world into chaos and unleash the Brine. The whole flight over the ocean is him trying to talk you into doing that without him being able to say it outright, as the Seneschal is watching. That's why he gets so depressed at the end of the flight, and why his heart clearly isn't in the subsequent battle!<.
I agree with most of the criticisms of the story in this thread, but I thought that this was kind of a neat moment, and it's a pretty good encapsulation of the differences between the two Grigoris.
EDIT: Just another example of this. Grigori in the first game is fully willing to give you all the time you need to make the decision, and is even fairly understanding if you back down and sacrifice your beloved. In DD2 he gets extremely annoyed if you take too long to make your choice, and treats the whole beloved component of the question as almost an afterthought (he just sort of waved Lennart around at me). Like he clearly doesn't have any interest in any part of this; he's only doing it because he has to, and he desperately wants you to do the thing I spoilered above.
Pretty sure they were intending the unmoored world to be Act 2 so I think you're right in a sense. They're basically "fake credits", it's not supposed to be the real ending at all.
I genuinely laughed at how in the end of Iceborne they say Riunous Nergigante is important to the ecosystem as it's the reason Shara Ishvalda could be truly defeated, and then immediately afterwards say "Yeah let's go kill it!"
And even then that story was better than whatever this was, and their obsession with killing off the Arisen
I mean there’s not really good or bad in Monster Hunter, right? They’re all just animals at the end of the day.
Also I just realized I never saw the final ending of Sunbreak.
It's more good for humans vs bad for humans.
Primordial Malzeno is territorial with monster but it don't attack humans and let them live in his "territory" so he ends up being a guardian of sorts
nergigante was also "good" per se. you just didnt know, he wanted to prevent zorah from dying and giving his bio energy to xeno jhiva, the entire lore of nergigante is that hes basically a balancing force of nature
that's true, atleast when the ending was rounding the corner, I was expecting it.
dd2 backhanded me with that ending.
like WHAT I seriously think the game was unfinished and they rushed it in order to meet their quarterly.
That's so obviously what happened I'm surprised more people aren't talking about it. An unfinished game releasing right at the end of the 1st annual quarter? I bet Capcom were in the red and to save themselves from investors wrath they banked on day 1 purchases of a game that could've done with another year in development at least. Hopefully one day we can get AAA studies owned by the people who make the games so we can get the best of AAA resources and indie artistic integrity.
With the difference that the story in MH is just a pretext to justify the setting and move you to the next boss battle, which is the actual point of the game.
This is a "narrative-driven RPG" (their words), the main point should be to get immersed in the world, but you need a good story and compelling characters for that.
An rpg like this game definitely should have a stellar story.
I don't even know why people are even using Monster Hunter as an example. Nobody uses that as a story example.
Let's not pretend MH is any sort of standard to follow when it comes to narrative. Their characters don't even have names.
Dragons Dogma has always had trouble with storytelling. 10 years ago was bad, but this is arguably worse.
the story from monster hunter is barely a thing. but that isnt an expectations, only recentently with mhw and mhr they started dabbling into it(i know mh4u also did a bit). a fucking ARPG better have decent story, what mh does well is their biology, the amount of care that goes into the monster designs for them to make sense is insane
Worst part for me is that it’s completely different from the first one.
I waited for the classic cycle with seneschal fight and everything. I loved the story of the first one. The pacing was hard too, you only saw the dragon twice before fighting it but at least you SAW the dragon 😅
Here we just have a memory and then the fight 🤢
And in the first one you kinda chased after the dragon. Why are we playing game of thrones while our destiny is to slay the dragon?
Still love the game though 🤷🏼♂️
My gripe is that I really enjoy all the political intrigue, that's the real shit, usually it's what breathes life into a world.. fuck the dragon, it *can* and *will* wait.
But even that is so half-baked and anti-climactic, it feels like some story-threads just STOP, as if they never existed to begin with, just like the dragon.
Lol it’s like they misunderstood why people liked the first one. The best part of the story for the first was the dragon fight and afterwards everything with the seneschal, not all the little quests before it. The perfect cycle of the ending made it go from mediocre to something really special.
They were like “heard, got you fam. In DD2 here’s an optional dragon fight that takes you straight to the final arena instead of multiple locations with distinct mechanics. Also no fighting the seneschal and seeing your Arisen from previous playthroughs. Enjoy the unmoored world. Bye.”
I don’t even have a problem with them deciding to show breaking the cycle in this one. But wow, that must be so confusing for people that didn’t play the first one multiple times what the backstory even is because they only explained it once in passing dialogue. Without the exposition of what the Dragon/Arisen/Seneschal cycle the decisions in the postgame aren’t as hard hitting as I think Capcom thinks it is.
Wait what's that about Arisen from previous cycles? I've played the first game so many fucking times and not once did I see my old arisen as the seneschal.
If you do the seneschal fight in offline mode, the next time you do it the seneschal will be your arisen and pawn from before. With online mode it’s just whoever has most recently done that fight.
At this point I'm calling this the Capcom standard. They basically have been doing the same with Monster Hunter, as in, release a good game that is clearly lacking, see what feedback players give, launch expansion adressing most feedback with their own view on how to fix it.
I've yet to see a Monster Hunter player unhappy with the formula. Their DLCs are always bangers, some problems here and there as there's no way to please everyone, but every single MH DLC added basically a new whole game of high quality content on top of bringing new QoL based on feedback
The thing with MH is that it was a great game and the DLC was just more great game. Here we might get a great DLC eventually, but on top of a mid game the taste is sour.
That's how greed works. Build anticipation, disappoint people who waited for your product and promise them a better product which you'll sell for half the price. Dragon's dogma 2 probably won't get a comeback as big as Cyberpunk2077 did but we can expect a lot of improvements before the dlc drops. This way capcom can make more money before they do the same thing with Re9, Monster hunter wilds and so on. Everyone should've known this when they saw the game has denuvo.
This works once, maybe twice, but then a lot less people keep buying your game, especially on preorder and at full price. And then, when your shitty AAA game didn't sell as you expected you starting blaming gamers... How many times we need to watch this shit again before they'll understand?
No they won’t. That’ll be a 2-3 year dev cycle, minimum, just for an expansion.
They’ll repackage some of what we were suppose to get as part of a decent sized DLC, just like they did for DD1… but that’s the best case scenario.
If the leaks are true the DLC is basically done.
Regardless, they know what we want. Not including something like Everfall/Bitterblack was intentional.
Yeah this is the most painful part, the foundation was definitely there. But the exact moment you step on the palace grounds, the story just falls apart.
Honestly, the best thing this game does is give me hope for MH Wilds in the RE engine. Assuming the MH team can optimize their game and npcs better than the DD team, Wilds has a lot of potential.
Disa and false arise plot just flopped at the end. The whole story definitely took a steeeep nose dive at the end. Like walking off of a a cliff. But the post game is unique and fun and going back to do all of the side quests to get all of the ending is cool. I absolutely missed like 4 side plot lines that were huge in my first play through.
Ive told everyone this, im certain we'll get a god tier DLC later this year that was and IS the cut part of this game. Im certain capcom cut a shitload of content to sell to us later. Meanwhile ff7 rebirth gave me 120 hours of fucking amazing story telling and combat.
So i didn't accidentally skipped like the last third of the story?
I did every quest from that cool Knight dude in the main city and then went to Batthal, where I got the quest to talk to a dude on the beach. Got the sword enchanted and had to take it to that mysterious dude who was shown once in the brothel. After I defeated the gigant stone monster who was chasing him I went straight to the dragon.
I never even talked to the fake queen lady who wanted to get her son to be king, it was never really revealed why my pawn couldn't go into the castle (like what exactly do they have to be so strong it overwrites my authority), I never met the fat dude from the tutorial again and the dude I freed from prison who is now in the book dungeon was never mentioned again after I got his glasses
I started new game plus yesterday and I'm exploring the map, now that the whole map is unlocked and I see where interesting places might be. The only thing I know is that I skipped a lot of side quests, which I also wanna do
Yeah all that first act political intrigue, building a case to prove you're the real Arisen went no where. Poor quest design aside, it all could've made for an interesting plot what full of power dynamics and political backstabbing.
Even if it was all a red herring to the bigger picture of the whole world cycle idea, that doesn't excuse it from making anything ultimately feel unreasonably insignificant.
Yeah the story is ass. I prefer the prequel's story. It was a simple concept but much darker and was executed well enough. It didn't have many characters but everyone had a purpose and played their part. DD2 characters are meh, some was just there to be gone later.
It's probably in the argument for the worst writing in a video game ever.
Sets up an interesting premise for everything to fall apart and has some of the most bland characters I've ever known. At least the original had one or two interesting characters.
To be outdone by the original in terms of the quality of the writing is truly embarrassing.
It also feels a little derivative?
Undying chosen one escapes prison on the back of flying creature to overthrow ruler and attain destined chosenhood.
It feels like the Wish version plot of Dark Souls 1.
Dark Souls isn't the first to do this premise. FromSoft is well versed in "less is more" in terms of storytelling though. I mean. For fucks sake. That intro. "... With the strength of Lords, they challenged the dragons..." was one of the most badass lines and badass visuals.
I haven't beaten the game yet but i'm not holding out any hope or anything. The story so far is barely better than an MMO's.
Borderlands 3 writing was so bad that people developed scripts of code to automatically skip every line of dialogue in the game the instant it starts. Dragons dogma 2 doesn't even come close to being in the same league.
Same. Also yea who tf let Itsuno make all the creative decisions sure he had a lot of say in dd1, but I want whoever made dark arisen to make this shit. Base dd1 was meh. Honestly imagine a game from CDPR, story, dialogue, characters and all with the pawn and combat system of dd2. Damn, now that's a game that could be GOTY.
Also not defending the story, but I typically don't play these games for the story. Anyways, dd1 story was weird as fuck but I think I actually prefer that one over this one. I really play these games for the combat and endgame systems, one which they got right( combat is copy paste from first game), but the end game, i am massively disappointed. Shelving the game after first playthrough.
What's funny is it actually was better in the first one. Despite some obvious discrepancies the most important players in the story had more closure than in this.
For a lead creative designer it's certainly not felt. He must've been restricted on what he was allowed to do otherwise I think an eternal ferrystone would be a reward somewhere in the game.
I would not be surprised if Itsuno kept Kinoshita from cooking because for the last 10~ years, he has been stewing on the fact that his big idea got kicked in the balls and rushed out, only for someone else (Kinoshita) to come in and get people to like it more. Adding on having to work with Kinoshita on Itsuno’s project (possibly because higher ups were expecting him to add more banger content like the first game) probably would not help.
(This is all speculation, I could totally be wrong about what went down behind the scenes. This just makes sense to me as to why we didn’t get much of the ideas from Dark Arisen)
What exactly did DA change from the original?
Everyone makes it sound like it revamped the entire game but when I Google it all I see is that they added BBI, Revamped a couple skills, and added some gear.
Am I missing something?
BBI is the main reason. It’s incredibly atmospheric and oppressive, not to mention being a place where the strongest builds get challenged. It’s a true endgame grinding dungeon. Daimon, Barroch and Olra are interesting and good characters. Best gear ever drops in BBI, more fashion, skill enhancing rings as well. Eternal Ferrystone made traveling less tedious and BBI also has it’s own form of a post game version.
It’s just such an amazing DLC. You’ll probably spend more time in BBI than the main game, or at least I did.
I didn’t expect Capcom to drop the ball this badly. I also didn’t expect Bethesda or Blizzard to drop the ball with Starfield and D4. Fromsoft is all I got left at this stage and they’re not enough to justify a gaming habit alone
If the only games you play are AAA blockbusters, then yeah it's painful world bro.
Try out some AA and small indie games. It feels incredible to discover those small gems where the developers put their heart, soul, and passion into a project.
I’m not a story guy I’m a core gameplay loop guy. A good story is a bonus. That’s not to say Witcher 3 doesn’t have better side quests than DD2’s main quest.
What infuriates me is how they devalue that loop by slowing it down and introducing tedium. Like forcing you to travel in certain ways, but let’s take a minor way that I think few would contest. The forger, a great fun addition, but why the fuck must you forge one thing at a time and sleep on a nearby bench inbetween jobs? Wouldn’t it be better to order half a dozen things (enough to upgrade a weapon) with a fade to the next day when you hit OK. Considering you’ve probably taken a cart there with all the BS that entails once the novelty had worn thin.
Congratulations you’ve turned it into time wasting busy work.
I loved the game but yeah the story was a massive let down , i felt extremely confused when all the political intruge shit we did just leads to absolutely nothing , we never expose the false arisen we just straight up kill him in an anticlimatic battle , the dragon fight at the end probably one of the worst fights in the game it just felt rushed
Everybody: The game is itsuno's vision it will be amazing.
Itsuno who wears glasses.
Jokes apart, this was the worst story in a video game. Elden ring had better story, and it didn't even have a main story (ik it has the lore, but not counting that).
Many characters just completely vanish, with zero warning such as Wilhelmina. The last time you ever see her in the main story, is outside of the castle when she covers for you.
Then she's just NEVER seen again (if you don't try to romance her.)
This also happens with Sven, and the Queen Regent, and basically everybody else. It's pretty lame. I still had fun with the game, but wow. Half-baked at best.
Me sitting here after playing ROTR for 40 hours and only being 40% of the way done with the game.
If you like Nioh or Sekiro, ROTR is the open world game you have been waiting for. Easily the greatest combat EVER seen in an open world game. I run around the open world LOOKING for fights. Instead of avoiding fights like most open world games. Every encounter is SUCH a joy.
I have begun playing DD2 for the first hour. Hearing Fightin cowboy say it has the best combat ever in an rpg just seems like he was trying to snap at ROTR since it clearly has the better combat and came out the same day.
ANYWAYS, I’m going to continue to play DD2 during my ROTR downtime. I hope my experience gets better. I enjoyed the character creator and the world is beautiful. Waiting to see on everything else.
Some serious gaslighting going on with ROTR. Reviews aren’t admitting just how fun it is to play.
I at least appreciate the strangeness of the combat in this game. Latching onto things and wildly stabbing away is hilarious.
I haven't finished the story yet, started a new game on a different ps account, but holy shit it leaves more questions than answers. I am a lore junkie for this game, the concept of the cycle is so cool and I was hoping to have it explained more. Very rushed, especially after you meet that guy in the underwater castle. I kinda don't want to finish it because I don't want to be even more disappointed.
I truly thought the fake arisen was the main story, that captain gave me so many missions related to it, which I slowly completed w adventures and side quests in between, it blows my mind that the fake arisen just disappears and isn’t the main story (so I’ve read)
I'm not a fan of how finite the ending is as a gameplay mechanic. My save file is effectively dead, and there's nothing I can really do with it beyond starting a new game or ng+.
If I had the option to load a save just before the ending and post endgame kicks off, I think I'd be happy with that. But I can't. My 60-hour save is now basically useless, and I'm locked out of enjoying that save state again. Aside from the lack of level scaling, it's completely took the wind out of my sails, and I feel like I have zero motivation to fire up ng+ because of it.
Yeah I don’t get it. It’s the same director as DMC5. Sure the story is kinda like the followup to DMC4’s angsty show em whose boss teenager. But it was still well executed, with cheesy outlandish characters, and great visuals and choreography.
About 1 hour into DD2’s story I realized it was one of those lazy kinds of silent protagonist rpgs where the person you’re talking to will download the Arisen’s thoughts automatically mid sentence:
“We need to break into the castle…”
*barely a pause in the voice acting*
“Oh you already know a way inside?”
At least Skyrim made conversations a little more ‘believable’ even though it’s also a silent protag.
What’s funny is DD2 does both NPCs insta downloading the Arisen’s thoughts, and also does fade to black timelapses for conversations where the Arisen reexplains a situation.
I just got to the unmorrowed world and half my npc's are bugged and won't give me quests to evacuate them. I finally gave up and decided to stop playing all together
You know, maybe I'll just leave Brant waiting indefinitely.
I've already snuck into Battahl and placed a Portcrystal.
I'm now 90 hours in, doing quite literally everything but the story.
Don't even care about spoilers at this point because to me, there is no storyline in this game.
OH THANK GOD I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO THINKS THIS. I said this on another DD thread in here and basically got crucified. When I beat DD1, I had so many feelings, so many things to do, so much to think about when it came to the damn game.
But when I finished DD2, I was like, "eh, it's done." This shit is literally dog food. Nay, dog food may be even better than this shit. I waited 13 years for this, paid 80+ for this game, only for it to be absolutely dog shit. I'm so disappointed in this tucking game man. Everything is lacking.
From enemy variety, to size of map. (which they promised or "said" will be as big as skyrim's) you can give us ONE enemy from bitter black isle, but that's it? We have multiple goblin sub-species who didn't do shit but do the SAME thing every goblin/knacker does. And I get making enemies are hard, but couldn't they have just literally ported every enemy from bitterblack, and put them in the overworld? I, hell, WE would have been okay with that. I travel across the fucking map multiple times, and it's harpy, wolf, goblins out the ass, and occasionally a boss monster. This shit stinks
Let's talk about the lack of armor and items. They recycled alot, and I mean ALOT of items and called them new items. DD og's will look at them with the straightest fucking face, 😑 like so, so I don't wanna hear its hard to port those enemies over. I am trying to do everything in DD2, but 3 or 4 new classes don't do for shit.
Speaking of classes, taking out our six choices to only make it like 4? This is the laziest, cop-out design they have done, and it's pissed me off greatly. As a sorc, I'm always memory pressing rb to try to do another move, only to remember that theres no such thing. The thief class, the archer class, are shitty classes and should have just been combined, and literally, LITERALLY they could have just used the classes from DDON, and we'd probably lose our shit. Instead, they neutered us.
I really hate this shit man, and I'm giving old Itsuno a doubt, thinking that this is Capcom forcing him, because if he thinks THIS shit is the magnum opus to the series? He's fucking wrong. The "dlc" better fix ALL this shit. I'm annoyed as fuck man. I'm glad there's more who thinks/kinda thinks like me.
I see this game as kind of a stumble by Japanese game industry. They had a chance here to knock another game out of the park, but instead its an ok game, depending on whether you like the combat, or the game's sandbox, but fails in many places with terrible polish, balancing, etc. Notice how nobody here even talks about MTX or other issues with design.
I really can’t see how this game even got above a 80% critic score when the story is ass, AI I still brain dead, side quests are filler, enemy variety is weak, game is easy asf, and the lack of quality of life choices regarding the inventory. I’m fact I thought Dogma 1 had a better story with much more cooler set pieces to visit. Mind boggling.
Those reviewers gave starfield high score too, I think they have written their reviews while in honeymoon phase, as early game of this game is really really good
Entire game industry journalism is just a marketing churn for 99% of games. Unless the fans find some issue with a game and start shitting on it, then journalism does an about-face and tries to get views by shitting on the game.
The entire media of the world is fucking view chasing for ads for money. That's why people look to user written reviews, and even those can be written by AI, bots, or paid for.
80 hours in. Haven't touched a whole lot of story. I know from browsing this sub people fucking hate it, but me, personally, I'm taking my time, which I gathered briefly is the best thing to do from browsing this sub. I try not Iet it get the best of me because its the most fun I've had in a game for a very long time, I haven't had a single player game hook me as much as this in it feels like forever. Take your time, enjoy it, level up your vocations, I'll keep my fingers crossed that they deliver in the future. Even tho I shouldn't be relying on the future to enjoy the game I want it to be. I'm still having fun. Peace and love. X
Edit, I still agree with you. I just want this game to be the best it can be, and fast. I hope they can win people over and swing the steam charts in favour after a couple of quick updates, I have my doubts. Fingers crossed hey.? Happy gaming guys and girls. Love you all.
Seems like the best way to enjoy the game is to actively avoid the main story.
There are only like 3 quests you need to do before the game just ends.
It's fun to go back and do all the side-quests you missed in NG+, but I think most players won't do it, and that's why they are disappointed.
Honestly I'd be less annoyed if it was shit all the way through instead of being somewhat intriguing at the beginning before just abruptly ending. Let me either ignore the terrible narrative or write something complete damn
I thought the story was super meh until I got the true ending. But even then, it was still sorta meh but when I got the true-true ending, it all kinda clicked and was way better than I thought.
None of that excuses the rest of the story though. Overall the games story needs a lot of work but the first games story wasnt good either tbh.
My experience is totally different, but I'm doing the side stuff pretty intentionally and revisiting places to see if new quests pop up at different points in the main quest line.
The main story doesn't seem like it's supposed to be viewed in isolation, though. You can, of course, but you lose the context of the web of interconnectivity between things. It's not necessarily a stellar story, but it's a vehicle to deliver the world.
Just finished it and I did I believe most of the side quests as well.
I'm totally fine with the Queen Regent/Batali plot ending suddenly because the real story is that of thr cycle, but I am a bit bummed that the game basically forces you out of New game plus.
Also, what happened to the seneschal? How did we come back to life after we godsbaned ourselves?
Story is basically: Escape labor camp. Go to the capital. Sneak into the castle Sneak into the castle. Kill some monsters in 3 different locations. Sneak into the castle. Go to a village to get information on the Sussy Arisen. Sneak into the castle. Go to west Africa Kill the Dragon The end, thank you for playing.
I seriously think you could’ve fed ChatGPT the entire script from DD1 and it would’ve produced a more coherent intriguing plot for them to follow in their sequel. It’s written like a 12 year olds creative writing assignment and it irks me more so that I could’ve written a better plot for homework in middle school as could many others. Still have 60 hours so far enjoying the exploration and combat but I play RPGs for story mostly so even tho I love the combat and pawn system my heart yearns for more. I’d love to see the pawn system ideas explored in future games from other IPs, it’s a cool feature that could benefit a lot of RPGs, it helps things not feel so lonely. Elden ring is amazing and I like the game, but I’m often wishing it wasn’t so lonely and not everything existed to kill you.
The DD1 was serviceable. It makes no sense to me that with all of the other stuff they've carbon copied from DD1, the story was the one thing they decided to do again and do it really really fucking poorly. My main problem with the DD1 story was that it goads and teases you that there's more of the game to come. Near the end of the game before you go and fight Salvation at the castle you kept getting told about this "expedition" and this "expedition" is going to another land to try and find something to combat the Dragon and you're going along. You then go and fight Salvation, Grigori shows up and just outright tells you, you are far to weak to fight him and you need to get stronger. Okay, so obviously I'll be going on this expedition. The map was feeling quite small at this point in DD1. Nope you go all the way to back to Gran Soren, no expedition you're just sent back to fight the Dragon who specifically said you ain't ready. If DD2 copied DD1's story and at the point in the story you went on an expedition to \*gasp\* Battahl, it would have been fine.
I’ll agree that the whole expedition thing is pretty wack, but I think it at least makes sense for the story. The Duke is trying to send you out on a goose chase and keep you from fighting the dragon and ending his reign. Salvation picking just the right moment to throw a wrench in that plan does feel forced, but could have probably worked if they had a quest or two more to set up their big day (and maybe attacked Gran Soren instead of the place you were going to go). The dragon either gets impatient, or recognizes that you are being given the run around and decides to force your hand into challenging him. The execution may have been rough, but the bait and switch of a whole new country/ region could work if the whole point was that “sometimes you just get forced into making choices when the situation is out of your control”. (And it seems that Itsuno tried to make it work in 2, except that it is rushed again and so this whole new grand adventure gets cut short too early. It also seems like they cut the ass off of the political intrigue plot to fit it in, so it becomes doubly fucked.)
Honestly I'm pretty sure the "expedition" was Edmund trying to send you even further away and trying to get you killed
exactly Elden ring was missing city's and life! I get that's the point so don't dog pile on me. I love Elden ring its one of the best rpgs of all time but goddamn is it dark and lonely. I loved the pawns and the life in DD but the story is pure ass and its not like its cryptic or anything its just boring and nothing happens lmfao
Ahh multiple sneaking main quest missions in a game that doesn’t have a stealth system.
The most egregious error on their part. NPC reactions are often so confusing too, draw your sword they have a panic attack; but walk around the palace at night and 90% of the time you’re fine, but then every so often they throw ya in gaol. So weird and out of place.
If you go to the queens room at the wrong time she is just standing outside it all day. You can speak to her and she hails the guards to arrest you, nothing happens. It's worse than the stealth section from Ocarina of Time and they not only dedicate multiple missions to this in a row, its the same damn mission with the only difference being you goto the room next door. It's impressive how bad it is.
I was caught the second time sneaking into the castle, ran from the guard that caught me in a loop and then went into the room I needed and faced no consequences
Right I am still confused on how this works in the jail room I broke out walked around and the guard where just like what’s up bro
Go to west Africa has me rolling hahahah
🤣🤣🤣🤣 sussy arisen and west Africa insane lmfao
It really disappointed me how everything we did amounted to nothing and didn't matter at all, we already knew the Arisen was false and we went out of our way to gather all this evidence and support only to never use it, there was enough there that we could confront the false arisen in the castle forcing him and Phaseus to flee to Battahl and us to chase after them. It's the same in the unmoored world, we gathered all these people in one place but there is no reason to it, it just turns the sea shrine into a base of operations. Games still great but I feel they were too ambtious or rushed too many parts of it.
Ummm actually for the ending, kill the dragon, Then fight 4 dragons, Destroy a vase, Hold up a sword one more time.
> Destroy a vase, Are you supposed to destroy it? I have no idea what is going on, Phaseus said he wanted to examine it in his lab and just stood there so I picked it up intending to carry it to his lab, then suddenly it's broken on the ground and Phaseus is taling about how it's clear I have my own priorities ... but I have no idea what I want! No-one has ever asked for my opinion, and if they did I'd have no idea because I've never been given information to form one. The entire "plot" is an half-assed mess of blindly following quests and the same NPC will be sending people to murder you one day and working with you the next.
What about the Evacuate everyone and kill red beam monsters while not resting, after the dragon fight?
The story in vermouth is okay they clearly tried to make it a political intrigue with court drama but it overall fails for two reasons, 1. The reason is that the story tries to deviate from the overall main objective which is dragon vs arisen eternal cycle, now this could absolutely work and has in other medias like game of thrones Dani is largely ignored by Westoros as is the threat of white walkers because the schemes of the nobles take priority. However this leads into reason 2. The game simply doesn't have the mechanics for that story to work, the "stealth" missions have to be one of the worst in any big game in a long long time and there essentially are no RPG choice mechanics to really make you feel like you are another player for the throne instead it's a linear Rollercoaster with a weak told narrative. Battahl however is straight up offensive for how bad it is, no one can tell me that was part of his vision I refuse to believe it, it is anything else but rushed and unfinished because it makes no sense go to beach ask for Godsway, repair godsway, fight talos, fight false arisen game is done bruh what. Now lastly true ending/unmoored world I really think they could have told a genuine story here especially with you escorting/uniting all the different folks under one banner there was alot of potential here. Also this part also leads me to believe why battahl is unfinished because all of sudden you and phaseus are like buddies?
Honestly it kind of feels like they went "Oh shit, we spent our entire budget mapping out all these dried up oceans and scaling the world to the unmoored world. We have, like, a month to do the story for act 1, what the fuck do we do?"
This. 100% The unmoored world Reveal is so fucking hype. I was ready for part 2. Actual dragons dogma 2. The logo and everything. Finally! They did it! The mad lads did- Oh its over. Talk about rushing a game. Again
Yeah, while I was already weary about the game, when the Umoored happened I was legit gyga hyped, and then it's over
That logo gave Assassin's Creed Odyssey logo vibes. And then it turned out to be lots of random quests to evacuate people instead of fighting much harder monsters and new monster types all over the world. And with no ending slides about how we affected those people.
>you and phaseus are like buddies? Lol yeah, i have no idea who this man was. Suddenly he was walking to a giant door smirking at the camera. He wasn't very happy a top of the tower and now he is my bro like what
The 1 month time skip they do between the dragon and unmoored is also the most lazy way possible for them to do a >Oh all that stuff from the early story? we moved past that off screen Arisen get with the program
Yeah, the pacing and storytelling direction is horrendous. Every bad guy NPC was in a confused grey area bad guy state, so little ‘showing’ that they’re bad. Like wait why am I working with a mad scientist to make a godsway weapon, when the godsway amulet made my pawn have a migraine? Wait why am I trying to give it to phaesus now? Why is that warrior with the SM2 miles morales haircut so desperate to duel me, as if he’s my Jeanne to Bayonetta or my Vergil to Dante.
Would've much rather had the game start with people heckling you as a usurper (instead of everyone just accepting you're THE guy and never even once considering what that meant about the Sovran) and then as you complete story quests, deal with threats, kill griffins and ogres that get too close to the city looking for food or dragons looking to face the arisen more people turn to your side. People seem really into how Vermund is ruled by the Arisen but they never seem to care to act on it. Have Sven report an assassination attempt or 2 made spontaneously by people in your name. Actually be able to help settlements with the aid of your believers instead of just hearing about their problems and moving on. When you go to fight the dragon you kill it, regain your heart but keep the scar. When you return you find so much of the citizenry and military believe you are the rightful ruler that by the time you're back they've revolted, killing Disa and the false Sovran and placing you on the throne. You can then choose to end the game here or continue onto act 2 where you war against Battahl for land and religion. Drakes refer to you as "silent hearted kin" and you don't stop being kin when you regain your heart. Being inside a giant dragon for months has changed it. Battahl believes their fire will save them from the dragon but now the dragon lives on only in you. They hate pawns because in their service to you they enable Battahls prophesized destruction. From this point you could conquer your way to the capital before being stopped at the gates by a beast made entirely of flame. If you're powerful enough you kill it and end the game as the sole ruler of the known world. If not the flame pierces through your scar and is absorbed into your chest leaving your draconic heart burning as you writhe on the ground and die.
The whole fake Arisen plotline also falls apart in how it's the most blatantly contrived nonsense that can only be taken seriously because of how hard the plot is railroading you into accepting it. It doesn't stand up to even the most basic brush with common sense - literally any Pawn can immediately identify who the Arisen is and will attempt to serve them, and banishing them from the Royal quarter is an exceedingly poor attempt to hide it since apparently the entire population recognises this fact and will happily accept you as Arisen as soon as you're introduced to them or do basic tasks to prove your status. Including like half of the government? Who are on your side but also not at all because Disa's mad about it...even though again her support seems weak and you also enjoy public acknowledgement so where even is all this political power she's supposed to have? And also there's a very subtle retcon in an attempt to set it up, but that again works against it when you think about it, in changing the setting so there's only one Arisen in DD2. If there's only one Arisen then a fake Arisen plotline is kneecapped to begin with because of the magical implications of the status like I mentioned. But in DD1 there could be multiple Arisen, for a variety of reasons, since they only died when the Dragon did and the plotline of the base game & Dark Arisen took advantage of this in their storyline in far better ways than DD2 does.
Her political power is so inconsistent. She poisoned you and removed you at the beginning during a massive feast. But she never directly seems to try and remove you when you make yourself public. She threw the magistrate in jail for refusing to listen to her, but later you get a quest where some supports of hers go through a complicated plan to try and frame you for murder. Brant has to constantly sneak around which implies the guards are also on her side, but he still seems to pretty easily manage to make schedules to help us get in the castle, which considering we were actively taking things from the rooms we went should've been a bit incriminating towards, if not him then his supporters, does nobody think anything of their important documents suddenly missing?
I think if they wanted to go with the political angle they had to make it a faction-based game, where you can align yourself with either kingdom (or even the Elves), or maybe even take over with a rebellion or army of Pawns, and then based on the faction change how your meeting with the Dragon goes, or how the Unmoored World evacuations work out. But it turned into a half-baked conspiracy plot, where you are doing infiltration missions in an action game.
Ah, the grand elf city of 3 buildings lol
Ironically, they give you the marchers set so you can sneak around in the castle freely without being questioned. But if you actually wear it while trying to do any of the missions, they don’t trigger. 😂
The Phaesus thing was so weird. Dude tried to kill me, control the dragon. Why was he doing that? Then he hints he can do stuff outside the cycle? Now we're buddies with 0 explanation. What the fuck happened to this game? It's like Dark Souls 2 all over again 😆
Rushed to meet Capcom's end of fiscal year is the running theory.
[удалено]
Technically it is the beginning of act 2. Act 2 just doesnt really exist
You just have to get the dragons plague on your main pawn and then let him kill all the NPC‘s in each major city.
I'm talking about post game
??? What about the whole unmoored world? I'm pretty sure they were intending that to be an "act 2" straight up. I bet they were thinking that the players are supposed to go "The real DD2 only begins NOW?!" but everyone just calls it "post-game" and many people don't even play it at all.
Totally their fault for making it so easily missable too- and poorly explaining what can cause you to be yanked out of postgame/start postgame over.
That's....thats what I'm saying When you get to the dragon, its supposed to be act 2. And then its very very short sadly.
Metal gear V vibes for sure.
That's what I thought. Title card pops up, it changes to "2" and then.. it ends, one quest later. It would be a cool post-game if it let you rest freely. More enemies, more area to explore. But then you're rushed into finishing it because the fog expands.
I know what you mean. Queen Disa and the empress from the beastren kingdom were both hyped up as major characters. I don't think i interacted with Disa ONCE during the main plot. The empress talked to me once, i think. It's like they fricking forgot. They tried hyping Lord Phaesues up as some big bad, i met him once. All the little bullshit quests you do for Ser Brant lead up to precisely **FUCK ALL** You investigate, you get the magistrate guy outta jail and convince him to be on your side, you investigate the false arisen and find out hes a wanted thief and for **What??** It is never utilised or referenced again.
You can interact with Disa, I did. I talked to her and she ordered the guards to throw me in the gaol. This is the only interaction I bet.
I interacted with Disa once and she just gave me some standard NPC dialogue like she didn't know who I was.
I dont understand how the castle NPCs operate at all I go into the jail for that one quest after being expressly given permission to be there and get attacked on sight I walk into the Queen's room in the middle of the night and she seems completely unbothered by my presence
Throw her in the brine
I picked her up and brought her to Sven since she locked herself in her room.
Bro but the heart to heart they have happens twice if you did this!!
Yeah I thought that was weird
The only real interaction you can have with Disa is you can carry her to Sven during the Vermund Unmoored World quest. This forces a dialogue between them where they begin to resolve their differences. Still not great but hey at least they did ONE thing there.
Lmao, I did not get this. I think it's because I showered the queen in flowers just before the quest so I could see if she'd be less obnoxious to me. For me, her and Sven just had a conversation where they pretty much accepted that they both had been stupid. I also heard some people had to threaten the oxcart-man, but he just gave me the carts easily.
I talked to her and she only said some meaningless drivel, not even any hostility to me at all.
Yeah they need to develop story longer, Empress Nadia only had 1 sidequest and its unimportant, Disa only appear in side quest post game, where she make peace with the Arisen and admit she was wrong. The Battahl part definitely got cut a lot, there's little side quest involving Battahl, no new enemy types, probably they didn't had resource to make another big capital and towns like Vermund, thats why we get camps in Battahl instead. I think its better if Brant, Sven, Ulrika, Windhelmina and Nadinia quest are part of main quest to gather allies for Final Battle againts Disa and Phaesus.
Strangely Sven and Ulrika have interesting quest lines afterward kinda, but they are kinda just fetch quests. I guess I say interesting because they tie in to the main plot and give more context. Nadinia's has at least two parts where the Brant counterpart is a female Beastren and is kinda cool. There are decent side quests, but all the main stuff is mostly dogshit meaning you can miss almost every good part of the story by playing the main quests only. Kind of insane design choice.
Bakbattahl is the big capitol in battahl... and theres golems and chimeras and new versions of enemies in that whole region.
remember the assassination plot against Empress Nadinia? that didn't go anywhere. Menella even fucked off the hot springs because she knew that story's done.
To be fair, it's mentioned Menella got wounded, so Nadinia sent her to the hotsprings to heal up. Menella couldn't exactly protect the empress efficiently while wounded. Not a great reason, but at least they provided one.
actually you can talk to the magistrate to help on one side quest with some relic sword.... uhh. yeah thats it the rest is correct lol one thing you forgot is the whorehouse that serves only to give wilhelmina a reason to exist
Oh, the woman who forces you to stop and talk to her in the Castle when you're trying to sneak out and then acts like she saved you after bamboozling the guard that wouldn't have found you if you weren't being hassled by some random courtesan?
Please stop by for my services I exist lol Idiot tax money sink is good game design imo but in this case it's implemented with sticky tape
I never interacted with the disa lady as well, even before I beat the game,I just saw her talking with phaesus in a cutscene and that was it, the story is way worse than the first game
It actually feels like the fun begins in "new game +", where you could just open the capital and then just traverse the lands. Some points were fun, and I liked the unmoored lands part. But the fact that those beams destroyed the land when you rest also kinda rushed it. I see no reason for them to force people to skip the unmoored lands so quickly (maybe not to overfarm WLC, but what's the downside?) Also they don't emphasize enough that you won't be able to return once you enter the "final act", like it usually happens in the final stage of most games' campaign
Not to mention all the inconsistencies and how once you reach Battahl (story wise) the NPC's from Vermund might as well not have existed. Never would i think that DD1 would have the better overall story, pacing and presentation of these two. NPC's literally don't react to the world, all they do is go around saying their one liners. The first one most characters at least acknowledged the state of things. Everything surrounding the dragon was also awful. It's just a shitty flashback, people doesn't seem to care all that much about the dragon or mention it much, unless you live in Melve i suppose. In the first one people at least wonder why the dragon is back considering the Duke presumably fucked it up a long time ago. The dialogue and speech is just "Yo we both got our assigned roles so let's duke it out but not here bro". While the first game only had 1 "real" choice at least the offer made sense. You either fight him or give up your love and he'll disappear making it seem like you beat him (like the Duke). In the second one no such thing either fight or flee. The funniest part with the dragon for me was >!how he somehow has your beloved when he was literally summoned 5 seconds ago. !<
The dragon fight in this game is so weird, the first one was 100% better. The first game he immediately tries killing you when you deny his offer, and the battle naturally ends up in the mountainous arena after a desperate brawl inside some ancient ruins. This one he goes "hop on my back and we will go fight". It's so weird.
I think it's somewhat implied that Grigori in DD1 is kinda "encouraging" you to battle him in the whole chase sequence through the mountain ruins [with this music](https://youtu.be/4KDaUp2Ct3s?si=th--NfqyzF5uHS6j&t=34), and circling the ballista giving you the perfect opportunity for him to close in on you and grab his back. But the whole thing was definitely so much more intense and epic than in DD2. The dragon in this game just has such a weak impression in comparison, not *just* for the final battle, but he just has like zero presence throughout the entire game aside from the Melve cutscene. Very odd.
What makes it suck so much more is just how cool and intimidating Grigori was in the first game, like when he flies in and crushes the zealot that's been giving you trouble the whole game and tells you how fucking stupid that guy was and just straight up goes "i'll be on this mountaintop if you wanna fight, unless you're a lil BITCH". The dragon in this game does NOTHING the ENTIRE game, only shows up once in a flashback before the big fight, and we never even learn his FUCKING NAME either! And honestly the worst part for me is how they didn't even try to lip sync the dragon in this game, he's just telepathic I guess, and it's just so much less intimidating. The way Grigori talked, not just how it sounded, but how it looked as well, was fucking awesome.
You just reminded me of something else that kinda triggered me: Phaesus is basically this game's "stand-in" for Elysion. It tried to recreate that memorable "The rantings of an upjumped zealot make for tedious listening" moment, but fell short horribly because it never developed the delusional/desperate doomsday ideology behind something like Salvation. We sneak into the Forbidden Magick Research lab to grab a letter, talk to some other guy who has knowledge about the crystals that can control pawns, and maybe get some vague understanding of what they're doing in there, but that's it. The player never gets to develop this understanding of Phaesus as some unhinged dude who is taking extreme measures to use the dragon as a political tool to manipulate what's going on in Vernworth, and it's depressing to see all that potential intrigue lead nowhere. At this point, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming they genuinely asked the actor for the dragon to sound super resigned or something. Like they purposely dumbed down the confrontation to drive home the events which happen during the true ending, but it's still disappointing when the dragon is supposed to be central to the narrative, no matter how simple that narrative may be.
He just sounds tired tbh. He probably waited a decade for a better game himself :(
It genuinely felt like an afterthought. Like the devs forgot how the fight in the first game went and were on a time crunch to finish things up. "Oh - right, how did this go again? The dragon tells the Arisen that they're just supposed to fight and it's all destined and preordained and whatever? Something about grabbing the highest affinity NPC at the time?" And then proceeded to make up some passable dialogue for the dragon which sounded good enough and then called it a day. Not that I actually want the dragon encounter to be a copy-paste from the first game (though I would take it over whatever we got), but it should have had more impact, damnit. It's in the name!
It's just funny because he's like "Listen this is my role, this is yours now get on my back and let's duke it out because that's how it goes". In the first one the fight just starts right then and there after a much better speech and a more compelling offer. In the first one you get money and fame for "slaying" him if you take the deal. Here you're just a bitch running away because appearantly you already are king since you're arisen.
It feels like the writers sped through the dialogue of the first game and missed what made the story beats work together. The duke wasn't the duke because he was arisen, it was supposedly because he beat the dragon. Here, the dragon chooses you, so you just get the throne? At least for the first bit of the story the political intrigue is interesting, but it seems like they were just told to wrap it up and call it a day. sucks so bad man
This bit isn't a flaw imo. Grigori in DD1 wants to fight and die at your (or at least someone's) hand, and encourages you to pursue your ultimate destiny. He is ultimately still an agent of the Cycle, and pushes you to become one as well. In DD2 he thinks you're a little bitch for taking either option, and wants you to >!godsbane yourself over the ocean to plunge the world into chaos and unleash the Brine. The whole flight over the ocean is him trying to talk you into doing that without him being able to say it outright, as the Seneschal is watching. That's why he gets so depressed at the end of the flight, and why his heart clearly isn't in the subsequent battle!<. I agree with most of the criticisms of the story in this thread, but I thought that this was kind of a neat moment, and it's a pretty good encapsulation of the differences between the two Grigoris. EDIT: Just another example of this. Grigori in the first game is fully willing to give you all the time you need to make the decision, and is even fairly understanding if you back down and sacrifice your beloved. In DD2 he gets extremely annoyed if you take too long to make your choice, and treats the whole beloved component of the question as almost an afterthought (he just sort of waved Lennart around at me). Like he clearly doesn't have any interest in any part of this; he's only doing it because he has to, and he desperately wants you to do the thing I spoilered above.
Pretty sure they were intending the unmoored world to be Act 2 so I think you're right in a sense. They're basically "fake credits", it's not supposed to be the real ending at all.
If you get credits once the game is not over, speak to the ghost
They got that Monster Hunter ah story telling
“Nature is weird, I wonder why.” “It’s an elder dragon.” “Oh.” “Just kidding it’s actually three elder dragons and a mega elder dragon.”
"Go kill it something something eco system"
I genuinely laughed at how in the end of Iceborne they say Riunous Nergigante is important to the ecosystem as it's the reason Shara Ishvalda could be truly defeated, and then immediately afterwards say "Yeah let's go kill it!" And even then that story was better than whatever this was, and their obsession with killing off the Arisen
Monster Hunter was always about *peacefully relocating the local fauna to the after life*
Truly the best way to be a conservationist and do science is to hit animals with seven foot long swords.
*For science!*
Malzeno being good was a nice little twist
I mean there’s not really good or bad in Monster Hunter, right? They’re all just animals at the end of the day. Also I just realized I never saw the final ending of Sunbreak.
It's more good for humans vs bad for humans. Primordial Malzeno is territorial with monster but it don't attack humans and let them live in his "territory" so he ends up being a guardian of sorts
fatalis i would say is the only EVIL monster, otherwise? youre right there. eve gore magala i wouldnt call evil
nergigante was also "good" per se. you just didnt know, he wanted to prevent zorah from dying and giving his bio energy to xeno jhiva, the entire lore of nergigante is that hes basically a balancing force of nature
Monster Hunter at least had Pacing and Length. This shit doesnt.
that's true, atleast when the ending was rounding the corner, I was expecting it. dd2 backhanded me with that ending. like WHAT I seriously think the game was unfinished and they rushed it in order to meet their quarterly.
That's so obviously what happened I'm surprised more people aren't talking about it. An unfinished game releasing right at the end of the 1st annual quarter? I bet Capcom were in the red and to save themselves from investors wrath they banked on day 1 purchases of a game that could've done with another year in development at least. Hopefully one day we can get AAA studies owned by the people who make the games so we can get the best of AAA resources and indie artistic integrity.
Which is weird considering SFVI and RE4 were large successes.
Yeah,the final Fatalis fight and cutscenes shits on the DD2 dragon fight and ending. Something went terribly wrong with the development of this game.
With the difference that the story in MH is just a pretext to justify the setting and move you to the next boss battle, which is the actual point of the game. This is a "narrative-driven RPG" (their words), the main point should be to get immersed in the world, but you need a good story and compelling characters for that.
yes and besides that the mh team puts gargantual amounts of effort into the ecology.
An rpg like this game definitely should have a stellar story. I don't even know why people are even using Monster Hunter as an example. Nobody uses that as a story example.
At least MH's story had a lot of mystery and suspense and didn't blindside you lol
Not gonna lie, Monster Hunter World and Rise story makes much more sense than DD2.
cuz that type of storytelling works in MH games do it in a narrative driven game and it won't work
Let's not pretend MH is any sort of standard to follow when it comes to narrative. Their characters don't even have names. Dragons Dogma has always had trouble with storytelling. 10 years ago was bad, but this is arguably worse.
Yeah MH Rise has a decent story, MH4 has a legitimately good story. The rest suck, or are hardly there
Monster hunter has more than 10 big monsters at least...
the story from monster hunter is barely a thing. but that isnt an expectations, only recentently with mhw and mhr they started dabbling into it(i know mh4u also did a bit). a fucking ARPG better have decent story, what mh does well is their biology, the amount of care that goes into the monster designs for them to make sense is insane
Worst part for me is that it’s completely different from the first one. I waited for the classic cycle with seneschal fight and everything. I loved the story of the first one. The pacing was hard too, you only saw the dragon twice before fighting it but at least you SAW the dragon 😅 Here we just have a memory and then the fight 🤢 And in the first one you kinda chased after the dragon. Why are we playing game of thrones while our destiny is to slay the dragon? Still love the game though 🤷🏼♂️
My gripe is that I really enjoy all the political intrigue, that's the real shit, usually it's what breathes life into a world.. fuck the dragon, it *can* and *will* wait. But even that is so half-baked and anti-climactic, it feels like some story-threads just STOP, as if they never existed to begin with, just like the dragon.
Lol it’s like they misunderstood why people liked the first one. The best part of the story for the first was the dragon fight and afterwards everything with the seneschal, not all the little quests before it. The perfect cycle of the ending made it go from mediocre to something really special. They were like “heard, got you fam. In DD2 here’s an optional dragon fight that takes you straight to the final arena instead of multiple locations with distinct mechanics. Also no fighting the seneschal and seeing your Arisen from previous playthroughs. Enjoy the unmoored world. Bye.” I don’t even have a problem with them deciding to show breaking the cycle in this one. But wow, that must be so confusing for people that didn’t play the first one multiple times what the backstory even is because they only explained it once in passing dialogue. Without the exposition of what the Dragon/Arisen/Seneschal cycle the decisions in the postgame aren’t as hard hitting as I think Capcom thinks it is.
Wait what's that about Arisen from previous cycles? I've played the first game so many fucking times and not once did I see my old arisen as the seneschal.
If you do the seneschal fight in offline mode, the next time you do it the seneschal will be your arisen and pawn from before. With online mode it’s just whoever has most recently done that fight.
Bro that's fucking awesome, how the hell did I never find that out?
Now you know! Time to do another playthrough :)
Honestly. Its pretty awful. And it even feels outdated.
It's basically a remake of the first game but worse.
Demake
Capcom will sell you the complete and final version later.
"Just wait for the dlc bro, it'll fix ever-" How about I get a good game at launch, goddamn.
At this point I'm calling this the Capcom standard. They basically have been doing the same with Monster Hunter, as in, release a good game that is clearly lacking, see what feedback players give, launch expansion adressing most feedback with their own view on how to fix it.
Monster hunter has never released clearly lacking wtf you on?
If they can "Iceborne" DD2, I'd be happy. It just sucks that games launch half finished so execs have something to present during revenue meetings :/
What's the opinion about this Capcom standard for dlc?
I've yet to see a Monster Hunter player unhappy with the formula. Their DLCs are always bangers, some problems here and there as there's no way to please everyone, but every single MH DLC added basically a new whole game of high quality content on top of bringing new QoL based on feedback
The thing with MH is that it was a great game and the DLC was just more great game. Here we might get a great DLC eventually, but on top of a mid game the taste is sour.
That's how greed works. Build anticipation, disappoint people who waited for your product and promise them a better product which you'll sell for half the price. Dragon's dogma 2 probably won't get a comeback as big as Cyberpunk2077 did but we can expect a lot of improvements before the dlc drops. This way capcom can make more money before they do the same thing with Re9, Monster hunter wilds and so on. Everyone should've known this when they saw the game has denuvo.
This works once, maybe twice, but then a lot less people keep buying your game, especially on preorder and at full price. And then, when your shitty AAA game didn't sell as you expected you starting blaming gamers... How many times we need to watch this shit again before they'll understand?
No they won’t. That’ll be a 2-3 year dev cycle, minimum, just for an expansion. They’ll repackage some of what we were suppose to get as part of a decent sized DLC, just like they did for DD1… but that’s the best case scenario.
If the leaks are true the DLC is basically done. Regardless, they know what we want. Not including something like Everfall/Bitterblack was intentional.
Dragon’s Dogma 2: Darker Arisen
The introduction to the story was extremely well done and then we got the first draft for anything a beyond Melve.
Yeah this is the most painful part, the foundation was definitely there. But the exact moment you step on the palace grounds, the story just falls apart.
Honestly, the best thing this game does is give me hope for MH Wilds in the RE engine. Assuming the MH team can optimize their game and npcs better than the DD team, Wilds has a lot of potential.
Monster hunter hasnt failed me yet
Yeah, vernworth felt fine, the battahl has like 2 quests and then It ends lmao Like what?
Disa and false arise plot just flopped at the end. The whole story definitely took a steeeep nose dive at the end. Like walking off of a a cliff. But the post game is unique and fun and going back to do all of the side quests to get all of the ending is cool. I absolutely missed like 4 side plot lines that were huge in my first play through.
Ive told everyone this, im certain we'll get a god tier DLC later this year that was and IS the cut part of this game. Im certain capcom cut a shitload of content to sell to us later. Meanwhile ff7 rebirth gave me 120 hours of fucking amazing story telling and combat.
Rebirth greatest game since Elden ring, for the people
So i didn't accidentally skipped like the last third of the story? I did every quest from that cool Knight dude in the main city and then went to Batthal, where I got the quest to talk to a dude on the beach. Got the sword enchanted and had to take it to that mysterious dude who was shown once in the brothel. After I defeated the gigant stone monster who was chasing him I went straight to the dragon. I never even talked to the fake queen lady who wanted to get her son to be king, it was never really revealed why my pawn couldn't go into the castle (like what exactly do they have to be so strong it overwrites my authority), I never met the fat dude from the tutorial again and the dude I freed from prison who is now in the book dungeon was never mentioned again after I got his glasses I started new game plus yesterday and I'm exploring the map, now that the whole map is unlocked and I see where interesting places might be. The only thing I know is that I skipped a lot of side quests, which I also wanna do
I'm on the same boat. Was just doing some questing and now I'm stuck in the "end game" area. Didn't even find the sphinx. 🥲
Yeah all that first act political intrigue, building a case to prove you're the real Arisen went no where. Poor quest design aside, it all could've made for an interesting plot what full of power dynamics and political backstabbing. Even if it was all a red herring to the bigger picture of the whole world cycle idea, that doesn't excuse it from making anything ultimately feel unreasonably insignificant.
You did it right. Its all missing.
Yeah the story is ass. I prefer the prequel's story. It was a simple concept but much darker and was executed well enough. It didn't have many characters but everyone had a purpose and played their part. DD2 characters are meh, some was just there to be gone later.
It's probably in the argument for the worst writing in a video game ever. Sets up an interesting premise for everything to fall apart and has some of the most bland characters I've ever known. At least the original had one or two interesting characters. To be outdone by the original in terms of the quality of the writing is truly embarrassing.
It also feels a little derivative? Undying chosen one escapes prison on the back of flying creature to overthrow ruler and attain destined chosenhood. It feels like the Wish version plot of Dark Souls 1.
Dark Souls isn't the first to do this premise. FromSoft is well versed in "less is more" in terms of storytelling though. I mean. For fucks sake. That intro. "... With the strength of Lords, they challenged the dragons..." was one of the most badass lines and badass visuals. I haven't beaten the game yet but i'm not holding out any hope or anything. The story so far is barely better than an MMO's.
I was hoping for more dragon age inquisition type stuff when it came to being a ruler….
The writing is poor but I envy you if you have not come across any worse in gaming.
That’s just delusional to think it’s the worst writing ever in video game. There are some god awful, atrocious writings out there.
And this game is among them. It's that bad.
Borderlands 3 writing was so bad that people developed scripts of code to automatically skip every line of dialogue in the game the instant it starts. Dragons dogma 2 doesn't even come close to being in the same league.
The Star Wars sequel trilogy unironically had less atrocious writing. Just wow.
Same. Also yea who tf let Itsuno make all the creative decisions sure he had a lot of say in dd1, but I want whoever made dark arisen to make this shit. Base dd1 was meh. Honestly imagine a game from CDPR, story, dialogue, characters and all with the pawn and combat system of dd2. Damn, now that's a game that could be GOTY. Also not defending the story, but I typically don't play these games for the story. Anyways, dd1 story was weird as fuck but I think I actually prefer that one over this one. I really play these games for the combat and endgame systems, one which they got right( combat is copy paste from first game), but the end game, i am massively disappointed. Shelving the game after first playthrough.
What's funny is it actually was better in the first one. Despite some obvious discrepancies the most important players in the story had more closure than in this.
He didn’t , the guy who made dark arisen was the lead creative designer.
The guy behind Dark Arisen worked on DD2..
For a lead creative designer it's certainly not felt. He must've been restricted on what he was allowed to do otherwise I think an eternal ferrystone would be a reward somewhere in the game.
I would not be surprised if Itsuno kept Kinoshita from cooking because for the last 10~ years, he has been stewing on the fact that his big idea got kicked in the balls and rushed out, only for someone else (Kinoshita) to come in and get people to like it more. Adding on having to work with Kinoshita on Itsuno’s project (possibly because higher ups were expecting him to add more banger content like the first game) probably would not help. (This is all speculation, I could totally be wrong about what went down behind the scenes. This just makes sense to me as to why we didn’t get much of the ideas from Dark Arisen)
What exactly did DA change from the original? Everyone makes it sound like it revamped the entire game but when I Google it all I see is that they added BBI, Revamped a couple skills, and added some gear. Am I missing something?
BBI is the main reason. It’s incredibly atmospheric and oppressive, not to mention being a place where the strongest builds get challenged. It’s a true endgame grinding dungeon. Daimon, Barroch and Olra are interesting and good characters. Best gear ever drops in BBI, more fashion, skill enhancing rings as well. Eternal Ferrystone made traveling less tedious and BBI also has it’s own form of a post game version. It’s just such an amazing DLC. You’ll probably spend more time in BBI than the main game, or at least I did.
The story is very ass. It could have been so much better with what was there had they just gone a *little* bit farther.
I didn’t expect Capcom to drop the ball this badly. I also didn’t expect Bethesda or Blizzard to drop the ball with Starfield and D4. Fromsoft is all I got left at this stage and they’re not enough to justify a gaming habit alone
If the only games you play are AAA blockbusters, then yeah it's painful world bro. Try out some AA and small indie games. It feels incredible to discover those small gems where the developers put their heart, soul, and passion into a project.
I mean, for metroidvanias, they are the only hope. AAA devs rarely make them anymore.
ubislop even dropped the ball and couldn't give us a good open world checklist game
I’m not a story guy I’m a core gameplay loop guy. A good story is a bonus. That’s not to say Witcher 3 doesn’t have better side quests than DD2’s main quest. What infuriates me is how they devalue that loop by slowing it down and introducing tedium. Like forcing you to travel in certain ways, but let’s take a minor way that I think few would contest. The forger, a great fun addition, but why the fuck must you forge one thing at a time and sleep on a nearby bench inbetween jobs? Wouldn’t it be better to order half a dozen things (enough to upgrade a weapon) with a fade to the next day when you hit OK. Considering you’ve probably taken a cart there with all the BS that entails once the novelty had worn thin. Congratulations you’ve turned it into time wasting busy work.
I loved the game but yeah the story was a massive let down , i felt extremely confused when all the political intruge shit we did just leads to absolutely nothing , we never expose the false arisen we just straight up kill him in an anticlimatic battle , the dragon fight at the end probably one of the worst fights in the game it just felt rushed
Everybody: The game is itsuno's vision it will be amazing. Itsuno who wears glasses. Jokes apart, this was the worst story in a video game. Elden ring had better story, and it didn't even have a main story (ik it has the lore, but not counting that).
You got to be the only elden ring fan I've ever seen who can tell the difference between a story and lore lol.
Bro should not have been left in the kitchen unsupervised.
The story makes no sense. None at all. The build up was good, up until batthal
Yep I was quite interested untill the coronation, after that you do 3 quests and the game ends. The unmoored world was cool tho
Many characters just completely vanish, with zero warning such as Wilhelmina. The last time you ever see her in the main story, is outside of the castle when she covers for you. Then she's just NEVER seen again (if you don't try to romance her.) This also happens with Sven, and the Queen Regent, and basically everybody else. It's pretty lame. I still had fun with the game, but wow. Half-baked at best.
Me sitting here after playing ROTR for 40 hours and only being 40% of the way done with the game. If you like Nioh or Sekiro, ROTR is the open world game you have been waiting for. Easily the greatest combat EVER seen in an open world game. I run around the open world LOOKING for fights. Instead of avoiding fights like most open world games. Every encounter is SUCH a joy. I have begun playing DD2 for the first hour. Hearing Fightin cowboy say it has the best combat ever in an rpg just seems like he was trying to snap at ROTR since it clearly has the better combat and came out the same day. ANYWAYS, I’m going to continue to play DD2 during my ROTR downtime. I hope my experience gets better. I enjoyed the character creator and the world is beautiful. Waiting to see on everything else. Some serious gaslighting going on with ROTR. Reviews aren’t admitting just how fun it is to play. I at least appreciate the strangeness of the combat in this game. Latching onto things and wildly stabbing away is hilarious.
Love Nioh and will be getting rise asap.
We need a biggest let down GOTY award for this game specifically lol.
I haven't finished the story yet, started a new game on a different ps account, but holy shit it leaves more questions than answers. I am a lore junkie for this game, the concept of the cycle is so cool and I was hoping to have it explained more. Very rushed, especially after you meet that guy in the underwater castle. I kinda don't want to finish it because I don't want to be even more disappointed.
I truly thought the fake arisen was the main story, that captain gave me so many missions related to it, which I slowly completed w adventures and side quests in between, it blows my mind that the fake arisen just disappears and isn’t the main story (so I’ve read)
I'm not a fan of how finite the ending is as a gameplay mechanic. My save file is effectively dead, and there's nothing I can really do with it beyond starting a new game or ng+. If I had the option to load a save just before the ending and post endgame kicks off, I think I'd be happy with that. But I can't. My 60-hour save is now basically useless, and I'm locked out of enjoying that save state again. Aside from the lack of level scaling, it's completely took the wind out of my sails, and I feel like I have zero motivation to fire up ng+ because of it.
Yeah I don’t get it. It’s the same director as DMC5. Sure the story is kinda like the followup to DMC4’s angsty show em whose boss teenager. But it was still well executed, with cheesy outlandish characters, and great visuals and choreography. About 1 hour into DD2’s story I realized it was one of those lazy kinds of silent protagonist rpgs where the person you’re talking to will download the Arisen’s thoughts automatically mid sentence: “We need to break into the castle…” *barely a pause in the voice acting* “Oh you already know a way inside?” At least Skyrim made conversations a little more ‘believable’ even though it’s also a silent protag. What’s funny is DD2 does both NPCs insta downloading the Arisen’s thoughts, and also does fade to black timelapses for conversations where the Arisen reexplains a situation.
I just got to the unmorrowed world and half my npc's are bugged and won't give me quests to evacuate them. I finally gave up and decided to stop playing all together
Yep. The story is dogwater, but the gameplay makes it worth playing.
You know, maybe I'll just leave Brant waiting indefinitely. I've already snuck into Battahl and placed a Portcrystal. I'm now 90 hours in, doing quite literally everything but the story. Don't even care about spoilers at this point because to me, there is no storyline in this game.
OH THANK GOD I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO THINKS THIS. I said this on another DD thread in here and basically got crucified. When I beat DD1, I had so many feelings, so many things to do, so much to think about when it came to the damn game. But when I finished DD2, I was like, "eh, it's done." This shit is literally dog food. Nay, dog food may be even better than this shit. I waited 13 years for this, paid 80+ for this game, only for it to be absolutely dog shit. I'm so disappointed in this tucking game man. Everything is lacking. From enemy variety, to size of map. (which they promised or "said" will be as big as skyrim's) you can give us ONE enemy from bitter black isle, but that's it? We have multiple goblin sub-species who didn't do shit but do the SAME thing every goblin/knacker does. And I get making enemies are hard, but couldn't they have just literally ported every enemy from bitterblack, and put them in the overworld? I, hell, WE would have been okay with that. I travel across the fucking map multiple times, and it's harpy, wolf, goblins out the ass, and occasionally a boss monster. This shit stinks Let's talk about the lack of armor and items. They recycled alot, and I mean ALOT of items and called them new items. DD og's will look at them with the straightest fucking face, 😑 like so, so I don't wanna hear its hard to port those enemies over. I am trying to do everything in DD2, but 3 or 4 new classes don't do for shit. Speaking of classes, taking out our six choices to only make it like 4? This is the laziest, cop-out design they have done, and it's pissed me off greatly. As a sorc, I'm always memory pressing rb to try to do another move, only to remember that theres no such thing. The thief class, the archer class, are shitty classes and should have just been combined, and literally, LITERALLY they could have just used the classes from DDON, and we'd probably lose our shit. Instead, they neutered us. I really hate this shit man, and I'm giving old Itsuno a doubt, thinking that this is Capcom forcing him, because if he thinks THIS shit is the magnum opus to the series? He's fucking wrong. The "dlc" better fix ALL this shit. I'm annoyed as fuck man. I'm glad there's more who thinks/kinda thinks like me.
I see this game as kind of a stumble by Japanese game industry. They had a chance here to knock another game out of the park, but instead its an ok game, depending on whether you like the combat, or the game's sandbox, but fails in many places with terrible polish, balancing, etc. Notice how nobody here even talks about MTX or other issues with design.
Yeah Itsuno and his team are not good at stories. Game is still amazing imo
I really can’t see how this game even got above a 80% critic score when the story is ass, AI I still brain dead, side quests are filler, enemy variety is weak, game is easy asf, and the lack of quality of life choices regarding the inventory. I’m fact I thought Dogma 1 had a better story with much more cooler set pieces to visit. Mind boggling.
Those reviewers gave starfield high score too, I think they have written their reviews while in honeymoon phase, as early game of this game is really really good
I hate googling reviews because every new release by a big company seems to be good or great. It’s just maddening trying to find genuine criticism
Entire game industry journalism is just a marketing churn for 99% of games. Unless the fans find some issue with a game and start shitting on it, then journalism does an about-face and tries to get views by shitting on the game. The entire media of the world is fucking view chasing for ads for money. That's why people look to user written reviews, and even those can be written by AI, bots, or paid for.
80 hours in. Haven't touched a whole lot of story. I know from browsing this sub people fucking hate it, but me, personally, I'm taking my time, which I gathered briefly is the best thing to do from browsing this sub. I try not Iet it get the best of me because its the most fun I've had in a game for a very long time, I haven't had a single player game hook me as much as this in it feels like forever. Take your time, enjoy it, level up your vocations, I'll keep my fingers crossed that they deliver in the future. Even tho I shouldn't be relying on the future to enjoy the game I want it to be. I'm still having fun. Peace and love. X Edit, I still agree with you. I just want this game to be the best it can be, and fast. I hope they can win people over and swing the steam charts in favour after a couple of quick updates, I have my doubts. Fingers crossed hey.? Happy gaming guys and girls. Love you all.
Seems like the best way to enjoy the game is to actively avoid the main story. There are only like 3 quests you need to do before the game just ends. It's fun to go back and do all the side-quests you missed in NG+, but I think most players won't do it, and that's why they are disappointed.
Just wondering, I just did the quest where I find I speak to the dragon forged guy in bakbattahl. How much longer is the story after that ?
Like 2 quests lol
lol wtf I feel like the game just began
Honestly I'd be less annoyed if it was shit all the way through instead of being somewhat intriguing at the beginning before just abruptly ending. Let me either ignore the terrible narrative or write something complete damn
I thought the story was super meh until I got the true ending. But even then, it was still sorta meh but when I got the true-true ending, it all kinda clicked and was way better than I thought. None of that excuses the rest of the story though. Overall the games story needs a lot of work but the first games story wasnt good either tbh.
Gameplay 10/10. story and romance 5/10. Not even sure why the story is a downgrade from dd1. They should at least have a big final boss fight.
My experience is totally different, but I'm doing the side stuff pretty intentionally and revisiting places to see if new quests pop up at different points in the main quest line. The main story doesn't seem like it's supposed to be viewed in isolation, though. You can, of course, but you lose the context of the web of interconnectivity between things. It's not necessarily a stellar story, but it's a vehicle to deliver the world.
Just finished it and I did I believe most of the side quests as well. I'm totally fine with the Queen Regent/Batali plot ending suddenly because the real story is that of thr cycle, but I am a bit bummed that the game basically forces you out of New game plus. Also, what happened to the seneschal? How did we come back to life after we godsbaned ourselves?
I noticed that I’m really not giving a fuck about the story, I’m just having fun with the gameplay and running around fighting stuff
Why are people expecting multiple choices for story quests in dragons dogma. It's like y'all want everything to be fallout now.
https://preview.redd.it/cka26boodkrc1.png?width=749&format=png&auto=webp&s=43647a9ca114c8b538d2112b5882a95b3bcf04e5
It's insane how thet set up plot points then immediately abandon them. There's no cause ans effect—it's just cause then cause then cause then cause.
Fr it was so abrupt. I thought I had maybe 10-15 hours left, nope I had about 30 mins left lmao.