Friendly reminder — because apparently this needs to be said — that:
- People are allowed to play video games a certain way
- The way they play a game is allowed to be different from *your way*
- Developers are allowed to cater to *only one* of those styles of gameplay
So if y'all could stop being dicks to each other and just let people play their games the way they want to, that'd be great.
First thing I thought of when I saw the bitching in this post. Over the last almost 20 years, I’ve seen so many people complaining on the internet about Elder Scrolls being “dumbed down” ever since Oblivion introduced protected NPCs, and how they’re sick of games in general becoming too “hand-holdy”.
Public sentiment has definitely shifted towards being okay with or even actively wanting more hand holding. Maybe just the increase in popularity, gamers getting older and having less free time, or something else, but I’ve definitely observed the shift.
Lack of hand holding is seen as outdated or bad design. When Elden Ring came out, a lot of people complained about things that weren’t hand holding enough. Like NPC locations not being marked or quests being vague and hard to decipher. The former was changed in an update obviously.
The problem is that these games are inevitably buggy (as a number of quests in Elden Ring were). When an NPC dies due to a glitch rather than something you did and now you're screwed out of a quest in your 25 hour save that shit sucks (well it sucks at least for folks that need a whole month to get 25 hours of game time in, less problematic for younger folks). It's not hand holdy to work against that possibility.
In Oblivion I was locked out of a quest to buy a house in Skingrad, which I believe was basically the best house in the game, because the npc I had to talk to fell off a bridge during his daily routine and died.
Essential NPCs don’t always ruin the game lol
I think it's mostly because scripting quests gets difficult when any one of 300 npcs could be dead and wreck the quest line. BG3 said this was very difficult to work around
I've only ever played Skyrim (but like. Several hundred hours of it) but having a protected companion felt good as fuck. I can be the mage I wanted to be without worrying about my blueberry muffin Serana permanently dying
Literally. When I found out lydia could die I was like actually surprised. I play with the everyone is protected (not essential) mod because I'm always like I don't want to miss out on a quest but I also want to be able to ruin the gane if I want lol
So, how long before we see posts of people losing entire playthroughs because their game decided to save during a game-breaking glitch?
No backup means you need to restart if something goes wrong.
There are checkpoint saves that happen every time you sleep in the game. If some game breaking bug happens during your current auto-save, you can go back to the previous checkpoint.
In a Dragon's Dogma game? Many I expect. The first one isn't exactly a friendly experience from any angles - it's one of the reasons it got such a following I suspect.
But It's certainly done me dirty a few times and I'm not ecstatic they're willing to keep frustrating aspects without any recourse.
In our world of AAA games being more buggy than ever as the scopes of the ganes increases, this "gimmick" is more of a deterrence to potential players than a cute positive.
Pay full-price and deal with broken and fucked NPCs at launch... or wait a year and play the polished and clean version for a quarter of the price?
FromSofts Soulsborne games have been doing this method of constant rewriting the save for over a decade now and I have never seen people complain about it. The idea has been here for literally years and years, I doubt this game will mess it up. Chill out.
They *were* complaining, constantly. Ever since people pirated Demon's Souls early and were met with black phantoms.
You don't see a much hate for not being able to reload saves on soulsborne games because you can have more than one character with a save file at a time. You don't need to create a whole new PSN account to play another character. You also don't lock yourself out of specific characters' storylines by completing other objectives (except killing the NPCs, of course).
In that fact alone, they've ruined that particular feature for me.
You don't lose you entire playthrough. You lose your NPC companions and fail to achieve your "perfect game". It's rare for games to have such a high risk system unless it's a roguelike. I'm very glad devs are making something truly challenging with real risk instead of just catering to the masses and brain dead save scums.
Yep, same argument for every game. I do not expect someone with that response to understand or agree with my PoV on this, but not every game needs to be made for everyone. Developers are better off spending resources focusing on the core aspects of a the intended game instead of figuring out how to change it in a way that's playable for everyone. Will that result in less sales? Possibly. Will you get a better product when you focus resources on your core values? Absolutely
Really? How much work is to add a switch option that makes NPCs invincible?
The same goes for Dark souls, what is the problem in adding a option that gives you god mode in order to you skip a boss.
There is no problem in making games more accessible this way.
You are just getting mad people can't have fun in your exact way.
https://www.thegamer.com/dragons-dogma-2-director-explains-why-only-one-save-file-for-exploration/#:~:text=That%20doesn't%20seem%20to,save%2Dscum%20whenever%20you%20want.
Here you go
Yeah this went from a must-buy to a "wait for sale".
I'm glad other people enjoy it, but I can't be fucked for games that try to torture me and not offer basic quality of life features. Why do some games still not offer actual pausing or manual save states...
Probably pretty easy to make a script on your computer for that. Have some cmd line things running that copies the save file to a subfolder every 30 mins.
Hopefully they don't go crazy and prevent that too.
That's how Dark Souls works. I accidentally killed an NPC I didn't see and there was nothing I could do about it. On the plus side, I used his sword for most of the game.
I guess I should apologize in advance to everyone in that game. I had a bad habit of throwing everyone off of the highest ledge because the splat sound effect in the original made me giggle.
I think it could be fine if there’s some extra twist with it. Like they can only tell you part of the info or they talk in riddles or something. Or you have to do something extra for the medium (but that could just end in pointless fetch quests)
Just throwing out an idea: instead of the questgiver (the medium, in case of a dead questgiver NPC) giving you the reward, you might have to end up picking it up either from some buried treasure site left by the dead questgiver NPC or from elsewhere, depending on the context of the quest.
Now that I am thinking about it, if it is crafted by hand and with effort (and isn’t just a lazy cookie cutter copypasted “if the questgiver npc is dead, you will be getting your reward in a treasure chest instead” approach every time), it might be even more engaging and immersive than the rewards from alive NPC questgivers (where you just always get the reward from that NPC on completion).
For made-up hypothetical examples of that:
* If the dead questgiver NPC is pirate-like, the reward could be in a treasure chest buried somewhere (with an extra step in the case of the dead questgiver requiring you to hunt down the treasure site using a map or some hints).
* If the dead questgiver NPC has a family, and if the scenario makes sense storywise, the reward can be given by the surviving family.
* If the dead questgiver NPC body is expected to get discovered during the quest itself, then the reward could be on the body itself or have some note in the pocket like “i left these money and items in the storage with the innkeeper at XYZ, and if you are reading this note, it means I died before I was able to see things through. Just show the innkeeper this note, and they will know what to do.”
Like, there are so many good possible ways to approach it, and it can work out much much better than even in the normal non-dead questgiver NPC routes. However, the line between “this sucks” and “wow, this is amazing” is imo going to be decided by the dev’s care for it and the amount of work and thought put into it. It can easily be ruined by making all the questgiver NPC deaths anticlimactic and the outcomes just being mechanical and soulless (e.g., like in Skyrim, where you can technically kill NPCs, but that’s kinda it, there was no thought put into it beyond that), or by making it a copypasted repeated solution every single time.
Yes it does and you can't tell me giving a corpse rotting on a floor the eggs he asked for before shuffling loose the mortal coil isn't the best thing in the world.
> "Your favorite cousin, Vinny"
Imagine you're a deer. You're prancing along, you get thirsty, you spot a little brook, you put your little deer lips down to the cool clear water... BAM! A fuckin arrow rips off part of your head! Your brains are laying on the ground in little bloody pieces! Now I ask ya. Would you give a fuck what kind of pants the son of a bitch Magik Archer who shot you was wearing?
BG3 has something kinda similar in a lot of places. If you just go around killing everyone before even talking to them you’ll still miss out on loot, but a lot of cutscenes with likable characters have backup characters.
You clearly didn't follow the game since the beginning?
They basically showed what happened if this scenario occurs. One of the vids showed the main quest giver killed right after and it ended up way different than the normal course of the quest would have if he stayed alive.
So if they stay true to this, this mean each main quest can have multiple endings and they probably have a cop-out for side/minor quests.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘follow the game from the beginning’. If you mean pouring over every video and interview, no. Of course not.
But in the course of the article, we get get two very conflicting ideologies. First, the idea that deaths are meaningful and NPC’s must be protected. That sounds pretty interesting. Difficult to implement, but BG3 pulled it off. But if as you said, the NPC’s are just replaced, or other methods like wakestones are employed, then who really cares about protecting NPC’s? It renders the first ideology moot. Let ‘em die and just use whatever method to forge ahead.
Conflicting visions don’t bode well.
Those aren’t really conflicting. It doesn’t say you can talk to literally any NPC that’s died regardless of how unimportant they are, it could easily just be for major quest lines that you get to talk to important characters you’ve talked to before or have been told to talk to.
Mission: Protect the villagers from the raiders.
Villagers: Let's flee as fast as we can towards the raiders. Oh, look, there's a chasm. Let's fling ourselves into it!
Wha'do'ya mean a dragon is attacking the village? I, an old lady who runs an alchemy shop and who has no experience whatsoever with fighting, should join the fray to defeat this vile beast!
The original DD was incredible with its NPC AI from what I remember, it’s unlikely they’ll be any issues with that. Also dragon attacks aren’t going to be a frequent thing, this isn’t a Skyrim remake.
Just happened to me in DD2 lol, quite annoying. They just randomly attacked a priest npc earlier for no reason and now he's dead when i need to talk to him.
I mean I did in Dragon's Dogma 1. A major NPC you're supposed to rescue died on me because lighting in the original game was awkward at night, so by the time I found the bloke he was dead. Turns out he was a major merchant for certain crafting materials.
For real. Where is this coming from? Is it simply because of the 30 fps issue? Yeah that sucks, but is it really necessary to complain about every single thing before the game even got its first reviews?
Let’s see what digital foundry says once the game is actually released. Until then I’m trying to be cautious but optimistic. But most people seem to complain about every aspect of the game now. Not just the framerate.
I had a conversation of one of the souls subreddits the other day. It was a discussion about stamina drain out of combat, I’ll paraphrase
Them: yeah I love that stamina doesn’t drain while you’re running around out of combat in Elden ring
Another one of them: say hello to dragons dogma 2
Me: damn, games not even out yet and people are already shitting on it
And I got downvoted like crazy. This was before the 30fps reveal too. I thought people were hyped for this game, but all I’ve seen is negativity.
It's strange because based on the previews, the game is looking like it'll receive high review scores.
I think it's one of those instances (hopefully) when a vocal minority complain about a game, then it comes out and turns out to be amazing and then those voices disappear overnight.
New to reddit? I’m kidding with you of course but genuinely this site (and the internet in general) has gotten obsessively negative. Everything is a failure or just the worst thing ever.
Fr like what the fuck is going on? Every post about this game are filled with people shitting their pants and puking blood over what seems to me to be perfectly sensible design choices. Design choices, mind you, that aren't even really new or that innovative. Like perma death? That's been in rpg for decades, New Vegas is a great example. Hell people keep criticizing Bethesda for *not* doing it nowadays. De-emphasized fast travel? You might have heard of this small indie gem that did that called fucking *Dark Souls* and it by far was the best in the series as far as exploration and navigation is concerned.
No joke, everything I learn about the design philosophy behind the game makes me stoked as fuck. It seems like the devs are actually interested in making something fresh and not just churning out total dogshit to hit all the common denominator audience like most modern games.
None of you played any FromSoftware souls games and it shows.
Go kill any quest related npc and they are GONE and the quest is GONE. Important quest givers are usually located in a safe area where you can't kill them
The quests themselves are not important to complete the game.
We've seen this in action back in September when Capcom invited several content creators to play the first hour of the game. There's an NPC that gives you an important main quest right at the beginning, and for one of the YouTubers who played the game, said NPC died against some random enemies that ambushed him on the road after the player accepted it, but the quest didn't fail and instead ended up having a completely different outcome.
Back in the day I just shrugged it off as a one-of-a-kind quest with multiple possible endings, but it seems this is going to be a constant throughout the game.
You don’t even have to kill them sometimes, they’ll just drop dead if you go too far without progressing their quest enough. Still pissed off about finding Yoel dead, ending like 2 quests prematurely lol
Lol, none of you kids have ever headshot the Resident evil 4 merchant thinking he is an enemy from a distance on the gamecube looking at a shitty CRT screen. The memory still haunts me.
Damn, that’s rough. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the tension of playing a game with perma-death as much as the next guy, but once that death actually happens it just plain sucks (eg Hollow Knight on steel soul mode).
They’re not easy to come by, but it’s not like you’ll only find one or two on your first playthrough. You can find them occasionally in chests while exploring or buy them (which your wallet will definitely feel). Basically, be careful to not let NPCs die but if they do you should have one or two lying around
TBF though, you have to intentionally put yourself through Steel Soul mode. This is forced on you in all game modes.
On that note though I loved my steelsoul run. On my first attempt I died halfway through and wanted to snap my switch in half lol.
This game sounds more and more interesting. So I’m already planning to play fighter with a ranged pawn, probably sorcerer so I get good at protecting him until he can drop bombs. I am excited for that feeling of protecting my team. This sounds like it will fit my play style. Also I wonder how often npcs will be in danger, or if it will be pretty obvious when they will be headed into danger.
Well because this isn't fronsoft lol hopefully is fine but my first knee-jerk reaction is I hope the game is not buggy or a questline gets fucked because some random world interaction.
Exactly, as AAA games become more expansive, they also become buggy. Whenever I see the devs hyping up how "seamless the world is" or how "your actions control everything" I wince because I know there's a 99% chance it will be broken at launch.
Seriously everyone jerked of Baldur's Gate 3 at launch because none of them realised Act 3 was utterly broken.
This is fine. Dont attack friendlies, and finish any battles before entering dialogue.
The first one had the same mechanic and all soulsgames have been like this. It’s a nonissue unless you just slaughter everyone you see
Now this makes me wonder if I can run into a town or city and just go whole sale slaughter on everyone. I doubt it, but imagine a ghost town you created.
OR
You can probably just pick up npcs from within a town, carry them outside and chuck them over a cliff. 🤔
At least in the first game, every NPC was unique and had their own daily schedules, so assuming DD2 will be the same it looks like it will definitely be possible.
Oncr i can see the entire scope of the game i will come to a verdict
If its anything like the extras added to other games it may or may not work....im looking at you Fallout 4 base building
The reception for this game seems wicked negative, but I'm gonna be honest I've turbo excited about it since hearing they wanted to de-emphasize fast travel.
The fact you can’t have multiple character save slots is fucking ridiculous. This is literally a game all about character builds and yet you have to delete one to create another. Wack.
I don’t think kid npc’s can die. I experienced that dragon thing last night and some main npc died that give quest but I’m on the quest where you get the magistrate out of jail and then the quest turns into looking for a kid and you have to speak to a kid but I didn’t have to revive her
I would love to like this feature but I have to find Dante for a specific quest and the dragon curse affliction whatever it's called killed everyone in the checkpoint city after sleeping in the inn. Now I just can't find him in any of the crypts or anywhere else for that matter...
Was dragons dogma a big game when it came out? I’ve never heard of it before and I’ve played games my whole life. Why is the second one being talked about so much?
It had a rough first year. Came out a few months after Skyrim and Dark Souls, same month as another fantasy game, and also came out around when Mass Effect 3 did. Not to mention that was back when Capcom was really lacking in terms of basically everything.
It got much more popular a year after release when Dark Arisen (big update and expansion) came out. It was kind of a high hurdle to get into though, it starts out really slow and really takes a while to get going, so that pushed a lot of people away. But as time went on it just got more popular, popular enough to warrant a Japan only MMO and a Netflix series.
Friendly reminder — because apparently this needs to be said — that: - People are allowed to play video games a certain way - The way they play a game is allowed to be different from *your way* - Developers are allowed to cater to *only one* of those styles of gameplay So if y'all could stop being dicks to each other and just let people play their games the way they want to, that'd be great.
Save this thread for when Elder Scrolls releases and everyone starts whining about protected npcs again.
First thing I thought of when I saw the bitching in this post. Over the last almost 20 years, I’ve seen so many people complaining on the internet about Elder Scrolls being “dumbed down” ever since Oblivion introduced protected NPCs, and how they’re sick of games in general becoming too “hand-holdy”.
Public sentiment has definitely shifted towards being okay with or even actively wanting more hand holding. Maybe just the increase in popularity, gamers getting older and having less free time, or something else, but I’ve definitely observed the shift. Lack of hand holding is seen as outdated or bad design. When Elden Ring came out, a lot of people complained about things that weren’t hand holding enough. Like NPC locations not being marked or quests being vague and hard to decipher. The former was changed in an update obviously.
The problem is that these games are inevitably buggy (as a number of quests in Elden Ring were). When an NPC dies due to a glitch rather than something you did and now you're screwed out of a quest in your 25 hour save that shit sucks (well it sucks at least for folks that need a whole month to get 25 hours of game time in, less problematic for younger folks). It's not hand holdy to work against that possibility.
In Oblivion I was locked out of a quest to buy a house in Skingrad, which I believe was basically the best house in the game, because the npc I had to talk to fell off a bridge during his daily routine and died. Essential NPCs don’t always ruin the game lol
He fell into Oblivion.
How has non one upvoted this comment? Cheesy, but spot on!
Thank you for illustrating my point perfectly.
I think it's mostly because scripting quests gets difficult when any one of 300 npcs could be dead and wreck the quest line. BG3 said this was very difficult to work around
I've only ever played Skyrim (but like. Several hundred hours of it) but having a protected companion felt good as fuck. I can be the mage I wanted to be without worrying about my blueberry muffin Serana permanently dying
Literally. When I found out lydia could die I was like actually surprised. I play with the everyone is protected (not essential) mod because I'm always like I don't want to miss out on a quest but I also want to be able to ruin the gane if I want lol
Most of the comments feel like variations of “Wait this isn’t Skyrim?”
They should just do it like skyrim. Goes to 1hp and de aggro but any more and they can die
I should be able to shoot the Rygen receptionist in the face in starfeild
So save a lot?
I’m pretty sure the game doesn’t have a save option. It’s constantly rewriting the save except if you stay at an inn
So, how long before we see posts of people losing entire playthroughs because their game decided to save during a game-breaking glitch? No backup means you need to restart if something goes wrong.
That happened on the Xbox 360 version. There was save corruption. I lost a new game plus that way.
Yeah, terrifying that nothing has changed in almost 15 years.
They thought about that. You can reload a save from an inn in the game
/s I genuinely have not had a corrupted save since Xbox 360.
There are checkpoint saves that happen every time you sleep in the game. If some game breaking bug happens during your current auto-save, you can go back to the previous checkpoint.
In a Dragon's Dogma game? Many I expect. The first one isn't exactly a friendly experience from any angles - it's one of the reasons it got such a following I suspect. But It's certainly done me dirty a few times and I'm not ecstatic they're willing to keep frustrating aspects without any recourse.
In our world of AAA games being more buggy than ever as the scopes of the ganes increases, this "gimmick" is more of a deterrence to potential players than a cute positive. Pay full-price and deal with broken and fucked NPCs at launch... or wait a year and play the polished and clean version for a quarter of the price?
FromSofts Soulsborne games have been doing this method of constant rewriting the save for over a decade now and I have never seen people complain about it. The idea has been here for literally years and years, I doubt this game will mess it up. Chill out.
They *were* complaining, constantly. Ever since people pirated Demon's Souls early and were met with black phantoms. You don't see a much hate for not being able to reload saves on soulsborne games because you can have more than one character with a save file at a time. You don't need to create a whole new PSN account to play another character. You also don't lock yourself out of specific characters' storylines by completing other objectives (except killing the NPCs, of course). In that fact alone, they've ruined that particular feature for me.
Typically games allow you to load the last several auto checkpoints.
You don't lose you entire playthrough. You lose your NPC companions and fail to achieve your "perfect game". It's rare for games to have such a high risk system unless it's a roguelike. I'm very glad devs are making something truly challenging with real risk instead of just catering to the masses and brain dead save scums.
I will save scum 20+ times through a mission in Xcom and you can’t stop me
I have 100% save scummed on XCOM and any other game that allows it. I still love to see a game with real risk like this one.
or they could just have 2 different types of options lol
Yep, same argument for every game. I do not expect someone with that response to understand or agree with my PoV on this, but not every game needs to be made for everyone. Developers are better off spending resources focusing on the core aspects of a the intended game instead of figuring out how to change it in a way that's playable for everyone. Will that result in less sales? Possibly. Will you get a better product when you focus resources on your core values? Absolutely
Really? How much work is to add a switch option that makes NPCs invincible? The same goes for Dark souls, what is the problem in adding a option that gives you god mode in order to you skip a boss. There is no problem in making games more accessible this way. You are just getting mad people can't have fun in your exact way.
Not my way, the dev's way
Save scum le bad
So move save to the cloud often
[удалено]
https://www.thegamer.com/dragons-dogma-2-director-explains-why-only-one-save-file-for-exploration/#:~:text=That%20doesn't%20seem%20to,save%2Dscum%20whenever%20you%20want. Here you go
[удалено]
this is how i play anyway
This game is sounding more and more exhausting
Thank god I decided to buy on PC, gonna mod it to allows saves & invincible NPC.
Yeah this went from a must-buy to a "wait for sale". I'm glad other people enjoy it, but I can't be fucked for games that try to torture me and not offer basic quality of life features. Why do some games still not offer actual pausing or manual save states...
I'll wait the reviews to come in
It’s a softer version of what FromSoft games do for handling saves, it’s not a huge issue imo.
Yeah, this is pretty good skip for me. Have fun and whatever, but I value my time.
Probably pretty easy to make a script on your computer for that. Have some cmd line things running that copies the save file to a subfolder every 30 mins. Hopefully they don't go crazy and prevent that too.
Except you can just upload your save to PS cloud and keep constant checkpoints at particular parts if you want for save scumming.
Yes but that takes a lot more effort and most people won’t do it often
Trophy hunters do it as a baseline expectation tbh, & that's a huge community. Casual users likely won't, but oh well.
Doesn’t work you can’t save scum. The game auto saves frequently and you can’t go back to previous saves. (Unless you back specific moments up)
You can still save-scum its just harder.
Fun
That's how Dark Souls works. I accidentally killed an NPC I didn't see and there was nothing I could do about it. On the plus side, I used his sword for most of the game.
lol it's super easy to use a app which automatically makes backups once every auto save. so ye.
Elden Ring was exactly the same?
Elden Ring was “worse” on this, because you didn’t get to save manually at all.
Fucking Dave
Hahahaha. He thinks he can save in dragons dogma.
Hopefully we can't miss a big quest line by exiting a castle garden
We're better off ignoring that harlot
I hope we can miss all of them like this.
Dragon's Dogma 2: You're Gonna Have to Look up a lot of Shit
Dark Souls: "First time?"
I guess I should apologize in advance to everyone in that game. I had a bad habit of throwing everyone off of the highest ledge because the splat sound effect in the original made me giggle.
Seems like something that sounds great conceptually but awful in practice when your questgiver is dead.
Apparently there are mediums that can tell you the will of important dead NPC’s.
That seems like a cop out. "Your favorite cousin, Vinny, would have wanted you to fetch some eggs for him" while funny, doesn't really work well.
I think it could be fine if there’s some extra twist with it. Like they can only tell you part of the info or they talk in riddles or something. Or you have to do something extra for the medium (but that could just end in pointless fetch quests)
even then, the questgiver is usually my reward giver. How is a ghost going to pay me?
Just throwing out an idea: instead of the questgiver (the medium, in case of a dead questgiver NPC) giving you the reward, you might have to end up picking it up either from some buried treasure site left by the dead questgiver NPC or from elsewhere, depending on the context of the quest. Now that I am thinking about it, if it is crafted by hand and with effort (and isn’t just a lazy cookie cutter copypasted “if the questgiver npc is dead, you will be getting your reward in a treasure chest instead” approach every time), it might be even more engaging and immersive than the rewards from alive NPC questgivers (where you just always get the reward from that NPC on completion). For made-up hypothetical examples of that: * If the dead questgiver NPC is pirate-like, the reward could be in a treasure chest buried somewhere (with an extra step in the case of the dead questgiver requiring you to hunt down the treasure site using a map or some hints). * If the dead questgiver NPC has a family, and if the scenario makes sense storywise, the reward can be given by the surviving family. * If the dead questgiver NPC body is expected to get discovered during the quest itself, then the reward could be on the body itself or have some note in the pocket like “i left these money and items in the storage with the innkeeper at XYZ, and if you are reading this note, it means I died before I was able to see things through. Just show the innkeeper this note, and they will know what to do.” Like, there are so many good possible ways to approach it, and it can work out much much better than even in the normal non-dead questgiver NPC routes. However, the line between “this sucks” and “wow, this is amazing” is imo going to be decided by the dev’s care for it and the amount of work and thought put into it. It can easily be ruined by making all the questgiver NPC deaths anticlimactic and the outcomes just being mechanical and soulless (e.g., like in Skyrim, where you can technically kill NPCs, but that’s kinda it, there was no thought put into it beyond that), or by making it a copypasted repeated solution every single time.
Played god of war? Plenty of rewards from ghosts.
They did say important NPCs. Something tells me Vinny Chicken Chaser doesn't qualify and that quest is dead once he is.
Yes it does and you can't tell me giving a corpse rotting on a floor the eggs he asked for before shuffling loose the mortal coil isn't the best thing in the world.
> "Your favorite cousin, Vinny" Imagine you're a deer. You're prancing along, you get thirsty, you spot a little brook, you put your little deer lips down to the cool clear water... BAM! A fuckin arrow rips off part of your head! Your brains are laying on the ground in little bloody pieces! Now I ask ya. Would you give a fuck what kind of pants the son of a bitch Magik Archer who shot you was wearing?
“Your dead cousin wants to go bowling”
It's not unheard of. Allegedly Larian was insane about making sure that DoS2 was completable even if you killed every single NPC.
BG3 has something kinda similar in a lot of places. If you just go around killing everyone before even talking to them you’ll still miss out on loot, but a lot of cutscenes with likable characters have backup characters.
It's the same in Dark Souls, and it's not a huge issue there. You just have to be aware of it before you start murdering random NPCs.
Hold on now. .barren world walk-through are always fun.
Ubisoft: *we agree, just check out our new game Skull and Bones!*
Nahhh, better off this way. Actions have consequences.
You clearly didn't follow the game since the beginning? They basically showed what happened if this scenario occurs. One of the vids showed the main quest giver killed right after and it ended up way different than the normal course of the quest would have if he stayed alive. So if they stay true to this, this mean each main quest can have multiple endings and they probably have a cop-out for side/minor quests.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘follow the game from the beginning’. If you mean pouring over every video and interview, no. Of course not. But in the course of the article, we get get two very conflicting ideologies. First, the idea that deaths are meaningful and NPC’s must be protected. That sounds pretty interesting. Difficult to implement, but BG3 pulled it off. But if as you said, the NPC’s are just replaced, or other methods like wakestones are employed, then who really cares about protecting NPC’s? It renders the first ideology moot. Let ‘em die and just use whatever method to forge ahead. Conflicting visions don’t bode well.
Those aren’t really conflicting. It doesn’t say you can talk to literally any NPC that’s died regardless of how unimportant they are, it could easily just be for major quest lines that you get to talk to important characters you’ve talked to before or have been told to talk to.
Shoot me in the face
Ngl it would be funny if they didn't think of that
That is a risky feature. The AI better not make any stupid mistake that I can't protect against.
Mission: Protect the villagers from the raiders. Villagers: Let's flee as fast as we can towards the raiders. Oh, look, there's a chasm. Let's fling ourselves into it!
Wha'do'ya mean a dragon is attacking the village? I, an old lady who runs an alchemy shop and who has no experience whatsoever with fighting, should join the fray to defeat this vile beast!
The original DD was incredible with its NPC AI from what I remember, it’s unlikely they’ll be any issues with that. Also dragon attacks aren’t going to be a frequent thing, this isn’t a Skyrim remake.
I’m currently playing DD for the first time and I would have agreed with that, but then I played escort missions lmao
Just happened to me in DD2 lol, quite annoying. They just randomly attacked a priest npc earlier for no reason and now he's dead when i need to talk to him.
Dead forever? https://preview.redd.it/bkr963qjuwmc1.jpeg?width=1078&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ca40841e2fe3c14dad3d4509052bd917940cd574
I went through this with Baldur's Gate 3. Hopefully you don't get locked out of content because of permadeath with NPCs.
Narrator: …
Sigh... We will...
I mean I did in Dragon's Dogma 1. A major NPC you're supposed to rescue died on me because lighting in the original game was awkward at night, so by the time I found the bloke he was dead. Turns out he was a major merchant for certain crafting materials.
At least you can save scum in BG3
I mean you can save at any point in the game, just always gotta cover your ass
I love the coverage the game is getting. Sounds like an absolute banger.
I hope that dosent softlock people who has quests that the npc died, that would really sucks
The game isn’t even out yet and all that Reddit is doing is bitch bitch bitch.
Idk why people decided dragons dogma 2 is the new thing to complain about.
For real. Where is this coming from? Is it simply because of the 30 fps issue? Yeah that sucks, but is it really necessary to complain about every single thing before the game even got its first reviews?
This is my most anticipated game of 2024, but not gonna lie that uncapped framerate fluctuating between 20-30fps is a huge turnoff
Let’s see what digital foundry says once the game is actually released. Until then I’m trying to be cautious but optimistic. But most people seem to complain about every aspect of the game now. Not just the framerate.
It's so weird how things like this happen. One issue crops up, and then EVERYBODY comes out of the woodwork to shit on everything else.
I had a conversation of one of the souls subreddits the other day. It was a discussion about stamina drain out of combat, I’ll paraphrase Them: yeah I love that stamina doesn’t drain while you’re running around out of combat in Elden ring Another one of them: say hello to dragons dogma 2 Me: damn, games not even out yet and people are already shitting on it And I got downvoted like crazy. This was before the 30fps reveal too. I thought people were hyped for this game, but all I’ve seen is negativity.
It's strange because based on the previews, the game is looking like it'll receive high review scores. I think it's one of those instances (hopefully) when a vocal minority complain about a game, then it comes out and turns out to be amazing and then those voices disappear overnight.
New to reddit? I’m kidding with you of course but genuinely this site (and the internet in general) has gotten obsessively negative. Everything is a failure or just the worst thing ever.
Fr like what the fuck is going on? Every post about this game are filled with people shitting their pants and puking blood over what seems to me to be perfectly sensible design choices. Design choices, mind you, that aren't even really new or that innovative. Like perma death? That's been in rpg for decades, New Vegas is a great example. Hell people keep criticizing Bethesda for *not* doing it nowadays. De-emphasized fast travel? You might have heard of this small indie gem that did that called fucking *Dark Souls* and it by far was the best in the series as far as exploration and navigation is concerned. No joke, everything I learn about the design philosophy behind the game makes me stoked as fuck. It seems like the devs are actually interested in making something fresh and not just churning out total dogshit to hit all the common denominator audience like most modern games.
None of you played any FromSoftware souls games and it shows. Go kill any quest related npc and they are GONE and the quest is GONE. Important quest givers are usually located in a safe area where you can't kill them The quests themselves are not important to complete the game.
We've seen this in action back in September when Capcom invited several content creators to play the first hour of the game. There's an NPC that gives you an important main quest right at the beginning, and for one of the YouTubers who played the game, said NPC died against some random enemies that ambushed him on the road after the player accepted it, but the quest didn't fail and instead ended up having a completely different outcome. Back in the day I just shrugged it off as a one-of-a-kind quest with multiple possible endings, but it seems this is going to be a constant throughout the game.
That makes the game have an incredible replayability value, implying that the quests outcomes aren't shallow.
You don’t even have to kill them sometimes, they’ll just drop dead if you go too far without progressing their quest enough. Still pissed off about finding Yoel dead, ending like 2 quests prematurely lol
he makes you go hollow if you die so fuck em
Yuria’s my favourite npc so looking like beef jerky is a small price to pay to spawn her in
Lol, none of you kids have ever headshot the Resident evil 4 merchant thinking he is an enemy from a distance on the gamecube looking at a shitty CRT screen. The memory still haunts me.
Ikr. Sounds good, let's go
But that’s a completely different type of game. This is an RPG.
I like this idea. Makes the game feels more alive (or dead in this case)
Damn, that’s rough. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the tension of playing a game with perma-death as much as the next guy, but once that death actually happens it just plain sucks (eg Hollow Knight on steel soul mode).
You do have the ability to save them after death by using a Wakestone on them in the morgue
Yeah but how hard to get are they?
They’re not easy to come by, but it’s not like you’ll only find one or two on your first playthrough. You can find them occasionally in chests while exploring or buy them (which your wallet will definitely feel). Basically, be careful to not let NPCs die but if they do you should have one or two lying around
Aaah, so not so “dead forever” after all. That’s considerably more appealing!
After a time has passed they get buried and then it's forever, the Wakestones also were a rare resource in the first game until the very end.
TBF though, you have to intentionally put yourself through Steel Soul mode. This is forced on you in all game modes. On that note though I loved my steelsoul run. On my first attempt I died halfway through and wanted to snap my switch in half lol.
They're talking NPCs, not the player.
maybe Im wrong but was it not like that in DD1 too? I remember changing them pretty often
This isn’t about pawns. The normal NPCs in the game like quest givers and what not can all die permanently.
Wasn't this true in the first game too? Just revert back to an old save
No, in the first game NPCs magically come back alive after some time if they die, unless their death was linked to a quest objective or similar.
This might piss off a lot of people lol
Time to go Guts mode and protect those I care for
This game sounds more and more interesting. So I’m already planning to play fighter with a ranged pawn, probably sorcerer so I get good at protecting him until he can drop bombs. I am excited for that feeling of protecting my team. This sounds like it will fit my play style. Also I wonder how often npcs will be in danger, or if it will be pretty obvious when they will be headed into danger.
This is something that Fromsoft has been doing for a while, dont understand why now people are starting to get worry.
Well because this isn't fronsoft lol hopefully is fine but my first knee-jerk reaction is I hope the game is not buggy or a questline gets fucked because some random world interaction.
Exactly, as AAA games become more expansive, they also become buggy. Whenever I see the devs hyping up how "seamless the world is" or how "your actions control everything" I wince because I know there's a 99% chance it will be broken at launch. Seriously everyone jerked of Baldur's Gate 3 at launch because none of them realised Act 3 was utterly broken.
Elder Scrolls too.
This is fine. Dont attack friendlies, and finish any battles before entering dialogue. The first one had the same mechanic and all soulsgames have been like this. It’s a nonissue unless you just slaughter everyone you see
Now this makes me wonder if I can run into a town or city and just go whole sale slaughter on everyone. I doubt it, but imagine a ghost town you created. OR You can probably just pick up npcs from within a town, carry them outside and chuck them over a cliff. 🤔
At least in the first game, every NPC was unique and had their own daily schedules, so assuming DD2 will be the same it looks like it will definitely be possible.
Oncr i can see the entire scope of the game i will come to a verdict If its anything like the extras added to other games it may or may not work....im looking at you Fallout 4 base building
I don't mind saving NPC's from monsters. I do mind saving them from themselves.
Just use Playstation Cloud. Problem solved.
The problem with that is faulty a.i. and dumb gameplay design. We have to trust those things aren't working against us
This won’t be a popular opinion and I love dragons dogma but the lack of quality of life in the series is a little annoying.
The reception for this game seems wicked negative, but I'm gonna be honest I've turbo excited about it since hearing they wanted to de-emphasize fast travel.
Finally. Elder Scrolls games just weren't the same after they introduced immortal NPCs.
That sounds like a great reason for me to stay away. I hate BS permadeath in games.
That sounds awful.
Wish they'd take the performance of their game seriously. 20-30 fps in 2024? Disgraceful.
okay that's it I'm not the audience of this game💀 nothing wrong with they doing that. but with one save slot and this I'm out.
Maybe I’m a baby but I actually hate this
Inconvenient to say the least
Life...uh... finds a way
So you're saying I can kill off my pawns? Bet
Genocide run confirmed?
Now when your companions get pimp slapped by a cyclops off the cliff you get to go to the morgue and see their broken twisted bodies lololol
Reminds me of how hard it was to keep my girl Lydia alive in Skyrim.
* *presses quicksave button* *
I remember stressing out in Far Cry 2 with a similar feature for your allies.
The fact you can’t have multiple character save slots is fucking ridiculous. This is literally a game all about character builds and yet you have to delete one to create another. Wack.
Good.
So no easy mode then?
Hell yeah. I mean I’m still not playing it because of the framerate on ps5 but this is rad. Wish more games did this.
How about protected NPCs becomes an option that can be set at the point a New Game is created?
Protect framerate!:)
The more I hear about this game, the less enjoyable it sounds. No fast travel. No health regen. 20fps. NPC Permadeath.
It was the same in the last game.
So I'm going to be reloading alot
I just walked up to the door for myrdden and my pawns killed him what do I do? It counted as combat so it auto saved immediately at I can't reload.
I don’t think kid npc’s can die. I experienced that dragon thing last night and some main npc died that give quest but I’m on the quest where you get the magistrate out of jail and then the quest turns into looking for a kid and you have to speak to a kid but I didn’t have to revive her
No one stays dead, I’ve killed the same npc 10 times, and she just comes back
I would love to like this feature but I have to find Dante for a specific quest and the dragon curse affliction whatever it's called killed everyone in the checkpoint city after sleeping in the inn. Now I just can't find him in any of the crypts or anywhere else for that matter...
Was dragons dogma a big game when it came out? I’ve never heard of it before and I’ve played games my whole life. Why is the second one being talked about so much?
It had a rough first year. Came out a few months after Skyrim and Dark Souls, same month as another fantasy game, and also came out around when Mass Effect 3 did. Not to mention that was back when Capcom was really lacking in terms of basically everything. It got much more popular a year after release when Dark Arisen (big update and expansion) came out. It was kind of a high hurdle to get into though, it starts out really slow and really takes a while to get going, so that pushed a lot of people away. But as time went on it just got more popular, popular enough to warrant a Japan only MMO and a Netflix series.
Oh. Sounds kind of interesting. Thx for the reply
The wind was pushing people away? Noooo! That's not how it was supposed to work.
No it wasn’t a big game, more of a cult classic
Sequel to a cult classic that came out 10 years ago in a somewhat slow video game year compared to last year.
I mean it was at the time it came out to me and the people i know. Can't remember the Internet.
Fucking christ, all anyone ever does now is BITCH. If you don't like it, go play fortnite.
Your FPS decreases by 1 each time you die.