Have you played Dragon's Dogma? Can you answer a question?

Gotta say it has it's bad points. I spent a good half hour running around the capital city last night following a guy for a reason that was unclear to me. I finished following him and reported back to the quest giver, and was showered with experience, praise and gold. Still not sure what I did though.

Another quest had me looking for a few family members. Follow the map marker. The last guy was up on a roof. I'm guessing I need to get the levitate ability to talk to him thereby encouraging me to switch vocations. Not really interested though.

I went back exploring around the wilderness and suddenly had way, way more fun.

for the roof guy, climb up from the house next to it and jump across, I didn't need levi for it.
First thing I did when get to the capital was spending an hour doing roof jumping and searching for hidden treasures.
If you are in city now, beware of the quest that have you baby sit a girl, the end result will affect merchant inventory later on.. I kinda regret I failed it now.

Played 30 hours. Some quick thoughts:

- Open world that reminds me of the first Two Worlds. Good draw distance for an Xbox game.
- Great dungeon design. Not many dungeons though. It's case of quality over quantity.
- Good combat which only improves as characters unlock more skills. The pace can feel too manic sometimes.
- Both pawn and mob AI is excellent. They know how to use the environment. I recall my main pawn saving my life once by picking up a barrel of explosive and throwing it at the skeleton that was just about to clobber me.
- Side quests are very shallow for the most part.
- Darkness really is darkness. Make sure never to run out lantern oil.
- Mobs respawn all too frequently. It gets old re-fighting the exact same mob in the exact same spot. Collectables respawn too.
- Bandits appear to level scale. Standard monsters don't as far as I can tell.
- Lack of fast travel. I know, I know, but you try walking between the capital and starting village. It's a long way fighting the same junk all over again. As far as I know, there is only teleportation to the capital and that requires rare crystals.
- Nine character classes. Limited character development. It's more breath than depth. Still, there is character development.
- It's not particularly difficult with a balanced team, but higher level monsters will flatten the party. Kinda reminds me of Gothic in that regard. Try fighting half a dozen Saurians and a Chimera at level 18...

I bought the game and so far I'm enjoying it ok. I spent a few hours around the first village and I've just reached the army encampment. I'm a bit confused about levelling up. I'm level five and basically (and embarrassingly enough) I don't really know what to do. It doesn't look like I have points to distribute or anything. I read a guide that says you buy skills at inns with discipline points. Is that all there is to it? What about raising stats and stuff? I guess I just want to make sure I'm not missing something, and there isn't a level up button I've overlooked and hence I'm getting killed a lot.

My other thoughts on the game are the NPC dialogs are a bit disappointing. The writing and voice acting is fine but you don't have responses or anything to say, so there's no way to express yourself as a character. The NPCs just say whatever they have to say, and you either accept or decline a quest and that's it.

Also I heard how austere the game is in terms of money and equipment, and that it's hard to aquire them. This is one of the things that attracted me to the game. Well I've got about 24,000 gold and I can afford to buy anything. There are chests all over the place, and money bags hidden here and there are plentiful. I wonder if they changed that with the patch. If so that's really disappointing.

I'm playing a strider and I don't really like how archery works. You have unlimited arrows and can fire them ludicrously quickly. Combat in general has a feel about it that I would associate with console fighting games like God of War, and Ninja Gaiden, and I don't like it very much but it's not a biggie.

I like that you can customise the HUD and can turn nearly everything on and off. Unlike Skyrim where you can't turn the damn compass off.

I like there's no auto health regen, again unlike Skyrim.

It's a bit odd that you have to exit to the main menu to load a game but it's not a biggie. The letterboxing is also weird.

I think one of the coolest things so far is when I waded out into the ocean and I got Soaked, which has various negative effects on you until you've dried off. In most of these sorts of games there's no consequence of getting wet at all. I hope this is an indication of other interesting and challenging aspects of gameplay as I'm sick of games being "streamlined" to have maximum mass appeal.

human_male said:

I bought the game and so far I'm enjoying it ok. I spent a few hours around the first village and I've just reached the army encampment. I'm a bit confused about levelling up. I'm level five and basically (and embarrassingly enough) I don't really know what to do. It doesn't look like I have points to distribute or anything. I read a guide that says you buy skills at inns with discipline points. Is that all there is to it? What about raising stats and stuff? I guess I just want to make sure I'm not missing something, and there isn't a level up button I've overlooked and hence I'm getting killed a lot.

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The levels don't really mean anything other than the cost of hiring pawns. Pawns your level are free to hire, but every level above your own makes the cost in rift crystals go up exponentially (making it impossible for a low level player character to hire high level pawns).

The other aspect is you class affinity. As you increase in your class affinity you unlock more and more skills that can be purchased with discipline points. Skills can only be purchased and equipped in certain locations and the first such place you encounter is inside the encampment.

human_male said:

Also I heard how austere the game is in terms of money and equipment, and that it's hard to aquire them. This is one of the things that attracted me to the game. Well I've got about 24,000 gold and I can afford to buy anything. There are chests all over the place, and money bags hidden here and there are plentiful. I wonder if they changed that with the patch. If so that's really disappointing.

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Trust me, 24,000 is nothing. You may be able to buy a level 0 armour or weapon that kind of money but once you start upgrading your equipment (which can't be done until you reach the capital) that kind of money will evaporate quicker than snow in hell.

Judging by your description is seems that you're still in the "tutorial" area. The "Real" game doesn't start until you've created your own pawn and reached the capital. My suggestion is that you hold off on judging the game until you get that far, because several aspects of the game-mechanics haven't been introduced properly yet.

I've played for a good few hours now and reached the capital, I think I've got a pretty good grasp on the game. I like it. I just had a blast battling some huge cyclops. It does seem a little more linear than I'd hoped. It's not like Skyrim where there's a huge area and you can just head off in any direction. The areas so far are quite linear, but that's ok. Also it is a bit more hack n slash than I'd like, you run into groups of mobs quite a lot, and they respawn which is never good. And there really should be a way to turn off auto save since it prevents you from going back if you made a mistake, or if you finished a quest which cancells another quest, or you just want to watch one of the cool little cutscenes again. I started backing up the save file onto an external source so I could reload if I wanted. It also desperately needs a "Wait here" command for the pawns. Sometimes you get sick of them crowding around you every second.

I think as an RPG it's paper thin. You have very few options when you level up. All you do is choose and "equip" new skills. And from what I can tell all the skills are simply combat moves. There's nothing like sneaking, pick pocketing, mercantile, or any speech skills. That's ok but it's worth pointing out. It's a mistake to think of this as an RPG in that sense.

I have a question with the skills actually, especially if anyone's played a strider. I don't see a difference in the dagger skills other than the animation that goes with them. I'm comparing Scarlet Kiss, Engrave and Roundelay and I can't see any difference in them. Do they do different amounts of damage or something like that? Where does it list that?

I'd recommend anyone who's interested in it get it. It's a fun, polished game with loads of customisation options for your character.

Oh one other thing, I heard a lot about how dark the nights are and how much you will depend on your lantern. But I can see quite well in the dark. I hardly use it, and haven't had to refill it yet. Have they changed that?

Looks like an interesting game. User reviews have given higher praise than most mainstream reviews, which leads me to believe it might be a diamond in the rough. If it makes its way to PC I will give it a shot.

Thanks to the constant rain here I've nearly finished it. Don't expect a deep RPG; its feels hollow on some levels. However, it's an excellent ARPG. I enjoyed it much more than Titans Quest or Borderlands for example. Although it's more superficially similar to Gothic, TES, or Two Worlds, Borderlands is a better comparison IMO. Near total focus on action and constant respawning.

Played about 15-20h now and well, it's an ok timewaster. I still think it's way too easy, i'm level 17 and i've died 1 time when fighting a tentacle monster and at the same time being attacked by a cyclops and some harpies, other than that there hasnt been any real challenge. Those wolves, bandits and goblins seems a bit stupid that they respawn since they're like a 1-2 hit kill, the game should spawn something more challenging by now. Initially i thought this game would be very difficult at night for example, but it really isnt when you have a full team. Might consider dropping off 2 of the pawns (this should make me gain more XP, right?)

human_male: there arent just combat skills, you also have pickpocketing, but that's the only non-combat skill i've seen so far.

That's interesting about the pickpocketing skill vurt. I'll look out for that.

Another question. I thought the only stats I have were hit points and stamina but I've heard people talking about their strength and magick. Stupid question I suppose but where do I view those? I can't for the life of me see anything like that on any of the screens.

There's a "stats" option under the menu. It's typically JRPG in that you get no options there. Which is typically AD&D on which all JRPGs are based via the orginal Wizardry. Asian games aren't big on change. Some equipement give bonuses to those stats.

I'd give it 8/10 as an Xbox game, but maybe 7/10 if it was available on PC. It's more sophisticated than I would expect for a console exculsive, but more hollow than I would expect of a PC RPG.

Just saw the gametrailers review of this. Looks great. Shallow as Borderlands is OK in my book if the combat is visceral and it appears to be so. PC please!

It's better than Borderlands imo, that game felt even more shallow and even less like a RPG. Combat is decent / good (better than most RPG's), but after playing Dark Souls both combat and atmosphere / world design is a bit underwhelming.

Play Dragon's Dogma for a while and the Borderlands comparison is more obvious. It appears at first glance much more of an RPG than it actually is. Like Borderlands, it's essentially a single player MMORG without the benefit of co-op. Still a worthwhile single-player game though.

Just wanted to say as much as I enjoyed the game the ending sure does suck.

Not Mass Effect 3 "that didn't make any sense" suck, just rather unsatisfying "sh*t, I went through all that for THIS?" suck.

human_male said:

just rather unsatisfying "sh*t, I went through all that for THIS?" suck.

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Much like life. In many ways DD is the most realistic game I've ever played.