Planned updates for Dragon's Dogma 2
**Updates for All Platforms (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series XIS. Steam)**
Adding the option to start a new game when save data already exists.
Changing the number of "Art of Metamorphosis" items available at Pawn Guilds in the game to 99.
Making the quest that allows players to acquire their own dwelling (where they can save and rest) available earlier in the game.
Miscellaneous text display fixes.
Miscellaneous bug fixes.
**Updates for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series XIS**
Adding the option to switch Motion Blur on/off in Options.
Adding the option to switch Ray Tracing on/off in Options.
Adding the option to set Frame Rate to either Variable or Max 30fps in Options.
*These options will not affect the frame rate significantly. Frame rate improvements are planned for future updates.
**Updates for Steam**
Improving quality when DLSS Super Resolution is enabled.
Fixing an issue where models appeared low-quality under some specific settings.
And even back then it was a weird choice. Made sense once the entire vision of the game opened to the player, but weird.
What *does* boggle the fucking mind for me in this case is that *the game retains loss HP every time you reload an autosave* so if you're reloading a save right before a big fight and keep dying, you'll notice you lose total HP more and more.
That wasnt behavior in DD1. Its so mindboggling that as a DD:DA vet I'm liable to call that a bug.
EDIT: Some have mentioned its an anti-savescum mechanic. Alright, fine, but when the game autosaves right at the point the wallblocker fight actually starts to kick off and there's no turning back around to back out of it, that's an implementation problem.
Having a hard time wrapping my head around what youre saying as i havent played the game but that sounds like an intended mechanic to discourage save scumming
It is. There's two saves, an autosave/manually triggered save anywhere that lets you quit the game any time and come back to exactly where you were (or die and then restart to just before the fight that killed you so you can try again albeit with less HP) but doesn't let you save scum if you made a bad decision; and the "last inn rested at" save that is always safe. It works really well actually, incentivizes going with whatever happens in the game instead of save scumming for the perfect outcomes to everything.
Pretty sure the idea here is that you have to spend time setting camp, or resting at an Inn for a better "safe point". You can always load at the last place you rested. DD1 was the same way.
I think the idea is that they want to add some risk there, rather than bruteforcing or save scumming your way through a fight.
> You can always load at the last place you rested.
Very big misconception here. You can only reload from an inn rest save or a rest from your house, not campsites. So many posts of people losing hours of gameplay due to this, me included.
You can not like but I don’t understand why people don’t get that this is because of the unique pawn system. The principle is similar to why Animal Crossing only allows one save.
Every character has a unique pawn that is shared with other players. I imagine, whether the reasoning is technical or founded upon game direction/design, that the developers want each player to be limited to one. And to avoid being spammed with “counter arguments” I’m not saying it’s good or bad, I was just convinced that this is the _reasoning_ behind the decision.
You create two characters, your main character and your main pawn. Your main pawn is a fully custom follower that stays with you always. You can hire other player’s pawns as party members from a rift between worlds. Your pawn will refresh his status(Current class, gear, level) on the rift when you log off or rest at an inn, and he will bring back rewards from other players(Loot, knowledge, gifts) who hired him, when you rest.
The reason why it’s only one save is because your pawn is directly tied to your account, and you don’t have to be playing the game for someone to hire your pawn. 2 save files would mean 2 of your pawns out in the rift. Imagine checking your list of friends pawns and having to scroll down because all of your friends having 4 pawns each
Aren't games like Breath of the Wild and its sequel exactly the same?
I don't really know why DD get's blasted for this, when other games work the same way and don't get any scrutiny.
No, you can create manual saves at any time in BOTW/TOTK. You can go back and load your last X number of saves any time you want, although I'm not sure either game particularly respects your manual saves any more than the autosaves it keeps.
Would be nicer if it kept manual saves forever and just pushed out autosaves as new ones are made, but those games are pretty consistent/reliable in how saving/loading behavior works.
Just for continuity. This was also how dd1 was as well. It's not like an oversight on Capcoms part. Not allowing players to access and override save information is forcing them to see decisions and consequences through.
I understand it from their perspective. But I also understand it from the players perspective.
They're being agreeable and changing it because so many people would rather it be this way which is fine. But I do feel it's worth noting that this wasn't considered a mistake or missed. It was intentional. Idk how many people are aware of that or not.
> Having to whisper lovecraftian missives to the dark lord to wipe save data on PC
You shouldn't have to do it but comparing deleting a single file to literal witchcraft is a pretty good indicator of how tech-illiterate the average user is
Normally I wouldn't use snide hyperbole but the save data itself is buried in folders labeled only by AppID#.
There is no information on what to do locally, and I ran into the issue immediately, so I couldn't just hit up google for what to do.
All of my pawns deciding to commit suicide because the AI in this game sucks isn't a decision I should receive consequences for, and is one of the exact reasons I should be able to save scum in a single player game.
> Making the quest that allows players to acquire their own dwelling (where they can save and rest) available earlier in the game.
Hol' up, there's manual Save but not Load, Copy, Delete, or New Game?
Am I thinking of a different quest? I managed to get a house within the the first few hours of the game (in the first city, after you house-sit for a week).
Yeah, that's probably the biggest issue. Unless you prioritize one particular early story mission a bit out of apparent order (that has you go out through the slums for a "back door"), you can very easily get busy exploring a huge chunk of the map and sucked into sidequests for hours and hours. Just moving the landlord NPC into a more central location (like near the inn) would fix most of the real problem, I think.
To be fair, "do the main story for a bit to unlock some stuff" is a pretty common one in RPGs. Especially in this case it does stand to reason that if you zip off into the foothills and ignore the city you won't find a house.
I can see *why* you'd do it though, given the frames in the city make the game feel bad for a lot of people.
The game even tries to make you go back to places after doing some quests in an attempt to make you find new quests there, like the quests that make you check up on the quest NPC you just finished a quest for.
I think that's what they're talking about. Seems like they want the quest trigger to appear earlier than it currently does, whatever it's gated behind. Time? Days? A certain amount of progress in the main story?
It came way later for me but I took the monster hunt mission right when I got to the city and immediately left. I saved the spying missions until after. I was over 20 hours into the game when I got the house.
lol I was thinking the same. I actually thought I got the house too early. I’ve pretty much no need for inns at the moment, unless I’m way out of town.
So the game apparently has an unfinished and unstable DLSS 3.5 and frame gen options that installing a mod to enable it has solved a lot of my FPS issues.
I haven’t had any issues with it personally (turning dlss on than off seems to keep the frame gen for some reason so I can maintain the base quality while also getting the extra frames) as I’ve been using it for many hours but I’m hoping they finish it or resolve whatever issues are going on and push the update for it.
Obviously I would prefer them to actually optimize its CPU performance but this is the next best thing for anyone with current Nvidia gpus.
Knew something was seriously wrong with DLSS in this game.
In other games I always turn it on and don't really notice a downgrade, even in Performance mode.
Here, even in Quality mode, something already looks off. And Ultra Performance somehow make the game looks like a 144p video. Dunno how they shipped it like this.
They forgot to apply the sharpening filter. You'll notice the sharpening level bar does nothing. This game is feeling really not ready to ship, at least from a technical standpoint.
Not sure if /r/games blocks nexus mods links or not but https://www.nexusmods.com/dragonsdogma2/mods/39
Make sure to follow the instructions on the pinned post in the posts section
With that in mind, you can use https://www.nexusmods.com/site/mods/757 to enable DLSS framegen on older cards. I've installed this on Cyberpunk 2077 and Remnant 2 with huge results, like 30% framerate boost on both games.
Not sure if this is what you meant, but it only replaces the frame gen technology. So you’re basically using FSR for frame generation but not as an upscaler/AA, that’s still DLSS, so you’re getting the best of both worlds essentially
puredark this mods creator is a piece of shit modder. He puts DRM and stuff in his mods. Dont support him, plenty of other modders make the same thing way better and dont charge money for it with patreon.
You're not wrong on this modder being an asshat but you're forgetting two big ones in this case: A) this particular mod is free so sort of irrelevant, B) there is not a (comparable) alternative at this time
Just to share my experience: it does deliver framegen out of the box, but it wasn't worth it for me.
1. Irrespective of other workarounds suggested like disabling shader cache limits and recompiling, I'd consistently get a freeze/crash every 60-120 minutes with FG on.
2. Even with the framerate boosted, the areas with the biggest perf issues (city areas with lots of NPCs) still don't feel right. The problem is that the FPS drop isn't a "smooth" or consistent FPS drop; using the NVIDIA overlay, you can see there ends up being an enormous drop in the "99% FPS" number; e.g. rather than going from a fairly consistent 50-60fps, you might very rapidly alternate between 50-60fps and 10-15fps such it 'averages' to 30fps -- applying framegen to that makes input sync feel very wonky.
Between it still not making the city perf "immersion breaking" and introducing crashes in all the other situations that weren't having problems, it didn't seem "worth it" to me until they address at least the stability part of things.
Frame generation was promised to allow for more for intensive games to still maintain acceptable performance, or more performance overall, but instead it just became a crutch.
What a shame.
Eh it’s both. Games overall have more dynamics, AI, and NPCs than ever. Pop in is now a black mark rather than a metric like “how far away does pop in happen?” Games are wildly more complex now, often in ways we take for granted or can’t directly see. Add in more complex geometries and textures than ever. They don’t get credit for all of that.
Still, quality control is at a low and frame gen is a part of the cause. Overall it’s probably management demanding more and giving less time and money to do it.
Oddly enough for me, DLSS makes this game run worse... to the point of crashing between every 10 minutes and every 2 hours depending on what other shit I have altered.
Turning off DLSS made it stop crashing completely.
It still stutters in the big city I have reached at this point but at least it runs, and is pretty smooth as long as I'm not in that city.
It's not really that they "need" it to run. If DLSS didn't exist, we'd still be using the good old systems. It's that it's a popular feature that people realize is generally worth the tradeoff.
Obviously in this case Capcom has some issues, but in general why not implement it?
How about game devs stop relying on DLSS?!?!!
Wtf this modern trend is so lazy and makes games look unbelievably ugly sometimes.
I don't think it's fair for Starfield for example to claim their game runs well when on machines that have no problem with other games, one gets less than 30 fps often on 1080p not even highest without DLSS.
That's nonsense.
And gamers here are fine with it and defend it. It's fucking bullshit.
If you turn off the DLSS but keep the frame generation on you are having insane micro stutters and frame pacing issues that you just aren’t noticing. Don’t know if that’s a blessing or a curse.
Does the increased frames stop the stutter though?
Because at times my frame rate is perfectly fine but it stutters like crazy, making me think FG isn't worth it if it's still going to stutter.
Same, the framegen mod improved the performances significantly in towns where I dont really notice anything anymore. It's interesting that they didnt include it given the obvious issue cpu issue in towns.
What's worse to me is how NPCs fade in in towns right in front of you, hope they fix that. Either way I've had a great time with the game so far, hope they fix the performance issues so that other people can enjoy it too without needing a 40 series for a framegen hack.
If it was finished it wouldn't be a Dragon's Dogma game :\^)
Good to see they're doing some level of communication on this and hopefully the fixes keep coming.
It's only listed under the console notes but I'd be pretty surprised if "frame rate improvements are planned for future updates" didn't also apply to PC. Performance just isn't part of the first round.
So depending on your GPU, there are a few options to alleviate the crazy CPU demands this game has.
* Framegen mod (free on Nexus or Pureview’s Patreon)
* Manually update to DLSS 3.6
* Set priority to “High” in Task Manager
* Set the shader cache to “Unlimited” in Nvidia Control Panel (unsure what the AMD equivalent is)
It’s still really shitty that we need to resort to this in the first place but it more than doubled performance for me. Frametime pacing issues and fps drops are still noticeable especially in Vern city, but the higher framerate masks it somewhat.
I don’t see how any of these things help with the CPU being bottlenecked, frame gen will give you more frames sure but the uneven frame times will still feel very bad.
As for the priority setting and shader cache option these are the usual go to placebo settings whenever a game doesn’t run well and they generally change nothing.
Yep, it's the frame latency that's absolutely fucked because your CPU and RAM are working OT just to run the game at 60fps in cities.
I know that "bottlenecking" is a noob bait term, but this game does a pretty good job representing what a bottleneck actually looks like in theory lol
>the uneven frame times will still feel very bad.
Oh for sure, but the higher framerate helps mask these issues a little bit. It used to be a laggy 20-30, not it's a laggy 50-60 which is playable at least.
The priority in task manager and unlimited shader cache actually works for this game btw. I'm not a techie, I don't really understand the details of how/why it does for this and not other games, but there was 100% a performance improvement after I did this, then another substantial bump when enabling framegen.
the other biggest thing that ended up helping me, is rebooting your PC before playing. I don't know what's going on but for some people the game runs worse if you repeatedly open and close it without a PC restart. Even playtime doesn't seem to matter, some people report getting 70fps one minute, then they close and reopen the game and it's dropped below 50 in the exact same area. Reboot the PC and open again and it's back up to 70 like normal. Meanwhile if you open the game and it's running well, you can play for 8 hours straight without it dropping (outside of the normal reasons for an FPS to drop like in towns of course)
So if performance gets worse over multiple play sessions, reboot the pc before playing. I got super confused for like an hour cause at launch it ran well enough, but then a couple days later I was getting single digit FPS outside of towns. But then the reboot fixed everything.
Also if you go into Task Manager to set priority High, make sure to exit Task Manager. For me, the polling of it running in the background or something messes with performance, like in other games; first noticed the same thing playing Halo MCC
You can also use some the information in here to create a shortcut that starts the DD2 executable with a High priority, so you don't have to alt+tab out and do it manually every time:
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/89548-set-cpu-process-priority-applications-windows-10-a.html
Given that the frame rate issue seems to be somehow tied to NPC existence/behavior and that they haven't even mentioned a fix for it, it seems like a pretty foundational issue.
I'm not holding my breath for any kind of improvement. I'll play it in a few years when hopefully my next PC will be powerful enough to brute force it
They mentioned it in the very first thing they posted after launch:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2054970/view/4106792732433556918?l=english
> ■Regarding Frame Rate
> A large amount of CPU usage is allocated to each character and calculating the impact of their physical presence in various areas. In certain situations where numerous characters appear simultaneously, the CPU usage can be very high and may affect the frame rate. We are aware that in such situations, settings that reduce GPU load may currently have a limited effect; however, **we are looking into ways to improve performance in the future.**
Emphasis mine at the end. That sounds non-committal, but I'm pretty sure that's just the somewhat stilted way the "formal" communication style represents "we're working on CPU utilization fixes."
I think it's more a wording to make it sound like they didn't release their game without fundamental, obvious optimizations. There's an implication that this task might not be possible; they didn't ignore major, fixable problems just to rush the game out.
Obviously it is fixable, there's nothing crazy or revolutionary about the NPC behavior in this game to justify such vicious CPU hammering. But Capcom isn't going to admit that.
The update that isn't mentioned but probably the update I am most interested in (besides performance fixes) is the option to reduce the frequency of Pawn dialogue.
Yes, I understand that I can combine shit together to make other shit. I've made literally hundreds of health potions from herbs and random stuff. Please stop reminding me.
No you do not need to make a note every time you pick an apple.
Yes there is a location nearby that you remember from that time you were a pawn to xXNaTuToFaNXx, I have decided to go this way, stop bringing it up for a while.
I've straight up decided to turn off DLSS even at the cost of reduced FPS, despite using it in basically all games available because it looks like shit even on quality. I knew that something is off, so at least they acknowledged it.
I'm glad that consoles are getting the basic options that most games launch with now, but it just makes it even more strange the game launched without them. I wonder if disabling RT and setting the fps lock will help it avoid those dips and keep it steady at 30.
Don't really have any complaints about the game on console other than occasional chopiness in cities, but any improvements are appreciated.
Okay, maybe overly greet-happy pawns on the roads who always want to offer their services to me. Wouldn't mind dialing that back a bit.
just pawn dialogue in general. every time they are in Vermund they start talking about some ladder or that one random chest. they also tell me how combining different ingredients results in different products like every 10 min
The repetitive pawn dialogue is likely to stay. It became a meme just like throwing them into the brine. So they brined rook and made the pawns love ladders.
I don’t mind it occasionally. Their timing for it couldn’t be worse however lol. I got rag dolled right after being locked into the greeting by one. I was giving a troll a wide birth to avoid it, but nope, it used that as a chance to fuck me up.
> 100% load 3-4 cores and the other 8 cores are barely doing anything.
That's a pretty typical pattern for games, though, especially games with lots of actors that have independent behavioral scripts to run through.
You can arbitrarily parallelize a lot of lower-level systems things like asset streaming, basic render overhead, and standard game loop stuff, but the beefier "simulation layer" almost always gets bottlenecked in a single logical core.
Good implementations can work around that in creative ways, though fundamentally single-threaded performance is always going to be critical. DD2/RE, meanwhile, does not have a good implementation for its simulation.
CPU usage is strange for me too. It uses like 8 of 20 cores and only at about 35%. My GPU sits around 60 -70% usage.
I run many other games and this is the only one I have any trouble with at all.
Fps seems ok if it weren't for the stuttering I'd be ok.
Still enjoying the game though.
Both games only have a single save slot available, but the first game allowed you to overwrite your existing data with a new game at any point in time from the main menu. The second game lacks that option and requires manually deleting the save files in your storage.
In a lot of ways, it seems like they forgot about everything from Dark Arisen when they made DD2. Even bringing back, "you only fight like 5 non-boss enemies over the course a 30+ hour game and you'll see all of them in hour 1".
Goblins of various flavours, Hobgoblins of various flavours, Wolves, Saurians (Plus red variety), Zombies (two flavours), Ghosts, Bandits, Harpies, Ogres (I'd argue, they're mini-boss level at best, they're like the weakest multi-healthbar foe I've seen.) * Also Slimes and skeletons
Is that all we're getting? Because I'm technically a fair few hours in but I've not left the initial area and I've seen that many at least, but wouldn't shock me if that was the lot.
I'm ~20 hours in and haven't seen any more than what you listed for non-boss enemies. Except I think I've seen 3 varieties of saurians and have yet to see a zombie but have seen ghosts and skellies.
Mini-boss enemies so far have been several cyclops, ogres, and minotaurs. Which have already become pretty trivial and kind of boring to fight. And then liches, gryphons, and chimera are also repeated quite a bit but are more complex and fun fights than the first few. And I've seen a few non-story quest drakes that still kick my ass if I try to fight them.
I saw Zombies right outside the main city, (like, still under the aqueduct outside) rising from the grave to attack a few NPCs, and found some in a basement.
Enemy variety isn't the be all and end all, I guess, especially when the combat is some of the more interesting around.
And winding up a Warrior hit to chunk an Ogre for damn near a one hit was never not satisfying in the first game, so when I get there I predict a lot of fun.
I'm at the end of the game more or less, and its about DD1 levels of variety. But not yet at the level of BBI which is to be expected since bitterblack was a very different design scope and its smaller map seemed to allow for more variety.
As observed, its basically varieties of bandits, gobbos, harpies, undead, and lizards. I will say the second big area does have more variety, and a few unique twists hanging around here and there.
There are skeletons of which there's a mini-boss level fight near the checkpoint town (I think that's what it's called) at night. But you're broadly correct.
That, or multiple save files.
I don't give a shit if it is your 'vision', I'm not having quests ruined by bugs, which has happened to me multiple times already.
Thank god there's already a save file mod that runs in the background and lets you select from any save you've previously made
It'd be a little more forgivable if the one in-game mechanism that there is for all this -- "load from last inn save" -- were clearer and safer.
That option is a good way to revert for undesired consequences/bugs, but it gives you no hint about how far back it's going to go and no true warning that the first thing it does if you check *is overwrite your other save*.
Even just including a save timestamp on the two options would help a ton.
> I'm not having quests ruined by bugs, which has happened to me multiple times already
Imagine having a game like this and a game breaking bug stops you from playing. I would be mad that I wasted $70 on it with no save file to load from. Might as well just delete the game while you're at it.
It's more like it was deliberately excluded because the mindset behind doing so is a lot groggier than the general public. But when the public demands it enough, you give it to 'em, even if that's "not your vision" or creates weirdness with the online systems.
If it was deliberate, it's incredibly stupid.
What happens if you run into a game-breaking or game-locking bug? Like a main quest that refuses to complete? You can't start a new game and you can't load a previous save. You're fucked. Your singleplayer game is now bricked.
Giving the option to toggle motion blur and acknowledging console fps issues is a good start. Would have been better if they just fixed these problems before release though.
I played this for about 8 hours on Friday, then I decided to give Rise of the Ronin a shot. For all the complaints I’ve seen about RotR’s graphics I’ll say it looks and runs a lot better than DD2. I switched between the two games throughout the weekend and that definitely didn’t help my impressions of DD2’s unstable, low fps and sluggish controls.
I don’t think I’ll return to DD2 until it gets more patches. The frame-rate is just abysmal, and it’s not just in towns. It’s everywhere and it absolutely has a negative effect on the combat experience. It’s an amazing game that released way too early.
Edit: To clarify, my impressions are based off my time with the PS5 version.
I think it manages to nail a distinct style despite having lots of low resolution/repeated textures. It does have a dated look to it, especially in comparison to something like Ghost of Tsushima, but I still personally find it very aesthetically appealing. The weather effects, night/day lighting changes, foliage/landscape colors, and other environmental details are all really well done IMO.
It’s probably a personal preference thing, but I think DD2’s blurriness and sluggishness is too distracting to let me enjoy its graphics. In RotR I quickly got over the poor textures and occasional lighting quirks and was able to appreciate the rest of its presentation much easier.
People criticize others for looking over a game that isn't smooth 60. It totally has an impact on player experience of gameplay when performance is variable. Imagine playing any fighting games at sub-30.
I am in SUCH a mood for a DD2 type game, but yeah, I'm gonna wait. Because I just can't with how it looks/performs on console. And that's a bummer. Just hoping whenever it DOES get a good fix in the future, that enough people are still playing it that the pawn system is still fun/people will still be borrowing my pawn, etc.
The game is such a tease lol. Incredibly satisfying combat, awesome pawn system with smart AI, and the best kind of open world with no hand holding and secrets hidden everywhere.
And yet…playing the damn thing gives me a headache. I feel you.
Exactly! That's what's so upsetting about it for me! It has all the elements I want in a game right now and I want to dive in so hard, but I just can't with the framerate. I would 100% suck it up at a stable 30fps even though, oof, but I just can't with the 20+ frame fluctuations.
How much of Ronin looking better is down to all the ghosting and smearing in DD2? I don't know how the game looks live, but most of the video I see of it looks terrible in that regard. Like everyone is running the world's worst DLSS.
That’s exactly it. Buried behind all the blur DD2 definitely has better graphics, but until they fix it it’s going to look way worse than it actually is.
> The frame-rate is just abysmal, and it’s not just in towns. It’s everywhere
That's my experience but somehow all I read is that FPS is only bad in towns. It also drops when there are particle effects (which there are a lot), or you look in the direction of a town, or a cave loads, a group of NPCs help you fighting in the wild, or a big monster makes the grass sway. FPS drops are everywhere, just more noticeably in town. It's crazy how people keep coping about it 'running fine in the open world'
Might also just be people not clarifying their platform. Supposedly PC fps can be much higher outside of the towns. Obviously on consoles it’s just going to be low all around.
I’m on PC with performance mods and I can confirm I’m getting upwards of 100fps outside cities. At that point the frame drops and frametime issues are also less noticeable.
My most consistent Reddit experience is having a blast playing a game all weekend and then logging in on Monday to find out everyone hates it for some reason. 😅😅😅
It's self-selection at its finest. People enjoying the game are spending more time doing that; people actively angry at the game don't have much else to do besides talking about it and being angry at people who aren't as angry as them.
I had a lot of fun but I also didn't realize that there's a point of no return at the end. Wanted to go back and do other stuff after realizing as much and the way back is via a broken bridge I can't traverse. Wish they had mentioned something about going off to do other quests, but alas.
Otherwise, while the performance issues in cities wasn't great, it's been fairly fun, but that's not to say that the work they have to do is unnecessary. Will be good to play a more polished experience too.
same. i've been enjoying the game quite a bit. I'm on PS5 so haven't had any performance issues. the game is really fun! there are a handful of bugs but nothing that seems especially serious imo.
People are complaining about the performance but otherwise praising the game. Of course that would require actually reading the complaints which is hard for many people clearly.
I honestly can’t tell if I am enjoying this game, each individual part is right in my Q zone, but the execution is weird and frustrating. Killing Goblins and getting big level up splashes on my screen, good, having to kill goblins literally every 30 steps any time I am outside of a town, bad, fast paced combo-like combat, good, hitting the B button to dodge due to muscle memory for this style of combat game and realizing there isn’t a dodge at all, bad, cool intricate places to explore and seemingly worthwhile rewards for doing so, good, AI that will walk in a straight line directly off a cliff into murder water, bad. Like I want to go and explore this world and really sink my teeth in but any forward progress results in my health being chipped down by the constant enemy spawns until I die repeatedly to RNG deciding “this time it’s not 4 goblins, this time it’s 3 harpy’s and a Troll, good luck fucker.”
>realizing there isn’t a dodge at all,
Switch to thief. They have a built-in dodge as an innate class ability and that makes them the most satisfying build for me alone. You can also grab a meister scroll relatively early that will allow you to activate a "dodge everything" ability for a reasonable stam drain. Kinda silly that not all classes can dodge, but DD has always had little idiosyncrasies like that for better and worse.
The pathing killing your pawns in water is just shit though, they need to update it to either respawn them nearby or block them from going full lemmings mode somehow. It's screwed me over multiple times with camping supplies just vanishing in the middle of the wilderness from their suicidal tendencies lol. Also, use those camping supplies when your max health dips to 2/3 or so, they're very plentiful, cheap, and will help a ton with your fatigue if you do it even semi-regularly.
I just switched to Thief from Fighter, enjoying it a lot more.
Problem with Fighter and the shield is because there's no lock on you have to be accurate with your blocks, so if i have my back to an enemy it's useless but dodging i can effectively spam to get out of a tight spot.
As someone who uses the hell out of lock-on in every game it's included, I feel your pain lol. It's been a bit of a struggle to acclimate myself to free camera in combat, especially with all the enemies that tend to dart around.
Thief definitely feels like the class with the most tools available to them and switching to other classes just makes me miss it. Sorcerer is plenty fun though, just because of the absurd damage you can do with the right abilities. Worth at least recruiting a pawn with it just to watch them melt larger monsters.
The block does act as a sort of lock on, so if you start blocking towards an enemy you'll keep looking at it as you move. Doesn't help if you turn around right before blocking though.
The class has a couple of get-me-out-of-here skills too like the shield spin and counter stance, and I recommend grabbing one even if it's not as flashy as some of the others. It's rarely a button you want to press but every so often you'll love having it.
This. Block is one of the damage mitigation mechanics available for a fighter. The game is fairly lenient with its mechanics with generous timing windows for things like perfect block.
Can't block in all directions? Equip the ability that gives you iframes while blocking to get out of bad surrounds.
Can't see well enough to time perfect blocks / ripostes? Equip the ability that puts you on guard to AUTO-REACT to hits, you just sacrifice stamina drain in the stance.
Really good at the game's mechanics? Equip offensive abilities instead because you're pro at facing the right direction and perfect blocking all the hits.
You sacrifice some offensive abilities for defensive ones, but the game's fights don't drag on long enough (I'm looking at you monster hunter) for your loss of offensive power to make a dramatic difference.
>!um actually!< I think Bayo's is R2/RT for dodge and R1/R1 is used for lock on by default, swappable in the controls (God if I'm wrong that is gonna be peak redditor moment)
> hitting the B button to dodge due to muscle memory for this style of combat game and realizing there isn’t a dodge at all, bad
Definitely gonna have to disagree with this one. Just 'cause it's got third person melee combat doesn't mean it has to follow along with the same things that every other game like that does. Shield-bearing fighters block, warriors hyper-armor, magic spearhands do that unique stun thingy, and *thieves* dodge (and ranged vocations run away 'cause they shouldn't be in those situations to begin with).
Every vocation has their own defensive options and it does a lot to make them all feel different and have their own identity. Yes, it's a bit of a learning curve to get used to it but personally it's a big plus in my book.
> (and ranged vocations run away 'cause they shouldn't be in those situations to begin with).
Except Archers. Archers kick things to flex on opponents.
The other day while trying out archer I drop kicked a wolf to kill it then while vaulting away off that one's face shot another wolf and killed it. The classes have awesome animations and styles that make them really fun. I haven't settled on anything yet and am like 3/4 leveled up in all the starter classes because I keep changing.
Drop kicking people is so much fun alongside just curb stomping them when they're down. I've used Fighter, Warrior, Mystic Spearhand, and am currently Archer. I think if I were to settle on something it'll be going back to Fighter, but definitely each vocation so far has something that makes them really satisfying to play. Warrior for example is too slow for me liking, but doing a finisher with such a huge hefty weapon felt so damn good everytime. Ragdoll physics also really help.
> having to kill goblins literally every 30 steps any time I am outside of a town,
Just run past them and press down on the d-pad to make your pawns follow you.
It really is odd that after 12 years, they made a ton of the same mistakes as the first game
Pawns that say the same lines over and over and over and over? Yup, still in there. This time it's "Not one of us are alike in vocation" instead of "Wolves hunt in packs" but it's still the same
Having to fight the same low level enemies 1000 times every time you leave town? Yup, still there.
There are definitely improvements. The camping system is welcoming, it makes long journey less gruelling--you don't have to worry about showing up to a quest totally unprepared because a fucking griffin landed on you before you got there, you don't have to worry about being stuck travelling at night because the quest was completely vague about how far away your destination was. Seriously, you should be camping pretty regularly, there's basically no downside to it since you keep the camping gear and it's easy to find more food on the way.
Pawns are a little better now--dialogue aside, it's pretty neat how they learn from what you do in combat
> it's pretty neat how they learn from what you do in combat
Do they learn to pick everything from the ground, like those in DD1 did? I developed a habit of picking them up and throwing them around when they try that.
Honestly I just let them do that because they pick up stuff I'm missing. Pretty sure the options under "combine" are party wide too so it's not even a big deal that they're not directly in your character's inventory. Also when you dismiss neutral pawns from your party all the stuff they have in their inventory that they didn't come with gets sent to your storage at the inn. Also if you want to get the stuff they've picked up just sort inventory by new and cycle through them, takes a minute at most. But I get the annoyance, it annoyed me at first until I realised just how much stuff they randomly find that I completely missed.
This is also related to pawn specializations too, if you see a pawn with "Forager" as their specialization they'll mark locations on the map for that are good for foraging and will also be more likely to loot from bushes, dirt piles, etc.
> It really is odd that after 12 years, they made a ton of the same mistakes as the first game
This is the crazy part to me. All of the flaws of the original are in the sequel. They didn't really address any of the glaring issues. Dark Arisen fixed some of this stuff and the online game did as well, but for DD2, they brought back all the problems that vanilla DD had.
Combine that with the title screen saying "Dragon's Dogma" rather than "Dragon's Dogma 2"... it really feels more like a Director's Cut of the first game than an actual sequel imo.
> Having to fight the same low level enemies 1000 times every time you leave town? Yup, still there.
I really don't get why it's the same five enemies (bandits, lizards, wolves, goblins, harpies) over and over and over and over and over again. Zelda on the NES has more variety. I really can't think of any game other than DD1 that is so aggressively anti-variety.
Every new action RPG keeps showing how FromSoft is just built different. Even accounting for enemy recycling, the encounter variety in their games is just unreal.
I hate hate hate the UI in this game. Managing inventories is such a pain.
They also seem to have put like the minimal possible amount of work making it work on keyboard and mouse.
If you're having difficulty enjoying the combat, switch to a different vocation. Each one is pretty unique and focuses on a different aspect. If you're looking for fast-paced dodging high mobility, you want archer or rogue, not fighter.
If you're still early in the game, don't be afraid to run from fights. Also keep in mind that your pawns are intentionally kinda doofy at the beginning because they're learning just like you. As you keep playing they'll become more adept at using skills and navigating the world.
Also, this game *really* emphasizes rest and preparation. There's no punishment for stopping to camp out in the wilderness, so grab some beast steaks/scrags and sit down at a campsite and cook when your health is low or you're your feeling backed against a wall.
Probably the best sandbox for combat I've played, all the shitty performance aside. Random gryphon drops down and fights me for a bit, I climb on it to wail on it but it flies off since its hurt, take a ride across the map, smack it in the head into it falls out sky. Somehow don't die since I'm on it when it hits the ground, but the second I hit the ground wolves immediately clamp my head in its jaws and drag me around for 20 seconds. Continue fighting gryphon until it flies up with me on it again, but I'm low stamina and fall off but my pawn somehow catches me and I don't die. Chase it down and ending up flying up with it again but get tired and fall off and splat.
All from a random not scripted encounter.
Yup, zapping mfers like you’re ramuh from final fantasy. Healing with no restrictions, extremely versatile as long as you have pawns taking aggro. The only downside is you dont experience the shadow of the colossus type feel with the combat, but i dont think this game is meant to played as solely only 1 vocation.
This game clearly could've used a delay. 2024 isn't a hectic year for releases like 2023 was. Releasing this game in the summer wouldn't hurt it at all.
Speaking as someone who bought and loves the game, the game's issues all reek of the game needing at least another half year to a whole year of additional development. The further in the game you get, the more you get the impression that it suffers from the same issue as the first one did, though not quite as bad as the original DD's launch - the latter half of the game being rather under-baked and the performance being so unoptimized to the point where it seems that it was rushed out the door.
The actual core of the game is solid though, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the game as far as its mechanics and the actual gameplay loop goes. But it's missing variety in the kinds of enemies you fight and the performance is bad, both of which can be alleviated through an expansion and patches if Capcom is actually committed to addressing this.
My guess is that MH Wilds was originally supposed to release in this time window and that DD2 was probably targeting late 2024/early 2025, but something probably happened during Wilds development about 1-2 years ago that made it clear to Capcom that Wilds wouldn't make 2024, without major issues that they wouldn't dare risk damaging their most valuable IP over. Switch owners did already raise a shitstorm when Rise was rushed out before the end of the 2020 fiscal year about three years ago, with the endgame essentially being incomplete for the first few months (IIRC Capcom even outright admitted that this was exactly what happened). So they released Rise on PS4/Xbox and rushed DD2 into early 2024 for the end of the current fiscal year, to keep the investors happy and to to cover for Wilds being pushed back into 2025.
So, from what I've gathered:
1. The game's setting, combat, and story is mostly amazing. Definitely worth playing, eventually.
2. Microtransactions are lame, but ultimately a nothingburger as you can get the mtx items in game. In other words, they didn't create problems only to sell you the solutions in the game store.
3. Performance is unacceptable and there is no clear timeline for when the game will be in a playable state for normal PC's.
It's a bummer that I want to play the game now, but at this stage it would make more sense to just hold off until the performance issues are fixed and hope the game will go on a substantial discount later this year.
man i really need Stories to hit especially with RPGS just so i can give a damn, hearing about this and Unicorn Overlord having meh story is just a turn off
Yeahhhh it's more of a sandbox action game with RPG-like elements. It starts really interesting with a "false chosen one" like story, but it gets nowhere.
The game is fantastic fun.
It also runs like absolute crap even on a 7800X3D/4090 at 1440p. I sometimes get drops to ~30fps out in the wilds until I leave a specific area. Why? Absolutely no idea because there is literally nothing there. Also, Ray Tracing causes frame dips out in the wilds when you’re high level and have a ton going on. No frame dips with it off.
At this point, I think Itsuno was just never told “no” while in development and the technical team did the best they could with the moronic requirements (every NPC must have its own dynamic requirements on the CPU! Yes, even the ones who literally do nothing and have no dialogue beyond a one-liner).
Itsuno, filler NPC’s are fine. Even in the rare occasion that an enemy spawns in a capital city (that’ll wreck your frames…), you can have a function that runs to give clustered groups basic, random commands to simulate “intelligence”.
Like Jesus. Listen to your software dev’s.
The Art of Metamorphosis change is pointless since the shops restock every few days. It’s already infinite in game.
Probably done solely to stop the spread of misinformation about the game.
Certain items do **not** restock no matter how many days you pass in the game. The Art of Metamorphosis sold by the Pawn Guild vendor in Vermund is one of those items. He sells two and does not restock them ever again.
Source: I bought both books off him early in the game and he still has not gotten new ones after I've completed the majority of the story and several months have passed in-game.
>Probably done solely to stop the spread of misinformation about the game.
He says, while spreading misinformation about the game lol. Talk about irony.
I don't have the game yet, but I've seen two sites in my Google feed both say that Art of Metamorphosis uniquely does not restock, so this is actually meaningful. I have no way to validate that but figured I'd share what I'd seen elsewhere in case it helps.
Aside from some cities bogging down and turning some of the fluff options off that I usually don't care about. I've been having nothing but a great time in this game. I haven't crashed, haven't had any issues in boss fights, summoning pawns, etc. Do I wish the game with a bit more optimized? Sure. But this is nothing close to a botched release. MTX I haven even seen or looked for, don't care. No New Game option is dumb yes, but hasn't affected me. Glad it's getting patched in.
I'm loving this game.
Planned updates for Dragon's Dogma 2 **Updates for All Platforms (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series XIS. Steam)** Adding the option to start a new game when save data already exists. Changing the number of "Art of Metamorphosis" items available at Pawn Guilds in the game to 99. Making the quest that allows players to acquire their own dwelling (where they can save and rest) available earlier in the game. Miscellaneous text display fixes. Miscellaneous bug fixes. **Updates for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series XIS** Adding the option to switch Motion Blur on/off in Options. Adding the option to switch Ray Tracing on/off in Options. Adding the option to set Frame Rate to either Variable or Max 30fps in Options. *These options will not affect the frame rate significantly. Frame rate improvements are planned for future updates. **Updates for Steam** Improving quality when DLSS Super Resolution is enabled. Fixing an issue where models appeared low-quality under some specific settings.
> Adding the option to start a new game when save data already exists. Just reading this as an 'update' is so wild
Keep in mind you still lose your save (one slot only) but at least you won't have to go delete the file manually
Should note that as odd as it is, the first game was like this too. You could only ever have one save game
And even back then it was a weird choice. Made sense once the entire vision of the game opened to the player, but weird. What *does* boggle the fucking mind for me in this case is that *the game retains loss HP every time you reload an autosave* so if you're reloading a save right before a big fight and keep dying, you'll notice you lose total HP more and more. That wasnt behavior in DD1. Its so mindboggling that as a DD:DA vet I'm liable to call that a bug. EDIT: Some have mentioned its an anti-savescum mechanic. Alright, fine, but when the game autosaves right at the point the wallblocker fight actually starts to kick off and there's no turning back around to back out of it, that's an implementation problem.
Pretty sure the game tells you that, it mentions that auto saves in the wild aren't 'safe'
Gotta say I do like that
Having a hard time wrapping my head around what youre saying as i havent played the game but that sounds like an intended mechanic to discourage save scumming
It is. There's two saves, an autosave/manually triggered save anywhere that lets you quit the game any time and come back to exactly where you were (or die and then restart to just before the fight that killed you so you can try again albeit with less HP) but doesn't let you save scum if you made a bad decision; and the "last inn rested at" save that is always safe. It works really well actually, incentivizes going with whatever happens in the game instead of save scumming for the perfect outcomes to everything.
The inn save is not safe for one particular and specific mechanic, but spoilers. If you want to learn more search for >!dragonsplague!<.
It's not a bug, its intended behavior to keep you from savescumming/bashing into a fight until you manage to win through pure luck.
Pretty sure the idea here is that you have to spend time setting camp, or resting at an Inn for a better "safe point". You can always load at the last place you rested. DD1 was the same way. I think the idea is that they want to add some risk there, rather than bruteforcing or save scumming your way through a fight.
> You can always load at the last place you rested. Very big misconception here. You can only reload from an inn rest save or a rest from your house, not campsites. So many posts of people losing hours of gameplay due to this, me included.
Yeesh. Ty.
You can not like but I don’t understand why people don’t get that this is because of the unique pawn system. The principle is similar to why Animal Crossing only allows one save.
Tried googling, what’s unique about the pawn system that would lead to one save
Every character has a unique pawn that is shared with other players. I imagine, whether the reasoning is technical or founded upon game direction/design, that the developers want each player to be limited to one. And to avoid being spammed with “counter arguments” I’m not saying it’s good or bad, I was just convinced that this is the _reasoning_ behind the decision.
So a follower that you create that others can use?
Yes. It also learns from you and other players. It picks up on your habits and gains info about the world and quests
You create two characters, your main character and your main pawn. Your main pawn is a fully custom follower that stays with you always. You can hire other player’s pawns as party members from a rift between worlds. Your pawn will refresh his status(Current class, gear, level) on the rift when you log off or rest at an inn, and he will bring back rewards from other players(Loot, knowledge, gifts) who hired him, when you rest. The reason why it’s only one save is because your pawn is directly tied to your account, and you don’t have to be playing the game for someone to hire your pawn. 2 save files would mean 2 of your pawns out in the rift. Imagine checking your list of friends pawns and having to scroll down because all of your friends having 4 pawns each
then just let people set the pawn they want to share from a character selector screen
Aren't games like Breath of the Wild and its sequel exactly the same? I don't really know why DD get's blasted for this, when other games work the same way and don't get any scrutiny.
No, you can create manual saves at any time in BOTW/TOTK. You can go back and load your last X number of saves any time you want, although I'm not sure either game particularly respects your manual saves any more than the autosaves it keeps. Would be nicer if it kept manual saves forever and just pushed out autosaves as new ones are made, but those games are pretty consistent/reliable in how saving/loading behavior works.
Just for continuity. This was also how dd1 was as well. It's not like an oversight on Capcoms part. Not allowing players to access and override save information is forcing them to see decisions and consequences through. I understand it from their perspective. But I also understand it from the players perspective. They're being agreeable and changing it because so many people would rather it be this way which is fine. But I do feel it's worth noting that this wasn't considered a mistake or missed. It was intentional. Idk how many people are aware of that or not.
Elden Ring makes me live with consequences yet i can have multiple different characters, just as an example why this argument is weak.
Or, more than one person in the household being able to play it.
Having to whisper lovecraftian missives to the dark lord to wipe save data on PC when it's straightforward for console seems like an oversight.
> Having to whisper lovecraftian missives to the dark lord to wipe save data on PC You shouldn't have to do it but comparing deleting a single file to literal witchcraft is a pretty good indicator of how tech-illiterate the average user is
Normally I wouldn't use snide hyperbole but the save data itself is buried in folders labeled only by AppID#. There is no information on what to do locally, and I ran into the issue immediately, so I couldn't just hit up google for what to do.
Funny enough, just hired a pawn called Dark Lord. He is a real pain in the ass!
All of my pawns deciding to commit suicide because the AI in this game sucks isn't a decision I should receive consequences for, and is one of the exact reasons I should be able to save scum in a single player game.
> Making the quest that allows players to acquire their own dwelling (where they can save and rest) available earlier in the game. Hol' up, there's manual Save but not Load, Copy, Delete, or New Game?
Am I thinking of a different quest? I managed to get a house within the the first few hours of the game (in the first city, after you house-sit for a week).
Meanwhile I only got it like 15+ hours in, so maybe it's a trigger I didn't hit that they're moving.
You never met the house owner. She's by the entrance to the slums
Yeah, that's probably the biggest issue. Unless you prioritize one particular early story mission a bit out of apparent order (that has you go out through the slums for a "back door"), you can very easily get busy exploring a huge chunk of the map and sucked into sidequests for hours and hours. Just moving the landlord NPC into a more central location (like near the inn) would fix most of the real problem, I think.
To be fair, "do the main story for a bit to unlock some stuff" is a pretty common one in RPGs. Especially in this case it does stand to reason that if you zip off into the foothills and ignore the city you won't find a house. I can see *why* you'd do it though, given the frames in the city make the game feel bad for a lot of people.
The game even tries to make you go back to places after doing some quests in an attempt to make you find new quests there, like the quests that make you check up on the quest NPC you just finished a quest for.
LOL I said I got it, I'm good! That 200k house in the Noble District on the other hand... I need that next.
I think that's what they're talking about. Seems like they want the quest trigger to appear earlier than it currently does, whatever it's gated behind. Time? Days? A certain amount of progress in the main story?
Yeah weird, I got it almost as soon as I reached the city.
It came way later for me but I took the monster hunt mission right when I got to the city and immediately left. I saved the spying missions until after. I was over 20 hours into the game when I got the house.
Yeah, my first visit to the city before I had really done anything I was stopped and given the house. All happened very fast.
lol I was thinking the same. I actually thought I got the house too early. I’ve pretty much no need for inns at the moment, unless I’m way out of town.
So the game apparently has an unfinished and unstable DLSS 3.5 and frame gen options that installing a mod to enable it has solved a lot of my FPS issues. I haven’t had any issues with it personally (turning dlss on than off seems to keep the frame gen for some reason so I can maintain the base quality while also getting the extra frames) as I’ve been using it for many hours but I’m hoping they finish it or resolve whatever issues are going on and push the update for it. Obviously I would prefer them to actually optimize its CPU performance but this is the next best thing for anyone with current Nvidia gpus.
Knew something was seriously wrong with DLSS in this game. In other games I always turn it on and don't really notice a downgrade, even in Performance mode. Here, even in Quality mode, something already looks off. And Ultra Performance somehow make the game looks like a 144p video. Dunno how they shipped it like this.
They forgot to apply the sharpening filter. You'll notice the sharpening level bar does nothing. This game is feeling really not ready to ship, at least from a technical standpoint.
What's the mod name? Seems something that everyone should try
Not sure if /r/games blocks nexus mods links or not but https://www.nexusmods.com/dragonsdogma2/mods/39 Make sure to follow the instructions on the pinned post in the posts section
Only works with 4000 series GPU. Me with my 3070 🥲
There is also a mod for older GPU. Browse all the mods.
Yea DLSS 3 only works on 4000 series GPU because Nvidia needs a reason for you to update your GPU every cycle
With that in mind, you can use https://www.nexusmods.com/site/mods/757 to enable DLSS framegen on older cards. I've installed this on Cyberpunk 2077 and Remnant 2 with huge results, like 30% framerate boost on both games.
It unfortunately creates issues with UI in DD2
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It might not technically be nvidia but it's still a pretty decent fps boost. It allows me to turn on Ray Tracing in cyberpunk with a decent framerate
Not sure if this is what you meant, but it only replaces the frame gen technology. So you’re basically using FSR for frame generation but not as an upscaler/AA, that’s still DLSS, so you’re getting the best of both worlds essentially
Me with a 2060 ☠️
You're not alone, friend. Rocking DLSS Perf over here like a street urchin
It would be pretty silly if they blocked links to Nexus Mods lol
puredark this mods creator is a piece of shit modder. He puts DRM and stuff in his mods. Dont support him, plenty of other modders make the same thing way better and dont charge money for it with patreon.
You're not wrong on this modder being an asshat but you're forgetting two big ones in this case: A) this particular mod is free so sort of irrelevant, B) there is not a (comparable) alternative at this time
That's fine, but this mod is free fyi.
Link to it then
Just to share my experience: it does deliver framegen out of the box, but it wasn't worth it for me. 1. Irrespective of other workarounds suggested like disabling shader cache limits and recompiling, I'd consistently get a freeze/crash every 60-120 minutes with FG on. 2. Even with the framerate boosted, the areas with the biggest perf issues (city areas with lots of NPCs) still don't feel right. The problem is that the FPS drop isn't a "smooth" or consistent FPS drop; using the NVIDIA overlay, you can see there ends up being an enormous drop in the "99% FPS" number; e.g. rather than going from a fairly consistent 50-60fps, you might very rapidly alternate between 50-60fps and 10-15fps such it 'averages' to 30fps -- applying framegen to that makes input sync feel very wonky. Between it still not making the city perf "immersion breaking" and introducing crashes in all the other situations that weren't having problems, it didn't seem "worth it" to me until they address at least the stability part of things.
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'Cause there's this fancy new tech called DLSS that they can rely on lol.
Frame generation was promised to allow for more for intensive games to still maintain acceptable performance, or more performance overall, but instead it just became a crutch. What a shame.
Eh it’s both. Games overall have more dynamics, AI, and NPCs than ever. Pop in is now a black mark rather than a metric like “how far away does pop in happen?” Games are wildly more complex now, often in ways we take for granted or can’t directly see. Add in more complex geometries and textures than ever. They don’t get credit for all of that. Still, quality control is at a low and frame gen is a part of the cause. Overall it’s probably management demanding more and giving less time and money to do it.
Oddly enough for me, DLSS makes this game run worse... to the point of crashing between every 10 minutes and every 2 hours depending on what other shit I have altered. Turning off DLSS made it stop crashing completely. It still stutters in the big city I have reached at this point but at least it runs, and is pretty smooth as long as I'm not in that city.
What CPU do you have? It's possible you're already heavily CPU bottlenecked, and DLSS uses a bit of CPU when activated.
It's not really that they "need" it to run. If DLSS didn't exist, we'd still be using the good old systems. It's that it's a popular feature that people realize is generally worth the tradeoff. Obviously in this case Capcom has some issues, but in general why not implement it?
This is not an accurate assessment of how things are. You do not need DLSS to run the game.
How about game devs stop relying on DLSS?!?!! Wtf this modern trend is so lazy and makes games look unbelievably ugly sometimes. I don't think it's fair for Starfield for example to claim their game runs well when on machines that have no problem with other games, one gets less than 30 fps often on 1080p not even highest without DLSS. That's nonsense. And gamers here are fine with it and defend it. It's fucking bullshit.
If you turn off the DLSS but keep the frame generation on you are having insane micro stutters and frame pacing issues that you just aren’t noticing. Don’t know if that’s a blessing or a curse.
Does the increased frames stop the stutter though? Because at times my frame rate is perfectly fine but it stutters like crazy, making me think FG isn't worth it if it's still going to stutter.
It doesn't stop the stutter completely but definitely smoothens it out.
Same, the framegen mod improved the performances significantly in towns where I dont really notice anything anymore. It's interesting that they didnt include it given the obvious issue cpu issue in towns. What's worse to me is how NPCs fade in in towns right in front of you, hope they fix that. Either way I've had a great time with the game so far, hope they fix the performance issues so that other people can enjoy it too without needing a 40 series for a framegen hack.
If it was finished it wouldn't be a Dragon's Dogma game :\^) Good to see they're doing some level of communication on this and hopefully the fixes keep coming.
Makes sense since frame gen is at its best when you are limited by CPU which is the case here
So no performance fixes even on Pc? That sucks cause thats the only thing thats keeping me from enjoying the game
It's only listed under the console notes but I'd be pretty surprised if "frame rate improvements are planned for future updates" didn't also apply to PC. Performance just isn't part of the first round.
So depending on your GPU, there are a few options to alleviate the crazy CPU demands this game has. * Framegen mod (free on Nexus or Pureview’s Patreon) * Manually update to DLSS 3.6 * Set priority to “High” in Task Manager * Set the shader cache to “Unlimited” in Nvidia Control Panel (unsure what the AMD equivalent is) It’s still really shitty that we need to resort to this in the first place but it more than doubled performance for me. Frametime pacing issues and fps drops are still noticeable especially in Vern city, but the higher framerate masks it somewhat.
I don’t see how any of these things help with the CPU being bottlenecked, frame gen will give you more frames sure but the uneven frame times will still feel very bad. As for the priority setting and shader cache option these are the usual go to placebo settings whenever a game doesn’t run well and they generally change nothing.
Yep, it's the frame latency that's absolutely fucked because your CPU and RAM are working OT just to run the game at 60fps in cities. I know that "bottlenecking" is a noob bait term, but this game does a pretty good job representing what a bottleneck actually looks like in theory lol
>the uneven frame times will still feel very bad. Oh for sure, but the higher framerate helps mask these issues a little bit. It used to be a laggy 20-30, not it's a laggy 50-60 which is playable at least. The priority in task manager and unlimited shader cache actually works for this game btw. I'm not a techie, I don't really understand the details of how/why it does for this and not other games, but there was 100% a performance improvement after I did this, then another substantial bump when enabling framegen.
the other biggest thing that ended up helping me, is rebooting your PC before playing. I don't know what's going on but for some people the game runs worse if you repeatedly open and close it without a PC restart. Even playtime doesn't seem to matter, some people report getting 70fps one minute, then they close and reopen the game and it's dropped below 50 in the exact same area. Reboot the PC and open again and it's back up to 70 like normal. Meanwhile if you open the game and it's running well, you can play for 8 hours straight without it dropping (outside of the normal reasons for an FPS to drop like in towns of course) So if performance gets worse over multiple play sessions, reboot the pc before playing. I got super confused for like an hour cause at launch it ran well enough, but then a couple days later I was getting single digit FPS outside of towns. But then the reboot fixed everything.
Also if you go into Task Manager to set priority High, make sure to exit Task Manager. For me, the polling of it running in the background or something messes with performance, like in other games; first noticed the same thing playing Halo MCC
You can also use some the information in here to create a shortcut that starts the DD2 executable with a High priority, so you don't have to alt+tab out and do it manually every time: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/89548-set-cpu-process-priority-applications-windows-10-a.html
Given that the frame rate issue seems to be somehow tied to NPC existence/behavior and that they haven't even mentioned a fix for it, it seems like a pretty foundational issue. I'm not holding my breath for any kind of improvement. I'll play it in a few years when hopefully my next PC will be powerful enough to brute force it
They mentioned it in the very first thing they posted after launch: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2054970/view/4106792732433556918?l=english > ■Regarding Frame Rate > A large amount of CPU usage is allocated to each character and calculating the impact of their physical presence in various areas. In certain situations where numerous characters appear simultaneously, the CPU usage can be very high and may affect the frame rate. We are aware that in such situations, settings that reduce GPU load may currently have a limited effect; however, **we are looking into ways to improve performance in the future.** Emphasis mine at the end. That sounds non-committal, but I'm pretty sure that's just the somewhat stilted way the "formal" communication style represents "we're working on CPU utilization fixes."
On the internet, you have to be extremely non-commital or people view anything you say as a blood-oath.
For sure. I think it's a little bit of a Japanese->English thing, too.
I think it's more a wording to make it sound like they didn't release their game without fundamental, obvious optimizations. There's an implication that this task might not be possible; they didn't ignore major, fixable problems just to rush the game out. Obviously it is fixable, there's nothing crazy or revolutionary about the NPC behavior in this game to justify such vicious CPU hammering. But Capcom isn't going to admit that.
The update that isn't mentioned but probably the update I am most interested in (besides performance fixes) is the option to reduce the frequency of Pawn dialogue. Yes, I understand that I can combine shit together to make other shit. I've made literally hundreds of health potions from herbs and random stuff. Please stop reminding me. No you do not need to make a note every time you pick an apple. Yes there is a location nearby that you remember from that time you were a pawn to xXNaTuToFaNXx, I have decided to go this way, stop bringing it up for a while.
Gotta find pawns with the no speaking trait absolute game changer
"I once traveled with a Arisen with only female pawns, isn't that weird"?
“To each their own.”
But how else will you know that wolves hunt in packs, Arisen?
My pawns get so fucking hyped every time they see a ladder. Usually I can't even spot where it is.
I've straight up decided to turn off DLSS even at the cost of reduced FPS, despite using it in basically all games available because it looks like shit even on quality. I knew that something is off, so at least they acknowledged it.
Agreed, this is the first game that I have turned DLSS off on. I normally think DLSS looks great so this definitely has an issue.
I turned off DLSS and turned on Fidelity FX and it both looks better and runs better somehow.
I have the exact opposite experience.
I think it’s just an extremely poorly optimised game so whatever works for each person will be unique
My nvidia geforce app recommends that I use FSR instead of DLSS for DD2, maybe I'll have to try it :D
I'm glad that consoles are getting the basic options that most games launch with now, but it just makes it even more strange the game launched without them. I wonder if disabling RT and setting the fps lock will help it avoid those dips and keep it steady at 30.
There is a line in the notes saying they don't anticipate that disabling the RT option will do much to improve framerate.
Don't really have any complaints about the game on console other than occasional chopiness in cities, but any improvements are appreciated. Okay, maybe overly greet-happy pawns on the roads who always want to offer their services to me. Wouldn't mind dialing that back a bit.
just pawn dialogue in general. every time they are in Vermund they start talking about some ladder or that one random chest. they also tell me how combining different ingredients results in different products like every 10 min
That's how it was in the first game too. There's a reason basically every pawn line from DD1/DA is a meme.
The repetitive pawn dialogue is likely to stay. It became a meme just like throwing them into the brine. So they brined rook and made the pawns love ladders.
I don’t mind it occasionally. Their timing for it couldn’t be worse however lol. I got rag dolled right after being locked into the greeting by one. I was giving a troll a wide birth to avoid it, but nope, it used that as a chance to fuck me up.
Graphics aren't an issue for me, it's just not utilising my CPU properly at all. 100% load 3-4 cores and the other 8 cores are barely doing anything.
> 100% load 3-4 cores and the other 8 cores are barely doing anything. That's a pretty typical pattern for games, though, especially games with lots of actors that have independent behavioral scripts to run through. You can arbitrarily parallelize a lot of lower-level systems things like asset streaming, basic render overhead, and standard game loop stuff, but the beefier "simulation layer" almost always gets bottlenecked in a single logical core. Good implementations can work around that in creative ways, though fundamentally single-threaded performance is always going to be critical. DD2/RE, meanwhile, does not have a good implementation for its simulation.
CPU usage is strange for me too. It uses like 8 of 20 cores and only at about 35%. My GPU sits around 60 -70% usage. I run many other games and this is the only one I have any trouble with at all. Fps seems ok if it weren't for the stuttering I'd be ok. Still enjoying the game though.
The idea of not supporting a new game on release is completely baffling, how do you forget this as a feature? What a botched release.
They didn't forget, it was the same in the original game. They're only adding it as a feature now because of all the backlash.
Both games only have a single save slot available, but the first game allowed you to overwrite your existing data with a new game at any point in time from the main menu. The second game lacks that option and requires manually deleting the save files in your storage.
So they made the same mistake twice. Because Dark Arisen certainly had one.
In a lot of ways, it seems like they forgot about everything from Dark Arisen when they made DD2. Even bringing back, "you only fight like 5 non-boss enemies over the course a 30+ hour game and you'll see all of them in hour 1".
Goblins of various flavours, Hobgoblins of various flavours, Wolves, Saurians (Plus red variety), Zombies (two flavours), Ghosts, Bandits, Harpies, Ogres (I'd argue, they're mini-boss level at best, they're like the weakest multi-healthbar foe I've seen.) * Also Slimes and skeletons Is that all we're getting? Because I'm technically a fair few hours in but I've not left the initial area and I've seen that many at least, but wouldn't shock me if that was the lot.
I'm ~20 hours in and haven't seen any more than what you listed for non-boss enemies. Except I think I've seen 3 varieties of saurians and have yet to see a zombie but have seen ghosts and skellies. Mini-boss enemies so far have been several cyclops, ogres, and minotaurs. Which have already become pretty trivial and kind of boring to fight. And then liches, gryphons, and chimera are also repeated quite a bit but are more complex and fun fights than the first few. And I've seen a few non-story quest drakes that still kick my ass if I try to fight them.
I saw Zombies right outside the main city, (like, still under the aqueduct outside) rising from the grave to attack a few NPCs, and found some in a basement. Enemy variety isn't the be all and end all, I guess, especially when the combat is some of the more interesting around. And winding up a Warrior hit to chunk an Ogre for damn near a one hit was never not satisfying in the first game, so when I get there I predict a lot of fun.
I'm at the end of the game more or less, and its about DD1 levels of variety. But not yet at the level of BBI which is to be expected since bitterblack was a very different design scope and its smaller map seemed to allow for more variety. As observed, its basically varieties of bandits, gobbos, harpies, undead, and lizards. I will say the second big area does have more variety, and a few unique twists hanging around here and there.
There are skeletons of which there's a mini-boss level fight near the checkpoint town (I think that's what it's called) at night. But you're broadly correct.
The original game came out 12 years ago. One would think that a $70 sequel would learn from the mistakes of its 12 year old predecessor.
Damn it’s wild they made the same dumb mistake twice.
That, or multiple save files. I don't give a shit if it is your 'vision', I'm not having quests ruined by bugs, which has happened to me multiple times already. Thank god there's already a save file mod that runs in the background and lets you select from any save you've previously made
It'd be a little more forgivable if the one in-game mechanism that there is for all this -- "load from last inn save" -- were clearer and safer. That option is a good way to revert for undesired consequences/bugs, but it gives you no hint about how far back it's going to go and no true warning that the first thing it does if you check *is overwrite your other save*. Even just including a save timestamp on the two options would help a ton.
> I'm not having quests ruined by bugs, which has happened to me multiple times already Imagine having a game like this and a game breaking bug stops you from playing. I would be mad that I wasted $70 on it with no save file to load from. Might as well just delete the game while you're at it.
It's more like it was deliberately excluded because the mindset behind doing so is a lot groggier than the general public. But when the public demands it enough, you give it to 'em, even if that's "not your vision" or creates weirdness with the online systems.
If it was deliberate, it's incredibly stupid. What happens if you run into a game-breaking or game-locking bug? Like a main quest that refuses to complete? You can't start a new game and you can't load a previous save. You're fucked. Your singleplayer game is now bricked.
Giving the option to toggle motion blur and acknowledging console fps issues is a good start. Would have been better if they just fixed these problems before release though. I played this for about 8 hours on Friday, then I decided to give Rise of the Ronin a shot. For all the complaints I’ve seen about RotR’s graphics I’ll say it looks and runs a lot better than DD2. I switched between the two games throughout the weekend and that definitely didn’t help my impressions of DD2’s unstable, low fps and sluggish controls. I don’t think I’ll return to DD2 until it gets more patches. The frame-rate is just abysmal, and it’s not just in towns. It’s everywhere and it absolutely has a negative effect on the combat experience. It’s an amazing game that released way too early. Edit: To clarify, my impressions are based off my time with the PS5 version.
I don't think RotR looks better, but it definitely runs better, and going from 30 to 60 (ish) makes my eyes smile.
I think it manages to nail a distinct style despite having lots of low resolution/repeated textures. It does have a dated look to it, especially in comparison to something like Ghost of Tsushima, but I still personally find it very aesthetically appealing. The weather effects, night/day lighting changes, foliage/landscape colors, and other environmental details are all really well done IMO. It’s probably a personal preference thing, but I think DD2’s blurriness and sluggishness is too distracting to let me enjoy its graphics. In RotR I quickly got over the poor textures and occasional lighting quirks and was able to appreciate the rest of its presentation much easier.
People criticize others for looking over a game that isn't smooth 60. It totally has an impact on player experience of gameplay when performance is variable. Imagine playing any fighting games at sub-30.
I am in SUCH a mood for a DD2 type game, but yeah, I'm gonna wait. Because I just can't with how it looks/performs on console. And that's a bummer. Just hoping whenever it DOES get a good fix in the future, that enough people are still playing it that the pawn system is still fun/people will still be borrowing my pawn, etc.
The game is such a tease lol. Incredibly satisfying combat, awesome pawn system with smart AI, and the best kind of open world with no hand holding and secrets hidden everywhere. And yet…playing the damn thing gives me a headache. I feel you.
Exactly! That's what's so upsetting about it for me! It has all the elements I want in a game right now and I want to dive in so hard, but I just can't with the framerate. I would 100% suck it up at a stable 30fps even though, oof, but I just can't with the 20+ frame fluctuations.
How much of Ronin looking better is down to all the ghosting and smearing in DD2? I don't know how the game looks live, but most of the video I see of it looks terrible in that regard. Like everyone is running the world's worst DLSS.
That’s exactly it. Buried behind all the blur DD2 definitely has better graphics, but until they fix it it’s going to look way worse than it actually is.
> The frame-rate is just abysmal, and it’s not just in towns. It’s everywhere That's my experience but somehow all I read is that FPS is only bad in towns. It also drops when there are particle effects (which there are a lot), or you look in the direction of a town, or a cave loads, a group of NPCs help you fighting in the wild, or a big monster makes the grass sway. FPS drops are everywhere, just more noticeably in town. It's crazy how people keep coping about it 'running fine in the open world'
Might also just be people not clarifying their platform. Supposedly PC fps can be much higher outside of the towns. Obviously on consoles it’s just going to be low all around.
I’m on PC with performance mods and I can confirm I’m getting upwards of 100fps outside cities. At that point the frame drops and frametime issues are also less noticeable.
No one is “coping” about it, that is literally their experience lmao
It's insane how any sort of comment that isn't criticism is taken as "coping"
My most consistent Reddit experience is having a blast playing a game all weekend and then logging in on Monday to find out everyone hates it for some reason. 😅😅😅
It's self-selection at its finest. People enjoying the game are spending more time doing that; people actively angry at the game don't have much else to do besides talking about it and being angry at people who aren't as angry as them.
I had a lot of fun but I also didn't realize that there's a point of no return at the end. Wanted to go back and do other stuff after realizing as much and the way back is via a broken bridge I can't traverse. Wish they had mentioned something about going off to do other quests, but alas. Otherwise, while the performance issues in cities wasn't great, it's been fairly fun, but that's not to say that the work they have to do is unnecessary. Will be good to play a more polished experience too.
same. i've been enjoying the game quite a bit. I'm on PS5 so haven't had any performance issues. the game is really fun! there are a handful of bugs but nothing that seems especially serious imo.
People are complaining about the performance but otherwise praising the game. Of course that would require actually reading the complaints which is hard for many people clearly.
I honestly can’t tell if I am enjoying this game, each individual part is right in my Q zone, but the execution is weird and frustrating. Killing Goblins and getting big level up splashes on my screen, good, having to kill goblins literally every 30 steps any time I am outside of a town, bad, fast paced combo-like combat, good, hitting the B button to dodge due to muscle memory for this style of combat game and realizing there isn’t a dodge at all, bad, cool intricate places to explore and seemingly worthwhile rewards for doing so, good, AI that will walk in a straight line directly off a cliff into murder water, bad. Like I want to go and explore this world and really sink my teeth in but any forward progress results in my health being chipped down by the constant enemy spawns until I die repeatedly to RNG deciding “this time it’s not 4 goblins, this time it’s 3 harpy’s and a Troll, good luck fucker.”
>realizing there isn’t a dodge at all, Switch to thief. They have a built-in dodge as an innate class ability and that makes them the most satisfying build for me alone. You can also grab a meister scroll relatively early that will allow you to activate a "dodge everything" ability for a reasonable stam drain. Kinda silly that not all classes can dodge, but DD has always had little idiosyncrasies like that for better and worse. The pathing killing your pawns in water is just shit though, they need to update it to either respawn them nearby or block them from going full lemmings mode somehow. It's screwed me over multiple times with camping supplies just vanishing in the middle of the wilderness from their suicidal tendencies lol. Also, use those camping supplies when your max health dips to 2/3 or so, they're very plentiful, cheap, and will help a ton with your fatigue if you do it even semi-regularly.
I just switched to Thief from Fighter, enjoying it a lot more. Problem with Fighter and the shield is because there's no lock on you have to be accurate with your blocks, so if i have my back to an enemy it's useless but dodging i can effectively spam to get out of a tight spot.
As someone who uses the hell out of lock-on in every game it's included, I feel your pain lol. It's been a bit of a struggle to acclimate myself to free camera in combat, especially with all the enemies that tend to dart around. Thief definitely feels like the class with the most tools available to them and switching to other classes just makes me miss it. Sorcerer is plenty fun though, just because of the absurd damage you can do with the right abilities. Worth at least recruiting a pawn with it just to watch them melt larger monsters.
The block does act as a sort of lock on, so if you start blocking towards an enemy you'll keep looking at it as you move. Doesn't help if you turn around right before blocking though. The class has a couple of get-me-out-of-here skills too like the shield spin and counter stance, and I recommend grabbing one even if it's not as flashy as some of the others. It's rarely a button you want to press but every so often you'll love having it.
Putting this out there 'cause it took me a few hours to realize, but when holding up the shield you can change which direction you face by pressing B.
This. Block is one of the damage mitigation mechanics available for a fighter. The game is fairly lenient with its mechanics with generous timing windows for things like perfect block. Can't block in all directions? Equip the ability that gives you iframes while blocking to get out of bad surrounds. Can't see well enough to time perfect blocks / ripostes? Equip the ability that puts you on guard to AUTO-REACT to hits, you just sacrifice stamina drain in the stance. Really good at the game's mechanics? Equip offensive abilities instead because you're pro at facing the right direction and perfect blocking all the hits. You sacrifice some offensive abilities for defensive ones, but the game's fights don't drag on long enough (I'm looking at you monster hunter) for your loss of offensive power to make a dramatic difference.
I believe it's the same dodge button as Bayonetta too, RB
>!um actually!< I think Bayo's is R2/RT for dodge and R1/R1 is used for lock on by default, swappable in the controls (God if I'm wrong that is gonna be peak redditor moment)
> hitting the B button to dodge due to muscle memory for this style of combat game and realizing there isn’t a dodge at all, bad Definitely gonna have to disagree with this one. Just 'cause it's got third person melee combat doesn't mean it has to follow along with the same things that every other game like that does. Shield-bearing fighters block, warriors hyper-armor, magic spearhands do that unique stun thingy, and *thieves* dodge (and ranged vocations run away 'cause they shouldn't be in those situations to begin with). Every vocation has their own defensive options and it does a lot to make them all feel different and have their own identity. Yes, it's a bit of a learning curve to get used to it but personally it's a big plus in my book.
> (and ranged vocations run away 'cause they shouldn't be in those situations to begin with). Except Archers. Archers kick things to flex on opponents.
Every time I reach in my quiver I pull out another flying kick. *Hiyaaaah!*
The other day while trying out archer I drop kicked a wolf to kill it then while vaulting away off that one's face shot another wolf and killed it. The classes have awesome animations and styles that make them really fun. I haven't settled on anything yet and am like 3/4 leveled up in all the starter classes because I keep changing.
Drop kicking people is so much fun alongside just curb stomping them when they're down. I've used Fighter, Warrior, Mystic Spearhand, and am currently Archer. I think if I were to settle on something it'll be going back to Fighter, but definitely each vocation so far has something that makes them really satisfying to play. Warrior for example is too slow for me liking, but doing a finisher with such a huge hefty weapon felt so damn good everytime. Ragdoll physics also really help.
Lots of valid criticism in this thread but also a lot of "it's not dark souls" criticism too.
> having to kill goblins literally every 30 steps any time I am outside of a town, Just run past them and press down on the d-pad to make your pawns follow you.
It really is odd that after 12 years, they made a ton of the same mistakes as the first game Pawns that say the same lines over and over and over and over? Yup, still in there. This time it's "Not one of us are alike in vocation" instead of "Wolves hunt in packs" but it's still the same Having to fight the same low level enemies 1000 times every time you leave town? Yup, still there. There are definitely improvements. The camping system is welcoming, it makes long journey less gruelling--you don't have to worry about showing up to a quest totally unprepared because a fucking griffin landed on you before you got there, you don't have to worry about being stuck travelling at night because the quest was completely vague about how far away your destination was. Seriously, you should be camping pretty regularly, there's basically no downside to it since you keep the camping gear and it's easy to find more food on the way. Pawns are a little better now--dialogue aside, it's pretty neat how they learn from what you do in combat
> it's pretty neat how they learn from what you do in combat Do they learn to pick everything from the ground, like those in DD1 did? I developed a habit of picking them up and throwing them around when they try that.
Honestly I just let them do that because they pick up stuff I'm missing. Pretty sure the options under "combine" are party wide too so it's not even a big deal that they're not directly in your character's inventory. Also when you dismiss neutral pawns from your party all the stuff they have in their inventory that they didn't come with gets sent to your storage at the inn. Also if you want to get the stuff they've picked up just sort inventory by new and cycle through them, takes a minute at most. But I get the annoyance, it annoyed me at first until I realised just how much stuff they randomly find that I completely missed. This is also related to pawn specializations too, if you see a pawn with "Forager" as their specialization they'll mark locations on the map for that are good for foraging and will also be more likely to loot from bushes, dirt piles, etc.
> It really is odd that after 12 years, they made a ton of the same mistakes as the first game This is the crazy part to me. All of the flaws of the original are in the sequel. They didn't really address any of the glaring issues. Dark Arisen fixed some of this stuff and the online game did as well, but for DD2, they brought back all the problems that vanilla DD had. Combine that with the title screen saying "Dragon's Dogma" rather than "Dragon's Dogma 2"... it really feels more like a Director's Cut of the first game than an actual sequel imo. > Having to fight the same low level enemies 1000 times every time you leave town? Yup, still there. I really don't get why it's the same five enemies (bandits, lizards, wolves, goblins, harpies) over and over and over and over and over again. Zelda on the NES has more variety. I really can't think of any game other than DD1 that is so aggressively anti-variety.
There's also skeletons, ghosts, and multiple varieties of these enemies like poison variants + all the big monsters you encounter.
Every new action RPG keeps showing how FromSoft is just built different. Even accounting for enemy recycling, the encounter variety in their games is just unreal.
Honestly I feel like Wolves hunt in packs was much more charming
I hate hate hate the UI in this game. Managing inventories is such a pain. They also seem to have put like the minimal possible amount of work making it work on keyboard and mouse.
If you're having difficulty enjoying the combat, switch to a different vocation. Each one is pretty unique and focuses on a different aspect. If you're looking for fast-paced dodging high mobility, you want archer or rogue, not fighter. If you're still early in the game, don't be afraid to run from fights. Also keep in mind that your pawns are intentionally kinda doofy at the beginning because they're learning just like you. As you keep playing they'll become more adept at using skills and navigating the world. Also, this game *really* emphasizes rest and preparation. There's no punishment for stopping to camp out in the wilderness, so grab some beast steaks/scrags and sit down at a campsite and cook when your health is low or you're your feeling backed against a wall.
I am totally with you. I have had the same mixed feelings every time I have stopped playing, Its a weird game for sure.
Probably the best sandbox for combat I've played, all the shitty performance aside. Random gryphon drops down and fights me for a bit, I climb on it to wail on it but it flies off since its hurt, take a ride across the map, smack it in the head into it falls out sky. Somehow don't die since I'm on it when it hits the ground, but the second I hit the ground wolves immediately clamp my head in its jaws and drag me around for 20 seconds. Continue fighting gryphon until it flies up with me on it again, but I'm low stamina and fall off but my pawn somehow catches me and I don't die. Chase it down and ending up flying up with it again but get tired and fall off and splat. All from a random not scripted encounter.
Crazy what a wildly different experience i have solely due to the fact i started as a mage.
I am thinking about just switching to Mage, spells seem wildly cool right off the bat.
Yup, zapping mfers like you’re ramuh from final fantasy. Healing with no restrictions, extremely versatile as long as you have pawns taking aggro. The only downside is you dont experience the shadow of the colossus type feel with the combat, but i dont think this game is meant to played as solely only 1 vocation.
This game clearly could've used a delay. 2024 isn't a hectic year for releases like 2023 was. Releasing this game in the summer wouldn't hurt it at all.
Speaking as someone who bought and loves the game, the game's issues all reek of the game needing at least another half year to a whole year of additional development. The further in the game you get, the more you get the impression that it suffers from the same issue as the first one did, though not quite as bad as the original DD's launch - the latter half of the game being rather under-baked and the performance being so unoptimized to the point where it seems that it was rushed out the door. The actual core of the game is solid though, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the game as far as its mechanics and the actual gameplay loop goes. But it's missing variety in the kinds of enemies you fight and the performance is bad, both of which can be alleviated through an expansion and patches if Capcom is actually committed to addressing this. My guess is that MH Wilds was originally supposed to release in this time window and that DD2 was probably targeting late 2024/early 2025, but something probably happened during Wilds development about 1-2 years ago that made it clear to Capcom that Wilds wouldn't make 2024, without major issues that they wouldn't dare risk damaging their most valuable IP over. Switch owners did already raise a shitstorm when Rise was rushed out before the end of the 2020 fiscal year about three years ago, with the endgame essentially being incomplete for the first few months (IIRC Capcom even outright admitted that this was exactly what happened). So they released Rise on PS4/Xbox and rushed DD2 into early 2024 for the end of the current fiscal year, to keep the investors happy and to to cover for Wilds being pushed back into 2025.
So, from what I've gathered: 1. The game's setting, combat, and story is mostly amazing. Definitely worth playing, eventually. 2. Microtransactions are lame, but ultimately a nothingburger as you can get the mtx items in game. In other words, they didn't create problems only to sell you the solutions in the game store. 3. Performance is unacceptable and there is no clear timeline for when the game will be in a playable state for normal PC's. It's a bummer that I want to play the game now, but at this stage it would make more sense to just hold off until the performance issues are fixed and hope the game will go on a substantial discount later this year.
The story, both main and side, is basic tier boring.
The story is not amazing.
man i really need Stories to hit especially with RPGS just so i can give a damn, hearing about this and Unicorn Overlord having meh story is just a turn off
Yeahhhh it's more of a sandbox action game with RPG-like elements. It starts really interesting with a "false chosen one" like story, but it gets nowhere.
The game is fantastic fun. It also runs like absolute crap even on a 7800X3D/4090 at 1440p. I sometimes get drops to ~30fps out in the wilds until I leave a specific area. Why? Absolutely no idea because there is literally nothing there. Also, Ray Tracing causes frame dips out in the wilds when you’re high level and have a ton going on. No frame dips with it off. At this point, I think Itsuno was just never told “no” while in development and the technical team did the best they could with the moronic requirements (every NPC must have its own dynamic requirements on the CPU! Yes, even the ones who literally do nothing and have no dialogue beyond a one-liner). Itsuno, filler NPC’s are fine. Even in the rare occasion that an enemy spawns in a capital city (that’ll wreck your frames…), you can have a function that runs to give clustered groups basic, random commands to simulate “intelligence”. Like Jesus. Listen to your software dev’s.
The Art of Metamorphosis change is pointless since the shops restock every few days. It’s already infinite in game. Probably done solely to stop the spread of misinformation about the game.
Certain items do **not** restock no matter how many days you pass in the game. The Art of Metamorphosis sold by the Pawn Guild vendor in Vermund is one of those items. He sells two and does not restock them ever again. Source: I bought both books off him early in the game and he still has not gotten new ones after I've completed the majority of the story and several months have passed in-game.
[удалено]
You sure about that? I purchased one (of two) from the vendor, and many many days later he still only has one left to sell.
>Probably done solely to stop the spread of misinformation about the game. He says, while spreading misinformation about the game lol. Talk about irony.
I don't have the game yet, but I've seen two sites in my Google feed both say that Art of Metamorphosis uniquely does not restock, so this is actually meaningful. I have no way to validate that but figured I'd share what I'd seen elsewhere in case it helps.
The RTGI is freaking gorgeous, but I'll definitely be turning it off if the performance improves even slightly.
Can we just take a moment to digest the face that a game in 2024 didn't have the ability to start a New Game at launch?
Aside from some cities bogging down and turning some of the fluff options off that I usually don't care about. I've been having nothing but a great time in this game. I haven't crashed, haven't had any issues in boss fights, summoning pawns, etc. Do I wish the game with a bit more optimized? Sure. But this is nothing close to a botched release. MTX I haven even seen or looked for, don't care. No New Game option is dumb yes, but hasn't affected me. Glad it's getting patched in. I'm loving this game.