Dragon’s Dogma 2’s combat is sloppy and unrefined — on purpose

28.03.2024 - 17:01 / polygon.com

A few hours into my time with Dragon’s Dogma 2, I was struck by a critical question that appeared simple, but was unusually difficult to answer. It was this: Does the combat suck?

Capcom’s latest hit is a sprawling, unruly open-world role-playing game that seems to delight in challenging players’ assumptions about genre. Whether you believe fast travel is a universal right or quest NPCs should never die, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is here to pull the rug out from under your feet. Mostly, I’m on board with this: I like games that push back sometimes (which is not the same thing as games that are just difficult). I like games that encourage the player to embrace the possibilities of failure and misadventure and just roll with it.

But one part of Hideaki Itsuno and his team’s uncompromising vision for Dragon’s Dogma 2 did give me pause, and it was the combat. To be honest, unlike with every other design choice in the game, I wondered if the way combat had turned out really was the result of the team’s uncompromising vision, or if it was just flawed in execution. It seemed kind of sloppy.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is an action-RPG, which means that it’s a game in which you’ll be hammering out skills and spells in real time as you battle monsters. The surprising thing about its combat system is… that’s it, in terms of player input. There’s no dodge roll, no counter, no combos. There are no mechanics based around timing evades or attacks. Blocks and parries are available only to the fighter and thief classes, sometimes as unlockable skills. There isn’t even a lock-on for reliably focusing your attacks on a particular enemy. Instead, you choose between relying on a very loose soft lock that automatically aims weak attacks at nearby enemies, or manually aiming stronger attacks, with the risk that you’ll whiff them completely.

This runs counter to trends within the action-RPG genre, which have moved closer to the sophisticated combat mechanics of pure action games in recent years. Last year’s Final Fantasy 16, for example, with combat directed by ex-Capcom designer Ryota Suzuki (who worked on Devil May Cry 5, as well as the first Dragon’s Dogma), had a particularly crisp and fluid combo-powered combat system, fed by RPG number-crunching in the background. Games like Capcom’s own Monster Hunter Rise and Ghost of Tsushima have all adopted lock-on action combat to some degree. Above all, FromSoftware’s Dark Souls series and Elden Ring have driven the trend toward refinement in combat design; these are RPGs in which players live or die by the care with which they watch enemies’ tells and the precision with which they time their attacks.

One reason Dragon’s Dogma 2 feels so different is that it’s designed from the ground up for party