Dragon's Dogma 2's Director Finally Confirms Cooking Cutscenes Are Live-Action

07.03.2024 - 01:09 / thegamer.com / Hideaki Itsuno

Now that Dragon's Dogma 2 is right around the corner, we're starting to get a much better picture of what the game will include. From all the pre-release footage we've seen so far, we've been given brief glimpses at some terrifying monsters and impressive spell-slinging, but one thing that has stood out among all of that is the game's visually stunning cooking cutscenes.

They were enough to completely infatuate our very own Meg Pellicio, as we tried and failed last year to get the developers to tell us whether it was CGI, or real footage of a steak sizzling away. Over half a year later, and a couple of weeks away from release, director Hideaki Itsuno has finally lifted the cooking pot lid on this mystery and revealed that Dragon's Dogma 2 does include live-action cooking cutscenes of various bits of meat.

Itsuno dropped this bombshell in a recent interview with Japanese outlet 4Gamer, who explains that the idea came about after several of the staff's camping enthusiasts had several meetings surrounding what was interesting and appealing about the activity. Someone had the idea of letting players watch meat cooking cutscenes as much as they liked, which eventually led to its implementation in the full game.

As for why the developers went with live-action cutscenes instead of CGI, Itsuno just decided that the money that would have been spent on creating realistic meat would be better spent on "buying good meat instead", and you can't really fault that logic. With development costs ballooning across the industry in recent years, it probably would be cheaper to set up a good camera and film yourself cooking meat rather than mess around with CGI, and you get some tasty meat out of it too. It's a win-win.

We could have used CG to depict the meat, but we decided to spend the money on buying good meat instead. That's how it came to its current form. Each type of meat obtained in the game has different visuals when grilled. - Hideaki Itsuno

In other Dragon's Dogma 2 news, another long-standing mystery was solved earlier this week, though it's a lot less wholesome than the meat revelation. The game's frame rate on consoles has been a big source of debate for the past couple of months, with very little confirmed information on how the title will run. Itsuno finally revealed earlier this week that Dragon's Dogma 2 will have an uncapped frame rate that targets "around" 30fps on consoles, which isn't great, but at least it puts the entire debacle to bed.