Dragon’s Dogma Interview

NowGamer is offering an interview with Dragon’s Dogma’s creative director Hideaki Itsuno, with questions ranging from how close the game is to the director’s original vision, to the online features, whether the success of Skrim made the team more confident about the chances of success of the project and more. Here’s a couple of snippets:

Dragon’s Dogma will last anywhere between 30-100 hours. Can you begin to quantify how much content is in there, and what will people have to if they want their experience to stretch to the latter end of the scale?

Originally it was about 30 hours for the main campaign, but if you took into account all of the side quests, you’re looking at around an extra 70 hours.

But actually, as a result of recent developments, the main campaign will now be over 30 hours. It will be very difficult to complete in 30 hours.

Looking at the bulk of potential quests in your Quest Log, you’re looking at having 20-30 active quests at any one time. There might not even be main quest either, as there are many side quests with a lot of rare things to collect, and so on.

We also saw three Vocations at work – the Strider, Fighter and Mage – and there are six other we are yet to see. Will there be a lot of replay value to playing as a different class on another playthrough?

You will definitely get a lot of replay value with this game. Of course, you can switch Vocations throughout the game, but if you wanted to max out the Vocations it would take a very long time.

But if you wanted to max out all of them, you’d have to replay the game a number of times to do that. Buy it really comes down to what you want to do with your party – the equipment you are all wearing, the weapons the party is using, and the customs skills that you make for your Pawns, and yourself.

When setting up a party, you ideally want to have a good balance, but if you want all out defence you can do that, or if you want to unleash a barrage of magic by using just mages, then you can do that too.

Every time you play the game, it will be a very different experience, and a different approach to enemies. One example from when you were playing earlier, is when you were fighting the hydra.

You were a fighter, and it was very difficult as a filter to climb up the hydras neck to hit the weak point on its head. So you were slashing at its neck and tail, but doing very little damage.

Eventually one of the characters chucked an explosive barrel into the hydra’s mouth and only then were you able to climb up and explode that barrel in the hydra’s throat.

But if you were a strider, you wouldn’t really get any help in that sense, as striders have greater agility and better climbing ability. So you could have just climbed up to the hydra’s head and just slashed away. This really changes things up during each play through.