Dragon’s Dogma Preview

The latest preview for CAPCOM’s attempt to gain the attention of the open-world RPG audience, Dragon’s Dogma, comes from the folks at Bit-tech, who don’t seem to be particularly impressed with the title. Here’s a sampling:

The Pawns will kill for you, die for you and follow you everywhere, no matter how you behave or who you betray. This in itself fosters a closeness between you and them, as you must accept absolute responsibility for their well-being even though you know so little about them.

Who are they? Why will they follow you? Why do they keep calling you ‘Arisen’? These are the questions which will prove central to the Dragon’s Dogma plot, according to Capcom, and the mystery wrapped up in the answers is one of the game’s draws, in our opinion.

Even then, though, the Pawns don’t seem to be implemented perfectly. You’re only able to control them in the most rudimentary fashion from what we saw of Dragon’s Dogma and, beyond that, their behaviour is littered with annoyances. The Pawns insist on narrating all of their own actions, for example, both in and out of combat. Our battle with the golem was no less a cacophony of status updates than the walk to the castle – ‘I’m going here!’, ‘I’ll attack with my bow!’ – these limited lines repeat over and over.

The presence of the Pawns also makes it hard to determine where the focus of Dragon’s Dogma lies. While the presence of party members, stats and character customisation imply a full-on RPG experience, much of what we saw seemed closer to the third-person hack and slash genre, especially since you can’t control NPCs as you would in other Western RPGs.