Dragon's Dogma thread (a sequel is in development!)

I got Dragon's Dogma 2 free from a friend, so I tried it for the first time. This is the first game I play of this franchise, I'm 11 hours in so these are my thoughts so far from someone going blind learning the game:

So right off the bat, I will start that it has a pretty solid character creator (at least for humans). This game and Street Fighter 6 have very impressive character creators that going back to a Bioware game creator feels super basic in comparison, so I really hope is true what they said and Veilguard really pushes a lot of customization, and both of those Capcom games do feature a lot of Cutscenes with created chars so it can be done.

Anyway I chose the archer class, because I'm bad at these type of games by nature so long range is great to stay safe and I love archer superheroes anyway. Now the game kicks off pretty fast, escaping a prison, cinematic, tutorial boss, you escape on a bird, it gets taken down, then your friend you escaped with falls in water and dies bleed out by some monster. I mention this because wtf was that. Anyway, your the arisen oh great arisen chosen one (shocker). And your arisen just goes because your character doesn't have voiced dialogue. Anyway you make your way, to a small camp and you found one of the pawn stones, and that's when it gets interesting for me.

You get to make a second character which will be your main companion, and of course I read here in the forum you can sort of romance them, so of course I treated myself to make a daddy, probably 2 hours wasted there making a man but what surprised me is that once he comes out he is fully voiced, WHAT! I do not comprehend why hes voiced and not my protagonist but ill take it. Now you can only make one pawn of your own, the other two have to be invited by searching people's pawns or a friend. So, my friend who gifted me the game suggested I invite his pawn because hes a mage, hes well leveled up and would help make things easier, so for sure what I need. So then I open this portal to get him and... well this mage sure likes to breath on his body, because man how skimpy he was XD. I told my friend listen, I support this but at the same time this really stands out for me LOL. Anyway I got used to it to the point that I absolutely love how different both pawns are, and they interact quite well. Thats another neat thing, all pawns talk. Now the only con side of this is that a lot of dialogue between them does repeat and so far besides the intro pawn scene, I haven't seen them show up in other cutscenes.

Also is funny my friend is asian, I'm latino, but we end up making a white boyfriend, we have problems clearly XD, granted I try to latino their skin same as my char but they always look whiter when in game grrr, here they are together:

 
Anyway, the gay harem trio has been really fun. They are different personalities, and its something you can choose from like 6 of them and multiple voices to give them, so you can really make them stand out and search for pawns that are very different than yours in that sense. Now the bad catch about rented pawns is that you can't level them, so if your over level, you have to switch that pawn out. Thankfully my friends pawn is from a finished run so is over 40 but is hard to find a good 4th that complements this trio, specifically the ninja class which is the one I'm missing as I feel there's way less pawns from that class when searching. Trying to get one from another race, but want it to be male just so they can keep talking about how I'm into just men in the party XD. But yeah I been having fun with their interactions and making up my own with the photo mode. The photo mode is a bit weird as the camera is not fully free but it still works enough to make fun stuff:

Now the bad things, traveling in this game is wacked, there's no traditional fast travels, the best one is a carriage but not at all like gredfalls, this one can be attacked including getting attacked by a big boss with triple health, which I almost died if it wasn't for me endlessly running like a coward while everyone else killed him. Now don't get me wrong, for immersion is pretty nice, but a lot of the big map forced exploration seems more to extend the game's length. There is some stones fast travel but is so complicated to collect I haven't bothered lol. Speaking of that, it has the same annoying quest designs like greedfall where you do a side mission in one place, then you have to travel all the way back to just say you did it but here is worse because no proper fast travel!

The other thing is combat, in general I like the combat even though performance issues is its biggest enemies, trying to aim with fps changing is hard. I can however see Veilguard feeling closer to this combat. The game has "adaptive difficulty" which is also annoying if you just want to have fun on your own terms, but at least common enemies wise I haven't had much problem, and grabbing high leveled pawns from friends for free helps. But the big tall boss I fought wiped me in like one shot and then I learned if you restart from last save  after you die, the game lowers your health making it harder apparently. You have to instead load from your last campsite to avoid that. This hasn't impacted me bad yet but is weird. And also had to stop trying to look nice and actually use higher stats armor.

That brings to the other big issue if you don't play on pc, there is no transmog in the game, so you gotta equip anything you find higher. I saw that nexus mods has a mod for it so for those on pc you get that, on console well your toast. Right now my highest piece of "pants" armor is actually well underwear... Now on the one hand, I'm glad they let males be able to wear this as well as females, but on the other hand, wtf on this being better stats then armored pants LOL, the piece I mean:

Now having dived very into all the quests, there is TECHNICALLY a few male romances in the sense they are structured the same way as Ulrika and Wilhelmina, have same amount of quests as them more or less and their questlines end with them loving you max affinity but also pretty loving lines, the only thing missing is a romantic cutscene but they do get two ending affinity scenes if you do it right:

One of them is Glyndwr, who is an elf, you help him out training him with the art of using a bow, he takes you to his elf kingdom, meet his dad and sister, do quests for his family, and he ultimately just loves how super helpful you are and drops a lot of messages like how much you changed him and bring so much to him and ends max affinity with you once you do a final escort quest. Also the ones the straight male gamer trigger the most on accident XD bless the elf for gaying them.

Now the other one is Beren, which I almost missed, he's a daddy lion. You meet him very early in the game during the day but may not trigger stuff with him until you visit him at night on his private camp. When you do you start a unique set of quest chains, helping him train new soldiers, etc. By the end of the quest he has to move out because he got removed from his post so you visit his actual home, and there he immediately was very direct with me, saying I had a special place in his heart. After he says that he gave me some flowers as gift. He then has an escort quest where he gets full max affinity red cheeks from it.

Sven is another plot relevant one you can achieve this, however I got his escort quest right at the end of the game so for him you might have to push some gifts if you want him early on max affinity but hes plot relevant as well but I didn't feel he was as in love and more grateful unlike the other two. But I didn't fully test him as I did not do his escort cuz I just wanted to end the game at that point.

Now personally, I actually prefer the way the romance works with these males npcs than Ulrika and Whillermina's because their "kiss/bed" just feels rushed, where as I feel with these male ones I'm slowly building a romantic bond and maybe one day they will bang XD. I think those were the main ones I noticed work as romance in terms of males, Captain Brandt didn't really have any questline apart from the main plot. The other thing you can do is the males in the Borderlie, you can sleep with male human or lions in there, so if you really want solid proof your arisen is gay well you can do that hahaha. But there's not really a good scene there is all very faded out so I don't think is worth it but its cool for the role playing aspect is there.



Minor complain, the hottest npc for me was Raghnall but hes main story ish but also poorly developed and wish I could have full on stuff with him like the ones above.

Another way you can declare your love to any npc is the sphinx trials, a creature with riddles, they will ask who is you beloved and you have to bring it to them. However, I think this only works with max affinity npcs otherwise they will reject your choice.

So this one while limited still got enough breadcrumbs to satisfy me. Firstly, to get them maxed out is pretty easy. You can slowly do so by talking to them every in game day at least once with the small talk dialogue, and make sure to celebrate after a fight with them at least once a day. That's the slow way. The bigger numbers is giving them a haircut, you don't have to actually change their hair though, just move the color or shine bar from 39 to 40 something of little difference and is enough. That gives a higher amount of points, I think by 3 or 4 haircuts I  already maxed him out with red cheeks. They don't often do it though, but at least once in a game day you will see them briefly red cheeks to reconfirm you achieved it. (Don't let them die fully though or they will lose points, falling and reviving during battle is fine). Their dialogue will also show more affection, just gotta be patient sometimes to trigger it. The other easy thing but takes time to get there is the bath springs, where you take all your pawns and get naked to relax in the spring (you can't take pics or record on ps5 though during this which is stupid but I have an elgato card MUAAHAHA), your high affinity male npcs will also appear there, not females as they are divided in the spring (unless your a female arisen obviously XD). These springs also raise the affinity of main pawn.

Lastly, and the BIG ONE where you actually declare your love to the pawn is the Sphinx Trials, as I mentioned above, a creature that gives you riddles and you have to answer them. One of them is to bring them the person you love the most, and you can bring your main pawn to her.  This will raise affinity with them and get all red cheeks shy when I did and commented surprised. Ultimately this is the one that made me happy because at least I am directly saying I love them. You don't need to be max affinity with your pawn for this one to work as it helps you gain more points with them instead. Once you reach Max Affinity with the Pawn, in the true ending, you get a special variation of their last cutscene, where they will go from a shadowy dragon figure to their normal self to declare their happiness with you. In the non affinity version the pawn stays in the shadowy dragon figure and says something more generic.

There is two scenes that confirm your affinity romance which surprised me, I only knew of the dragon one. First one here is the dragon one and I got Beren which made sense because he was one of the last people I raised affinity with but I also gave him extra gifts because I had multiple people with max at the end of the game, so I gave him more gifts despite him being already max and that helped make sure he popped here. If you played the first game I think this scene is similar, the dragon gives you the choice to leave and sacrifice your beloved or fight him. Now don't worry after this scene he was fine and releases him.

The second scene takes place in the true ending, where if you decide to change the cycle, you enter a new story and the game turns from dragon's dogma to dragon's dogma 2 in the title, which was kinda cool. Anyway once you done all the quests in this post game story, you end the cycle, and at the end credits scene, your max affinity character will show up staring into the sunset as if thinking about you. The vibe is similar to say mass effect 3 and your romance looking up giving hope shepard lives, I imagine this is a tease of the Arisen still lives. Now for this one I got Elf boy instead of Beren, the reason for that is because in the post game I did a quest in the elf kingdom and I assume that makes him gain more affinity points and I did have him maxed too before. But hey I was fine with it cuz at least is not a random female XD, I initially thought I was getting him in both scenes anyway so is cool I got to test both.

Can you Avoid Ulrika and Wilhelmina Romances?

The answer to this is full yes with Wilhelmina, with Ulrika is a yes as well but it has a consequence at the end. In the case of Wilhelmina you meet her in the main questline, I thought she was a cool femme fatale type of character. She helps you escape twice from being captured by guards in the castle grounds because you are sneaking in. Now in one of the scenes, she will kiss you to pretend to the guards that your one of her lovers so the guard walks away. Now usually this kind of scene is UGH but I actually didn't mind it here because there was never any implication about you liking it or her being into it either, is also a quick touch. In fact you get two dialogue choices where you either tell her thank you for the help or question her why she's helping you. So at least for me, I didn't see at any point my arisen being like all giddy about it, unlike *cough* bioware *cough* when they do those type of encounters. After those main quests though, you can only trigger her side story quests by giving her gifts first, so is easily avoidable and had no problems with her.

In the case of Ulrika, if you don't do her full questline, her town and her people pretty much die on the post game story as the place is first attacked from the start, and they would only be safe if you manage to make them move to another town in the main story. That said, there really isn't anyone special in that town besides her and I think without those sacrifices the urgency of the post game feels less impactful so I didn't mind it. Plus you make sure she can't invade any cutscenes in the ending . You cut her content essentially. But in terms of being forced to do her quest not really, is actually time limited. If you try to do her quests after a certain main mission is done early in the game, you can 't, you simply miss her stuff and can just visit the town and even talk to her normally and never trigger stuff on her.

Other Female Romances?

For females you can romance the lion empress and/or her bodyguard, they have their own full quest chain like the males I mentioned above, so if you don't want to romance human chicks, you have them, no kiss/sex scene but yeah.There's probably others but those were the ones notable to me as something different and lots of quests.

Can I avoid getting max affinity in an npc with quests?

Yes you can, once you complete their main sidequests, they will either visit your home or have a yellow mark on the map where they usually are and when you go they will ask you to escort them somewhere, that's the quest you want to avoid so you don't max out the npc. So you can tell them no, it will not start automatically. I learned that the hard way with some grandma but is fine she didn't screw up my endings lol, just try to give gifts to the one you want on top of the max affinity and avoid escort quests on who you don't want (unless is a new npc you met that starts with an escort quest). Of course this doesn't apply to Ulrika and Whillelmina, don't do their quests, this is strictly about the other npcs. The game at the end will highlight your top affinities too in the credits in order.

Final Thoughts and Recommendation or not of the game:

So putting aside all my scientific affinity research experience above, I did really end up enjoying the game a lot. The combat really opens up as you progress, and it reaches a point where you are practically op and can take down the big bosses in 20 seconds, and even the final dragon boss was a breeze.It definitely feels rewarding the game when you do level up and gear up well. I was afraid of the game getting harder and harder but it reaches a point where you are the more powerful one. That and choosing good chemistry pawns too. I think the world itself was pretty fun to explore, I had to find like 80 hidden coins, 50 caves for trophies. The caves got repetitive and tedious at the end but the coins was fun enough. The graphics themselves are pretty beautiful, specially the cinematics that are quite impressive looking considering its custom characters. The performance of the game may not be 60 fps at least on my ps5 but it felt stable after a while, the last update might have helped on this too, but I stopped thinking about it and felt fine. On the negative side I would say the story is rather short, and gets really exciting toward the end rather than always, there's some interesting plot points throughout the story but is all pretty short covered. There was potential here for so much more but ultimately they focused on making sidequests have story over the main story having too much and main plot is more obsessed about the dogma cycle.

In the end, I do recommend the game if you want an action 3rd person rpg, is one of the more engaging rpg combats I played, that has enough rpg story/questing content to not make it just be purely combat. Not to mention one of the best games at doing archers gameplay so that was a dream. With the added bonus of playing around with romance possibilities with affinity into the role playing. I however do not recommend the game if you strictly just want romance content, the romance is a nice bonus instead of a more of an actual thing. Even in the case of Ulrika and Whillelmina they don't really feel like full on romance and more like flings because they want to reward you for being their hero XD by banging you but thats it. In any case whenever the game goes on a good sale and feel like trying something new, is worth playing for fun. Also apologies if you all know all of this I said here, I just needed to shoot all my thoughts somewhere haha, don't really have any other place to just scream about imaginary romances XD.