Dragon's Dogma

Kiith

humanji wrote: »

I don't think it is. It's more a case that the monsters aren't levelled, so if you wander into the wrong area too soon, you're screwed.

You say that like it's a bad thing. Enemies that level up with you has to be one of the most annoying aspects of many rpg's these days. If i go into the 'Cave of Generic Darkness' when i'm lvl4, i expect to get brutally flawed by the Trolls/Spiders/Morlocks.

humanji

Oh no, I like it this way. I was just pointing it out to Sephiroth Dude.

Sephiroth_dude

humanji wrote: »

I don't think it is. It's more a case that the monsters aren't levelled, so if you wander into the wrong area too soon, you're screwed.

ah good to know : ),whats the open world like?very big?

humanji

I don't know yet. Bought it at lunch and can't play it til later. I just know what I've read. It seems big enough, but I won't be able to gauge it until I get a shot at it.

calex71

Mine arrived on time from gamestop.ie this morning, haven't had a chance to play it yet.

Good to hear monsters are not levelled.

humanji

I only got to play about an hour of this (too sunny to be in doors), but I'm quite liking it. The combat seems pretty cool (especially jumping on the larger monsters backs), and it's quite frenetic when you're fighting a group.

The only bad thing I've found so far is that the music is absolutely horrific. I'll post more when I get more time on it.

calex71

humanji wrote: »

I only got to play about an hour of this (too sunny to be in doors), but I'm quite liking it. The combat seems pretty cool (especially jumping on the larger monsters backs), and it's quite frenetic when you're fighting a group.

The only bad thing I've found so far is that the music is absolutely horrific. I'll post more when I get more time on it.

Same here, didn't even put the disc in the xbox yet , that will change when it starts raining next week

humanji

Right, got to play a few more hours of this and I think it's brilliant so far. What follows are just my impressions of what seems to be only the starting couple of areas.

I've only really touched on the main story, so can't really comment on that. Although the main gist is Skyrim with only one dragon. Every X amount of years a dragon appears and goes on a spree. He attacks your village and eats your heart, causing you to become "The Arisen" (or maybe you already were and the dragon noticed this. I'm not sure), and you go off on a quest to beat the sh*te out of him.

I'm sure it twists and turns as it goes along, but so far it's your average fantasy story.

Gameplay-wise, it plays a bit like Fable (and looks quite similar to Fable 3 with beefed up graphics). You run around a world that's split into sections (ie one section is your village, another is a military encampment and another is the road in between, etc). These areas are reasonably big, but don't allow for a whole lot of exploratio. And some places, like your starting village, are large enough to be a pain when you've to run back and forth in it.

You can talk to most people, but they usually only have one or two lines of repetative stuff to tell you. Those NPC's who are more important to the plot will say a little more to you, but you're still left not really knowing anything about them. To get a quest, you walk up to an NPC with a green square over their heads and they'll tell you their problems and you choose to accept it or not. If that quest is set as your primary quest, then other NPC's who have any info to give you will have a red square above their heads. It's quite handy and saves you having to talk to everyone to see if anyone can help you.

The quests themselves are the standard fair of kill X amount of enemies or collect Y amount of items. There's the odd escort mission and dungeon to crawl through as well. Now, usually you'd get pretty bored of these types of things, but the design of the actual gameworld and the combat system make every journey exciting.

There's a normal day/night cycle and while most NPC's will head to bed at night, a lot of more dangerous beasties come out. So you're left wondering if you should spend money to sleep in the inn until morning, or hope that you don't stumble upon anything in the dark.

What makes the nighttime (and dark caves) even more exciting is that you can see bugger all. You can get a lamp, which you tie on to your belt and illuminates the area in front of you. In one escort mission, I was bringing a trader just down the road from one area to another along a quiet road at night. We had lamps lighting our way, but a group of wolves came out of nowhere and attacked us. It was a really exciting battle as the wolves would dart out, attack and then run off into the darkness again. My party of four would be standing back to back, in silence looking for any sign of movement. It was really tense, and so far, every bit of combat has been like that.

Combat can be slow and calculated, or a mad button mashing frenzy, depending on the situation. If there's only a couple of enemies, you can pretty much plan you attacks. But when you're surrounded by an unknown amount, you end up struggling to remember what button combinations do what, and end up resorting to your standard light and heavy attacks. I'm sure it'll be second nature after a while.

Each character class (fighter, ranger, mage) has two attacks. I'm not sure if you can move on to using different weapons as it hasn't happened so far, but playing as a ranger, you have two daggers as your primary and a bow as your secondary. On the Xbox, left trigger will draw/sheath your weapons, X is light attack and Y is heavy attack. Then, holding the right button opens new options for X, Y and B. And holding the left button takes out your bow and gives you X, Y, and B options (with the right trigger firing the arrows).

It's a bit confusing at first (and I'm sure my description of it there didn't help), but you soo get the hang of it. As you complete missions and level, you get skill points (which I can't remember what this game calls them) which you can spend on buying new skills in inns and a few other places. These skills can then be mapped to what ever attack buttons you want. This way, you can't have all your skills available, so you have to decide which ones are more important for certain situations. You can only map the skills you have in the inns.

Near the start of the game you'll get a Pawn (actually you get some right at the beginning, but you won't have a clue what's going on as it just doesn't tell you). As the story goes, there's a legion of mercenaries called Pawns, who don't have any real will of their own, but are sworn to fight with the Arisen.

The first Pawn is pretty much just to give you a taster of what pawns do. Soon after, you're allowed to create one of your own, using the same character creation system you use for yourself. You can also get Pawns created by other users to have a party of 4 (including yourself and your own Pawn).

These Pawns level up and have their own skills, so you have to choose which ones compliment your style of play. For example, as a ranger I decided to have one fighter Pawn, one offensive mage and one defensive mage, and that's suited me pretty well so far.

As you wander around your world, the Pawns will talk to you. This can, at times be quite repetative, but I think it adds a lot to the game. If your current quest is to find a certain flower, one Pawn might tell you that it grows in the shade of larger trees. If you're out at night, one will tell you that it's probably safer to travel on the roads. They'll also pick up stuff them come across, that you may not have seen, so that's pretty handy.

Sadly, they have no personalities, so won't talk to each other and don't give you any information about themselves, like in Dragon Age. But having them along as they comment on the area is a nice touch.

Having Pawns fight with you also adds a nice new dimension to the game. One might get behind a goblin and grab on to him, shouting at you to finish them off. A mage will see that you're injured and rush over to heal you, while a fighter rushes over to defend you both. It's nothing that hasn't been done before, but for some reason it feels more dynamic here.

Where the Pawns really shine is when they learn something. The Pawn you create starts off knowing pretty much nothing. As they explore with you, they'll learn about the areas, the monsters and the quests. So after a while, you'll find a goblin at night and your pawn will shout out that they fear fire and cast a fire spell on your weapons.

And when you hire the Pawns of other players, you get the knowledge they gained while that player was playing. So you could come to a quest you haven't done before, but your Pawn has, so he'll give you hints on what to do, or how to kill a large monster.

And it really is handy when it comes to large monsters. Every now and again a big beastie comes along and you've to take it down. When up close to certain areas of them, you hit the grab button and climb up on to them. Certain mosters can only be taken down in certain ways, so you have to figure it out for yourself. It was pretty cool seeing one Pawn shouting that we should go for a monsters legs, then he ran at it, hopped onto its legs and started slashing away with his sword. Once the moster fell over, I jumped on its head and stabbed it to death.

There's a crafting system in there too. You find various bits and pieces and then combine them with others to see if you can create something new. So far I haven't really played around with it, so I'm curious to see what else I can make.

Em, that's pretty much it so far, I think. I wrote more than I thought I would, so well done if you managed to read it all. It's a great game so far, and I've no real grumbles about it. I suppose that having to go back through areas over and over may be a pain to some. Monsters aren't levelled, so once you get high enough, you'll be able to breeze through when you're backtracking, but it's still annoying.

There's also a problem with inflation. It costs 300 gp for a night in an inn. Shocking!

Sephiroth_dude

So dar whats the level difficulty like?

humanji

It's not much of a struggle for the most part. I've died twice. Once was when I wanted to see if there was an invisible wall that stops you walking off ledges (there isn't), and the second time was when I came up against a group of Lizardmen that one shotted me.

The rest of the creatures have been fairly easy to kill, though if you're careless then they'll take advantage of that and do some damage. The large monsters that I came up against have all been part of the main plot, so they were levelled for my character and weren't too tough once I knew what I was doing.

Oh, a couple of important points for anyone who's about to play. The tutorial isn't up to much and although random gameplay information comes up, it doesn't explain everything. Firstly, when you get to the point where you can buy skills, these skills aren't automatically added to you action buttons, you have to do it yourself. Also, with the skills, you can buy skills for your main Pawn by hitting the right/left buttons on the controller. When you start off, a lot of information is thrown at you, so it's easy to miss.

Secondly, when you're in combat you can be healed by a mage. I didn't realise what was going on at first, but the mage casts an aura in front of him and you stand in there to heal. But this will only heal a certain amount that's indicated on your health bar. To heal the rest you have to use potions, herbs or sleep in an inn.

Thirdly, save often. When you die it asks if you want to retry, go to a checkpoint or quit. But you can't be sure where the retry will be from or how far back the checkpoint is. So if you're out matched by an enemy you want to start far enough away from them, but not all the way back at a checkpoint before you had bought skills and weapons etc.

Finally (for the moment) when you get to choose other players Pawns, check to see how long that player has been playing. It's a good indication of what knowledge the Pawn will have.

promethius42

Thanks for the review, a very insightful look into the game.

Sephiroth_dude

God damnit wasn't gonna get this,now I'm very very tempted : )

Fluffy88

Is this coming to PC?
It looks very very interesting and I'd like to have a play

Sephiroth_dude

Fluffy88 wrote: »

Is this coming to PC?
It looks very very interesting and I'd like to have a play

its only on console

Hawke

Ordered this yesterday, will give it a go and see if its good.

Sephiroth_dude

Hawke wrote: »

Ordered this yesterday, will give it a go and see if its good.

where did you order and how much?

mrm

I have only played a little of the game so far, but it has components that are excellent and would put elements of skyrim to shame.

The sense of mystery in the game is superb. Dragon steals your heart for unknown reason, and you should get it back, even though you appear to be doing fine without it. You are placed in a blank map that is revealed only as you traverse new areas. And these areas are dangerous. Every corner should be taken with care, weapon ready.

The atmosphere of danger is presented really well. Most inhabitants want to kill you, and simply can. You walk, slowly, from basically safe zone to safe zone (eg. a camp, city, castle identified with your new quest). Your third person viewed protagonist walks crouched, almost cowering, and rightly so.

On one of the first quests we (me and pawns) met with a gang of hard scaled lizard dudes with spears and dash attacks, who I have eventually (after a few battles) found out dont like ice attacks. Bet them eventually. Moved onwards to meet another gang who brought along a lion with a goat fused to its back and a poison spitting snake for a tail, each with a sizeable health bar. This was a battle that was tougher than the final boss battle of a lot of games. Eventually bet them all. Seriously epic stuff! So I thought, typical for gaming, I wont meet anything that epic again until my next quest. About 500 yards up the path, I bumped into a pack of goblins hanging out around a rock. So, all bravado'd up I thought I'll 'ave 'em. Started my attack and the rock work up to reveal that it was actualy an ogre, who, after I jumped onto his back, grabbed me and bit my head off! And I needed that!

Restart my last save and take a different path away from the ogre. Different path means meeting a different enemy. You get no indication as to the difficulty of any enemy encounter. So while it is open world each path is fraught with different levels of danger- some you can cope with, others not so much, yet.

All this happened during daylight. Its when night descends that it gets really dangerous. The race to beat, on foot, the impending night is really exciting. Seeing the sun rise is glorious!

The brilliance of the game is the slow travel across dangerous terrain, across a blank map, popping up onto rocks to see what is ahead on the path, all against seriously dangerous foes and the race against the oncoming darkness. The difficulty is well balanced, you just might need to seek out your balance. Unlike Skyrim, if you see a large foe (eg. dragon) you shouldn't always head towards it. The ease of switching to different classes is very good.

How it all pans out over a 40/ 50 hour campaign (with backtracking and repeat enemy battles) - time will tell. The games strength could eventually become its weakness. Just on initial impressions this has serious potential.

One negative is pop ins, which can place a character suddenly beside you. Ok in the safe zones. Not so great in the open when you hear goblins, place yourself at a tree to protect your back only for the goblins to pop in right beside you to commence their attack. Still, its not a true glitch if it makes you laugh!

Sorry for the long post but Humanji started it, and as he has described perfectly the game is certainly worth a comment or two.

Hawke

Sephiroth_dude wrote: »

where did you order and how much?

48 from Gamestop.ie with the most expensive shipping since it was only 3 quid more.

calex71

Hawke wrote: »

48 from Gamestop.ie with the most expensive shipping since it was only 3 quid more.

Same here and had it on launch day..... rue that now as I still haven't started it

Sephiroth_dude

I might trade in 3 games and buy it for 3 to get this

Somnus

This definitely looks good to me. I'll pick it up once my ps3 is fixed.

To anyone playing on the PS3, what's the framerate like during combat? I read it can be a bit dodgey and slowdown during some fights. That's always pretty annoying.

Sephiroth_dude

You can save only once?

Somnus

Sephiroth_dude wrote: »

You can save only once?

As in you can't have a backup save or anything?

Also, for anyone who's playing it at the moment, what's the dialogue like with NPCs for both the main quest and smaller ones?

I'm a fan of the dialogue trees in Fallout/Elder Scrolls. Do you get that level of detail here? Or is it more: Click on quest NPC, they tell you where to go, that's it. That would make the game lose some long term enjoyment for me.

I know everything gets compared to Skyrim these days, but I like that in Elder Scrolls games you get a bit of background or story when even doing little quests

Sephiroth_dude

Dr.Poca wrote: »

As in you can't have a backup save or anything?

Also, for anyone who's playing it at the moment, what's the dialogue like with NPCs for both the main quest and smaller ones?

I'm a fan of the dialogue trees in Fallout/Elder Scrolls. Do you get that level of detail here? Or is it more: Click on quest NPC, they tell you where to go, that's it. That would make the game lose some long term enjoyment for me.

I know everything gets compared to Skyrim these days, but I like that in Elder Scrolls games you get a bit of background or story when even doing little quests

nope no back save according to the angry joe review anyway,which is odd

humanji

Yeah, there's no backup save, but I don't actually think it's needed (or at least I haven't had reason for it).

The dialogue is simply click an NPC and they'll give you the information. There's no dialogue trees or anything like that.

Somnus

humanji wrote: »

The dialogue is simply click an NPC and they'll give you the information. There's no dialogue trees or anything like that.

Awh That's a little disappointing.

Will still probably pick it up though

Temptamperu

Picked this up today, fairly happy with it. I am enjoying running around the roof tops, jumping and clinging and finding treasure. haven't done any of the pawn stuff yet though.

danthefan

Picked it up today but haven't tried it. For reasons I don't understand the guy in GameStop gave me codes for the pre order DLC stuff which I very much appreciated, it's an extra weapon, armour and pawn I think, which is sweet. Will give it a good go over the weekend.

Sephiroth_dude

I didnt get any codes :mad:

Somnus

danthefan wrote: »

Picked it up today but haven't tried it. For reasons I don't understand the guy in GameStop gave me codes for the pre order DLC stuff which I very much appreciated, it's an extra weapon, armour and pawn I think, which is sweet. Will give it a good go over the weekend.

Which GameStop was this?