Curious about Capcom' upcoming RPG Dragon's Dogma? I certainly am. I've heard all the comparisons to Monster Hunter or Skyrim (and made my own rather less intuitive comparisons as well); I've seen demo impressions across half a dozen gaming forums; and I've played a several-hour chunk of the game for myself. But what is Dragon's Dogma, really? The game seems to be different things to different people, and maybe that's the point.
Myself, I have a weakness for huge lands to explore freely and game design that doesn't suffocate me with invisible walls and contrived plot gates. Now that I have a build of the game in hand, I intend to see just how much of that is possible in this game. Capcom has kindly given me the go-ahead to report my findings provided I don't spoil the story. That's fine by me. I'm sure a lot of consideration was put into the plot, but given the name and the intro I have a pretty good idea what the big twist will be, and I don't really care. I just want to run around and find loot, put cool armor on my character, and pump everything in sight full of arrows. So let's see just how much of that there is to be done, shall we?
Chapter One: A Long-Repeated Journey
If you've played the Dogma demo or read any of dozens of previews of the game, you know how it begins: You play a pre-rolled character and his team of A.I.-controlled pawns, fight a few monsters, take down a massive chimaera, and move along to the main story by jumping ahead in time and building a proper character.
Of the three major character classes available -- warrior, strider, and mage -- strider best suits my favored play style of shooting things from a distance and letting some other meat shield take the brunt of the abuse. So I rolled a petite, lithe, nimble elf woman (named Yukiko, per tradition) in order to play the part to its Tolkien-approved extreme. From what I've read, your character's body type matters: A hulking bruiser can lug tons of stuff, but a smaller, slimmer model has better stamina for sprinting and using special attacks. In this case, I let my desire to run the heck away from overwhelming odds win out over my packrat habits. I'm pretty sure Pawns can serve as meat shields and pack mules. Maybe I'll name my main Pawn "Lydia."
I can already tell that Dogma will be one of those RPGs where you'll sometimes have to make a compromise between play mechanics and staying in character: The strongest armor set in the first village is a skull belt and a cuisse. Neither provide much, uh, coverage. My tiny elf woman is running around in her fur bikini underwear wearing nothing else besides a skull-covered belt across her chest and a fancy set of straps on her legs. Galadriel would not approve.
(Also, I just learned "Galadriel" checks out with the OS X's built-in spell-correction. Apple, you nerds!)
Having hit the shops and geared up for adventure, the next step in my previous play session was to hit the road and find the next quest. This time, I decided to fart around (it's a technical term) in the starting town and see what I could do and find.
Quite a lot, it turns out. None of it is particularly riveting, but there's definitely a "the journey not the destination" kind of vibes to Dogma. You can jump into half a dozen different quests by checking the posted bills at the inn or speaking to the right characters, and these are handy for getting a sense of the game mechanics. At their simplest, the quests send you over to speak to a couple of non-player characters; these are essentially free experience and cash for taking a few moments to follow a waypoint on your mini-map. But others demand a little more involvement, such as the plant-gathering quest that requires you to harvest both day- and night-blooming flowers.
The developers' aim with the flower quest clearly pushes you to learn the effects of Dogma's day/night cycle (along with the fact that you can pass time for 50 coins at the local inn) -- standard RPG stuff. But it also reveals one of the intrinsic values of Pawns, as the flower-gathering points aren't marked on the mini-map. Since the day-blooming flowers only grow in the wild and you can't leave town without taking on a Pawn companion (one confusingly named "Rook"), you'll almost certainly stumble onto the fact that your chatterbox Pawns are only too happy to dispense advice on completing whichever quest you've currently set as your priority. In the case of the flowers, Rook will tell you that the plants you're looking for grow in specific locations when you draw somewhat near them, and mention that you'll need to look elsewhere if you wander too far off-course. It's basically A.I. hot-and-cold, and it's a far more natural way to go about solving a quest than following a way-point or simply hoping you stumble upon the answer in the wilderness.
After about three hours of wandering around resolving minor quests and exploring the environs around the starting village, I finally managed to reach the nearby fort where the plot begins in earnest. At this point, Yukiko may in fact be overleveled, since I made a point of plugging every visible bit of wildlife (seagulls and bunnies, mostly) with well-aimed arrows. Turns out those little guys are worth a bit of experience -- not a lot, mind you, but the cumulative effect is similar to dropping extra coins in a jar. At some point you upend the jar and realize you have enough to afford a nice dinner. Yukiko is also loaded down with cash, since completing quests yields monetary rewards, and poking around the hidden recesses of the map almost inevitably reveals odds and ends to harvest and sell. This includes a startling number of coin pouches. The people of Gransys are remarkably fumble-fingered with their life savings.
To date, Yukiko hasn't engaged in any real combat to speak of. But even the prologue portion (starring as it does some other mysterious warrior) and the few little goblin skirmishes I've mixed it up with are helping me to gain a better handle on the intricacies of Dogma's combat in a way that eluded me in my previous play sessions, brisk and time-constrained as they were. The demo battle with the chimaera went much faster this time once I realized I could grab onto the beast and stab it safely out of range of its claws and fangs... and Rook has been quite vigilant about buffing Yukiko's weapons with fire magic for extra effectiveness against wayward goblins. Every action game seems to have its own hook, and Dogma pleasantly skips the cliché of quick-time events in favor of a system that revolves more around varied short-range tactics and maintaining a balanced team with an emphasis on buffs and debilitating status effects. Still, we'll see how well my elfin archer fares in her barbarian bikini once the adventure begins in earnest.
Source: http://www.1up.com
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