One of the most anticipated games of 2024, Capcom’s Dragon’s Dogma 2, has fans riled up and excited for a good time after a decade plus wait since the first installment in the series, celebrated director Hideaki Itsuno brings his passion project to the modern era and, courtesy of IGN, we can see some of the fruits of his labor. This gameplay demonstration is 18 minutes of gameplay from Dragon’s Dogma 2’s fighter, thief, warrior, and sorcerer vocations, though as admitted in the video the player was only about 10 hours in, so don’t expect anything too insane like High Maelstrom or Arc of Obliteration. Still, the gameplay is wildly entertaining and well worth the watch.
The featured gameplay demonstration has 3 fights against cyclops, and one particularly entertaining fight against an ogre. In the fighter and thief portions of the video against their respective cyclops we saw some things typical to their classes, the fighter parried an attack against a goblin and the thief performed some devastating attacks by climbing onto the cyclops’ head. As shown in one of the earlier previews, the fighter even knocked his cyclops down by detonating a mudslide and getting a long advantage against the dazed enemy.
But the most entertaining portion of the video was the warrior’s fight against the ogre. The ogre begins the fight by dropkicking the warrior and causing him to ragdoll across the screen, the difference between the cyclops’ lumbering attacks vs. the ogre’s very aggressive temperament was definitely shown here. Interestingly, a carriage, one that the Arisen themselves can hire to take them across the map, shows up here mid-fight accompanied by a city guard. The carriage ox and guard, NPCs in the open world, participate in the fight (the guard funnily enough throws himself to his death by the end), the entire Warrior section really showing off how chaotic the gameplay in Dragon’s Dogma 2 can be.
That’s not to say the Sorcerer had nothing to show, firstly the Sorcerer is wearing armor, something they couldn’t do in the first game. And can cast intense high DPS spells as expected. The pawns in this section showed off their knowledge too, the feature where they can recall quests they’ve done while on loan to other Arisen online raised its head here as a pawn offered to lead the way to the next quest. Said pawn was clearly experienced too, as it would rush to the Arisen to refill their stamina when they ran out, and dragged the unconscious body of another pawn to the Arisen to be resuscitated when they were knocked out. It’s good to see the pawn system be just as complex and deep as it was in the first game, where pawns could get so strong and know so much about the game they could potentially play the whole thing for you.
Overall, this demonstration was a fun appetizer for the full game, and Dragon’s Dogma 2 looks to be a very exciting addition to Capcom’s game catalog in this coming year. Dragon’s Dogma 2 looks to release on March 22, 2024, for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.