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Final Fantasy 12’s combat is a neglected masterpiece of game design
Thinking about Dragon’s Dogma 2’s interestingly scrappy combat recently took me back to another time when a major role-playing game series tried something very different with its combat mechanics. In this case, the designers’ goal was the same as Capcom’s with the first Dragon’s Dogma: a single-player RPG that felt like a massively multiplayer online game to play. But the resulting system couldn’t have been more different, and stands as one of the most fascinating dead ends in game design history.