Dragon’s Dogma 2 doesn’t care if you’re new, it’ll still kick your ass
Dragon’s Dogma 2 is like a fantasy-inspired installment of 1000 Ways to Die, if a hands-on preview attended by Polygon is any indication.
Last week, Polygon was invited to a three-hour hands-on preview of Capcom’s forthcoming action game, which follows a game with an unconventional pedigree. The original Dragon’s Dogma is something of an enigma, a third-person, heavily combat-oriented action RPG released in the post-Skyrim fantasy boom. While it didn’t immediately find a wide audience, it attained bona fide cult classic status over the years, buoyed in part by a 2013 rerelease (Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen). Dragon’s Dogma 2 straddles the line between sequel and reboot; you do not need to have played the original to make sense of this one, though perhaps familiarity with the series would’ve kept me more alive.
During one early fight, a giant eagle flew out of nowhere, picked me up, and tossed me 100 feet off a cliff into the ocean. Then, the water literally ate me. That was far from the only time I died. I also got stepped on by a dragon, electrocuted by a griffin, frozen solid by a harpy, kicked by a golem, sucker-punched by an ogre, and mercilessly whaled on by a group of club-wielding orcs. Wolves ate my face. I fell off (so many) cliffs. But I pressed on, only truly brought to heel by one thing: a gate.
Our preview of the sequel was broken into two distinct 90-minute sessions, each one showcasing a different vocation (class, basically) at a different point in the game. For the first session, I played as the Mystic Spearhand vocation and was tasked with entering Battahl, a nation of cat-people known as beastren. Seemed easy enough. Needless to say, it wasn’t.
Early on, I spotted a writ of passage for the border in my inventory. I figured I could use it, but because I wasn’t a beastren, the guard at the gate refused to let me through. So I went into the nearby village to see if I could find an alternate path through the gate, but instead found myself inundated with
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