Dragon’s Dogma 2: How Pawns Are Getting Better – IGN First
Dragon’s Dogma was always envisioned as a single player game that gave off the impression of a multiplayer one, or a “Single-Player Online Party Action Game” in Director Hideaki Itsuno’s own words. And one of the key elements of driving that feeling home are the AI-controlled Pawns that make up 3/4s of your party. Pawns were a fascinating inclusion in the original game – at times endearing with their amusing (and frequent) comments on whatever was happening, other times bewildering with some of their behaviors in battle, and very often a great source of humor and levity.
That system is largely the same in Dragon’s Dogma 2 – you still create your own Pawn with their own Vocation that you can gear up however you like, and that Pawn will get shared online with the rest of the world so that another player can hire your Pawn that’s equipped with both the gear and knowledge that you provide to it. You’ll then fill out the remaining two slots of your party with two other Pawns that you can hire from The Rift – essentially a Pawn Network – who will provide you with quest knowledge and information that they themselves gained from their own creator’s adventure.
One of the key things that I noticed in my own playthrough, and something that Itsuno also highlighted when speaking with IGN, is that both Pawns and NPCs in general are much better this time around at guiding the player to a quest, or pointing out areas of interest, basically themselves acting as replacements for UI elements like markers or arrows.
“We wanted it to feel like a friend who's played the game before is sitting there next to you and giving you advice. Like, ‘Hey, go this way,’ or ‘In this case, you should go with this here,’ or ‘This is what you do.’ In other words, having a friend there with you who provides guidance in an enjoyable way,” said Itsuno. “We wanted to avoid putting too many markers and such on the screen, if possible. We didn't want too much that kills a player's mood, so we put a lot of
Read more on ign.com
