Dragon’s Dogma 2 patch reins in the disastrous Dragonsplague

polygon.com:

Capcom has released a patch update for Dragon’s Dogma 2 that tones down the threat from Dragonsplague, the viral sickness that can be caught — and carried from one player’s game to another — by pawns, the game’s AI-controlled party members.

Infected pawns show signs of sickness, become aggressive and disobedient, and their eyes glow red. Eventually, when the player rests at an inn, the pawn transforms into a shadowy dragon that canwipe out whole towns full of merchants and quest-givers. Since the player has just saved at the inn, there’s no way to roll back the game save, either. (Towns apparently do repopulate over time, though.)

When waves of Dragonsplague started to hit in earnest after the game’s release in March, some players were shocked and annoyed at the devastation being wrought on their game saves — despite the game’s frequent warnings about the grave threat from the disease. It was another example of the apparently deliberate pushback against players in Dragon’s Dogma 2’s game design, like the lack of fast travel options, and the way saving is handled, making it hard to just roll back bad luck.

But it seems Capcom is now admitting that in this one instance, players may have had a point. In the patch notes for the new update, the developer notes that it has reduced the infection frequency of Dragonsplague and made the signs of infection easier to spot — for example, by making pawns’ glowing eyes more noticeable.

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Is this a case of the developers capitulating to the loud complaints of a section of their fanbase and compromising their original vision, like the infamous debacle of Mass Effect 3’s ending? That may be part of it, but it’s also possible that Capcom genuinely didn’t intend the scale of the wipeouts that the Dragon’s Dogma 2 community has been seeing.

The game has been a sales success — Capcom said it had sold 2.5 million copies in its first two weeks — and maybe the infection rate of Dragonsplague wasn’t correctly tuned