Dragon’s Dogma 2: The Final Preview First

ign.com:

I thought it’d just be a simple sidequest. The owner of an apothecary enlisted my help to find his lost grandson, who had been taken by wolves. As I followed the trail, I heard a screeching noise from up above. All of a sudden I’m in a battle for my life against a Griffin. It’s a monster that’s far too strong for my party to handle, but we fight and claw and hold our ground until we finally get it to retreat. I breathe a sigh of relief, then set up at the nearby camp and sleep till nightfall. That sleep is interrupted by the same Griffin, back for revenge. That fight somehow boils over into another battle with a Wight, who proceeds to beat me within an inch of my life before I finally take him out, just as the sun rises, after an epic 20-minute battle.

None of this was part of the actual quest involving saving the boy. It was just a series of events that cascaded into one of the most unforgettable encounters I’ve had in an open-world action-RPG. And it was just one of the incredible encounters that I experienced during the 10 hours that I spent adventuring through Dragon’s Dogma 2’s fantastic open world.

While I didn’t get to start from the very beginning, I did get to begin with the creation of my own Pawn. Pawns, for those unfamiliar with the first Dragon’s Dogma, are AI-controlled companions that gain gear, skills, and experience from your game, and take all of that with them online where they can be hired by other players to be companions in their own games. I’m not going to spend too much time on either Pawns or character creation – especially because we already have a Dragon’s Dogma 2 Character Creator Deep Dive and a look at How Pawns Have Evolved in Dragon’s Dogma 2 – but what I will say is that Pawns are integral to one of my big takeaways, which is that exploration and discovery in Dragon’s Dogma 2 feels much more natural than before.

First and foremost, there are no more quest boards, there are no markers that appear above people’s heads letting you know