The first Dragon’s Dogma predicted the future of good games
polygon.comModern video games are a constantly shifting and bracingly ephemeral medium. The steady flow of patches and updates, the fickle nature of licensing and server shutdowns, the state of a given user’s internet connectivity — there are dozens of things that can crater or enrich a given video game experience. This means that games can take on all kinds of unusual narrative arcs: Disappointing games can undergo a renaissance (most famously Final Fantasy 14and No Man’s Sky), forgotten titles can be rediscovered (Among Us), and old favorites can die the death of a thousand cuts (Overwatch 2).
Some games go on stranger journeys, more tied to the ebb and flow of the culture and conversation surrounding them as they fragment across dozens of outlets and platforms. 2012’s Dragon’s Dogma is one of those games. Initially an oddball misfire in Capcom’s weirdest year, the intervening decade has seen it slowly grow in reputation until it became not just a good game, but a blueprint for what good games are.
The story of Dragon’s Dogma’s release is one that’s all too familiar in just about any medium: It was an idiosyncratic weirdo crushed between commercial and critical juggernauts and lost in a sea of also-rans. When it arrived in May 2012, most audiences had had their fill of fantasy action-RPGs from the previous fall’s incredible double-header. Skyrim had swept the industry off its feet, and Dark Souls was enchanting a steadily growing contingent of players, many of whom were critics and game designers. Between these two poles, Dragon’s Dogma — a video game with an over-the top intro in which a dragon raids a fishing village and rips out your character’s fucking heart — just seemed kind of ridiculous. Until people played it.
To this day, this is one of the most remarkable things about Dragon’s Dogma. Before Twitch — itself barely a year old at the time — and early in the advent of let’s plays, people were won over on Dragon’s Dogma by seeing people play it. The quirks and
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