The Game of the Moment, the one people in my circle have been talking about for the last week – both positively and negatively – is Dragon’s Dogma 2. A sequel to Capcom’s RPG cult classic, the game is currently hovering at a 57% Mixed rating on Steam.
Customers have plenty of valid complaints. At $70, the game’s expensive. Beyond the initial price tag, it features in-game monetization purchases that – while not particularly aggressive or necessary when you’re playing the game – are front and center on the Steam store page. Performance issues and an oddly restrictive autosave combined with a single save game slot add to the frustration.
Capcom is working to address these issues, but in today’s crowded marketplace, it’s challenging to regain a community’s trust after a rocky launch. That’s a shame – because for those who look past the initial sound and fury of the first glut of Steam reviews, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a game with innovative design pillars.
In particular, the developers of Dragon’s Dogma 2, like the developers of Elden Ring, understood precisely when, where, and how to apply heavy friction to the player’s experience – delivering, in return, plenty of moments of joy and accomplishment.
in Dragon’s Dogma 2. It’s easy to
miss this area entirely!
Friction, Yesterday and Today
Friction – the elements of a design that slow the player down and add length and challenge – exists in every game. Even a purely casual idle clicker game uses time as friction. The longer you play, the further you’ll go, and the higher your numbers will rise.
Part of a designer’s role is figuring out where and when to add friction. What decisions do you want players to focus their time on? How challenging should the mechanics be?
With an excess of friction, players will get frustrated and lose interest. On the flip side, reduce friction too much, and players will also quit – the game won’t be engaging.
Old-school game designs were heavy on friction. Consider classics like System Shock, which required backtracking through previously completed levels and a strong sense of direction (without a quest marker in sight!) Or Infocom’s famous text adventures, which littered the player’s critical path with challenging, obscure puzzles in the days long before internet walkthroughs.
For the past decade, open-world games have followed a set of conventions – and in the process, smoothed away traditional mechanics that created friction. Fast travel is easily accessible for the player; saving is unlimited and quick. Death is often inconsequential, a brief and minor setback. Skill is secondary to time investment. Unskilled players can still finish every quest and get 100% of the achievements provided they put in the hours.
The Right Amount of Tough
Dragon’s Dogma 2 tosses these modern conventions out the window. There are exactly two saves, one manual save and one at the last inn where your party rested. Journeying anywhere is a challenge that requires planning, purchasing supplies, and avoiding the perilous night.
Massive enemies can suddenly crash out of a forest. Death can mean significant lost progress, or force a player to backtrack. Quests can be obscure, and many are missable entirely.
One of the core features of the game is the player pawn. Pawns are the not-quite-human characters who follow the Arisen, the player’s avatar. At the start of the game, every player makes both a main character and a single pawn, then recruits the pawns of two other players to round out a traditional RPG party of four.
You’ll always travel with your primary pawn, but the other two slots are filled by a rotating cast of characters, swapped out periodically for fresh buddies. When you dismiss another player’s pawn, you have the option to rate them and send back a gift to their owner.
Choosing the wrong abilities, the wrong personality type, or the wrong gear for a pawn reduces their effectiveness. Properly setting up your pawn is easy to screw up, leaving you with a brain-dead pal that gets low ratings and no gifts.
The game doesn’t warn you about any of this – it lets you make bad choices and learn over time how to make your pawn better. There’s no hand-holding for this core feature, one of the game’s signature selling points.
me – a chonky cat-man. Seeing how other
people make their pawns is part
of Dragon Dogma’s charm.
So mechanically, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is unfriendly for new players. Yet, like Elden Ring and Dark Souls, it’s not fundamentally as difficult as the popular narrative suggests.
The action combat is loose and forgiving. The split-second reflexes and timing needed to beat notoriously difficult games like Ninja Gaiden and Cuphead are absent.
Why It Works
It’d be easy for a modern game exec, trained on the best practices of today’s friendly mass market open-world games, to dismiss Dragon’s Dogma 2 as a hardcore, niche experience.
Yet I think the developers achieved what they were after – a game that, while not casual, isn’t in reality all that tough. Instead, it feels like a challenge because the design applies friction along different vectors than the typical modern title – and thus, is unique.
On paper, it’s yet another open-world fantasy RPG without much to make it stand out in a crowded market. Yet there aren’t any other games that offer the same experience. Dragon’s Dogma 2, like the first game, excels in recreating the “feel” of classic role-playing tabletop adventures – especially exploration and planning for a trip.
If Baldur’s Gate 3 is like a modern D&D campaign – story-heavy, focused on role-playing, drama, and complex characters – Dragon’s Dogma 2 is an old-school Friday night middle-school get-together tabletop session, complete with Dorito-stained fingers and a DM that enforces the ridiculous encumbrance rules.
From moment to moment, the game is goofy and chaotic – pawns constantly chat, run off to pick herbs, and pick up goblins to hurl at other goblins. Even the shortest trip requires figuring out how many (heavy) camping supplies to pack given the (incredibly limiting) weight restrictions to make it to the next town.
And the vectors of friction the developers chose to include are the source of the game’s feel.
The single save slot and limited inventory space make each trip a risk. Further, a large percentage of the side quests are hidden. This means you’re unlikely to experience large chunks of the game’s content unless you wander off the trails and purposely poke around in forgotten corners of the landscape.
Paths Untravelled
I’ve spent a lot of blogging time talking about imperfect games. From Pathologic 2 to Shadows of Doubt, the titles that most interest me are not perfectly polished big-budget extravaganzas.
Instead, I’m drawn to games where the development teams take risks and build genuinely unique experiences. If the games I prefer to talk about have a common thread, it’s that they buck trends in how, when, and where they apply friction to the player’s experience.
Pathologic 2 forces you to grapple with punishing survival mechanics and a tight time limit. Shadows of Doubt has you pouring over a complex maze of threads and cards on a corkboard, looking for minor connections in mountains of insignificant evidence – procedural needles in haystacks.
in Shadows of Doubt – mostly there
to distract you between murder cases.
For developers trying to make their game stand out, thinking about the role friction plays is a fresh way to approach a game’s design.
What are the challenges you put in the player’s path? Are you throwing in mindless collect-a-thons or a hundred points of interest on a map to extend the game’s length – or are you building genuinely interesting barriers to progress that reinforce the key design pillars of your game?
Dragon’s Dogma 2, despite its many flaws, is a game built with a design focus: long, peril-filled trips through a monster-filled fantasy land. Time spent in the world is more about the journey than the destination.
The design forces you to come to grips with the unusual experience it offers and meet it halfway – but it also respects your time and cares about how you spend it.
It’s the kind of friction that gets the job done.
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