where do I start with this game? probably at the beginning.
dragon’s dogma is a game about cycles. the arisen rises, chosen by the dragon, and either succeeds or fails at slaying it. beyond the dragon lies the seneschal, an arbiter of the world’s fate and crux of its existence. strewn across the land of gransys are the stories of those who came before you, their legacies carried on by their pawns. a network of history, both within and without the narrative. adventures with representatives of those in our world, sharing experiences, warnings, and strategies, as comrades in the winding journey.
when you kill god at the heart of the everfall, you simply take up his mantle. invisible. intangible. immaterial. god is not dead. she’s just silent. no matter how much she wants to scream.
when you finally use the godsbane dagger on yourself, your pawn finds a new life in your place, shuffling into your role as you shuffled into the seneschal’s. life goes on without you. your image left in the hands of your most trusted adjutant, a memory left to fade into ash.
once more, the cycle begins.
dragon’s dogma is a game about cycles. the arisen rises, heart ripped from their body, and seeks its return. beyond their heart lies the illusion of choice, a decision that will perpetuate infinity in either case. strewn across bitterblack isle are the stories of those who raged before you, their wounds carried on by the miasma of these halls. a network of rot and misfortune.
when you kill daimon at the core of the isle, he’s replaced by a revised horror, shifting the darkness of the dungeons further into decay. time heals all wounds, but these have been festering for eons.
its first death was a mercy. the second… who knows.
when you face god once more, your own face looks back at you. god is dead. a puppet dancing on eternity’s strings.
once more, the cycle begins. if it had an end, it would not be infinite.
dragon’s dogma is a game about cycles. the arisen rises, chosen by the dragon, and is raised as a champion of the people. the duke has no power here; instead, they are crowned sovran. a spirited celebration, before they’re ripped from their throne, told to abandon reason if they wish to see the truth of the world, and cast into slavery, a king no more. a pawn named rook saves them. the chess metaphor strains.
the world here feels… real. verisimilitudinous. a thing approximating reality satisfactorily to my current standards. where the first was a gen-7 game approximating a duchy where daggers meant you could double-jump and the landscape was meaningful in its design but still easy to traverse, this dragon’s dogma feels heavy. where once the wilds of the witcher 3 felt strangely like home with their turbulent skies and familiar empty fields, the wilds here felt like I was taking a hike through unfamiliar (and hostile) territory.
the burden of travel is magnified by how your body handles in this game. the first game was snappy, mostly uninterested in being a simulation so much as using your inventory weight vs your character build to change your movement speed and how your stamina drained. here, your gait changes significantly with not only how weighed down you are, but the terrain you’re walking on.
stamina management becomes a real part of the ebb and flow of getting around, in a way that felt extremely relevant to me, someone with a sedentary lifestyle (and who had a date in the midst of playing this game which included the most walking I’ve done in quite a while). my body twinges sympathetically as my stamina refuses to recover as I press on up a slope, recalling every hill around pike place market and the degree to which my asthma felt like a limiter on my own stamina recovery.
wandering around this game made me nervous in a way that I didn’t realize I could be made by a game that wasn’t survival horror. respite design is something I harp on a lot when it comes to games, because it’s goddamn important for the player character! (and the player! when I see people complain that one hundred percent of their playtime in a game is not doing something Exciting, I get tired. design your games so that people can take breathers while still playing them and you will have games that aren’t exhausting to play for long stretches of time.)
where the world in the first dragon’s dogma felt composed in a very meaningful way, with sightlines and points of interest, this world feels too big to be meaningful in the same way, although I know this is part of the illusion. augmented by how fast travel has been changed, so every journey is costly either in diegetic time or other resources, the world feels enormous. escort requests that can pop up with assorted befriended NPCs never have a time limit, but other side quests often do, pressing you to strain your resources or risk failure. an early quest I stumbled over tasked me with saving a man who was sent out on a dullahan hunt, as a gambit by another noble to have him killed off so his wife would be left a widow and thus open to his affections; when I realized I was being asked to rush off to an unfamiliar locale to fight an unfamiliar foe, it was at the end of an already grueling day. I wanted to return to the inn so I could mark firmly that I had made progress. instead, I saw the existence of a vague time limit and made a decision, rushing off into the burgeoning dusk on my first overnight journey.
dragon’s dogma 2 made me nervous about going out and doing quests because every scratch piled up. every goblin attack landed on my noggin, every time I got clipped by a cyclops (that I could totally handle), every harpy swooping down at me, they all drain your max hp a little bit. before long, my already meager hp bar was shredded. so I ran back to town, my fear of camping out exacerbated by several bad luck moments where my campsite was raided in the night and destroyed.
in time, I grew more bold, eventually venturing further out, staying multiple days at a time out in the wilderness, managing my resources, dipping my toe into civilized parts of the world to drop off my assorted gains, but I’d always eventually find myself back in a real town. inns are oddly expensive, but I paid anyway. the fact remains that staying in an inn (or later, my own house) is a big deal; despite being able to save anywhere, you only have the one save file, and while you can load the previous save, it will frequently update with autosaves. lodging saves are hard latch points that you can hop back to despite that, and I’ve had a few mistakes where rewinding back to my last lodging save saved me a lot of trouble.
this is all complicated by probably the most notorious aspect of this game: the dragonsplague.
the pawns are, like the arisen, inexorably tied to the Dragon, and its lesser kin can exert a corruptive influence on them in battle, so once you’ve become enough of a threat to encounter drakes in your travels, you’ll be warned of its presence when you hire a pawn that has it for the first time, even as you’ll likely hear rumors about it beforehand from your pawns. there are no obvious signs when it’s contracted, but given enough time, it will lead to the pawns, normally obedient to your commands, to disregard them. this corruption can also be passed on to other pawns, meaning it’s possible to be infected even without fighting a dragonkin yourself.
if the illness is allowed to persist, your trusted allies, the force by which your claim to the title of arisen is upheld, will use your next lodging save to kill everyone in the settlement.
as if the cruelty of killing all these people for no reason but ignorance was not enough, because it takes place as part of a permanent save, there’s no real way to undo it. to add insult to injury, the system message following the cutscene of the pawn transforming into a shadowy dragon directly blames the player’s incompetence: “if only you had been more observant, perhaps this tragedy could have been prevented.”
I once wrote about muv-luv alternative, and discussed a sequence in which the violence that the protagonist was trained for followed him back to a peaceful world, in a capacity that would work quite well as a metaphor for PTSD. this, too, would work as something similar, but perhaps both are more adequate as representation of a hero returning from a journey that has changed them beyond the pale. someone who is fighting monsters should take care they do not become one in the process. or, in this case, dragons.
the pawns represent the everyman of the setting, but devoted to the cause and always replenished, the endless wave crashing against the shores of time. corrupting them and stealing their already diminished will is the domain of the villains of the game. every pawn is someone’s companion, their closest friend, their steadfast ally.
vermund, battahl, and the volcanic island are made of stories. the terrain, a story of how the people before you walked this path, and a story of how the designers wanted each combat encounter to feel. the people, myriad stories of how history has played out. every pawn, a story of someone else spending time wondering at this world, every dungeon, a story of treasure to uncover and foes to defeat.
every one of these, a story of your own to tell someone else.
there is, supposedly, a great will that maintains these cycles. one you eventually defy in pursuing the “true” ending of this game. you cast aside reason and break the sequence, if not the cycle, by ending yourself before the dragon.
the great will knew this would happen eventually. it’s not a matter of seeing the ending coming. it was always about stalling it out as long as possible. of going through the motions, of seeking satisfaction in the time it took.
the narrative idea of infinity ends. it always does. “infinity” is just a large enough scope to postpone thinking about. the limits of the human mind while processing infinity are what make the idea so appealing, after all.
the world, and the everyman, are changed, not beyond recognition, but irreversibly. the cycle ends. same as it always does. that’s what time does, after all. it goes on.
but the great will… the player, trapped in the glory of the moment, will never see that future.
I stare at the words “restart game with current level and equipment”.
dragon’s dogma is a game about…