Dragon’s Dogma was pretty heavily recommended to me for a while. After getting into the Dark Souls series in 2018, and absolutely loving those games, I was obviously on the lookout for more action RPGs. This game popped up and was on my wishlist for about three years until I purchased it in 2022, and then finally sat down and gave it a proper go in 2023. I’ve heard lots of people say that it’s the best action RPG ever made, that it has the best combat system in the genre. I watched a review from Shadiversity on YouTube where he said that he likes Dragon’s Dogma’s combat more than the Souls games. So of course I had to play eventually, based on that level of notoriety.

I’ve put a little over 26 hours of playtime into the game, and after more than a year since the last time I booted it up, having spent some time reflecting on my experience, I’ve now decided that I am not going to return to the game to continue my playthrough. I haven’t finished the game, but I’ve spent enough time with it to get a good idea of how it plays and have completed at least half of the main quest line, I’d wager. I’m also no stranger to offering games far more of my time than most people are willing in order to give them the benefit of the doubt that they will interest me eventually. I have put 10s of hours into more than one game, in the past, before I was able to properly start enjoying them, and unfortunately to say, Dragon’s Dogma has reached its time limit.

My issues with the game all boil down to the design of one thing: the open world. To start with, the world is barren in terms of content. There are two types of enemy spawns in the open world: fixed spawns and giant monster events. The fixed spawns are comprised of mostly weak enemies that are trivial to fight and don’t do a whole lot. You’ll find packs of wolves that go down in a couple of hits each, goblin raids that become non-threatening when you set them on fire and watch them flail about in pain instead of retaliating, bandit groups that put up some level of resistance… sometimes, and a couple of other enemy types like harpies and saurians (crocodiles with spears). These enemies will always spawn in the same locations on the map and never outside of those spaces, meaning you will always know where and when there are combat encounters, and you’ll known how to deal with every single time they do show up once you’ve fought them once or twice before.

The other type are the gigantic creatures that all of the game’s marketing and reviews are focused on - the ones that you’re able to climb on and that require a great deal of effort to take down, unlike the trash mobs. Based on what I found on Google, there’s apparently 22 different “colossal” monsters in the game, and with exceptions made for story-specific, scripted monster encounters (like the chimera in the tutorial, and the hydra toward the intro section of the game), I only encountered 3 of them in my playthrough. (Technically it was 4, but that’s because one of them is the Armored Cyclopes, which is essentially just the regular Cyclopes with damage-mitigating armor that can be shattered off the creature.) Perhaps it’s a result of the way in which I played the game - I might’ve not gone to other zones where other colossal monsters appear - but 3 of the primary enemy type in over 20 hours is a very slow pacing of content, especially when I also fought multiples of them, including 2 separate Griffins and around 3-4 total Cyclopses.

On top of this, the act of traversing the world is long and uneventful as a result. Dragon’s Dogma largely follows the trend of having a linear narrative that requires moving from quest location to quest location in order to progress, and beyond that, it doesn’t offer much in the way of side content. There is an island that you can travel to from the starting town, which I think was added as part of the ‘Dark Arisen’ relaunch, and it’s apparently where people go to speedrun leveling up their characters on subsequent playthroughs due to the presence of high-level dungeons with enemies that offer massive pools of experience. Beyond that, however, the thing I eventually noticed about places on the map that I would explore on my own is that, eventually, they would become a quest location. The catacomb behind the waterfall beneath the bridge that you cross on the way to the main town, Gran Soren, became a location to retrieve an item in the main story. The dungeon I found in the woods outside of Gran Soren became a site to investigate a cult. And even the mine that serves as a shortcut over the mountains, where I met one of the Ogres, was recommended by the quest giver to help reach a far away fort more easily. All of this suggests to me that if you simply focus on the questing, you’ll end up seeing most or possibly even all of the game’s world by having the game take you there. So what is the point of exploring on your own, then?

This is coming from a person who is a huge fan of open world, fantasy RPGs. My favorite game of all time, RuneScape, is an open world, fantasy RPG. I loved Skyrim when I played it in 2012, and I’ve been desperately craving to experience Elden Ring for many months now. Dragon’s Dogma is the exact sort of game that appeals to someone like me, and yet I did not like it. I think it might’ve been better by not being open world, instead going for a more linear, “open zones” style. A big part of why I say this is the fact that according to what I’ve heard about the game’s development history, it seemingly ran out of its budget and was released as half of a game. The ambitions of the developers apparently outweighed what they were able to create, and much of what was planned to be in the open world never made it to the final product. A more tightly controlled experience would’ve potentially prevented this from happening, I’d think, and the way that there are a bunch of obvious barriers surrounding certain sections of the map indicates that they didn’t intend for everything to be traversable.

I won’t sit here and try to claim that there isn’t anything good about this game. I’ve seen plenty of fans whom express their love and admiration for Dragon’s Dogma, so it’s fair to believe that there is something to this game that I didn’t see personally. But that’s what it comes down to: you have to play for long enough before “the game gets really good”, and I think everybody who likes it will admit that. All of the stuff I hear people praise the game for, most of it is endgame, like the high-level sorceries and the dragon that’s in the cover art. I’m not opposed to the idea of an open world game with minimal fast travel options that places a strong emphasis on the journey to the destination. But if that’s core to your experience, then that journey needs to be engaging and memorable, and that wasn’t how I felt while playing. I would’ve much rather just had the ability to warp to each locations; you are able to teleport back to the hub town without restriction, at the very least. If I could’ve done that, then I may have considered to continue playing.

For anyone wondering about the sequel, Dragon’s Dogma 2, I cannot give you a definitive answer since I haven’t played it myself and don’t plan to. I have listened to a small handful of videos from people that have, and based on what I’ve heard, it seems like DD2 follows mostly in the footsteps of DD1, meaning that any design choices I’ve criticized here are likely also present in the sequel. Some people have even gone as far as to state that Dragon’s Dogma 2 feels less like a second entry and more like a refined version of it, or like a remake that uses a different storyline and setting from the original, but keeps the same general idea. Make of that what you will; perhaps someone else who has played it can attest otherwise.

very fun game that I always seem to come back to. I've 100% on ps3, ps4, switch, and pc

I've never played a game that uses so many weird systems which individually make no sense, but they somehow work toghether :))
Give it a shot, you might enjoy it. I'm pretty mixed about it