This is mostly a surface level review trying to avoid spoilers and give context for things I like/dislike. The TLDR is the game runs very poorly on PC (regardless of your hardware) and if you like Dragon's Dogma 1, you will probably like this game depending on what you are looking for.

So I'm one of those people that actually likes the story in the first game. I don't think it was executed well at all though for many reasons. One of those reasons being the idea of the Dragon and you not even partaking in activities related to facing the Dragon. In this game however I feel like they put more effort into the reasons behind the main quests and WHY you are spending time doing it. (There's still a feeling of some quests being "filler" and the pursuit of conclusions not solely focused on facing the Dragon as the Arisen). I still think the core idea of the story is great, but again the execution still fails in some key areas and most players are going to walk away from this game not really getting the whole point of the time they spent and what the point of it was. Overall the story is fine, good voice acting and compared to the first game there's a lot more focus on cutscenes and less awkward in-game sequences.

Like DD1 this game has an open world but unlike DD1 this open world is seamless. Even major cities and their interiors require no loading. To keep it short and simple, the first game was vast open fields with destinations in every corner of it but for the most part a very empty open world. In DD2 the world is MUCH more packed and dense, with more interesting caves and locations to visit. There's plenty of side quests to find which have multiple ways to be tackled. Overall as far as open worlds go it's not Elden Ring but it's a really good translation of the first game's ideas into a more realised version of itself.

The gameplay at it's core is fantastic, depending on the vocation you pick though it can really alter the way you will play and it can be very jarring for newer players. Here's where it falls apart for me though... The game as it stands right now has no difficulty options, and the game gets easy quite quickly (depending on skills used and vocation) but eventually the challenge completely disappears and every combat encounter can be quickly finished without much effort or planning. There is a max health reduction system in place which does kind of make exploring for long periods of time "harder" because your maximum heal-able HP will reduce over time, but that does not really change much considering you can just setup a camp and sleep overnight to go back to max HP. With camping kits also not expiring it also kind of just circumvents the max HP system anyway (Your camps might be attacked by nearby enemies when you rest, and your camp kit CAN be destroyed but after 120+ hours played it basically never happened and I can only assume it's because I would kill everything nearby naturally before setting up camp.) With the absence of a Hard mode and no Dark Arisen style expansion from DD1 I am left wanting for more of a challenge and I do hope a hard mode is added for the NG+ system kind of like a souls game.

So pawns are very interesting and quite unique in Dragon's Dogma and there's lots of new mechanics here to breakdown but I'll keep it simple. You have a squad of 3 pawns who act as followers who help you in combat and quests as well as exploration. 1 of those pawns you create yourself and the other 2 you can hire from an online system where other people's main pawn is usable in your own world where they gain knowledge which is transferable to their owners world. The whole squad can be whatever you like, everyone can be a thief or you can build your party in a more balanced way which will definitely make the game easier if you have a good mage in the party with buffs and heals. Pawns are both sometimes quite smart in attacking or sometimes will just walk off a cliff and kill themselves there's kind of no in between. You can issue them commands but it's mostly a let them cook kind of situation. There's a lot more depth to pawns here like specialisations that let them combine things from the inventory or heal you with items etc but basically it's overall just an NPC follower party system with some controllable depth. You can choose to play alone by killing your main pawn and not hiring any pawns or maybe you just want to play with 1 bro you make yourself as the main pawn, it's completely up to you. I find that playing alone with a main pawn and not having a healer in the party starts to make the game more challenging and to me, more fun overall.

This game, like the first, has a very abrasive carry weight system that basically means the more stuff you carry, the slower you move. You can increase your carry weight by making a taller and stronger character and by using a certain collectable item you find in the world. My main issue with this system is NOT that it exists, but the fact that healing items weigh next to nothing and you can spam them in combat. Like I said there IS a max HP reduction system but it doesn't really matter in the long run and overall you can even spam heal through death itself. This weight system to me, kind of has no purpose other than forcing you to turn in all your junk collected every now and then, which is fine. I don't particularly enjoy the system but it is what it is. I just wish in this game healing was less of a commodity and mages were more of the main healing source.

This game runs like ♥♥♥♥. There's no way to sugar coat it. CAPCOM are usually right on the money with their PC games and the performance is typically great on most systems. The RE engine is usually quite good across the whole spectrum of PC hardware.
Now I'm no developer and I have no idea about how making an open world on the RE engine has challenged the developers but for the price of this game the state it has launched in is unacceptable. For reference I have an AMD Radeon 7900xt GPU and an AMD Ryzen 7 7700x CPU playing games at 1440p 165HZ and for every single game I have played on PC Dragon's Dogma 2 is the worst performance-wise. If you have a better system than this chances are you are still running into problems related to frame pacing and frame drops. If you lock the FPS to 60 and just put up with the frame pacing in major cities the experience is less jarring but you need a very beefy CPU to achieve this, and the steam hardware survey doesn't lie, most people do not have that kind of system.

Now, speaking about MTX I'm gonna keep it short and simple... MTX = bad, we can all agree on that. Yet, the MTX in this game are useless, they are not changing the game as much as people make it out to be and frankly the only thing on the store that has a measurable impact is the DD1 classic soundtrack. (Please add Into Free -Dangan- CAPCOM wtf). CAPCOM have done WAY worse with MTX in their previous games and those games have insanely positive reviews, so I think most of this outrage is compounded with the bad PC performance and rhetoric from game journalists/gamers who misrepresent what the actual content of the MTXs are.

So yeah, I like this game a lot just like DD1 but I can't help but feel like it's missing the challenge that was offered from the Dark Arisen expansion from the first game. It makes improvements where needed and keeps the core of the game systems mostly intact. I think this game would be much improved for me IF they can add some sort of scaling difficulty and IF they add some sort of harder dungeon system akin to the Dark Arisen expansion from DD1.

This is mostly a surface level review trying to [b] avoid spoilers [/b] and give context for things I like/dislike. The TLDR is the game runs very poorly on PC (regardless of your hardware) and if you like Dragon's Dogma 1, you will probably like this game depending on what you are looking for. [h1] Story [/h1] So I'm one of those people that actually likes the story in the first game. I don't think it was executed well at all though for many reasons. One of those reasons being the idea of the Dragon and you not even partaking in activities related to facing the Dragon. In this game however I feel like they put more effort into the reasons behind the main quests and WHY you are spending time doing it. (There's still a feeling of some quests being "filler" and the pursuit of conclusions not solely focused on facing the Dragon as the Arisen). I still think the core idea of the story is great, but again the execution still fails in some key areas and most players are going to walk away from this game not really getting the whole point of the time they spent and what the point of it was. Overall the story is fine, good voice acting and compared to the first game there's a lot more focus on cutscenes and less awkward in-game sequences. [h1] Open World [/h1] Like DD1 this game has an open world but unlike DD1 this open world is seamless. Even major cities and their interiors require no loading. To keep it short and simple, the first game was vast open fields with destinations in every corner of it but for the most part a very empty open world. In DD2 the world is MUCH more packed and dense, with more interesting caves and locations to visit. There's plenty of side quests to find which have multiple ways to be tackled. Overall as far as open worlds go it's not Elden Ring but it's a really good translation of the first game's ideas into a more realised version of itself. [h1] Gameplay [/h1] The gameplay at it's core is fantastic, depending on the vocation you pick though it can really alter the way you will play and it can be very jarring for newer players. Here's where it falls apart for me though... The game as it stands right now has no difficulty options, and the game gets easy quite quickly (depending on skills used and vocation) but eventually the challenge completely disappears and every combat encounter can be quickly finished without much effort or planning. There is a max health reduction system in place which does kind of make exploring for long periods of time "harder" because your maximum heal-able HP will reduce over time, but that does not really change much considering you can just setup a camp and sleep overnight to go back to max HP. With camping kits also not expiring it also kind of just circumvents the max HP system anyway (Your camps might be attacked by nearby enemies when you rest, and your camp kit CAN be destroyed but after 120+ hours played it basically never happened and I can only assume it's because I would kill everything nearby naturally before setting up camp.) With the absence of a Hard mode and no Dark Arisen style expansion from DD1 I am left wanting for more of a challenge and I do hope a hard mode is added for the NG+ system kind of like a souls game. [h1] Pawns [/h1] So pawns are very interesting and quite unique in Dragon's Dogma and there's lots of new mechanics here to breakdown but I'll keep it simple. You have a squad of 3 pawns who act as followers who help you in combat and quests as well as exploration. 1 of those pawns you create yourself and the other 2 you can hire from an online system where other people's main pawn is usable in your own world where they gain knowledge which is transferable to their owners world. The whole squad can be whatever you like, everyone can be a thief or you can build your party in a more balanced way which will definitely make the game easier if you have a good mage in the party with buffs and heals. Pawns are both sometimes quite smart in attacking or sometimes will just walk off a cliff and kill themselves there's kind of no in between. You can issue them commands but it's mostly a let them cook kind of situation. There's a lot more depth to pawns here like specialisations that let them combine things from the inventory or heal you with items etc but basically it's overall just an NPC follower party system with some controllable depth. You can choose to play alone by killing your main pawn and not hiring any pawns or maybe you just want to play with 1 bro you make yourself as the main pawn, it's completely up to you. I find that playing alone with a main pawn and not having a healer in the party starts to make the game more challenging and to me, more fun overall. [h1] Inventory and Weight management [/h1] This game, like the first, has a very abrasive carry weight system that basically means the more stuff you carry, the slower you move. You can increase your carry weight by making a taller and stronger character and by using a certain collectable item you find in the world. My main issue with this system is NOT that it exists, but the fact that healing items weigh next to nothing and you can spam them in combat. Like I said there IS a max HP reduction system but it doesn't really matter in the long run and overall you can even spam heal through death itself. This weight system to me, kind of has no purpose other than forcing you to turn in all your junk collected every now and then, which is fine. I don't particularly enjoy the system but it is what it is. I just wish in this game healing was less of a commodity and mages were more of the main healing source. [h1] Final thoughts, PC performance and the MTX [/h1] This game runs like shit. There's no way to sugar coat it. CAPCOM are usually right on the money with their PC games and the performance is typically great on most systems. The RE engine is usually quite good across the whole spectrum of PC hardware. Now I'm no developer and I have no idea about how making an open world on the RE engine has challenged the developers but for the price of this game the state it has launched in is unacceptable. For reference I have an AMD Radeon 7900xt GPU and an AMD Ryzen 7 7700x CPU playing games at 1440p 165HZ and for every single game I have played on PC Dragon's Dogma 2 is the worst performance-wise. If you have a better system than this chances are you are still running into problems related to frame pacing and frame drops. If you lock the FPS to 60 and just put up with the frame pacing in major cities the experience is less jarring but you need a very beefy CPU to achieve this, and the steam hardware survey doesn't lie, most people do not have that kind of system. Now, speaking about MTX I'm gonna keep it short and simple... MTX = bad, we can all agree on that. Yet, the MTX in this game are useless, they are not changing the game as much as people make it out to be and frankly the only thing on the store that has a measurable impact is the DD1 classic soundtrack. (Please add Into Free -Dangan- CAPCOM wtf). CAPCOM have done WAY worse with MTX in their previous games and those games have insanely positive reviews, so I think most of this outrage is compounded with the bad PC performance and rhetoric from game journalists/gamers who misrepresent what the actual content of the MTXs are. So yeah, I like this game a lot just like DD1 but I can't help but feel like it's missing the challenge that was offered from the Dark Arisen expansion from the first game. It makes improvements where needed and keeps the core of the game systems mostly intact. I think this game would be much improved for me IF they can add some sort of scaling difficulty and IF they add some sort of harder dungeon system akin to the Dark Arisen expansion from DD1.