Dragon's Dogma 2's Microtransaction Misstep
Capcom's ambitious open world action-RPG is out today after receiving some really rave reviews. Built on the back of its beloved but often overlooked Xbox 360/PS3-era predecessor, Dragon's Dogma 2's director, Hideaki Itsuno, recently said the franchise has managed to break out of "cult-hit" status having finally "sold its way and made its way into many gamers' hearts." Now the sequel is already being described as 2024's possible Elden Ring moment thanks to its deep build crafting, dynamic fantasy sandbox, and rewarding exploration.
Here's how Austin Walker wrote about the game's approach to quests, the lynchpin of most RPGs, over at Remap:
“If there is one thing that game designers are going to talk about in their weekly design team meetings, or that YouTube game critics are going to make videos about, it’s going to be about the, frankly, fearless decision to make so many open ended, unguided quests in this game. It will be like the year Dark Souls hit big, except instead of saying ‘look at how this game trusts the player to tackle difficult combat challenges,’ they will be saying ‘look at how this game trusts the player to engage with its narrative systems.’”
And here's what some other critics are saying:
”’Have you figured out what the name of this continent is? Are we on a peninsula? An island?’ It’s 3 a.m. and my partner is insisting I go to bed, but I have questions and theories, and because of the review embargo the list of people I know playing Dragon’s Dogma 2 is very small. I am vibrating out of my skin about this game and have to share. Austin tells me he just got to a point where it becomes clear this game is for ‘dogma sickos.’ That ‘they made this game for Us.’” — Dia Lacina, Paste Games
“You're constantly pulled in numerous directions at once and it's up to you to decide which avenues to pursue. It might be a quest given to you by a villager in need, an enticing structure looming on the horizon, or a locked gate and the potential to find an alternative way inside. Backtracking is fairly common, but no one journey is exactly the same as another, so it never feels like a chore when you're retreading familiar ground.” — Richard Wakeling, GameSpot
“We can’t even tell you the best thing about Dragon’s Dogma 2. It’s a game that’s so full of surprises, that each time it dazzles you, you think “Surely that’s it,” but no. The game ramps up show-stopping moments throughout, but there’s one moment that players and developers will reference for decades. It’s a moment that will have your jaw smashing through your floor into your downstairs neighbor, and we can’t implore you enough to experience it and the rest of this magnificent game for yourself.” — Jordan Middler, VGC
All of this unflinching commitment to its world and how players creatively experiment within it makes the decision to attach random microtransactions to Dragon's Dogma 2 feel particularly weird. Wakestones that revive characters and pawns, the game's fancy system of NPCs, can be discovered in rare locations or purchased for $1 per five-pack, VGC reports. Another item called Art of Metamorphosis lets players redesign their characters, and can be found in the world or purchased for $2. Other items like Ambivalent Rift Incense (alter a Pawn's behavior) and Portcrystals that let you add fast travel points to the map can also be purchased for a total of 21 individual DLC microtransactions in the game according to its Steam page.
Despite breaking publisher Capcom's concurrent player record on Steam with nearly 200,000 at launch, the PC version of the game has a rating of Mixed with just 40% positive reviews as players rage about the microtransactions in addition to performance issues. Capcom wrote "we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience" in response to the negative feedback, stating it's looking into improving optimization on PC and noting that the most controversial microtransaction items can all still be found for free in the game just by playing.
Oli Walsh at Polygon has a good breakdown that contextualizes the player-backlash and questions if it's an overreaction. Review-bombing a game, i.e. lodging hyperbolic criticism about the overall value of a thing to make an unrelated point, is bad. Capital G gamers farming rage bait over something that's on its face so trivial is cynical and always leads someplace bad. And the disproportionate response and spill damage effect has certainly made it easy to dismiss as just another entitled angry gamer backlash elevated into something more important by internet platform dynamics.
Still I think the microtransactions low-key suck. The mere fact that you could purchase these items to gain an advantage or save time in the game can do real harm to the immersive illusion of playing it in the first place. Read Walker's initial thoughts on everything interesting Dragon's Dogma 2 is doing to try to organically bring players into its world and not reduce every part of its adventure into an Ubisoft-style chore for reward checklist and it makes letting players pay to access shortcuts seem not only out of place but fundamentally at odds with what the rest of the game is working so hard to achieve.
I don't think it's an accident that Ubisoft open world icon barf has become inherently linked with the French publisher's own attempts to insert microtransactions into single-player narrative experiences. That monetization-influenced design is part of what makes open world games like Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Elden Ring feel so refreshing. So it's extremely jarring to see Dragon's Dogma 2, another game that appears to be working toward a less coercive player experience, embrace pay-to-save-time mechanics. And maybe both things can be true: Dragon's Dogma 2's microtransactions aren't overly intrusive but also don't have a reason to exist outside of padding earnings reports and maximize potential returns.
Patch notes
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League's season 1 update arrives March 28 and will nerf its most annoying enemies: rooftop snipers. In addition to hitting from far away and being hard to see, they also teleport as soon as you get near them. After next week's update, which introduces the Joker and a host of other changes, snipers will teleport less quickly and less often.
Skull and Bones' Y1S1.3 update this week made a ton of changes to how players grind for gold and various exploits they were using to climb the leaderboards. It upset a ton of players or, depending on who you ask, liberated them from relying on the most tedious resource farming strats. More importantly, Ubisoft has changed the game's climate. The wind, which boosts sailing speed, was apparently too volatile before and will now change direction and speed much less frequently.
Stardew Valley's 1.6 update is truly massive and has put the long-time farming sim back in a lot of players' rotations. There are too many wonderful changes to highlight here, like how NPCs will now "shove chests out of their way instead of destroying them," and players can finally "drink mayonnaise and jelly, and eat pickles." Other good news: pans can now give you those tough to find bone fragments.
Dune: Spice Wars patch v.2.0.3.31764 has altered various character perks. In House Harkonnen, for example, Councillor Cron Vatia now "gives +2 manpower per empty building slot on oppression, on top of his other effects."
Brok: The Investigator Update 1.4.7.2 was a doozy at less than five words long: "Added 85 fanarts."
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection received the first of what will likely be many updates aimed at fixing the botched release. A tree will no longer be clipping up through the middle of a walkway in the Endor: Bunker map in BF2, for example. The game still has more concurrent players on Steam than Suicide Squad does.
Lords of the Fallen update v.1.1.626 will kill players faster in PVP with a 10% damage buff across the board. A boss skip was also deleted. You won't be able to dodge the Hushed Saint by jumping on Umbral objects near the bonfire in Forsaken Fen anymore. RIP.
Gas Station Simulator Tidal Wave DLC update has nerfed accidental scuba deaths. "Fixed an issue that caused scuba or surfing customers to stay in the water until the durability of the rented item reached 0," the patch notes read.
Helldivers 2 patch 1.000.103 fixed the new mechs so they no longer randomly blow up when you fire rockets. It also quietly added flying bugs. Unfortunately, the developers also recently discovered the culprit behind tons of player crashes this week: Arc weapons. The particle effects appear to be freezing people's matches and the team is working on a fix for early next week. I lost 29 samples right before extraction last night to this nasty bug and I don't even use Arc weapons (but everyone I matched with in quickplay did).
My 10 games of 2024: February edition
Last year I tracked how my top 10 list evolved over the year on Twitter, alongside the new releases that seemed like GOTY contenders worth paying attention to. I've kept doing that with the latter but figured this newsletter was a better place to track how my personal list is changing, and what it reflects about my tastes and time, and the perennial struggle to try out most of the best games every year. Here’s the current list:
Anomaly Agent
Balatro
Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth
Go Mecha Ball
Helldivers 2
Pacific Drive
Persona 3 Reload
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
Solium Infernum
Unicorn Overlord
I don't normally like to include by-the-book remasters like Persona 3 Reload, but I've just been having a wildly good time with it in ways that even Persona 4 Golden and Persona 5 Royale never quite gripped me. It's been a special late night chillout treat as I slowly grind through its procedural dungeons and try not to get caught cheating on my school exams. What I like most is how much the PS2 charm of the original feels intact but fresh again.
Games I'm still trying to make more time for: Tekken 8, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Banishers: Ghosts of Eden.
In other links:
Fans of the original Super Mario Maker were racing against time to beat every level ever created before the Wii U severs shutdown at the end of the month. They were stuck on a real torture chamber called Trimming the Herbs only for the creator of that level to reveal today that they cheated (used a TAS) to get it uploaded. The final level actually ended up being the already completed The Last Dance. (Ars Technica)
Someone disrupted the Apex Legends regional finals by hacking the players live during the tournament just for the lulz. (Techcrunch)
The PlayStation 5 Pro specs have reportedly leaked with the new console possibly arriving as early as this holiday. (Insider Gaming)
Larian Studios doesn’t plan on making a Baldur’s Gate 3 expansion or Baldur’s Gate 4. Instead, it’s director said the company will leave the Dungeons & Dragons license behind for now to focus on a new big projects. (IGN)
Overwatch 2 devs were told earlier this month they won’t get their bonuses for the second half of last year. The sequel has also abandoned all future PVE content. (Bloomberg)
Bungie replaced the director on Marathon as it pushes to get the extraction shooter out sooner than later amid cancellations and mounting pressure on The Final Shape to bring players back to Destiny 2 and deliver big sales. (IGN)
Rockstar was hoping to release Grand Theft Auto VI as soon as early next year, but is reportedly rushing developers back to the office in part to avoid any potential delays. (Kotaku)
Speaking of Destiny 2, a horde mode called Onslaught is coming for free on April 9. It will have 50 waves and seems heavily influenced by Gears of War. (Bungie)
Ubisoft debuted a new AI chatbot NPC tech at GDC. It did not impress. I’m very curious what data it was trained on because somehow it managed to sound exactly like someone you’d run into in a Watch Dogs game. (The Verge)
Long-running Pokémon fan game website Relic Castle was hit with a takedown notice (VGC)
Diablo 4 will delay it’s fourth season by a month and massively re-work its loot system to be more meaningful. (Blizzard)
Former long-time VP of internal production at Sony, Connie Booth, has been hired by EA to be group manage of RPGs and action games at studios like EA Motive and BioWare. Booth left PlayStation under mysterious circumstances last fall. The Last of Us Online was officially cancelled two months later. (IGN)
Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth’s game over screen is an absolute mess. (Twitter)
Kotaku’s Editor-in-Chief and my boss, Jen Glennon, resigned this week after receiving an apparent mandate from management to start almost exclusively producing guides for games. “It is very clear that leadership wants to undermine the people who make these sites special and replace their work with slop,” the GMG Union, which represents me, wrote in response. Since I started writing at Kotaku over seven years ago I’ve posted a mix of news, features, reviews, guides, and original reporting, and plan to continue doing so. (Aftermath)