Kim
04-24-2012, 07:22 PM
I just downloaded the Dragon's Dogma demo, and, because I know Greed is looking forward to it, I will share my thoughts.
First thing's first: The levels in the demo are the same ones I saw at E3 last year. So the stuff you're playing in the demo? It's ooooolllllldddddd news. The first of the two missions is a Prologue one about how you're some fancy dude who needs to go stab a dragon. Along the way, you get to summon some pawns and fight goblins, harpies, and a chimera.
Controlling pawns is pretty basic. You can tell them to attack or tell them, "I need halp!" and they'll do that. They didn't seem too idiotic when I played, so they certainly have that going for them, and it's convenient to be able to run up to a dude and have them heal you. Occasionally they'll do stuff to try and help you, like grabbing a holding a goblin or getting ready to launch you into the air to attack a flying enemy, but every time this happened they stopped doing these things by the time I was able to get over to them, rendering their attempts at help rather useless.
Anyways, in this prologue, you play as a knight with a shield and a sword. You ready your shield with the left bumper and ready your sword for special attacks with the right bumper. You don't ever really need to use your shield, though, because the combat is more or less mindless hacking. You have light and heavy attacks, but, as far as I could tell, neither use stamina and the light attacks are sufficiently faster as to render the heavy attacks useless. The sword special attacks use stamina, but you'll hardly ever use them, except the knock low-hanging harpies down so you can mash X.
There are two other main weaknesses to the combat. The first is that there doesn't seem to be any tactical element. Enemy mobs are too numerable for one-on-one strategy to even really be a thing, though I laugh at anyone who claims strategy is at all necessary, so it's mostly just charging and swinging your swords until all the baddies are dead.
The other issue is that there's no weight to anything in the game. Take a game like Dark Souls, which Dragon's Dogma borrows heavily from, for instance. When you swing a weapon, you get a feel for both the weight of the weapon and the impact as it hits an opponent. This plays into combat with stuff like shielding, because you can sort of feel the impact from a weapon hitting your shield and the impact as your weapon bounces off an opponents shield. It's also an important part to the sense of immersion. Dragon's Dogma lacks that entirely. In fact, enemies shielding themselves didn't seem to have any noticeable impact other than I wasn't doing damage. I just kept swinging until their shields went down and then attacked until they ran out of health. In short, the combat is mindless and weightless, making the whole experience incredibly boring.
This is pretty much how most of the first mission will go until you get to the chimera. The chimera is this mission's boss fight and has basically the only thing I really actually enjoyed, which is climbing onto large enemies. You're still mindlessly hacking, but climbing onto a chimera to mindlessly hack at its tail until it comes off is much more satisfying than mindlessly hacking mobs of goblins. The fact that you can take down the chimera one part at a time also introduces the only element of actual strategy the mission had. So hey, good on the game for that. Even so, the amount of damage you do to the enemy combined with how boring the combat is and all that results in even this getting tiresome incredibly fast and just mashing X until it finally goddamn ends.
The second of the demo's missions takes place in a field. You run up and slay a bunch of goblins, and then a griffon attacks. As with the chimera, fighting the griffon is more fun than fighting the goblins because you can climb onto it. This is useful during the fight because you can (mindlessly) hack away at its wings until it crash lands, letting your party go after it on equal footing. The fight is a bit more challenging that anything in the first mission, but if you actually pay attention to your health, something I didn't have to do even once in the first mission, you shouldn't have too much trouble. Oh, you have a bow, too, but that's something you're only going to need to use if you didn't have the common sense to climb onto the griffon's back, and you're really only going to use that until it lands. The only cool part of this, other than riding a griffon while you kill it, were the fire damage affects on the griffon, which were pretty badass.
The demo also comes with a character builder that lets you design the look of your character and your main pawn. There's a lot of variety in terms of base look and the extent to which you are allowed to change up your character, making this easily the best part of the demo. There's even a base look built on Guts from Berserk, which is pretty rad. My one complaint with the character builder is that the female character models have a "sexy" pose that the male character models lack.
So yeah, that's the Dragon's Dogma demo in a nutshell. It's got a few good parts, but the whole is pretty crap. I guess play it if you played Dark Souls and thought, "You know, I want this but much less good." I've heard of some stuff that's part of the full game that sounds good, and the leveling and class systems could also be good, but you don't really get to access those in the demo, so fuck it. The demo is crap and has me pretty convinced the full game will be crap.
First thing's first: The levels in the demo are the same ones I saw at E3 last year. So the stuff you're playing in the demo? It's ooooolllllldddddd news. The first of the two missions is a Prologue one about how you're some fancy dude who needs to go stab a dragon. Along the way, you get to summon some pawns and fight goblins, harpies, and a chimera.
Controlling pawns is pretty basic. You can tell them to attack or tell them, "I need halp!" and they'll do that. They didn't seem too idiotic when I played, so they certainly have that going for them, and it's convenient to be able to run up to a dude and have them heal you. Occasionally they'll do stuff to try and help you, like grabbing a holding a goblin or getting ready to launch you into the air to attack a flying enemy, but every time this happened they stopped doing these things by the time I was able to get over to them, rendering their attempts at help rather useless.
Anyways, in this prologue, you play as a knight with a shield and a sword. You ready your shield with the left bumper and ready your sword for special attacks with the right bumper. You don't ever really need to use your shield, though, because the combat is more or less mindless hacking. You have light and heavy attacks, but, as far as I could tell, neither use stamina and the light attacks are sufficiently faster as to render the heavy attacks useless. The sword special attacks use stamina, but you'll hardly ever use them, except the knock low-hanging harpies down so you can mash X.
There are two other main weaknesses to the combat. The first is that there doesn't seem to be any tactical element. Enemy mobs are too numerable for one-on-one strategy to even really be a thing, though I laugh at anyone who claims strategy is at all necessary, so it's mostly just charging and swinging your swords until all the baddies are dead.
The other issue is that there's no weight to anything in the game. Take a game like Dark Souls, which Dragon's Dogma borrows heavily from, for instance. When you swing a weapon, you get a feel for both the weight of the weapon and the impact as it hits an opponent. This plays into combat with stuff like shielding, because you can sort of feel the impact from a weapon hitting your shield and the impact as your weapon bounces off an opponents shield. It's also an important part to the sense of immersion. Dragon's Dogma lacks that entirely. In fact, enemies shielding themselves didn't seem to have any noticeable impact other than I wasn't doing damage. I just kept swinging until their shields went down and then attacked until they ran out of health. In short, the combat is mindless and weightless, making the whole experience incredibly boring.
This is pretty much how most of the first mission will go until you get to the chimera. The chimera is this mission's boss fight and has basically the only thing I really actually enjoyed, which is climbing onto large enemies. You're still mindlessly hacking, but climbing onto a chimera to mindlessly hack at its tail until it comes off is much more satisfying than mindlessly hacking mobs of goblins. The fact that you can take down the chimera one part at a time also introduces the only element of actual strategy the mission had. So hey, good on the game for that. Even so, the amount of damage you do to the enemy combined with how boring the combat is and all that results in even this getting tiresome incredibly fast and just mashing X until it finally goddamn ends.
The second of the demo's missions takes place in a field. You run up and slay a bunch of goblins, and then a griffon attacks. As with the chimera, fighting the griffon is more fun than fighting the goblins because you can climb onto it. This is useful during the fight because you can (mindlessly) hack away at its wings until it crash lands, letting your party go after it on equal footing. The fight is a bit more challenging that anything in the first mission, but if you actually pay attention to your health, something I didn't have to do even once in the first mission, you shouldn't have too much trouble. Oh, you have a bow, too, but that's something you're only going to need to use if you didn't have the common sense to climb onto the griffon's back, and you're really only going to use that until it lands. The only cool part of this, other than riding a griffon while you kill it, were the fire damage affects on the griffon, which were pretty badass.
The demo also comes with a character builder that lets you design the look of your character and your main pawn. There's a lot of variety in terms of base look and the extent to which you are allowed to change up your character, making this easily the best part of the demo. There's even a base look built on Guts from Berserk, which is pretty rad. My one complaint with the character builder is that the female character models have a "sexy" pose that the male character models lack.
So yeah, that's the Dragon's Dogma demo in a nutshell. It's got a few good parts, but the whole is pretty crap. I guess play it if you played Dark Souls and thought, "You know, I want this but much less good." I've heard of some stuff that's part of the full game that sounds good, and the leveling and class systems could also be good, but you don't really get to access those in the demo, so fuck it. The demo is crap and has me pretty convinced the full game will be crap.