That's what I've been fearing. Hearing from many reviews, this game looks like it's lacking as a true sequel. Hell, some even say that the gameplay is almost exactly the same as DD1.
Not to mention how terrible the enemy spawns in Battahl are. Literally every 5 steps, there's a pack of goblins, wolves and/or harpies. Literally no room to breathe.
I remember when the rose colored glasses kinda wore off and I was like wait this is just dragons dogma 1.5 they don’t even have 2 on the title screen 😭😭
Once u get the true ending the title card shows Roman numeral 2. Once u save all the villages in unmoored world, u get the true ending. Use the gods way on the drago as you ride to the final battle
Leading into release day, one of my top wants for the game was the "infinite stamina outside of combat" thing you mentioned. I replayed DD1 a few months ago to sort of prep myself for DD2 and the stamina drain outside of combat was a total drag, BUT I understood that the game is 10+ years old. I was hoping DD2 team would pull a FromSoft Elden Ring QoL change and do the infinite stamina out of combat, especially seeing as how DD2 is "4x larger than the first game". That was a total bummer. I still love the game dearly, mind you, but I'm not going to lie to myself and others and act like it's a 10/10.
There's an augment in DD1 that helps with that. Don't know if it makes a return in DD2 though, Athleticism. Just checked, it's back in DD2. Doesn't really serve for what you really want, but it combined with the roll, got me through a lot of DD1's nonsense traversal.
Cool Hobbit sword and old school PlayStation:) Totally agree re camera angles, it's not mentioned enough in reviews. Especially indoors, the awkward camera angles have killed me more often than the enemies themselves. Anyways expected to like this game but was surprised at how much I like it. I usually hate companions in games like this and almost always play solo, but in this game I find the pawns especially my main pawn, so weirdly charming. I make a habit of never watching guide videos before I've put some solid time into games like this. Just to avoid spoilers but also because of things like this: when my main pawn died, I was heartbroken. I'd spent hours exploring the countryside with her, she'd had my back fighting hordes of enemies, I'd chuckled at her weird sense of humour. It wasn't until one of my other pawns mentioned that I could resurrect her at a riftstone that I actually realised this was possible. I didn't learn that from watching a RU-vid guide, I'd learned it organically by simply playing the game. Any game that can make me care about a companion NPC that much is a winner for me. I couldn't care less about best builds, OP builds, best pawns, "beating" the game, etc. All decisions are made by instinct not strategy, and the game is so much better for it. This is fast becoming one of my favourite RPGs.
I was just playing last night and my performance was just fine. I don't need 60 fps for every single game, especially since I grew up a console gamer so practically every game I played until 4 years ago when I got my first PC was 30 fps.
Yeah DD2 is really flirting with the quality and scale of games like Elden Ring and Witcher 3, but it's just not quite pushing the ambition far enough.
The best thing The Witcher 3 did was the update that made crafting materials weigh nothing. I feel like DD2 needs that. Also, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that camping kits were NOT single use: I was only using them when I reeeeeally needed to, which actually made the early game way more fun :)
They also got rid of the stamina drain when running too, I used to just run with Geralt because Roach annoyed the shit out of me too much. Plus she drained stamina off the path.
This game's biggest shortcoming is its story and world layout. While the gameplay and/or exploration can be addictive along with those big monster takedowns, ragdoll moments, etc., the world and story are just some subpar version of Tolkien mixed with other elements like Elden Ring. The game shows some technical expertise or know-how from the Capcom development team, but the big picture and visionary writing/literary stuff is very lacking. If someone with vision partnered with Capcom to create a compelling and complete story with world design, Capcom could stun the gaming world. PERHAPS Capcom would go full traditional RPG (like Ultima) and have your class locked for the entire story, then the game could be compelling, UNIQUE and technically impressive.
So liitle has changed, especially the more annoying and dated things. It's like they took the original game, mixed up the map a bit, added a couple of characters and slighty imprived the visuals. Absolutely nothing was done to improve the game with even the QoL fixes from Dark Arisen completrly missing. 12 years for this is terrible.
Main problem was the story felt like it had a huge chunk cut out with the way it wrapped up, narratively it felt like I was halfway through the game, then next thing I know I’m in the final boss fight
If you use the ox carts and set up port crystals where there are no ox carts you can get around quite fast. Besides that just set some gold aside for ferrystones and you’re good. The traversal feels very similar to BG1 in some regards. You have to manage your quests and your party carefully lest you spend ages backtracking. DD was always a love letter to old school rpgs/dnd just with Capcom’s specific brand of action.
I think the open world comparison between Elden Ring and DD2 is: ER has better level/map design, but DD2 has better systems. I think those systems limited the map design to some extent (though they could have done more).
The exploration you talked about from Elden ring is a good comparison. Skyrim was for me as well. It had click to go fast travel plus it had carts like DD2 but I still found myself traveling overland on foot a lot and always making sure to point myself toward an area of the map I hadn't explored yet on the way. It was great! At first... After a while, you have been there, done that, killed that goblin and you just have other bigger things to do. I get what they were going for but the constant repeat slog goes from positive to negative after some time.
Well I was hoping the climbing mechanic was better, because as a long term player of DD1 it was a nightmare. Stamina loss is still a big thing again like FFXV, at least it was taken out in Witcher 3. Don't understand why they put it in on big open world games totally dumb. Witcher 3 you have a horse, that drains stamina if you go off the path and FFVX you get a car or Chocobo eventually. I'm still waiting for it to come down in price, cause I'm seriously not impressed with this one. The pawns sound super annoying in this one, the voices alone are what bugs me. I'm actually currently replaying DD1 and I'm on my 10th playthough, it's not a perfect game but I seriously love it enough to take my time and level up to 200 super slow.
I miss the pause combos, the secondary abilities, which is reduced to one now, and a descent jump since a lot of jumping attacks don't work anymore. That's a downgrade to the first game and it's baffling why they did this. Yes, you still have a much larger toolkit and more to experiment with as in for example Elden Ring but not even to the degree as the over a decade old predecessor. You could describe DD1 as a small DMC4 in a big world and I expected DD2 to be a small DMC5 in a big world and that's sadly not the case. There are improvements that makes it interesting, the balance mechanic on big enemies let's you use your whole moveset on them and leads to cool finisher moments. The physics work amazing with the AI, the game is now even more of a sandbox in which all sorts of situations can occur, which are awesome.If this game would be a meme it would be "this escalated quickly". I love the game and in most cases the direction it took, there are moments only possible in this game but when it comes to sequels the training wheels are off, so it can stagnate in some parts but it shoulden't have worse elements and especially in the area where the team usually is king.
It's kinda meh for me. I'm just looking for something to fill the gap until Shadow of the Erdtree. I'm lukewarm here. The frame rate and performance issues should not happen in this day and age, we are well past 30fps. The combat is pretty dull. Other than that, I'm enjoying the story and will see it through to the end. It's ok, but it's not great.
Without question this is the last game I'll ever pre-order. The microtransactions/performance alone would have been enough for me to not buy. And unfortunately these two issues vastly over shadow the other gameplay and story issues I have with the game. Comparing this game to dd1, it doesn't even hold a candle. Feels like they took two steps back for every step forward.
The lack of enemy variety that is in opposition to a world map without cities, towns fast travel and the lack of roll mechanics and some unnecessary survival mechanics , is hurting the game from being one of the best of all times.
IM loving it, except a few things.... Enemy variety is, the same as the first. Which I have over 500 hours in. Thier way of making world not boring is apparently fights with bs enemies every 4 feet. Movement is janky, and the dragon aids is unnacceptable. This game likes to waste your time.
