User blog:AeonsLegend/Ideas for Dragon's Dogma 2

There's a lot of talk going around of what the next Dragon's Dogma should or should not have, but before I go into the whole sharing of ideas for Dragon's Dogma 2 I'm going to have to go back to how fan-based ideas were handled in the past. Considering some creators seem to take ideas from their fans its not surprising that an increasing number of fans voice their dissatisfaction with certain parts of the game. With this it is also good to note that many creators that do listen seem to only take ideas into their games unfitting of the previous title. Good examples of these are Saints Row 3 and the Mass Effect series. In these games the creators added features and gimmicks to appease a certain type of "fan", while disregarding the base of the game. As such Saints Row 3 became a silly revamp, which might actually die out with the next sequel and Mass Effect became a Dating Sim.

There you have it. Some ideas can destroy the franchise you love, but of course there's also a lot that can improve them. I'm always in favor of letting the creator make up their own games and improve them as they themselves see fit without actually going on some forum and looking at what fans are saying. People misinterpret each other all the time and so do game creators with their fans. So... after careful consideration, here's my ideas. :)

Graphics
Ok, out of all the things I could come up with I put in graphics first? Yes. I feel that Dragon's Dogma is seriously lacking in detail. Perhaps it's the limits of the systems we're playing on, but I remember plenty of good looking games. Dragon's Dogma is a 720p game which could easily be a 1080p game. Next year 4K TV's and systems are coming to the bigger audience, so creating a game at 720p is not really of this day and age.

Story
Dragon's Dogma has an interesting premise. You get your arisen and your pawns and some cycle that cannot be broken or some such. Sure we've seen it before, but with the right story telling this could be epic. Well as we've all seen this game doesn't really make an effort with giving you a story. There's a few (and they are in fact mostly missable) talks with The Dragonforged that shines some light on your plight, but there's really no story being told in the bulk of the quests. The only quests I can think of are the Salvation quests and the end game and post game quests. But for a game to bring some story and shove it all the way to the end, well that's just weird.

So how should we go about changing this? Well let's see:
 * Adding story to main quests where pieces of the puzzle are uncovered. Somewhere along the way you should get some "Holy shi..." moments.
 * Explain more about the world and its people. As it is you learn almost nothing of where you actually are.
 * Use books and tomes with relevant information for us to read. Sure I won't read all of them, but at least have something to add to the story.
 * Add a tavern to towns with gossip to obtain. This has been done in many other games with great success.
 * Use side quests to enrich the main quest.

(Side) Quests
Dragon's Dogma is basically a slap in the face and shove in the mud when it comes to side questing. Granted some of the main quests can be interesting, most of the side quests are simple "fetch a number of this item", "escort person a to location" and "kill x amount of this type of enemies". Side quests should have a story. I don't care for a quest that I pick up at a board which get completed as I play the game. And what's with the whole killing of rabbits, oxen, seagulls and pigs. These don't even attack you.

How should they work? You talk to someone who needs help, you take their quest and you go somewhere and do this quests, learn something new and report back to the person who game it to you (if the quest allows it). Quests should always involve people. Sure some quests can be triggered or completed in different ways. I remember a quest in Skyrim where you enter a light house and found out the people were all killed. From reading their journals you find out about how they bought the light house and how the father wanted it, but the kids were scared of something. Until some creatures digging tunnels from below got in their basement and killed them all gruesomely.

Questing should be fun. They should provide some sort of story, which may or may not be connected to the main story. I do not consider killing 45 rabbits fun. (Well other than pissing off my rabbit loving wife in the process)

Towns
This game has like... 2 towns. For an area as stretched out as Gransys you should have at least 4 or 5 of these with people in it having different problems for you to fix. Cassardis is a great little village. It has personality it has some involving quests with its inhabitants. Its fun to be there if it wasn't so far away from everything else in the game. Towns should be diverse. For example a woodland town with wooden houses, a royal capital with wealth and riches decorating homes, a town bordering a monster infested area with destroyed and make shift homes and a large battered wall. All of these are "stock" examples of how to build a game with towns that have a personality.

A last note here is that, if you have a house, you should be able to sleep in it Capcom. I mean there's a bed there, but I have to spend 50 gold to sleep at the local inn. What's up with that?

Port Crystals
A widely made complaint. I agree to it with some limitations. I never found that walking anywhere was a drag. The roads and maps are well implemented and you hardly ever get lost. Distances are acceptable. You can walk from Cassardis to the Bluemoon Tower in about 15-20 minutes with enough stamina. Still with the multitude of quests scattered in the entire area it may become frustrating to have to travel everywhere on foot for the most part of the game. As described in my previous paragraph there should be more towns and they should all have port crystals.

Weather
All Dragon's Dogma has at this point is clouds and wind. Oh yeah it also has night. This game could seriously use a little rain ranging from minor drizzle to heavy rainstorms which become almost impossible to traverse. Every RPG has snow or some sort of ice area. I'm not saying this game should have this, but snow always adds an extra dimension. The game has mountains, it's only natural for some snowy area to exist.

Pawns who know when to shut up
Okay this is the most widely made complaint. And I have to agree. Pawns are annoying. You can turn off the on screen talk of pawns, but you can't make them shut up. I remember walking from Gran Soren to Windbluff Tower and my pawns were almost constantly talking about surroundings, monsters or just random nonsense banter. In fact there was so much for them to comment on they kept interrupting themselves. "Gran Soren, the beating hea..."--"Castle walls or ruins of su.."--"They're armed master!". I mean just shut the f#ck up!.

The most annoying banter I found was when pawns actually have something interesting to say. Sometimes your pawns will comment on an area to add something to the story. The Catacombs is a good example. Your pawns will comment on its origin and why they were built. BUT, they will also interrupt themselves before finishing.

So a second Dragon's Dogma should have some sort of customizable pawn banter. In fact I think it's good if it has the option to set the amount of banter or to turn it off completely for those that wish for them to be silent all the time. Other than that pawns should have more to say and should learn to not tell me that "wolves hunt in packs" each time we encounter them. I got it the first time. I mean you have to teach your pawn how to use a potion, but you can't teach them to be informative. Ok that's not entirely true, you can in fact use the Knowledge Chair to tell your pawn to talk less, although the annoyances are less frequent with this setting, they don't become less annoying. Plus hired pawns will still talk your ears off.

Clothing coloring
At this point I'm loving the vast amount of clothing you can find and wear, but even though I do like most of the clothes, they don't mix well with other pieces because of their color. Plus some clothes are only available in one single color so if you get tired of it and want to try something else you're stuck with looking completely different. As in Saints Row, this game could use some coloring options so people can create even more unique looking characters and pawns.

Ever present difficulty
One of the main problems with the game is that at the start of it the game can be very challenging, especially for beginners. The game has a leveling system which allows stats and such to become 10 times their original value and we're not even talking about equipment. Well let's just say that if you can kill a Cyclops with 200 Str and 200 Def you can surmise how the battle will end with 3000 str and 700 Def. Some people have mentioned level scaling like Elder Scrolls games to fix this, but to me that's not fixing it. Elder Scrolls games are haunted by bad leveling systems. In one hand you build a leveling system that overpowers your character and in the other you have monsters which level up when you do to nullify this. What's the point of leveling up if it has no impact? So I can imagine I got more powerful?

The game should be challenging every step of the way. Many RPG's use a linear path with monsters of increasing difficulty to adjust to your ever growing power. And we can all agree we want to become more powerful, because that's what RPG gaming is all about. So how do we get this to work in an open world setting? I'm unsure. One of the reasons the battles become stock during your game is because you're simply too strong for enemies to hurt you. As a Fighter at level 200 your defense is 767 without any armor. If you take into account that you're invulnerable with about 300 defense for most minor creatures and with 500 to most bosses as well you can see where this is going. Another big influence is the effect of percentile growth with certain Augments. I have explained this in detail in the Stats page on this wiki. With the right configuration a player may increase their strength to 10000. Yes Vegeta, it's over 9000.

In order to keep difficulty the same you can do two things. incredibly low stat growth and equipment growth, or use level scaling. I'm not a fan of the latter though, I would go with the former. Using low stat growth, but focusing on abilities to make a difference. Now we only have two levels of abilities. For instance you have your Blink Strike which upgrades to a Burst Strike. I would opt for having 5 or more of these levels so your characters can keep growing. When you do this you can also keep playing as a certain vocation without having learned all there is at level 20.

More monsters and actual boss battles
The game actually only has a handful of monsters and "boss-type" creatures, but I couldn't help, but feeling that after a while you've simply seen them all. Now an easy way to increase these numbers is to work with different sizes. This has been done to some extent, but you only have one type of spider. A fairly small one when comparing them to other RPG games like Skyrim or D&D games such as Neverwinter Nights or Baldurs Gate. How cool would it be to have huge spiders or huge snakes to fight. Easy conclusion next would be to create boss type versions of them so you get to climb a spider or a huge snake. Now altering sizes may be cheap, but it can be effective. Aside from that more different types of creatures are needed and should be bound to the area you're in. A lot of high-fantasy worlds have different creatures we can think of. Orcs for instance or giants or trolls to name but a few. And if its mythological creatures Capcom wants, then there's far more to think off such as Centaurs or Minotaurs.

There's a few boss type creatures in the game. You have a Cyclops, a Chimera, an Ogre, a Griffin, a Cockatrice, a Wight, a Drake, a Golem and in post game a few more, but that's about it. And the main gripe I have with them is that even though they pose a fair challenge at the start of the game, they lose their prowess and imposing nature about halfway through. Oh it's a Cyclops -> High Bolide = dead Cyclops. If you're level 60 you can simply walk past a Chimera and your pawns will kill it for you before you get out of range. As I explained in the previous paragraph this difficulty is solely dependent on your stats, which are increased by far too much over the course of the game.

Next to the limited amount of creatures to climb on the game really doesn't have any bosses for you to fight. Most of them don't feel like bosses, because they have no personality, no name, no background. The Cyclops in the Watergod's Altar is supposed to be a boss, but it's just another monster who's "in the way".

Conclusion
So there you have it. Plenty of ideas which, if done right, can increase the quality of Dragon's Dogma. As you can see though you'll find not much is wrong with the setup of the game. Capcom needn't change its basis. It has to add to it and shape the game to become more "alive".