Been playing Dragon's Dogma 2. Having waited over a decade for it, my hopes were sky-high. I played through the original on PS3, then Dark Arisen on PS3, then played it through endlessly on PC. Even put a good amount of time on the Switch version. I had pretty much squeezed every bit of entertainment out of that game, so a new game was long overdue.
DD2 has faced a fair bit of criticism, some deservedly, and some largely overblown. I think arguably the biggest criticism it's faced is the microtransactions, and to me, this has been making mountains out of molehills. The in-game purchases amount to nothing more than "boosters", yet people are acting like they are somehow game breaking. It's literally just stupid stuff like wake stones, port crystals, and character transformation items; all of which are plentiful in game.
The bigger issue with the game is performance, particularly on PC. In city areas it runs very poorly, and it's straight-up not leveraging any of your hardware. Even on my 5600X3D, a 6-core CPU, I'm only getting about 70% usage, with my GPU being at about 50%. Utterly unacceptable. Thankfully, outside of towns the game runs pretty decently. Things like DLSS are broken, but FSR looks good if you need the upscale, and running natively isn't super demanding.
So with that out of the way, I'm absolutely loving the game. The world is huge and sprawling, with things to do at every fork in the road. There are deep reworks to the combat system that changes the way it feels, and I don't think I can ever go back to the first game. I'm slightly annoyed with traversal, as the physics-based movement gets a little weird with steps and small cliffs, but I can largely overlook that.
There's mostly the same creatures from the previous game, but they've got some tweaks to them, opening up new strategies for downing them. It really makes experimenting in combat a lot of fun.
Not super far in yet, about 16 hours or so, but so far I'm really enjoying my time with the game. If they can hammer out the technical issues, this will likely be my game of the year.
