@Karkarov said:
Actually I would argue that off all the games Dragon's Dogma has been compared to Monster Hunter is the least valid comparison save maybe Shadow of the Collossus. It isn't just a more complex character creator your character is literally in a totally different dimension of functionality, customization, and depth than a Monster Hunter character. In Monster Hunter you are in an instanced closed world, Dragon's Dogma is open world with very little instancing. MH has no story, DD has a 30-40 hour long main story. MH it is all about the gear in every respect down to how you play and what moves you have, in DD gear is important but only because it helps determine stats and your move set options which are so expansive it is literally impossible to even have half the available moves for a one hand sword usable at the same time. Forget about the fact that you actually have a class, character level, job level, very deep build system, more gear slots, etc etc in DD. MH is heavily reliant on multi player for it's fun factor and was built for multi player from the ground up, DD is the exact opposite.
Both games have big monsters with multiple body parts, action based combat, and were made by Capcom. Beyond that they have very little if not nothing else in common.
Remember that you can at least hire a buddies pawns, trade items with friends, participate in the Ur Dragon fight, and share pics on facebook or other social media. So it has some multi player based things.
Apologies for the wall. of. text:
I'm gonna have to state, once more, that Dragon's Dogma most definitely has been designed with mutliplayer in mind because every encounter is faced with at least two characters - you and your pawn - and every action that every pawn is capable of making is also an action that any player-controlled character can do. There is also a distinct singleplayer aspect to Monster Hunter, with quests that cannot be done online, which means that if it wasn't designed from the ground-up as singleplayer, it should have been.
Monster Hunter also had different classes - depending on the weapons that you chose to wield (hammers, greatswords, daggers, crossbows, that kind of thing) and the success of your team, online, depended on your collective ability to balance those classes. The game did not give you AI buddies, but some of the enemies were so difficult that you required multiple players to get through it, so if you didn't have internet access (or no-one you knew had a PSP), the game was very hard and difficult to get deep into. Would it have been so difficult to put in AI characters that you could give weapons to? Or even choose from a list of characters, like you do in the character select screen at the start of the game? Do you see how, immediately, this makes the game almost identical to Dragon's Dogma?
I understand, by the way, that DD is a far deeper game than MH, in many respects, but that doesn't mean they are not incredibly similar to each other. The gameplay itself is remarkably similar, and seems more like that of a sequel than anything else. An incredibly polished sequel, mind you, and one that's dealing with hardware that can take a lot more punishment - like Metal Gear Solid to Metal Gear 2. The two games have distinct story lines, distinct characters, distinct themes and are totally distinct from each other, but they are both progressions of an idea of gameplay - one more primitive than the other.
So they make Dragon's Dogma and they want to put big enemies in it, but they realise that you can't deal with all of these enemies by yourself, so they give you AI buddies to help you out.
Why not go Monster Hunter with it, then? Why the sudden change of heart? If the answer is, indeed, that they wanted to craft a story-driven experience that might have been marred by the presence of human companions, why not go Resi 5 with it and present the option to play the game with others if you so choose? What about after you've completed the game the first time, when you know how the story goes and you decide to skip a few cutscenes because the reason you're playing the game again is to play it, not because you are moved by the story. When all there is left is gameplay, adding more people simply makes all the variables explode and this creates parameters of chaos that every game benefits from - in a way that is completely distinct from the singleplayer experience.
Also, you really can't count any of that stuff as multiplayer, it's all based on social media and exists outside of Dragon's Dogma - the game. The only slightly multiplayer part of it is the Ur Dragon, which is pretty cool and all, but that's all it is, it's still not actually multiple players taking part in the same encounter. Can you really tell me that any of that is comparable to taking on a dragon with 3 of your friends?
All of this - and then you consider Capcom's most recent announcement, that on-disc DLC will no longer be a sticking point for consumers. Except we have to wait until after Dragon's Dogma for DLC to be entirely off-disk? It sounds even more like they're going to be selling me the multiplayer code a few weeks down the line - and if this happens, by the way, all of your arguments are null and void, because then they will have thought of and implemented multiplayer long before the game's release.
Honestly, I kind of hope that multiplayer never comes out for it, if that was the case.
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