And I loved it. Dragon's Dogma exposed to me why I had a hard time getting into Skyrim (and most other recent RPGs because, let's face it, sadly Skyrim is better than most).

1. Their combat mechanics suck so hard
2. They are too lazy to use the medium to tell a story, so they just stock up with silly NPCs that stand around to opine to strangers about everything about everything about everything

I was cool with Oblivion because 1) I wasn't burned out on stuff yet, and 2) you could really make things fun with Athletics, Acrobatics, and Speed/Jump boosting spells. They took all that out of Skyrim so Skyrim was just like a dumbed-down Oblivion with better graphics. So I haven't really loved an RPG since Oblivion (besides the Souls series, but that's practically a different genre).

Sorry to go on about TES games, but they are a good frame of reference.

So...DD was a breath of fresh air. The feel of the action is varied and fun and just a cut above what I've come to expect from an RPG, and it's got that extended replayability that most RPG's don't have. Also, DD trusts the player to follow the story, instead of having it read to you in excruciating detail by poorly voiced NPCs. In fact, if you skipped the side quests and just ran straight through the main quest line you might wind up with little idea what the hell was going on in the world. I like that, the story is as much a reward for playing as it is context for playing.

I really liked how the Dragonforged, the Duke, the Dragon and the Seneschal each turned out to be a reflection of the Arisen's possible futures depending on the player's 'choices'. It really extended the story, kind of fleshing out a whole post-game story at the same time you were playing through the core story, even though you wouldn't understand it until the game was over. That's a great example of trusting the player to follow the story instead of sh*tting it all over their face with immersion breaking exposition.

Considering DD was a new IP, it's a pretty amazing game. I can't wait to see what they'll follow it up with now that they've got reduced risk / a success on their hands.

Dragon's Dogma is a fine game, maybe slightly worse than Skyrim in the grand scheme of things but both games are vastly inferior to Dark Souls. The combat is better than Skyrim sure, but it's like 40 hours vs 200 hours of roughly the same enjoyment level.

@plaintomato: One of my favorite parts was the Grimoire Side-Quest and how it factors into a Main Storyline quest later on - especially amusing if you choose to give him a forged Grimoire. It's the little things that matter.

Thats like apples and watermelons. They are vastly different games, but both Dragons Dogma and Dark Souls are vastly superior to the cookie cutter content that Skyrim has to offer.

@humanity: They're similar enough games, explore world, get boring-ish quests, kill big monsters with somewhat awkward controls. The main thing that sets Dragon's Dogma apart is the Pawn system; but ultimately what that means is a lot of amusing phrases and bad AI. The Dragon fight is great but every other fight is great once and then tedious thereafter, which isn't that much different than the Skyrim experience.

@plaintomato: I enjoyed the hell out of Dragon's Dogma, and the expansion. I'm a bit divided on how you can lose large chunks of the story if you skip or miss certain sidequests, but as someone who tends to do any quest that seems even a little story related, I really liked the whole big-picture that pops up. Everything that happens after you kill Grigori is fantastic, and the fight itself was pretty great. You're gonna kill a dragon, that's how it should be.

For a first showing of a new IP, Dragon's Dogma completely blew me away. I can't wait to see where the series goes in the future.

Damn, I really need to get around to playing Dark Arisen, given I got it for free with my Ps+ account.

I've beaten it twice and still missed getting in the Dukes Manse. I still have no idea if I missed anything story related!

Just because they're fantasy games and you got bored of them doesn't make them similar. Almost every game you play a character and are either alone or have companions on a quest with you and you kill things. All games are 'similar enough'!

@fredchuckdave: Dragons Dogma has pretty good controls, they're less clumsy than Dark Souls anyway.

The AI is actually pretty damn good. They know when to buff with what element. They know which elemental attack spells to use in order to exploit an enemy weakness. They're even smart enough to harmonize - cast the same spell as you're casting in order to hasten the casting time.

When I was playing with a rented pawn that had already done the quest I was on they told me which way to go. I'm really impressed with how intelligent the pawns are!

I just started trying to play it and so far I'm not enjoying it at all. I don't find the combat all that exciting and I constantly find myself just walking along and suddenly getting gang raped by a group of guys that one shot me out of nowhere with no indication that they are any more powerful than the other guys I had been wiping the floor with before until I'm dead. Then I lose like 30-40+ min of progress. On top of that the game just looks and runs so bad. I'm used to playing stuff on my PC, but my god I don't remember console games looking this bad.

I'm going to try and force myself to keep playing for a few more hours, but if it doesn't click soon I think I'm just going to put it on the shelf with my other mistakes. I think playing a mage is my main problem as this game seems to have designed them to just be played by the AI. Think I will try Strider.

The combat is way better than other games but honestly just about everything else was not as strong. Not that it was all bad. But having combat that great did go a long way for me.

Hope a sequel comes out to improve everything around the combat. A more open, less back tracky world would be huge.

While far from infallible(for instance even my fav lvl 200 rentals will hurl themselves over cliffs if I run to a Cliffside treasure box too fast), the friendly pawn AI in DD:DA is amazing. Especially after the pawns learn all enemies and areas. Can't count the number of times pawn spells synergize like mentioned above, or how pawns are always telling each other and using what element an enemy is weak too. Also the way they will get really aggressive with climbing the larger enemies is truly amazing. Also, my main has saved me sooo many times, especially in the insane run through Fallen City to Daimon. You do have to keep tabs on the inclinations, and change and/or use potions to erase the ones that are annoying(especially the one that has them tethered to your Arisen). Keep them attacking the toughest enemies first and the lesser enemies one as the secondary(worked best for my fighter main pawn).

EDIT:

@crusader8463

Some ideas:

To avoid the early and annoying diff spike, just run the main quest line all the way to Gran Soren, and then go back later and extract just revenge. :)

Also, did you install the graphics upgrade available in the DA version of DD? It does help quite a bit.

DD is a fine game good combat, interesting pawn sistem, for a new ip it is great i hope camcom gives this ip a next gen sequel it deserves (should i count deep down as the sequel, i think camcom said that deep d is set in Dragon Dogma univers but with that New york thing ??)

@humanity: Dragon's Dogma's controls are terrible compared to Dark Souls, but so is like every other 3rd person fantasy rpg game like it except maybe Vagrant Story or Valkyrie Profile 2 if you want to count those. They're okay in general. I mean the game is easy but that doesn't mean the controls are good, if you compare it to Shadow of the Colossus (which it is obviously taking from) the controls in that were way better and I don't even think those controls were optimal.

@everettescott: The experience, feeling, and immersion level was all relatively similar for me; I never said I disliked either game by the way, they're perfectly fine. Dragon's Dogma is more or less fairly scored by critics, Skyrim was overrated. One is third person and one is first person, that's the biggest difference.

Exactly.

I actually like this method of player direction, you can try to go where you shouldn't to find a brutal challenge. Bandits are like boss battles at first, and later you end up OP. And really only in-engine cut scenes and conversations look excessively terrible. Anyway, this game is about action. Any of the four vocations that can use daggers is the best class to play, and if you want to be able to cast something or levitate you can swap to Magic Archer. I do like having a Sorcerer pawn though, because when some of those godlike spells go off it's just cool.

The combat is what extends the re-play-ability for me. If a game has boring combat, it doesn't really matter how good the rest is. AKA Skyrim's melee, or on a totally different note think of how FFXIII's combat ruined the game in comparison to the better combat systems in XII and even X.

Wait what? DD is great but I think you're confused. The Souls games controls have to be the highest level of precision and responsiveness ever found in an RPG, and as a result the Souls games were the most replayable RPGs. EVER. PERIOD. BELLY BUTTON.

Now I'm not sure if you're trolling or just an overzealous fan of the series..

@plaintomato: if you play it again the last boss will be the guy you beat it with the first time.

I've been playing Dogma for about twenty hours and I'm SERIOUSLY going to miss jumping onto monsters and hacking at them, even if I have to relearn, every time I play, why it is a horrible idea to clamber onto a dragon or a griffin when they're about to take off and an EVEN WORSE IDEA to fell them while flying. The horrifying SPLAT is a welcome punishment.

I HATED playing Dark Souls because I just can't accept "we hid this guy around a corner lol" as good design and some of the areas, like Ariamis and Blighton are just fucked and aggressively annoying.

Someday Dragon's Dogma. Someday.

@plaintomato: Yah they're the highest level precision controls, if you've like never played any other game before.

I'm glad you enjoyed yourself. I spent hundreds of hours last summer playing it and picked up Dark Arisen earlier this year. The key story elements were pretty good but the side stuff was pretty underwhelming. The combat tho, that's the good shit right there. Can't wait to see what direction and improvements they add in the next one, and I'm so glad there will be another one.

The enemy scaling is way off, the lack of checkpoints suck, pawns are pretty dumb, the quests are dull, the item stats aren't well explained and the dialogue is super repetitive...and yet I still really enjoyed Dragon's Dogma much more then I did Skyrim. I mean I still like The Elder Scrolls series since Daggerfall but by the time Skyrim was out I got bored by it, not to mention I'm older so I'm more aware of some issues that it had.

The main thing that drew me to Dragon's Dogma was that it was just about different enough to be compelling. The combat was fun, there's loads of loot, = the character is very flexible, it's a fantasy game that doesn't lean to heavily on the JRR Tolkien tropes (which I'm sick of) and it's a relatively pretty game (though the photo mode still sucks.)

It's a flawed gem for sure but for a new IP I really liked it, as frustrating as it was. Capcom have said that they're going to make a sequel at some point which has me excited since if they could some of the major problems it had, it could be a really fantastic game. Triple A open world RPGs aren't terribly common so I would like to see more of it.

To give you an idea of how much I've got the Dark Arisen copy (as well as the original) and I've gotten myself and my pawn up to Lvl. 200 which is the maximum and I've also collected about 95% of all the loot. This and Dark Souls are the only games I've platinumed so far.

Please explain how DD is vastly inferior to DS. I love DS too but we seem to have played different games.

DD's controls are terrible compared to DS?! wait what? Are we talking about the same games here? In one game you can climb terrain/enemies, jump(double jump) (jump attacks), dodge, grab enemies, sprint(without needing 3 fingers to run and still look where you want to run to and the other has a fraction of those abilities. I could go on but I really need to hear details from you just how vastly inferior DD is to DS.

As far as repetitive combat DS takes the cake. Every battle is either blocking the attack (if your stamina was high enough) or dodging out of the way and waiting for the AI to finish its predetermined attack and backstabbing them. Large enemies were a boring fight as well, waiting for it to attack then rushing to attack its heel once or twice and repeating this one two step over and over.

Not to mention the clipping your weapons did in tight areas while not impeding theirs at all. I just don't see how one can play both games and say DS has a more robust combat system. It's clumsy and can be just as repetitive as any other combat mechanic. Now I love BOTH souls games, but it gets way too many passes. Someone complained about losing 30 or 40 mins in DD, well that's your fault as you can save anytime outside of combat, why not use it as well as the autosave function, which the game does have as well? Last time I checked DS worked in almost the same fashion.

Someone mentioned enemy placement in DD sucks compared to DS, really? Again last time I played DS everytime you died the same exact enemies spawn in the same exact location. EVERYTIME. Last time I played you could kill most AI by standing just outside their trigger zone, pelting them with arrows and them never even moving, let alone the undead standing next to him. Again in no way do I aim to bash DS, but some of you guys are a bit overzealous with your praise for it while condemning other games that do the same thing if not better.

This is strictly SP too, I know a lot of DS fans like to bring up PvP, but leave that out of this, we are talking SP ONLY.

@humanity, I said Souls probably had the best precision and responsiveness ever found in an RPG. That's a pretty important qualifier. Like @eroticfishcake, I get bored if the actual gameplay isn't good, and the combat in most RPGs just isn't that good. The best selling RPG ever (well, maybe Pokemon stuff sells more) has terrible combat mechanics (maybe that's on purpose so that any casul feel good at it). In DD, the combat is the best part, which is why I loved it and can overlook it's other shortcomings so quickly and get a lot more play time out of it than I could Skyrim.

The Souls games may not have the same combat options DD has ("climb terrain/enemies, jump(double jump) (jump attacks), dodge, grab enemies"), but there is absolutely no question that the Souls controls are more precise. You don't have to praise it, or even like it, to admit it. The big difference is that DD is more about turning into an OP god spazzing around everywhere and owning giant monsters with action heavy flash and pizzazz, while DS is more about precision spacing and timing.

Does that make one "vastly superior"? Not objectively I guess; it depends on what you enjoy more. But it's such a major difference as to make a Dragon's Dogma vs Dark Souls comparison about the same as a God of War vs Dead Or Alive comparison, as far as specific mechanics go.

The reason DD and DS both get mentioned in the same breath is because they are epic RPGs that have superior combat that puts other RPGs to shame and makes them feel boring in comparison. If I had to choose, I'd choose DS, but I don't have to choose and sequels for either will be getting my money on day 1.

I picked it up from Plus a few weeks ago. I played the shit out of it for a couple nights. Ended up restarting at one point. And then I went on some foolish ass, misguided adventure. I mean, I had no fucking map or sense of what direction I should be going. I ended up in some valley blocked off on one side by a massive gate and the other by a few dozen goblins and a fucking dragon. Despite my total failure as an adventurer, it was a blast. I haven't worked up the courage to go back to it and address that situation just yet though. I would like to. It's the first time in an RPG like that, that I've felt like I'm in an unknown, unexplored, and dangerous place. A similar sense of dread that Jackson achieved during the LOTR movies. That's pretty impressive.

I keep hearing people praise DD's story...which seems absolutely fucking crazy to me. It's just super vague and bland for the first like 3/4ths of the game. Vague poorly explained cult, dragon stuff. Then that thing happens out of fucking NO WHERE. (no thats not a good thing). then the rest of the game is you farming for 20 wake stones. In the most annoying grindfest of a dungeon ever. It's SO tedious. Then you get a stupid exposition dump and an extremely unsatisfying boss fight. It was a mess! Plus the games stance on "choice" is kinda insulting. Wanna take the dragons deal? Cool we'll give you a 5 second long cutscene then a big fat GAME OVER screen cus you picked wrong IDIOT! TRY AGAIN. Thats not a choice, thats a slightly more elaborate game over screen. But seriously. If you're story is just a massive exposition dump at the end, then its not a good story. AT ALL.

I mean, i did really like the combat, it was fun and snappy. Granted the difficulty was really poorly designed. I breezed through the entire game barely ever having issues except for random unexpected massive difficulty spikes. When your generic sword and shield bandit is SIGNIFICANTLY tougher than a 30 foot tall cyclops, yeah. You got issues game!

I think the game on it's own is really good. It did suck that it reset your progress in Dark Arisen if you chose to beat the game. Really cool game to me.

@plaintomato:

I agree and disagree with you at the same time, but it's easier to see why now. You describe the controls as "precise" but doesn't the added aid of a lock on sort of take away any need for the player to be precise in combat, other than timing and area of attack. Without the combat assist the controls are just as spazzy and all over the place, from my play experience. I do agree that the controls are timing and spaced based though, especially dealing with the lock on, as far as knowing when to lock on and when to release and so on.

I'm looking forward to both sequels, but I think the ceiling is higher for DD2.

Yeah Dragon's Dogma is very good. I especially loved it for it's combat, and it feels more interactive than Skyrim since you can climb on monsters, pick up stuff and throw your companions. As for Dark Souls Vs Dragon's Dogma I play both and I enjoy them for completely different reasons.

In the same boat here. I got into Dragon's Dogma because I heard that the plot got interesting in the last few hours. And it did, I will grant that. But an hour of interesting after 39 hours of dull characters, stilted dialog, vaguely explained world-building does not a good plot make. The game itself is pretty good, and I had fun fighting big enemies, but the hard parts were just tedious. Fighting a metal golem for the first time and only figuring out at the end that it's essentially impossible to beat without playing someone with a bow really fucking sucks!

It is a good game that I enjoyed playing. Beat the Gazer last night after dying on the last health bar - I quickly learned to bring those heart stones along while traversing BBI. Fun!

I can agree with all of that on the surface. Game gots flaws. And the first 39 hours does feel like pretty generic RPG trappings with the combat being the thing to keep you going (personally I loved the difficulty spikes, predictability is boring).

But the good story is to be found in the world, not a 5 second cutscene or an exposition dump. Nobody fully explains to you the aftermath of all of the potential choices, the game doesn't spell out the best parts, it shows them to you - you see the 5 second cutscene that's "meh" but you have to put it together with what the world has already shown to be the long term results of choosing that path, because you got to know characters that did choose that path. That's what people are talking about when they praise the story. Not the cutscenes.

And the 20 stones wasn't a grind-fest unless you wanted to avoid one of the best parts of the game. You kill the one biggest baddy in the game and he drops 20 stones. They say "collect 20 stones", they mean "here's a dungeon to explore, but you're gonna be surprised when you think you're just at the middle and all of a sudden there's the biggest boss in the game, but if you kill him you get your 20 stones". I kind of feel bad for you, it sounds like you missed all the best parts of the game. By the way, IMO, the Ur Dragon has so many hearts because of all the Arisen that fail to recover them (i.e. made those other choices) - so there you go, some more good story stuff that wasn't in any exposition dump.

The early moments when starting a level 1 character on hard mode come close to out Soulsing DS. It never feels as cumbersome and laborious as a souls game but the subtle defensive lock on with shields is probably not as tight as DS. It's also the only lock on you'll get so you have to put a bit of effort if you want to hit something with your sword. There are moments where the combat in both games does become a lot more comparable, especially when you can be one hit by a goblin throwing a rock at you.

Dragons Dogma is probably the greatest 3 star game ever made and it definitely holds a place in my heart. I also feel the art direction is under appreciated sometimes. There are some really beautiful locations in that game.

@jazz_bcaz:

"It never feels as cumbersome and laborious as a souls game but the subtle defensive lock on with shields is probably not as tight as DS. It's also the only lock on you'll get so you have to put a bit of effort if you want to hit something with your sword."

I so agree with you on this as I felt like it took more effort and skill to be successful without the combat aim assist. You had to actually stand on your own two feet to get through battles and not rely on the game to aim for you, until you out leveled everything of course. Really loved that about DD.