Dragon's Dogma 2: two years on, the game has finally become itself

Dragon's Dogma 2 released on 22 March 2024 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and Windows, on the RE Engine, directed by Hideaki Itsuno. Critics received it well, with scores around 86–88, but Steam reviews came out mixed: PC performance sagged, and on release day the storefront turned out to list paid conveniences such as travel stones and appearance changes. By November 2025 it had sold around four million copies. I return to it now, in August 2026, because Capcom has just shipped update 3.1 and dated the Dark Arisen expansion for 9 October.

A game about the road, not the destination

The central achievement, and one almost nobody else offers: distance has weight. Fast travel exists but consumes a stone, and stones are scarce. There are oxcarts running on a schedule between towns — and they are regularly wrecked by harpies or goblins, after which you walk. Night is genuinely dark: without a lantern you cannot see the path, and what comes out of the dark is stronger than what walks by day.

From this comes a kind of planning open worlds have not required in years. You look at the map and count not kilometres but daylight. Returning by the same road is dull, so you look for another. The game does not reward exploration with icons; it simply makes the road dangerous, and that is enough.

By removing instant travel, Capcom gave the map its meaning back. Everything else in the game is worse than this one idea — and the idea still justifies enduring everything else.

Pawns

The second system is companions. You create one and hire two more from other players' worlds. They remember where you have been, and in someone else's game they point out routes and monster weaknesses, returning to their owner with loot and knowledge. It is the same asynchronous help as in Death Stranding, but talkative: pawns comment on everything and repeat themselves until your teeth hurt.

Dragonsplague deserves separate mention — an illness a pawn catches without your noticing. There are symptoms: glowing eyes, complaints of a headache, refusal to obey. Ignore them and the pawn wipes out an entire town overnight, merchants and quests included. The mechanic is cruel and real, but the game explains almost nothing about it, and until August 2026 there was a single save slot for the whole campaign — meaning the consequences could not be undone.

What took two years to fix

Update 3.1, shipped in August 2026, raised the number of save slots from one to three, added a draught that cures Dragonsplague, and lifted assignable weapon skills from four to six, alongside optimisation and interface work. Which is to say Capcom spent two years correcting precisely the decisions the game was criticised for in March 2024.

What was not fixed: the monotony of the bestiary — griffins, ogres, cyclopes and goblins account for nearly all of it — and the closing stretch of the campaign, which breaks off faster than the game can explain what happened.

Why 7.5

For a travel system worth ten open worlds full of towers, and for pawns that genuinely link strangers' parties. Points off for a launch with paid conveniences in the shop, for performance, for a mechanic that punishes the player for what he could not have known, and for a thin bestiary. Seven and a half is the August 2026 verdict, after all the patches. The March 2024 game would have taken a point less, and that, probably, is the real conclusion here.