Dragon’s Dogma 2 has dropped its first update, addressing one of the fantasy action-RPG’s most baffling decisions – the inability to start a new game once you’ve begun your first adventure – and letting you acquire a home of your own earlier, providing a reliable place to rest and save. There are some other small tweaks too, while Capcom dare to raise the question about future DLC in the wake of the game’s controversial microtransactions.
First, the patch! The now-live update adds a New Game option to the main menu, meaning you can easily restart the campaign if you really want to – something that wasn’t possible from within the game itself beforehand, given that it only offers a single save slot and autosaves frequently before and after fairly major events, a la Dark Souls.
Adding to the slight softening of the game’s divisive difficulty and often unforgiving nature – where fast-travel is extremely limited and death is frequent – is a change to a quest that unlocks a personal dwelling for the player’s character. Your Arisen will now be able to access the quest that gives you a home earlier in the story, letting you secure somewhere where you can rest up to recover health and save.
Elsewhere, the number of Art of Metamorphosis tomes available at Pawn Guilds has been increased up to 99, giving you the chance to stock up on the items used to edit your character’s appearance past initial character creation. (Modders had already made their own changes to make finding the books easier, which can be bought in-game for Rift Crystals but are also one of the bits of paid DLC that had stirred up players’ ire and dropped Dragon’s Dogma 2’s Steam ratings to negative – since recovering to ‘Mixed’ – despite being a damn fine video game.)
Smaller tweaks under the headline additions and changes include better quality when using the DLSS Super Resolution graphics setting, and fixing problems with rendering models, displaying text and other bugs. While Capcom have said they’re working on the game’s very iffy PC performance – don’t play it on a Steam Deck! – this first patch doesn’t make any notable performance improvements yet.
Speaking of DLC, despite the barrage of complaints about the paid DLC available from launch (which really isn’t as bad as the internet would have you believe), Capcom have dared to swiftly issue a separate user survey to ask about future DLC for the game.
For now, the survey simply asks whether players would be interested in paying for future DLC – or whether that decision might depend on its price – but has sparked various conversations in the community about what expansions could offer. New regions? More pawn options? Extra vocations? Romance? Expanded endgame content? What would you like to see?
