Dragon's Dogma - Preview

Consoles have seen their fair share of dragon-based games in recent years, from Dragon Age 1 & 2 and Divinity II to the upcoming Skyrim – but none can boast the level of dragon-twatting promised by Capcom’s new action-RPG IP, Dragon’s Dogma. Borrowing heavily from their own Monster Hunter series, Capcom are hoping to make Dragon’s Dogma unique by giving you the chance to get up close and personal with all manner of cottage-sized beasties, from feathery griffons to multi-headed hydrae.

Your character will be entirely customisable, built upon the now-standardised templates of fighter, mage or ranger (here called striders). Sex and appearance is adjustable before the game begins in the village of Casadeis, where an enormous dragon makes a real bastard of itself by ripping your heart out and buggering off with it. Inexplicably resurrected, you then set off on a quest to retrieve said vital organ, presumably by killing the shit out of anything with scales, feathers or more than one head.

Party-based like Monster Hunter, you’ll recruit companions from the various NPCs found throughout the gameworld. Options are apparently very open, for example allowing a mage character to recruit burly fighters to do all their pig-sticking while they sit back healing and buffing and directing the battle. One of your three party members will come from your own gameworld, whilst the other two will be “borrowed” from other players. Quite how this will work is a bit of a mystery, but it certainly will add variety.

The real meat of Dragon’s Dogma, though, is the combat. This is not the sort of game where you flail around ineffectually stabbing the ankles of a towering goliath – instead, you grip your sword between your teeth, grab two handfuls of griffon balls and get stuck in. Fights are dynamic, meaning that you can tackle the monsters however you choose, either with magic or arrows or blades – but by far the most interesting option is to leap on them and hack away at their wings, neck, legs, or whatever you can reach. Every beast will have weak spots that you can climb towards and attack – imagine hacking away at a dragon’s neck-plates in real time whilst it carries you fifty feet above the battlefield. There’s no way that won’t be epic.

Although the Capcom brand automatically promises some level of Japanese-ness that will irk westerners in one way or another, there’s no denying that Dragon’s Dogma looks like one of the most promising and original games I’ve seen in a while. Boasting around 200 NPCs and a campaign that can take anything from 30 – 100 hours to complete, Dragon’s Dogma will have us all swinging from hydra heads and griffon wings come 2012.