Dragon's Dogma 2

The base game is the whole adventure, and the content around it includes smaller add-ons and an expansion that is dated but not yet released. Here is what the current purchase covers.

What you are buying

The base game is a single-player, narrative-driven action RPG, and it is the complete adventure. It is available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, with a Nintendo Switch 2 version arriving alongside the expansion.

Check the name before anything else, because the expansion shares it with an older release. The Dark Arisen Expansion is a new expansion for Dragon's Dogma 2, and it carries the same title as the earlier Dark Arisen release for the first Dragon's Dogma. The game-plus-expansion bundle is titled Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen. It is dated for this October, so it had not shipped when this review was written and nothing here is a verdict on it.

What it adds is a new northern region, Norgan, a story built around the Fallen Dragon, forgotten relics you appraise for new weapons and skills, the Lost Rites challenges spread through Vermund and Battahl, and new hairstyles and tattoos for the character creator. It is sold on its own and in a bundle with the base game, The announced platforms include PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2; there is no announced PlayStation 4 or Xbox One version.

Smaller paid add-ons include the following examples, and one of them is gear rather than decoration. The Explorer's Camping Kit hands you a special camping kit and adds it to shop stock, and the Dragon's Dogma Music & Sound Collection swaps some of the game's music and sound effects for those of the original Dragon's Dogma. An original soundtrack is sold separately, and the free Character Creator & Storage app lets you shape an Arisen and a main Pawn before you own the game; it received the expansion's new hairstyles and tattoos.

Ten vocations, four of them yours alone

There are ten vocations: Fighter, Archer, Thief, Mage, Warrior, Sorcerer, Magick Archer, Mystic Spearhand, Trickster and Warfarer. That list is where the party maths starts, because four of them, Magick Archer, Mystic Spearhand, Trickster and Warfarer, are exclusive to the Arisen, so the shapes you can ask your main Pawn to fill are narrower than the shapes you can try yourself.

Each vocation changes what the party is missing rather than just how hard it hits. Mages and Sorcerers pay for power with longer incantations, Thieves trade weight for speed and the ability to cling onto an enemy, and Fighters carry the shield that keeps a line standing. Skills come from your own progress and from a vocation's maister, who hands over the teaching at the top of that discipline, and the number of skill slots you can carry was raised from four to six in a later update.

Pawns: one is yours, two are borrowed

You lead a party of up to three Pawns. You create and keep the main Pawn, and the other two arrive through a covenant with other players over the network. One qualification is worth knowing early: the main Pawn is the one you build, but that is not the same as an escort you cannot lose. The game lets the main Pawn be revived at Forgotten Riftstones, and the inn stay that secures your progress is also what brings your Pawn home with whatever they learned in the Rift.

The two borrowed Pawns are other people's work, and you hire them with the game's Rift Crystals rather than training them yourself. Level decides the price, because the cost scales with the difference between the Pawn and your Arisen, and a later update capped that fee at 3,000 Rift Crystals once your Arisen reached level 51. Offline play is covered: Pawns can be hired without a connection and Capcom publishes its own Official Pawns, while hiring another player's Pawn needs both of you on the same platform. None of it needs a PlayStation Plus or Game Pass Core subscription.

The system worth reading up on before you commit hours is Dragonsplague, a contagious condition Pawns pick up while travelling between worlds. Afflicted Pawns perform conspicuously well and behave more boldly, and the folklore in the game says the final stage brings a calamity. Later updates made the symptoms easier to spot, gave afflicted Pawns more to do in a fight and added a simpler cure.

Stamina, weight and the road

Dragon's Dogma 2 puts much of its difficulty in logistics rather than reflexes. Climbing is part of combat rather than scenery: Thieves cling to enemies to open them up, and the party can be launched at walls they could not otherwise climb. Weak points reward the Archer, who is there to create openings for everyone else by hitting them. Stamina runs down and comes back, weight has thresholds that flip you into Heavy or Very Heavy, and both are things you can plan around rather than tolerate.

Travel and rest follow the same argument. Campsites let you camp overnight to shake off fatigue and talk with your allies, oxcarts run between towns, checkpoints and villages and will carry you quickly if you doze off on one, and the map's warp points are built around portcrystals, with one later added to Bakbattahl. Staying at an inn is the most reliable way to lock in progress and is tied to your main Pawn's return from the Rift, so check whether you are loading your latest save or returning to an earlier inn rest before continuing.

Reading the monster before the fight

Beyond the town borders you meet monsters and the game frames the encounter as a choice rather than a trigger: engage, or find another way past. The three things to check before committing are your party's setup, the terrain around you and the monster in front of you.

Treating the alternative as legitimate matters in a game where your party may simply not have an answer for what is standing in the road. The inhabitants of the world are the ones who hand out the work to begin with: travellers, merchants and soldiers go about their own lives and may approach you with a favour that becomes a quest, and a Pawn who already knows that quest will walk you to it.

Should you play it

Yes, if you want an action RPG that treats the party you assemble as the build and the road out of town as the difficulty setting. Dragon's Dogma 2 puts its decisions in front of you and then makes you live with the ones you have already made.

Go in knowing two things. There is no co-operative play, only the asynchronous Pawn network, and the expansion is a dated release still to come rather than something you can play now. The base adventure and the free character creator are available now.