Dragon’s Dogma 2’s Events Are Not Scripted, But They Feel Like It

Dragon’s Dogma 2 director Hideki Itsuno has an interesting story to tell about testing the game so far.

As shared by GamesRadar from an Edge Magazine interview, Itsuno told the story of getting away from a cave troll that had already killed off his pawn companions.

Itsuno just kept running away from the troll, because he just wasn’t powerful enough to defeat the troll and he was looking at the prospect of losing his game to it. He eventually went running into a village, hoping to hide while the villagers were panicking.

But then, to Itsuno’s surprise, the villagers didn’t run away. They started working together to climb the troll. Eventually, they beat the troll thanks to their sheer numbers, much like Pikmin taking on an endboss.

And then Itsuno explained why this was all surprising:

“It felt like a scripted event. But Dragon’s Dogma 2 doesn’t have scripted events. There are no invisible flags or triggers that cause certain events to occur.

Everything that happened that day happened dynamically, because of how the game’s rules and systems interact with one another.”

Producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi also chimed in, sharing that the 15 minute demo they prepared for Tokyo Game Show was enough to demonstrate these systems. In his words:

“15 minutes is a relatively short amount of time, but when we were playtesting this brief segment, team members kept coming up to me and saying: ‘Come and see what just happened to me!’

Even within such a tiny portion of the game we keep being surprised by what’s happening, even though we’re the ones who originally designed the possibility space.”

Now, Itsuno’s Dragon’s Dogma did not invent the idea of emergent gameplay. That kind of gameplay can be found in games as different as Minecraft, Metal Gear Solid 5, Hitman, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, XCOM, and Deus Ex.

But what made Capcom’s action franchise special is that it emerges as a Japanese take on Western action RPGs. Some people would say that it is obviously inspired by The Elder Scrolls, which makes the game’s original release alongside The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim hugely ironic.

But in truth, even from its roots, Japan’s RPGs were hugely inspired by their Western brethren. It’s the reason that Wizardry ended up in the hands of Japanese game studios instead of still staying in America. After Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen’s successful revival, Capcom has an opportunity to carve out their own space in the genre.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is planned for release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows via Steam.