Capcom has shared a new update after Dragon’s Dogma 2’s launch.
As we had reported, what was anticipated to be an early GOTY contender has become one of the early controversial releases for the year. The unexpected last minute revelation that the game has microtransactions has ruined it very early on, especially for gamers who may have been interested in the game, but got turned off.
As gamers have figured out, Capcom’s implementation of the microtransactions in Dragon’s Dogma 2 isn’t as bad as feared. We had already noted in our report that the items that are up for sale are also in the game, and can be picked up if gamers looked for them. It’s also possible to get through the game without buying any of these microtransactions. One may say that these microtransactions are set up for people who want to play an easier game, rather than something that actively breaks the game.
But the bigger problem here is one of trust, and Capcom has once again misread the room here. The company definitely knows that their customers distrust microtransactions, not just based on the actions of other game companies like EA or Activision, but based on their own decisions as well.
Games like Marvel vs Capcom Infinite, and Street Fighter V, continue to be sore spots for fans, not only because of the disappointing decisions that Capcom made with these games, but because they pushed monetization strategies that gamers decided were exploitative and greedy.
Outside of this, it turned out that Dragon’s Dogma 2 had serious performance issues at launch as well. As Gamers Nexus found out after a weekend’s worth of testing, Capcom had programmed the title to be CPU intensive, but they also see this as solvable through optimization. You can watch their coverage and explanation of the finer details here.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Capcom sent out a tweet explaining that they were addressing these issues. We would note that Capcom did not admit to any wrongdoing on their part, but if they won’t admit to it directly, they already received the punishment for their transgressions, no matter how closely their perceived mistakes matches the reality.
They said:
“To all Dragon’s Dogma 2 players! We’re planning to release patches including the following updates and fixes in the near future, and will release them as soon as they are ready for distribution on each platform. Thank you for your patience and support!”
You can read the patch notes below, but will point out here that among their fixes is allowing gamers to really start a new game and start over with preexisting save data. If that doesn’t tell you how poorly Capcom treated consumers here, we don’t know what will.
The patch notes follow below.
All Platforms
- Adding the option to start a new game when save data already exists.
- Changing the number of “Art of Metamorphosis” items available at Pawn Guilds in the game to 99.
- Making the quest that allows players to acquire their own dwelling (where they can save and rest) available earlier in the game.
- Miscellaneous text display fixes.
- Miscellaneous bug fixes.
PS5 and Xbox Series X/S
- Adding the option* to switch Motion Blur on/off in Options.
- Adding the option* to switch Ray Tracing on/off in Options.
- Adding the option to set Frame Rate to either Variable or Max 30fps in Options.
- *These options will not affect the frame rate significantly. Frame rate improvements are planned for future updates.
Steam
- Improving quality when DLSS Super Resolution is enabled.
- Fixing an issue where models appeared low-quality under some specific settings.