Dragon’s Dogma 2, Capcom’s latest hit, is a sprawling, unruly open-world role-playing game that seems to delight in challenging players’ assumptions about the genre. However, one part of the game that has given players pause is the combat system. Unlike with every other design choice in the game, some players have wondered if the way combat had turned out really was the result of the team’s uncompromising vision, or if it was just flawed in execution.
The surprising thing about its combat system is that there are no mechanics based around timing evades or attacks. Blocks and parries are available only to the fighter and thief classes, sometimes as unlockable skills. There isn’t even a lock-on for reliably focusing your attacks on a particular enemy. Instead, you choose between relying on a very loose soft lock that automatically aims weak attacks at nearby enemies, or manually aiming stronger attacks, with the risk that you’ll whiff them completely.
This runs counter to trends within the action RPG genre, which have moved closer to the sophisticated combat mechanics of pure action games in recent years. Games like Capcom’s own Monster Hunter Rise and Ghost of Tsushima have all adopted lock-on action combat to some degree. Above all, FromSoftware’s Dark Souls series and Elden Ring have driven the trend toward refinement in combat design; these are RPGs in which players live or die by the care with which they watch enemies’ tells and the precision with which they time their attacks.
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