Dragon's Dogma 2 designers "holed up for three days and two nights" with a pledge to figure the game out
Nov. 4, 2023“It was by combining these little ideas together that the overall concept and shape began to emerge”
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Turns out, sometimes you just have to lock a bunch of creative minds in a room together until something amazing comes out.
“We holed up for three days and two nights and literally pledged to not leave this place till we figured it all out.” Itsuno recalls his private retreat with other Capcom designers, just outside of Osaka, where they first got down to business with designing Dragon’s Dogma 2.
This was where the game’s broad strokes came into being - a whole boatload of key moments that the designers wanted players to be able to experience. Though, as is the case when ideating for any game, Itsuno makes it clear that not all concepts were viable.
“We wanted the player to be able to shatter a bridge while enemies were standing on it, and to have the physics react naturally and dynamically, and the enemies to fall into the river to defeat them”, says Itsuno.
Enviro-kills are all the rage in the DnD obsessed world of today, it seems.
Though, in considering some of the pre-established systems and rules of the game-world, the team realised “Of course, we couldn’t use every idea we had because there were so many of them and they weren’t all feasible.”
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Even with this addition to the franchise said to be aroundfour times the size of the original game, it’s clear there were compromises that had to be made. That didn’t stop them, however.
Having done my share of game design at uni, when it comes to the masses of great ideas you end up with after a game design brainstorming session, plenty of ideas get mashed up, cut out, and completely transformed by other designers' thought processes. It’s a messy experience, is what I’m saying. But as Itsuno notes, “It was by combining these little ideas together that the overall concept and shape began to emerge.”
While the wait for Dragon’s Dogma 2 continues, check out our guide to thebest RPGsout there.
Katie is a freelance writer covering everything from video games to tabletop RPGs. She is a designer of board games herself and a former Hardware Writer over at PC Gamer.
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