Sorry, I Have Thoughts On The Dragon's Dogma 2 Discourse

At the end of the day it's not new, but I do have a lot I want to say about it.

On Friday morning, I woke up to hear that Dragon’s Dogma 2 had made fast travel paid DLC. That isn’t the whole story of course, and I later found out the situation was a bit more complicated.

The game was designed with limited fast travel in mind, as Dragon’s Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno isn’t fond of it and feels you should make travel “interesting” instead.

To wit, in Dragon’s Dogma 2, there are a limited number of items called Portcrystals that you can set as markers on the map and use as manual fast travel points by spending Ferrystones. However, the game does greatly discourage fast travel, as going on foot means you miss out on items.

When Dragon’s Dogma 2 was released, additional DLC was selling Portcrystals for $3 a pop, though the Steam page notes you can only place 10 on the map at a time.

As discourse tends to do, several different conversations sort of got mixed together and lost in the sauce, so I’m going to attempt to separate them out and give my thoughts because I have a lot of them.

First Impressions vs Kneejerk Reactions

It’s generally bad to jump on a bandwagon and get mad about something that you don’t fully understand, and the idea that “Dragon’s Dogma 2 made fast travel paid DLC,” does not capture the full nuance of the situation.

Many have risen to the game’s defense to say you don’t actually need to buy the DLC, and in some cases, it actively undermines the game design. 

(The less charitable people will argue that these are only for people who are lazy, impatient, or otherwise stupid. Put a pin in that.)

I’m not advocating for doubling down and getting mad about something you haven’t looked into, and I think reviewbombing a game is bad (but also that’s its own bag of worms) but I do think it’s worth pointing out that the reasonable assumption is that when the Steam page is advertising DLC, it’s something you will actually want to use.

You see the store page before buying the game, so Capcom is deliberately signaling to people who have not bought the game “Hey! Items to help with fast travel are something you’ll want/need!”

That is a bad first impression. The best-case scenario is it primes people to think “Oh this is inconvenient, I’ll just buy a Portcrystal” whenever they have trouble with traversal, which based on my understanding goes against the design of the game that wants you to grapple with your understanding of the world and locations.

The worst-case scenario is people think “Wow, this was made annoying on purpose to get me to pay more!” which makes people view the game design as actively hostile, and not in the fun way! Games that want to murder you personally are much preferable to games that want to steal your money.

Either way, this is how Capcom initially decided to present themselves, and I think this is a scenario where they’re allowed to be judged by that first impression, even if the specific details of what they decided to do might get a little lost and distorted, and of course, it becomes overkill really quickly.

Speaking of specific details…

Capcom is asking you to pay for nothing

Whenever I saw people saying that you don’t need to purchase Portcrystals and all of the microtransactions were available in-game, my first thought was “Oh so Capcom is just trying to scam people?”

Because I don’t know what else to call it. Scam-adjacent? If you truly believe these microtransactions are not necessary, then what is Capcom selling? 

Why are they wasting time and resources and burning their reputation selling something with no value?

Now the bad-faith answer is that it’s for people who are stupid, lazy, or impatient. I don’t believe that, but even if we want to pretend that’s true, it’s still bad to take advantage of people like that. People who either don’t know the game well enough to understand they need the item, or don’t have a lot of time to sink into a $70 game, or mistakenly believe this is hard because the game wants to sell them something, don’t deserve to be taken advantage of?

It kind of reminds me of companies that rely on people forgetting they made a subscription and charging them for a service they don’t want anymore. If your business relies on people not understanding or forgetting something, then I feel very strongly it shouldn’t exist. 

So while it’s nice that they haven’t stooped to completely gating off fast travel behind DLC, either this is an item the game is built around you having and it’s scummy to lock that behind DLC, or it’s something that’s not helpful (or actively detrimental if the game is built around the player traveling on foot a lot) and Capcom is trying to sell you assuming you don’t know better, and that’s also scummy!

It all comes back to Capcom

One big issue I have with all this discourse is that really? Everyone should be mad at one specific group, and that group is Capcom. 

It feels lacking in nuance to say this because it’s so definitive, but no matter how I look at it, the fact that this DLC exists at all is bad because Capcom decided to be scummy.

It is either a marketing failure on the part of Capcom for not seeing how this would ruin their launch and ruin people talking about their game, or they knew and didn’t care because the small amount of money they could get from the microtransactions is worth it.

If you can’t play this game because you don’t like microtransactions, then you should be mad at Capcom for adding them.

If you love this game and are upset people are dissing the game because of this, then you should be mad at Capcom for undermining the game design and blowing up the launch in a completely foreseeable turn of events.

If I worked on this game, I’d be pissed at whoever decided my carefully crafted world needed to let people pay to see less of it.

Look, this was avoidable. It’s the latest in a long stream of very annoying microtransactions in a $70, single-player game, a topic that’s already contentious, the kneejerk headline looks bad, the defense doesn’t make them look better, and it’s coming off games like Baldur’s Gate 3 getting praised for not having a bunch of paid DLC.

Capcom is either completely ignorant of the current landscape or doesn’t care and neither of those things are good. I think turning it into another thing people are fighting over where people who like the game are arguing with people who don’t is a disservice to everyone involved, and the ire should be directed and whoever decided to add in these microtransactions, not the developers or the people who are upset they’re there.