Dragon's Dogma 2 has its claws firmly in my chest, ripping out my heart, still beating, with the intent of swallowing it whole. I don't quite understand why, because the main quests are pretty boring (sorry, Captain Brant), the stakes are low (at the moment, a dozen hours later), and the performance is poor. But hey, at least the fast travel is reminiscent of one of my favorite fantasy RPGs ever.
But most importantly, the gameplay loop is incredibly engaging. The exploration is rewarding, the battles are perhaps too frequent but perfectly balanced. I was murdered by a lizard in the first few hours of the game – the damn lizard was hiding in the darkest corner of a cave I was walking through – and now I can take on three or four at once. I still have to be careful, I can't just jump into the fray, but with the right technique and clever use of a broadsword I can defeat them. That being said, it's not Elden Ring's difficulty that ultimately turns me off from playing.
Then you'll rise to the top. The first Minotaur I faced was devastating and I had to retreat. Now, just ten hours later, I can handle it with relative ease. While the storyline is a bit boring, developing your combat skills feels great.
As you progress you earn gold. Up to this point, I've spent all my money buying and upgrading my weapons and armor, forgoing staying at an inn in favor of camping to save a few more pennies. But while I was on one such shopping spree, I noticed that Vermund's economy is in shambles.
Let's talk about the costs. In the early stages of the game, the best sword in Vernworth will cost you 5,650 gold. That's roughly the price of three nights at the local inn for your group of four. That all makes sense. You can toss a few hundred coins to a bullock cart driver who will drive you across the country. And a haircut costs 10,000 gold.
Who gets a haircut for that price? In this world full of monsters and dangers at every corner, who gets a cut instead of buying two swords? That's the equivalent of renting a guesthouse for three weeks to brush up on your highlights. Now there are a lot of rich people in Vernworth – I'm trying to attend a fancy masquerade ball and the gossip is costing me 300,000 gold – but for us Arisen and our farmers, we make a living by picking up 200 gold from every fifth goblin we kill, do we stick with our haircut for life?
It's worth noting that some of the prizes clearly have no background information, but rather are there to make the gameplay systems work. Oxcarts are as cheap as chips because Capcom wants you to use them to traverse their world. Likewise, Ferrystones cost a hundred times more because the developers didn't want this system to be so freely usable.
If you think Capcom made Ferrystones expensive so you have to buy microtransactions to fast travel, you don't understand game development or Dragon's Dogma 2.
Inns are quite expensive to encourage you to go camping – which not only affects your carrying weight as you have to lug your tent around with you, but is also a dangerous proposition. Better weapons are also expensive, encouraging you to find better weapons in chests or retrieve them from the corpses of defeated enemies. Everything is designed to discourage you from minmaxing and force you to engage in the game's core loop: exploring and scraping.
But what purpose does setting discounts at this price level serve? Are the developers trying to force you to live with the hairstyle choices you made during character creation? Haircuts make no sense in-universe and no sense from a developer perspective, so why do they cost so much? How are the hairdressers doing? Do they rely on two rich clients stopping by every month to pay the rent? I don't understand Vermundian economics, but I sure as hell know I'm not getting a chance any time soon.
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