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Dragon's Dogma Demo Impressions

Eppy Thatcher

God's had his chance.
I just broke down and made a Japan account just for this demo. I've owned a ps3 since launch and nothing yet had me like "Yep. Gotta go jump through a tiny hoop so i can have access to all that cool shit. Just not worth it..."

Fuckin hype. 20%
 

Astra

Member
The face selection sucks for male

And I cancelled out of my good looking female character to find out
LbrGC.png

That's disappointing. I made a female character in the last game I played and wanted to go with a male next time. Not sure how much time you actually spend looking at your character's face, but regardless, I hate when they look like shit.

Either way, I stayed very in the dark about this game, and look forward to trying out the demo.
 

Eusis

Member
Tried it... and I'm seriously considering waiting JUST IN CASE there's a PC version. I don't mind sticking with 30 FPS, the problem is when even that seems to be too much for developers anymore. At least it's a more open world game.
 

Anteater

Member
That's disappointing. I made a female character in the last game I played and wanted to go with a male next time. Not sure how much time you actually spend looking at your character's face, but regardless, I hate when they look like shit.

Either way, I stayed very in the dark about this game, and look forward to trying out the demo.

Well they're not too bad, just not a large selection to choose from, some of the faces should let you make a decent looking character I think
 

Ratrat

Member
That's disappointing. I made a female character in the last game I played and wanted to go with a male next time. Not sure how much time you actually spend looking at your character's face, but regardless, I hate when they look like shit.

Either way, I stayed very in the dark about this game, and look forward to trying out the demo.
It's not that they look bad. It's more just a selection of presets with minor tweaks. Like I couldn't recreate my unique regal mug but easily made a genreic handsome dude.
 
Oh wow... I'm not feeling the demo. After keeping up with the game and looking forward to it, the demo just didn't sit well with me. I'll play it again and see, but I wasn't that impressed with the gameplay. There are some hit detection issues, visuals aren't that great for a touted improved MT Framework, and there wasn't much challenge.

I did like the character creation and some of the monster animations looked good.

Also, what the hell is up with the black bars on the top and bottom of my TV screen? Is the game always going to look like this? It's annoying.
 
It seems like fun even though I had absolutely no idea what was going on or what the control scheme was despite the onscreen prompts - I did last a while before the Griffin had the better of me.

It seemed more FFXIII than Demon's Souls to me though. Still on board.
 

Anteater

Member
oh, do try making a different character and play the countryside quest again, since it lets you use your character, I find the smaller character much quicker on strider, even though the Griffin die even faster, but I like my new character much more than the default

Edit: never seems to run out of stamina too, fuck yeah!
 

Astra

Member
Well they're not too bad, just not a large selection to choose from, some of the faces should let you make a decent looking character I think

It's not that they look bad. It's more just a selection of presets with minor tweaks. Like I couldn't recreate my unique regal mug but easily made a genreic handsome dude.

That doesn't sound too bad. I don't mind a simplistic character creation system, as I tend to be a bit picky when I create my characters. Having too many options, sliders, etc. causes me to spend way to long in character creation.

Really want to try the demo now, but it's 5am and I am too tired to give it the proper attention, and won't enjoy it as much as I should.

Played Skyrim, followed by Kingdoms of Amalur, and finally started Dark Souls last week (Put 95 hours into it, though a lot of that time was spent trying to summon and get summoned by friends). Hope I don't burn myself out on all these long RPGs. I'd say I would wait until the Summer to play, but I know I'll cave and buy it at release, or very soon after.
 

Anteater

Member
My little Loli Strider Girl is god-like, she's fast as hell!

edit: damn, wish there's a way to save multiple characters, maybe I'll try different characters on another account...
 
Went through the demo a couple times.
Poor Griffin doesn't stand a chance really. Burn his wings, get him on the ground, grab onto his head, go to town.
 
Ignore my previous post. Played again for the second time and got the mechanics down. Love it!

Really loving the gameplay - I like being able to climb and grab on to the monsters and hack away at certain parts. I also love the Monster Hunter-like animations present here - being knocked back by gust, a loud roar knocking back a character blocking with a shield, and the knockdown you receive from vicious hits. I will say that hit detection could use some work in certain areas, but overall it wasn't a problem.

All of the monster boss battles are going to be super-duper fun for me because I can tell Capcom is bringing in some monster animations from MH. Griffon flies around like Rathalos and has back-and-forth dash attacks like Tigrex. The Chimera has a poison gas attack like Gypceros and unleashes it if you grab onto it for too long.

Some notes about the visuals and framerate: visuals are ok, but the thing that bothered me were the black bars on the top and bottom. I think the game is meant to look like this for a "cinematic" feel, but it's annoying to me. Framerate was smooth and I didn't encounter any screen tearing.
 

Sophia

Member
Some notes about the visuals and framerate: visuals are ok, but the thing that bothered me were the black bars on the top and bottom. I think the game is meant to look like this for a "cinematic" feel, but it's annoying to me. Framerate was smooth and I didn't encounter any screen tearing.

Yeah I could really do without having 30% of the screen being flat out unused.
 

raviolico

Member
Some notes about the visuals and framerate: visuals are ok, but the thing that bothered me were the black bars on the top and bottom. I think the game is meant to look like this for a "cinematic" feel, but it's annoying to me. Framerate was smooth and I didn't encounter any screen tearing.


to archive B they had to do A i guess.
 
So, you guys think the final game will be like that? Black bars during gameplay is going to be pretty damn annoying. Doesn't bother me for cutscenes, but during gameplay? Meh, I'll just get used to it if so.
 

Papercuts

fired zero bullets in the orphanage.
Yup, demos on Tuesday and arcade games on Wednesday.

That's good, I'm interested in seeing how the 360 version is.

By banding, do you guys mean that strange effect you see in games at times, where the sky has circles of varying brightness?

Yeah, it's when there's abrupt changes in the color and you can clearly see the lines where it happens.

Colour_banding_example01.png


Atleast on the PS3 one, it's really obvious at night. The actual area is extremely dark and the mood is well done, but I always love looking up at the sky in games like this. Around the corners where it's lighter you can see the banding all over the place.

So, you guys think the final game will be like that? Black bars during gameplay is going to be pretty damn annoying. Doesn't bother me for cutscenes, but during gameplay? Meh, I'll just get used to it if so.

I would be 99% sure it's going to stay like that, it was present in all the videos.
 

Anteater

Member
So, you guys think the final game will be like that? Black bars during gameplay is going to be pretty damn annoying. Doesn't bother me for cutscenes, but during gameplay? Meh, I'll just get used to it if so.

I got pretty used to it, at first the camera felt too zoomed in too, well maybe because my character I made is smaller now...

yea the color banding is distracting, it's actually a new issue we've never seen before too

Edit: I'm hoping they're lazy and are just using the same old demo they've been using for all conventions
 

Kyoufu

Member
I liked it. Demo doesn't have the open world exploration so I'm looking forward to that.

Strange that you can't roll evade in combat though.
 

UrbanRats

Member
In the final game will we be able to have more than one character per console? This still isn't clear to me, and it's a deal breaker.
 

Santar

Member
Gotta say I'm very disappointed that you basically have no control over your pawns.
They're doing everything I dislike about ai partners in single player games. They're basically playing my game for me.
At least if you'd have control over them I could've told them to just hold back and provide support while I do the actual "defeating of bosses".

I really hope you're free to have say only one pawn with you in the full game.
 

Sword Familiar

178% of NeoGAF posters don't understand statistics
I won't be able to play the demo until tomorrow, but I see a lot of good impressions so I'm looking forward to it. Also looking forward to seeing 360 impressions.
 
Gotta say I'm very disappointed that you basically have no control over your pawns.
They're doing everything I dislike about ai partners in single player games. They're basically playing my game for me.
At least if you'd have control over them I could've told them to just hold back and provide support while I do the actual "defeating of bosses".

I really hope you're free to have say only one pawn with you in the full game.

You can have no pawns if you like. In the prologue section I ran past the Rift stone and then tossed my main pawn off a huge cliff edge and he died. I wasn't able to beat the Chimera by myself, perhaps on my second attempt now that I've realised how useful blocking is.

Got close though!
 
You can have no pawns if you like. In the prologue section I ran past the Rift stone and then tossed my main pawn off a huge cliff edge and he died. I wasn't able to beat the Chimera by myself, perhaps on my second attempt now that I've realised how useful blocking is.

Got close though!
Having no pawns is fine, but aren't they a big part of the online part of the game?

It seems like the criticisms are to do with AI, so "you can have no pawns" seems like a convenient get out clause. Why can't we have customisable AI?
 

Santar

Member
You can have no pawns if you like. In the prologue section I ran past the Rift stone and then tossed my main pawn off a huge cliff edge and he died. I wasn't able to beat the Chimera by myself, perhaps on my second attempt now that I've realised how useful blocking is.

Got close though!

It's just a shame you have to "trick" the game to play the way you want.
If only we'd be able to actually control the pawns they could be a nice tactical element to the combat. Now it's just chaos with them doing what they want whenever they feel like it.
 
Ugh, I wanted an actual quest, not just a single fight. Still pretty fun though. Sword play is a little weak but arrows seem fine. Grabbing onto the griffin and having it take off is pretty cool.
 
Damn gold only

360 users: could you try to set the video output from the dashboard settings to 720p, and see if there's still tearing? This completely fixed the tearing issues with RE5, and since it's the same engine it could work with this too
 
Impossible to make good looking character.

What are you talking about? The two characters I made look great.

http://i.imgur.com/t0KqI.jpg?1
http://i.imgur.com/hMu7b.jpg?1

Anyway character creator is basically the Monster Hunter character creator. The whole game feels kind of like a fast paced, medieval, action RPG Monster Hunter, minus all the complexities.

Does the full game have a higher difficulty? Demo was pathetically easy.
 
I was totally pleased with all the characters I made. There was a pretty short-haired lady, a fatty with a mad white beard, a young monkey-like guy with loooong limbs. Then I tried to make a super ugly guy, but he ended up looking pretty goddamn badass in the end, despite the ginger chin strap beard.
 
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