Dragon Dogma Demo

I finished up all my work this morning just before noon. Now I had the toughest decision of my day. Watch porn or play video games.  I was leaning towards porn until someone I follow on twitter mentioned Dragons Dogma. It’s demo dropped today and it’s an RPG I had yet to hear of. I am always up for a good RPG demo, so I went off to download it. Oh wait it’s from Capcom I muttered to myself. Oh well I will play it anyway and see how it goes.

I am not sure I have ever mentioned this, but I love creating characters. I can spend a long time getting my in game avatar just right. So that was the first place I went once fired up the demo. I am not super impressed with the character art, but it has a ton of customization options and that is always a plus. Now with this game you can also create and edit a pawn. Think of the pawn as a meat shield/assistant. I was bloody tempted to create a midget named Oompa and might with the full game. I like the concept of a companion you can have from the beginning.  It is a big positive in favor of the game.

There are two quests that you can choose from in the demo. I went through the country side demo first. The art in the game is good, but it seemed a bit off to me. Maybe it’s because I have played way to much Skyrim. Plus it’s a demo so final tweaks may improve the quality. It was still above average, but not gorgeous. In this quest you beat the hell out of a few goblins and then get attacked by a griffin. It was pleasantly surprising to see this creature as an enemy for once. It was also a challenging fight, but will remind many of fighting dragons in Skyrim. The difference being your helpers are far more useful in Dragons Dogma. After defeating the beast this portion of the demo is over. While short,  it gave me a decent feel for the outdoor portions of the game.

The second portion of the demo is called the prologue quest. Basically you ramble around inside a castle/dungeon looking for a dragon. Even though it’s a prologue I am going to take a wild guess that the dragon is the main nemesis in this game. You never get to the dragon and end up fighting a chimera. Which is a creature I have not dealt with since my days of D&D table top gaming. That got Capcom and the developers some serious bonus points from an old school RPG fan. One thing I noticed during this phase of the demo that was weird. To destroy boxes, you had to pick them up and throw them. Now there is no doubt they can also be used as a weapon, but there also seemed to be no other way to destroy them. Which made it a two step process to see what goodies may be lurking in the boxes. Seems strange when compared with the bash crap approach most games take. Still not bad or frustrating, just odd.

Speaking of the controls, they seem to be sufficient and not to hard to learn. There was another interesting aspect to the game play mechanic that was new to me. When you knock and enemy down you or your pawn could pick them up and hold them. Then another member of the party can run them through and kill them. In a video game sense that is freaking awesome. In reality I wouldn’t let anyone stab someone I was holding for fear of getting a claymore in the kidneys.

Overall I liked the demo and saw enough positives to lean towards purchasing it soon after launch, which is May 22nd. If your interested, either check out the demo or go here for more information. Now I am going to go watch porn, possibly with midgets.

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