Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen

Some news about the expansion in the form of vague changelog to the "old" game that come with the expansion.

http://www.capcom-unity.com/gregaman...nge-log-within


Also shameless bump, been playing the game for a bit more than a week so pretty excited ^^. Just hope I can buy the US version and use my euro save with it, shouldn't be a problem since PS3 isn't region bound but not entirely sure.

Well the things to know in general is that every class works fine and the differences in terms of power are only relevant in terms of min maxing damage output on the online Ur Dragon which is a very minor part of the game anyway.

In terms of fun and stuff however, Warrior is arguably one of the worst classes. I'd put Ranger up there too. Warriors do not get double jumps, do not get rolls to avoid stuff and do not get blocks. Basically, you either run away or tank the hits. On top of that, warriors also only get 3 skill slots when every class gets 6(generally 3 per weapon and each class has 2 "weapons" like shield+sword or bow+daggers, casters get 6 spells on their staves). That makes warrior fairly dull to play overall, plus the skills aren't very interesting either. The weapons are cool and hitting shit with the massive 2H sword is fun as hell since everything gets knocked the fuck away and die in one hit and shit like that but overall it's repetitive dull gameplay. I played as warrior for a few hours but I got bored of it, it's mostly about either charging super long attacks while your pawns distract the enemy, doing jump attacks which isn't very warrior-y but the faster attack or just swinging your weap slowly for about as much damage as anything else. It's not bad, but it's just nothing amazing.

Ranger is the same mostly because Tenfold Arrows is the best skill of the class by far, and it's spammable, so you just spam that the entire time. Meleeing as a Ranger is pointless(they also only get the core dagger skills, not any special dagger stuff like Striders/Assassins/Magick Archer) and while there's a few interesting situational bow attacks, it's fairly spammy. On the other hand it is super strong and long range so unlike the warrior while boring it is also extremely effective.


Everything else I find is fine in terms of fun and efficiency. The casters get a large mix of very slow super large aoe, fast casting spells and a large amount of buffs and debuffs. Rogue types(strider, assassin) have very quick paced skills with a lot of unique style skills(striders have steal, have a sprint, have a move to jump super high as well as an air super strong attack and quick short range bow attacks, while the assassin gets invinsibility, counters as well as the usage of a shield and swords for more varied gameplay). Fighter has more variety than Warrior and while defensive in nature, you can do some pretty cool stuff with the shield combos. Finally Magick Archer and Mystic Knight are very fun classes that are unique and powerful, combining basic caster spells/debuffs/buffs with the traditional combat of striders and fighters.

In terms of what to do, unless you want to min max from the start, just do whatever. Money isn't too important just don't waste too much, upgrade your gear to +2 or +3 if you have the material and it's a new drop but don't bother otherwise. There's some augments you might want in other classes but it's so annoying to farm points that you might as well wait until you reach endgame, which has a nice spot to afk grind all your vocations(classes) to 9 and buy whatever. Grabbing Warrior rank1 for Bastion(+50def) when you reach Gran Soren is pretty nice though. Also grinding Fighter to 5 for Sinew can be useful if you use heavy armor so you don't lose too much mobility(takes 15minutes or so). There's tricks if you want to trivialize content like grabbing weapons that are only inferior to endgame weapons very early, but that's not really worth it if it's your first time playing, might as well enjoy the progression. Also ignore escort quests as they tend to be annoying as fuck. Unless you read a walkthrough, you will miss side quests and such however. However you can complete the achievement on the 2nd playthrough by just doing the quests you missed, and you need 2 playthroughs for another achievement anyway so if you care about that it's not really a big deal.

If you add people, you can rent their pawns for free regardless of the level. It's pretty pointless unless you're trying to powerlevel though. Otherwise you can just rent any pawn of your level for free. There's a system ingame where you can filter pawns by level, class, spell type and shit then select which one you want to recruit.

Lost Ranger_sl said:

I missed playing the first one. I tossed both on Gamefly though so should be getting the first one in a day or two. How long would you say these are? Quick rpgs, or tons to do for those of us with OCD?

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The achievements are fairly easy to complete if you check a walkthrough to get all the quests on NG+. There is however a fairly large amount of content even if you do that, I'd say 60-80hours depending on how much you want to farm, if you want to level to cap, get a bunch of gear dragonforged, find some of the rarer gear and so on. If I had to compare I'd say it's similar to Skyrim in many aspects, the leveling system is different(but your one char can do everything, you do have to swap classes in town though), there's a ton of fairly useless sidequests, some sidequests are actual questlines with nice stories, there's a lot of missable shit and the world is fairly big, at least was in the original without portcrystals but still will be fairly big even with DA ease of travel. Also the night looks like actual night, as in you can't see jackshit unless you have your lantern out, which only illuminates a fairly small area, so when night falls while you're exploring it's pretty cool. Combat is a lot better than skyrim though, it's closer to dark souls without being as tight nor as unforgiving, but you can climb on monsters(or get thrown on them or other various ways) and stab them so that's nice.

Overall, quite a lot to do if you haven't played the original release. Not a huge success but I think it was one of the best games of these past few years, I wish it was more difficulty/better tuned, but it's still very fun and really looking forward to next one on PS4/Xbox720/hopefully PC.

Lost Ranger_sl said:

I thought I had added both, but it must of been something else. Added over 40 games to the queue so it all blurred together heh. Gamefly only has Dragon's Dogma. Worth getting now or should I wait until they have Dark Arisen?

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Might as well wait a bit, Dark Arisen fixes some of the OP shit and buff some of the stuff too so it's overall better even for the basic experience(also adds fast travel points in the first playthrough so you don't spend as long running back and forth).

Well technically, the US xbox version is about 10 gens further than the PS3. However iirc when I checked the euro one was like 20behind. Regardless though it's not much of a deal unless you can log at any time during the day, as having euros/japanese killing the dragon off hours means the grace period is also off hours so you'll often get fucked if you can only play prime time.

With that said, there's also basically no point to the whole thing at all. You get items that you can only get there, but people have been farming that shit so long they give the stuff away if you ask nicely on various forums. Also with the rebalance of gear, other than the abyssinal armor set(which you 100% get all kills so most people who farmed the dragon have dozens to give away) and the mask, the gear isn't even that good anymore.

In terms of graphics as far as I've read the main difference is the PS3 will have more lags(when a dragon breath right in your face and it takes up the whole screen it drops to 5FPS) while the xbox360 has a lot of tearing all the time. So you pick the lesser of 2 evils pretty much. Game looks the same otherwise.

Sean_sl said:

I think they fixed a lot of the tearing problems on the X360 version with the expansion, I rarely saw it happen as I was playing through it.

I need a list of all the new gear they put in.

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The wiki is getting updated slowly but it's confusing and not very well updated atm, people just add a bit of info about some shit and don't add where to find it, what the upgrade items are, the values on the upgrades and such. I guess it'll take a while especially since a lot of items I assume only come from de-cursing shit so yeah.