Dragon’s Dogma was a bold experiment during Capcom’s darkest days

Nearly 12 years after game director Hideaki Itsuno released Dragon’s Dogma on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is finally almost here. Since the original game debuted, Capcom has released Dragon’s Dogma spinoffs, semi-sequels, and ports to varying degrees of success, but the highly anticipated sequel looks poised to break out.

Publisher and developer Capcom has been on a hit streak lately, thanks to investing in strong franchises like Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, and Street Fighter. However, the company’s fortunes weren’t so favorable in 2012 when Dragon’s Dogma debuted. Back then, Capcom was experimenting and often failing, either critically or commercially, to find global success.

Dragon’s Dogma landed amid a year of big swings and misses for the company. The Resident Evil franchise was at one of its lowest points with multiple poorly received releases that year, including Resident Evil 6, which critics called “a franchise-diminishing disappointment,” and Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, blasted as “an insult to Resident Evil fans.” Only Resident Evil: Revelations, a 3DS-only side story that stuck to the survival horror core, kept the franchise relevant that year.

Capcom seemed confused about what to do with its rich vein of properties in 2012 in particular. It’s the same year that it worked with FromSoftware to deliver Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, an abysmal, Xbox 360 Kinect-only spinoff of its hardcore mech action franchise — you know, the one famous for its dedicated 44-input controller — and reimagined the Lost Planet franchise as a manga-inspired shooter with EX Troopers, a deviation from the serious sci-fi presentation of the previous games.

The company’s identity crisis extended to many of its oldest franchises, including releasing a social mobile game based on Mega Man and going crossover-crazy with Project X Zone, Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright, and Street Fighter X Tekken. The latter, in particular, was a commercial misfire despite the popularity of both franchises, and it was knocked by players for its heavy-handed monetization tactics.

One bright spot in that dour year was Asura’s Wrath, the CyberConnect2-developed action game that delivered an astonishing, over-the-top spectacle. But even that game had a strange wrinkle; players couldn’t experience the full story and “real” ending unless they paid to play its DLC.

Image: CyberConnect2/Capcom

In hindsight, 2012 feels like an inflection point for Capcom. The year prior, the company pumped out both Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and the expanded Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, with only a nine-month window between them. It later blamed low sales of Street Fighter X Tekken on “cannibalism” in the fighting game genre, of which Capcom itself was particularly guilty. In 2013, the publisher’s experiments continued; it worked with developers Ninja Theory to take the reins of the Devil May Cry series with DmC, a controversial game overseen by Dragon’s Dogma creator Itsuno, and Spark Unlimited to make Lost Planet 3.

Incidentally, 2012 was also the year of two infamous Capcom typos. The publisher misspelled the title of Resident Evil: Revelations on the game’s box art and even misspelled its own name in the copyright of its Kinect Steel Battalion game. That’s a relatively minor quality control issue, but it’s indicative of a weird, chaotic year at Capcom.

Given the messy atmosphere of the time, it’s no surprise that the modestly successful Dragon’s Dogma may have been viewed by Capcom executives as yet another experiment of the era, rather than a franchise to fully invest in. They did give the original game a second chance, however, with 2013’s Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, an expanded re-release of the original game with a new landmass and new enemies. Capcom also attempted to keep Dragon’s Dogma going with a mobile game and MMO, both of which shuttered a few years after release.

Image: Capcom

In a 2019 interview with Eurogamer, Itsuno recalled the development of Dragon’s Dogma as his most challenging project at Capcom. “That was a brand-new series — a lot of other stuff I’d done was already established,” Itsuno said. “It was one of the first real new things.”

Dragon’s Dogma was a “real new thing” for Itsuno himself, who had worked on Capcom’s fighting games (Power Stone, Capcom vs. SNK) and the Devil May Cry series. It was a long-held dream of his to make an original role-playing game: one that simulated the experience of an MMO, but built for solo players, Itsuno said in an interview with IGN.

“I wanted to make an action RPG that did two things: I wanted to create an RPG that wasn’t a chore to play, and I wanted to make an RPG you could play alone that still felt like an online experience,” he explained. “I created Dragon’s Dogma by combining these two ideas. I’m proud that it feels like playing with friends even when you’re alone, and that it’s an RPG with action elements that feel just as fun as an all-out action game.”

“It’s always been about taking ridiculous ideas and approaching them completely seriously,” he told Eurogamer.

Getting to seriously approach a ridiculous idea during Capcom’s rockiest and most experimental era paid off for the creator. In 2024, Itsuno’s confidence about Dragon’s Dogma 2 and its unique design decisions — the sequel shuns modern expectations like on-demand fast travel and traditional online co-op play — appears to match that of modern-day Capcom’s. The company is well beyond its troubled era from two console generations ago, experimenting where it makes sense but still properly nurturing its hit franchises. Hopefully, that won’t mean another decade-long wait for more Dragon’s Dogma.