The original Dragon’s Dogma was an odd duck. A hardcore action RPG that took inspiration from games as varied as Skyrim, Monster Hunter, and Devil May Cry. Despite a few rough edges, Dragon’s Dogma attained a dedicated cult following, and with a sequel on the way, this could be the series’ chance to break into the mainstream.
The spectacular boss battles, the free-form class system, and the huge open world will no doubt all make their return, but what will really define it is whether it has an online co-op system. . In the original game, creating a party was essentially a cattle auction, but with stalwart adventuring types instead of cows. You create a pawn, who follows you around and helps out in battle, but is also available for hire to other players around the world through the “Rift”. You can hop into the Rift whenever you like, survey the pawns on offer, and take the ones you like with you. When you feel it’s time to part ways, you can even give them a present to take back to their human master.
It did all have a slightly suspect ‘slave trade’ air to it, (which is probably why the game makes it very clear that pawns don’t age or die, don’t have emotions, and are not human), but it actually worked really well. Each pawn had a full suite of abilities, could comment on events, locations, and NPCs, and level up alongside the player. I haven’t seen anything like Dragon’s Dogma’s “Pawns” system before or since.
The pawns are so well fleshed out that they could easily have been human players. The opportunity for actual co-op play was right there and somehow Capcom missed it. There’s a case to be made that this was a conscious decision. Hideaki Itsuno, the game’s director, is on record as saying he wanted to create a game where “you could be connected with a lot of people but not have to worry about the courtesies one generally has to consider when playing online” (check out the interview here). Courtesies? Online? I think he’s kind of idealised human interaction in the online realm but hey, I appreciate the sentiment.
Games like Capcom’s own Monster Hunter: Rise prove that teaming up with three of your mates to bring down a lizard the size of a bus is great fun, so it’s a shame that they didn’t transfer that thinking over to Dragon’s Dogma. With the benefit of hindsight and the immense success of the Monster Hunter series in recent years, it seems like a given that Dragon’s Dogma 2 will take the pawn system to the next level and actually let players visit each other’s worlds.
All the pieces are there for a co-op feature, Capcom just need to make a few adjustments. Loot would need to be instanced for a start, and there would need to be some kind of level scaling system. The original game allowed up to three tagalongs; the sequel could have the same limit, allowing for a mix of NPC and human helpers. This is all assuming the pawn system is carried over of course, which it certainly could be. It’s by no means a bad idea, and could easily work alongside more traditional multiplayer mechanics.
The big question is: do we have any reason to think that Capcom will decide to include multiplayer in Dragon’s Dogma 2? There is actually a precedent a Capcom that’s even closer than Monster Hunter. There was a lot of buzz around potential multiplayer following the original Dragon’s Dogma release, and Capcom responded by releasing Dragon’s Dogma Online in 2015 (exclusively in Japan), an MMORPG that worked within the game’s framework. The game was a hit and showed that the Dragon’s Dogma premise works perfectly with multiplayer.
The servers were shut down in 2019, but the mere existence of Dragon’s Dogma Online gives me hope for Dragon’s Dogma 2. Both it and other games that have come before and since prove how much fun big fantasy RPGs are to play with friends. We’ve even seen games like Skyrim get multiplayer modded in and tens of thousands of people download it within days. There’s a clear demand for small-scale co-op play. Capcom knows this as well as anybody with their Monster Hunter series, and they could be onto something big if they get this right.
There are of course a few other things the sequel will need to address: a story that isn’t somehow both totally off-the-wall bonkers, and stupefyingly boring, some kind of fast travel, and slightly more convincing pawns who don’t feel the need to point out every building, animal, flower, and air molecule they see. Get all that out of the way, and online co-op is the obvious next step. Few games would be as well suited to it as Dragon’s Dogma.
