Waiting For The Sun To Rise
What do you look forward to the most when playing a videogame? The music? The big set-pieces? The gameplay? When I started playing Dragon’s Dogma II on the night of it’s launch I had one goal in mind:
To chill.
You see I’ve been a bit of a freak this year. I’ve been smoking through games like they’re getting delisted and I don’t have enough money to purchase a physical copy. With DDog2 I just wanted to hang out, do quests, kill some stuff and have a good time. One of the big things in the game that caught my attention is the deliberate lack of traditional fast travel systems. You can buy a portcrystal and and place it somewhere in the game, and then use a ferrystone to travel between portcrystals. These items are finite however. You need to pick and choose where to place the crystals, and when to use the stones to travel. With this knowledge in mind it makes sense that the game wants you to manually walk between areas to get a lay of the land. Maybe you’ll find a cool cave with some lizard monsters guarding a nice sword. Perhaps you’ll find a character to recruit that someone made online that isn’t wearing pants for some reason. In fact you’ll find several feminine characters walking around the game’s world without pants. Gamers love characters that are pretty and not much else.
On the second day of my journey through the game I decided to take an ox cart between villages. Ox carts are the second form of fast traversal that the game provides. The idea is that you take the cart, put the controller down for a bit and let the game take you to where you need to go. It’s just you, your party, the cart and the GIANT OGRE COMING YOUR WAY OH SHIT OH FUCK-
My time in the oxcart wasn’t relaxing. I had maybe 3 minutes of reprieve before I had to take the mantle back up and kill some baddies. Unfortunately for me the cart I paid good gold for TOOK OFF while I was hacking away at the enemy, and my group and I found ourselves stranded on the side of the road as the sun quickly started setting. If I learned anything from the first Dragon’s Dogma, it’s that you absolutely don’t want to be outside when the sun goes down.
Firstly, there’s almost no natural light. If your lantern runs out and you’re not near a torch on the road, you’re in near pitch blackness- just the soft moonlight reflecting off your armor. Secondly, there’s monsters out there. I’m not just talking about goblins and the like. Zombies, skeletons, and other assorted mobs roam the forests and temples scattered across the land.
If DDog1 was scary, DDog2 is downright unnerving.
It’s now in the dead of night, and my party and I are trying to hoof it to the nearest village. I estimate it would take about 6 or so minutes to get there, but the ghosts and goblins have other plans. With a hefty swing of my sword, I manage to make short work of the hissing goblins. The ghosts on the other hand are immune to physical attacks, and the mage I recruited has been dead for a long while now. I’ll never forget the pants that you didn’t have. Knowing that we don’t stand a chance against these ectoplasmic enemies I instruct my last two party members to follow me and run.
Instead my archer runs off a cliff and meets a fate only suited towards looney tunes characters.
Now it’s just my main pawn and I. We’ve been through thick and thin. I made them. I put my heart and soul in creating this character, and well ok now they’re trying to fight a cyclops by themselves in the dark. Alright they’re dead now. Shit.
Remember when I mentioned the player-created characters that roam around the map? The pant-less women that fill the lands? Well in order to recruit them your personal pawn character still needs to be alive, and while it’s easy to resurrect them, you can only do so at “Rift Stones” peppered throughout the world, and even if I were to find said stones, you can’t interact with them while engaged in combat, which I’m constantly in a state of.
So now it’s just me, the handful of health potions I have left, and my wits. I stick to the torches and lanterns lined along the roads because my own lantern has long been out of oil. If a monster comes I run while simultaneously watching my stamina usage, as it refills slower if I completely run out. Recruit-able pawns will stop to help me in a pinch, but I still can’t take them with me. The situation is dire. I don’t remember my last save. I may lose hours of progress if I die.
Still far from the village, I stop at a lantern at the road for a brief respite. Here I meet a pawn walking along the opposite direction. I speak to them. They give off some dialog about how I can’t recruit them unless I have my main squeeze with me, but instead of departing this character decides to stick around. The enemies in the game don’t usually spawn around non-player characters, so as long as this pawn stayed near me at the lantern I was in the clear. The sun wasn’t coming up for about ten or so real-time minutes, so I had to just hope that this traveler would stick around until dawn.
I can still hear the battle music fading in and out. Enemies were growling around us, but I had no choice but to wait it out with my new friend. I had long been out of healing items at this point, and was virtually one strike away from demise. This was my last chance. During this digital smoke break I took in the sights.
Grass
Mountains
Trees
That’s all I could see past the light of the road lantern. This NPC could leave at any time but they remained. It’s like the game knew that they were my last line of defense.
It’s like…the NPC themselves knew.
With the sun finally rising, I made my way to a camp, and slept off my injuries with a delicious live-action steak in my stomach. I found a rift stone to resurrect my pawn shortly after, and recruited two new pawns to replace the mage and archer that died on my way to the village. The road that was once a hellscape of growling monstrosities was now a bright, serene hiking trail. The enemies were still on the map but for the most part they kept to themselves. Not even 5 minutes later I found myself at the village. At this point I completely forgot why I needed to be here in the first place. I quickly saved and closed my game, got up and took a shower, and crawled into bed. As my eyes grew heavy I smiled to myself and proclaimed:
“Dragon’s Dogma II is so cool.”
-PA
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