We begin our review of our best games of the year 2024 with one of the titles that was snubbed at The Game Awards: Dragon’s Dogma 2.
Every time we tell someone that we are video game journalists, they immediately ask us one of the few questions that we know well by now. Once you get past the obvious ones, like “When are you moving out of my apartment?” (hi mom), the one that strikes us the most is “does playing video games for a living decrease the enjoyment you get from it as a hobby?”.
We always say no when someone asks us, but only because the truth is much more complicated than we are willing to explain to someone we just met in the pub. It’s part of an attempt on our part to seem less weird than those who overanalyze their own behavior and find it too interesting – although, dear reader, we will not do you that courtesy.
The fact is, while we don’t enjoy playing games any less now, the way we play has changed significantly. We’ve always been completionists, to some extent, and now that we make a living at it driving every corner of the most complex games out there, we have to be very careful when playing a huge RPG. We need to know the outcome of every possible choice, we need to coordinate with the rest of our team to understand what others have done, so we can do things differently. Simply put, if a player can ask a question about any aspect of the game, we need to know the answer.
A game that goes out of its way to tell you as little as possible —
To that end, Dragon’s Dogma 2 was an exhausting experience because it’s a game that goes out of its way to tell you as little as possible. Mission indicators are vague, if they exist at all, and virtually every single mission can end in one of five different ways, at least half of which involve mechanics you don’t even know exist.
If this seems like a painful and frustrating time to you, then you should never engage in gaming journalism, because we assure you that playing Dragon’s Dogma 2 this way was the most enjoyable gaming experience of the entire year. We would go even further, and say that the disparity between critical praise and the indifferent shrugs of the general public exists in part because we critics have been able to play without guides.
About three weeks before the game’s launch, five of us at GLHF were playing it, and, as we do when we have a big RPG that needs a lot of guides, we created a group chat to help each other out. For the next few weeks, this group chat became a source of endless joy, as we shared clips of the brilliant combat system and created hilarious scenarios; we theorized possible solutions to the game’s strangest mysteries; and generally we worked as a team to fill any little gaps in our knowledge.
It was a never-ending treasure trove of discoveries. It’s honestly no exaggeration to say that at least two or three times a day someone came into the chat with a “Hey, did you know you could do this? This?” and everyone else gasped at the discovery. The quest to solve the Sphinx riddles was our favorite, because someone came up with the dumbest possible solution to the Wisdom riddle and a quick investigation proved them right.
Endless possibilities —
Even the simplest mission in that game has infinite possibilities. The hunt for the jade sphere is one of those that will always remain imprinted in our minds, because every time we did it we found a new possible way to end the story. The entanglement of two people who both wanted the item, the possibility of creating a fake of that item, and the characters’ different abilities to determine whether they had received the fake created a web of possibilities that forced us to analyze it from every angle .
Meanwhile, when Dad came across that mission, he simply consulted the guide we’d written about it, saw what the best way to profit from it was, and did it, leaving us with a sense of conflict. Solving these things and making them easily understandable for other players is our job, it’s the purpose of what we do, and yet we can’t help but feel that by giving him an easy answer, we have robbed him of some of our experience.
We can remember every detail of that research, because we spent a whole day exploring and discovering all the different ways it could go, as well as discussing it with colleagues to see if they had found any solution that we hadn’t, yet we doubt that our father would be able to tell us a single detail about it if we asked him.
This isn’t to say that we’re annoyed by people using guides – that would be the most hypocritical thing possible under the circumstances – but we can’t deny that knowing you have access to online guides dramatically changes the way you approach the game from experience direct.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 with and without guides —
If we had played DD2 with access to the guides, we would have liked it less. The sense of discovery is an integral part of what we liked so much about this game, but we don’t have infinite patience. If we had known we could get some answers with a quick Google search, we would definitely have resorted to this solution on more than one occasion, rather than spending a week consulting four other people to try to solve the riddles of the Sphinx. It’s only because it was impossible under pre-launch circumstances that we persevered and found incredible satisfaction in solving the game’s darkest mysteries ourselves.
That’s without even mentioning the biggest secret in the entire game. The one moment that truly shocked us in a way that no other game had before. We refuse to give spoilers to anyone who hasn’t played it, but we’ll just say that never before has a title card made us so confused and happy at the same time.
This brings us back to the question we talked about at the beginning – no, not the apartment question, Mom. stop asking – because, while we reiterate that being a video game journalist hasn’t diminished our enjoyment of playing games, there’s honestly only one game that we’d say has been actively improved by having played it for work, and that’s Dragon’s Dogma 2.
Written by Dave Aubrey for GLHF
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