Dragon’s Dogma was the action-RPG for people who wanted to play alone, but didn’t want to feel alone. By far its most charming feature was the Pawn system, whereby you’d create an AI-controlled sidekick and hire two others, shared online by other players, to accompany you on your journey through a fantasy wilderness of tumbledown castles and goblin campfires. Pawns make dependable companions in many respects - pinning enemies for you to tag-team kill, healing or resurrecting you, opening chests you’ve missed, and enchanting your weapons at the outset of each skirmish. But what makes them fun to be around is that they’re a bunch of massive buffoons.
Pawns talk without cease as you explore: a steady patter of idle observations about well-wrought staircases and the local fish trade, advice about the bestiary and, in the case of Pawns recruited from other players, quest tips based on time in their own worlds - all of it couched in the game’s quirky faux-medieval dialect. Pawn dialogue is highly context-sensitive, and very often, nonsensical. They’ll climb into fountains and complain that they’re wet, and launch into pithy descriptions of monsters even as they’re set on fire. It ought to be maddening, but somehow, it never is - probably because the Pawns never actually attempt to be witty like ally characters in, say, Xenoblade Chronicles. They’re resolutely straight foils in a realm of lions with snakes for tails, chaotic boulder traps, unpleasantly lusty ogres, and players who push the wrong buttons and make random decisions on the fly. Well, pawns are back in Dragon’s Dogma 2, which I recently played an hour of, and they’re chattier than ever.
More of the same? Awesome, can’t wait!
Some people were annoyed by the pawns, but personally I loved them. Their chatter can get repetitive at times, but there’s also a lot of detail and subtlety that’s easy to miss. Each pawn gains knowledge of different enemies, quests, and areas as they interact with them, and what they say depends on how well they know the subject they’re talking about. If they know nothing, they will react with surprise or curiosity, otherwise they will offer advice of varying helpfulness. One time I encountered a cockatrice, and my pawns started yelling to watch out for the griffin. At first I thought it was a bug, but after the fight I realized they had some knowledge of these bird-like enemy types but not enough, and as a result they confused one for the other. Now that’s what I call attention to detail!
That actually sounds really awesome.
I never quite got into it, because it was just too old mechanically by the time I heard of it, but it did feel like there was potential.
I’m honestly at a loss about how it’s “mechanically old” and how it could possibly be updated. It’s been a few years since I last played it, but I thought it was basically perfect and even did some things few if any other games do, such as the whole grappling/climbing system.
Even the basics of movement and combat are super janky. It’s very obviously a very old game.