Just don't expect the chugging framerate in towns to disappear.
Written by Jason Venter
Published Apr. 19, 2024
Today, Capcom posted on the Dragon's Dogma 2 account on X to let the game's fans know that an update is planned and will launch as soon as it is ready for the various impacted platforms. The response from the community has been positive in general, with one exception: many folks are dismayed that general performance issues remain unaddressed.
To hear people talk, Dragon's Dogma 2 is virtually unplayable because its framerate isn't consistent. This seems to be a recurring complaint with virtually every major game released in a post-2015 world. At some point, players got the idea that they can't live with 60 FPS. In the case of Dragon's Dogma 2, however, some of those complaints are warranted. You can be running a powerful PC that exceeds the system recommendations and still see drops below the expected 60 FPS. In some towns, such as Vernworth, it's not uncommon for the game to drop to a level that's difficult to miss even if you don't typically notice such things.
Angry players are blaming everything from the DRM to poor optimization, to Capcom's understandable desire to release one of its biggest games ahead of the fiscal year's end. But while the update won't do anything to appease FPS diehards, it will at least fix the various other issues that more obviously impact actual gameplay for everyone. Here's the list Capcom shared in its X post:
The first item on the list is the "dragonsplague." After spending a lot of time with the game, you may notice your characters suffer from this ailment, which is supposed to be a feature and not a bug. It makes them less responsive and apparently causes other issues, to help make the master/pawn relationship more tense. The pawns mention the condition basically any time you visit the rift. From what I can tell, this affects you only when you recruit pawns from that dimension. None of my pawns were ever impacted because I worked almost exclusively with the ones who hailed me on the road.
Some of the other updates seem more impactful. Treasure chests you've already opened will stop appearing on the map, which is big news. Maybe the pawns will even stop talking about them constantly? Pawns will stop talking about other things, too, and in other cases may have more to say instead of falling silent the minute you actually want them to share their wisdom. Those are good fixes, if properly implemented. I'm also excited that escort missions will stop failing for apparently random reasons.
In general, the promised updates will make the game better. Hopefully, Capcom will follow those updates with some improvements to performance, though it's important to remember that a lot of people experiencing the worst of the game's performance are probably running it on computers that have no business attempting to make it work. Right now, the Steam page contains a warning that "Framerate might drop in graphics-intensive scenes." That's not changing anytime soon.
