Highlights

  • Capcom has addressed the Dragon's Dogma 2 player backlash on Steam, focusing on issues like microtransactions and frame rate.
  • Players are frustrated with paid DLC items contradicting game design, like Portcrystals which are supposed to be scarce.
  • Capcom responded to complaints, promising bug fixes and save system improvements, but maintained its stance on paid DLC items.

Capcom took to the Steam forums to address Dragon's Dogma 2 player backlash after the game was review bombed. Most of the negative criticism is due to the appearance of several microtransaction items after Dragon's Dogma 2 was released on Steam, including some that jeopardize all the claims that director Hideaki Itsuno and the team have made about the game's intended design.

It didn't take long for Dragon's Dogma 2 to break Steam records after its launch, but people soon took notice of the game's frame rate, poor save system, and the amount of DLC content that was popping around. While DLC is standard practice nowadays in most games, some of Dragon's Dogma 2 microtransactions include items that contradict the traveling experience the game has been promising, such as the scarce Portcrystal which facilitates fast travel. On Steam, while the negative feedback lingered around several issues, players were more vocal about the DLC and responded in volume, review bombing Dragon's Dogma 2.

Dragon's Dogma 2 Key Art Header
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Dragon's Dogma 2 Review

Dragon's Dogma 2 is everything fans could want from a Dragon's Dogma sequel, but that also means it has a few rough edges.

Capcom Responds to Player Backlash

After the player backlash, Capcom went to Dragon's Dogma 2 Steam forum to address the players' complaints. The developer said it was aware of the community's comments, apologized, and claimed to be trying to resolve these issues. Capcom opens the post by saying, "We will be addressing crashes and bug fixes starting from those with the highest priority in patches in the near future." Plus, the developer mentions that it will add a feature on Steam to facilitate the process of starting a new game, as Dragon's Dogma 2 save system auto triggers almost constantly and doesn't make it easy to restart the game.

However, most of the players' complaints are regarding the DLC, in which Capcom summed up by stating, "All the items listed below can be obtained in-game or as paid DLC items," suggesting that it will not take any action against the existence of these microtransactions. Players' frustration stems from the fact that some commercialized items go against the design proposal of limiting fast travel in Dragon's Dogma 2, as Hideaki Itsuno preached in his interviews.

At the end of the post, Capcom comments on the frame rate of Dragon's Dogma 2. The developer says that the high CPU usage is directly related to NPCs, "In certain situations where numerous characters appear simultaneously, the CPU usage can be very high and may affect the frame rate." Players took matters into their own hands to resolve this issue and decided to kill a bunch of NPCs in Dragon's Dogma 2 to solve the frame rate problem. Even so, it seems that most of the game's negative reviews will remain until Capcom addresses the microtransactions backlash with more decorum.