opinion: Capcom”s action role-playing game Dragon”s Dogma is currently experiencing a small renaissance on Steam. This is happening quite rightly, if only because of the ingenious minion system in the game.
I”m at an age now where I only play multiplayer titles competitively because I”m allowed to shoot my fellow players there with impunity. I”m just sick of them for good: guys who compulsively post some DPS meter every two minutes, damage dealers who never wait for the tank, tanks who never wait for the healer, healers who go to the bathroom for half an hour without feedback in chat.
Something about your mudder and Chuck Norris in the trade channel. Guy who signed up as a tank for the dungeon runs around in a leather robe and with daggers. Replacement tank doesn”t get the desired loot from the first boss and leaves the group without warning. And on and on.
Wouldn”t it be great if you could simulate these players somehow and reduce the unbearable asshole factor a little? Dragon”s Dogma takes care of this through the so-called minions and a fascinating, unusually complex AI. In a way, there is multiplayer there, only without multiplayer. Because here you still interact a little with other players, but only in a roundabout way and without them being able to make your life hell.
Table of Contents
What are vassals anyway?
In addition to your main character, you also create a second character in Dragon”s Dogma for whom you also define appearance, gender, class, abilities and everything else. This is great because you can, for example, go out as a rogue and send your minion out as a warrior who absorbs damage. Or maybe you feel called to be a heavy melee fighter yourself and would rather have a healer at your side. So far, so ordinary.
In addition, you can now invite two more minions into your party who have been created by other players through this system. In other words, these characters were created by other users on the internet, but are controlled by an AI when you invite them into your party.
Sounds strange at first, but it”s incredibly practical from the very first moment: You decide yourself which group composition you like best, you have control over the loot and which quests are played, and your minions don”t suddenly have to AFK or grumble when you want to take a break for ten minutes.
Using a search function, you can specify whether the desired comrades are specialised in melee or ranged combat, have healing or certain elemental spells, whether they are more likely to work in support or fight on the front line, and so on. Before you hire them, you can check out all the skills and spells of your temporary slaves… ahem, companions. Very handy!
Surprisingly human
Once you”ve assembled your party, you”ll move through the open game world and dungeons, pursuing your quests, with your minions at your side, using the equipment, skills and spells provided to them by their creators. If you start the game as a newly-minted low-level adventurer and hire inexperienced hired help, they will still be bumbling around the game world.
The first time you encounter a cyclops or a chimera, your colleagues are as baffled in battle as you are. But the more often they kill certain enemy types alongside you, the more they learn about their weak points. Not only do they exploit these, but they also explain them to you loudly in battle: “It”s weak against fire! Poke its eye out!”.
If you send the minions away again, for example because you want to level up and hire stronger help, they return to their creators with their newly acquired knowledge. At the same time, your minion goes on adventures with other players while you are offline and learns new strategies for fighting enemies.
You can even give your comrades ratings for appearance, helpfulness and strength and give them a gift along the way. The more such a character is hired and sent on quests, the better and more effective he becomes in battle over time. Where at the beginning they hit the ground wildly and uncoordinatedly, suddenly really cool strategies emerge.
Team play instead of chaos
In addition to learning by doing, you can fine-tune by talking to minions and encouraging certain behaviours and talking them out of less useful habits. Do you want your companion to loot? If so, what and how much?
Should the warrior prefer to fight on the front lines and focus on the strongest monster, or stay close to the wizard and protect him from harm? Should your cowl-armed staff fighter prefer to cast supportive or maximum devastating spells? Everything is customisable, planning is half the battle. The results can be seen quickly.
It”s a lot of fun when the AI warrior, who at the beginning still ran around like a headless chicken, now grabs bandits from behind and holds them for you so that you can stab them in peace. It”s also great when the mage learns that wolves don”t like fire and doesn”t just selfishly throw fireballs, but sets fire to the weapons of the whole group and helps everyone.
Or just let the tank use his shield as a springboard for the rogue – who then catapults himself into the air and jumps on gryphons to knife them in flight. The combat system has a steeper learning curve than, say, Skyrim, but once you”ve got it down, you don”t want to go back. The minions do learn a few useful other tricks, though.
Blabla parallel worlds or something
Dragon”s Dogma handles minions much like Dark Souls handles its summons, phantoms, and other multiplayer features: multiple co-existing realities, time streams, some abstruse excuse for your AI party members to possibly have completed quests before you even discover them.
Sounds totally confusing, but it”s enormously helpful: if you accept a mission in the game that one of your minions has already completed alongside another player, that character is familiar with the quest and can give you useful advice. For example, when I had to clear a fortress besieged by monsters, an AI companion pointed out a shortcut to the fortress. An inexperienced minion would not have known it and I would have taken a diversion.
Many quests in Dragon”s Dogma are not quite obvious. Yes, often there”s just a map marker to a dungeon, you flatten everything there, and then you go home again. But sometimes you”re supposed to find things or people whose exact location isn”t on the map, and you actually have to search a bit (or open the wiki if you”re not that ambitious, but heyho). It”s not just a gimmick that an AI companion can give his opinion on a quest. You”re really grateful for their help at that moment.
Am I beautiful?
To determine which minions are especially popular in the community, who is considered especially cool designed, helpful or powerful and accordingly often borrowed, also gets a good place in the minion ranking. It”s a vanity feast that even I couldn”t escape when the game came out for Nintendo Switch a few years ago.
There I created a Dark Elf Rogue, complete with pointy ears, red eyes, black skin and white hair, totally unique, I haven”t seen it like this anywhere else in the game. I trained her like crazy, she knew all the monsters and all the quests, and players hired her so often that she ended up in the top ten with top ratings.
Then one day I was thrilled to discover that His Clinginess himself was playing Dragon”s Dogma on Switch and borrowed my Dark Elf. When he was done with her, he skipped all the ratings and gifts, I got the automatic 3/5 stars on everything, my overall rating went down permanently and then a week later it wasn”t even enough for the top 100. Yes, I know, it”s totally pointless and doesn”t mean anything, but at that moment it was untoll. Thanks, boss!
Play it at last!
When I mentioned Dragon”s Dogma the other day, many of you commented that you couldn”t warm up to the game because the battle system was so unfamiliar and the gameplay was a bit lame and tough. That”s both true, but the game still deserves a second chance.
When, after a little time to get used to the game, you understand the classes, abilities, minions and the combat system and suddenly find yourself climbing around on cyclops and gouging out their eyes, daggering away griffins in full flight and, as a mage, summoning entire glaciers, huge tornadoes and meteor showers, it not only looks extremely cool, but above all is still a lot of fun and just feels really good.
When you unlock the hybrid classes and shoot elemental arrows with the magic bow or hurl magic projectiles as a mystical knight and slash your opponents with swords and clubs, the game really gets going. Above all, you can get it (on Steam) at the time of this writing for a whopping 84 percent off, and it”s currently priced at something around three-fifty. You can”t go wrong for that at all. If you can”t do anything with Steam, there”s always the version on (GoG).
