Capcom is about to completely defang one of the coolest mechanics in Dragon’s Dogma 2, and I’m pissed about it. Come the game’s August update, the infamous Dragonsplague will be an utter non-issue, and I think Capcom is cowardly for doing it.
If you don’t know what Dragonsplague is and ever intend to play Dragon’s Dogma 2, please get out of here, because it’s very cool and you should experience it firsthand, preferably before the August update nerfs it into inconsequentiality. Everyone else, listen up:
Dragonsplague is a “disease” in Dragon’s Dogma 2 that can afflict your Pawns, the NPC traveling companions you can create or borrow from other players to fight alongside you. And it isĀ terrifying. In its current form, if your Pawn gets the plague (which can be contracted from encounters with dragons or spread via other Pawns), you won’t initially be able to tell. The symptoms start off slowly: they’ll get stronger in combat, and more aggressive. They’ll start to disobey commands and will speak in a very independent manner at first, eventually bordering on insulting. They’ll get headaches. As it gets worse, their eyes will glow red.
In its final stage, triggered after staying in an inn, the Pawn will transform into a dragon and destroy the entire town you’re in, and all the people in it.
This is so cool. It’s horrible, yeah, and it sucks to lose a town of questgivers all of a sudden in a game with no save scumming. But it’s genuinely a really neat mechanic that highlights the wonderful weirdness of Dragon’s Dogma 2 and the emphasis on making choice and consequence have some meaning. It forces you to pay close attention to your Pawns and be willing to make sacrifices if you think one of them might have contracted it, because basically the only way to get rid of it is to either dismiss the infected Pawn or chuck them off a cliff while frantically watching your other Pawns for signs they’ve contracted it too. It’s also given players the ability to troll one another by putting infected Pawns out into the ether for others to hire unwittingly.
Of course, a lot of people hate Dragonsplague because it snuck up on them (just look at how many guides are out there on how to avoid it/get rid of it), and the criticism has pushed Capcom to make a number of adjustments over the last two years. Some were necessary: originally there were situations in which a Pawn could just get Dragonsplague and immediately transform that night, leaving players with no ability to detect or head off the disease or even realize what had happened. There was also no way to tell originally if a Pawn had the plague when you hired them online, so trolling was a little too easy. Subsequent updates have fixed those problems, and also perhaps made it even easier to spot and stop the plague: there’s now a tutorial the first time an infected Pawn is in your party, its progress has been slowed significantly, and the red eyes are even more obvious than before. And there’s a Casual Mode added to the game that, among other things, keeps Pawns from destroying villages at all. To me, those changes were more than enough to keep Dragonsplague from being a game-destroying disaster (also, you can revive entire villages with an Eternal Wakestone anyway if you still screw it up).
So of course, with the upcoming August update to Dragon’s Dogma 2, Capcom is nerfing Dragonsplague again in a way that will trivialize it completely. A new item, Dragonsbaulk Draught, is being added to the game that justĀ straight-up cures Dragonsplague, and Pawns will get new dialogue toĀ tell you about it so there’s no mystery around there being a cure. What’s more, afflicted Pawns will now becomeĀ even stronger than before, gaining new abilities that let them stun large enemies and mow through small ones. Honestly, it’s worse than nerfing it: they’ve completely flipped the purpose of Dragonsplague. Before, it was something to be feared and avoided. In August, it will be something to be sought out for the sick buffs, and then cured easily before it can cause any real problems. It’s PokĆ©rus for Pawns.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a game about both reckoning with the direct consequences of your actions, and also about finding your way forward when the indifferent chaos of the universe decides to screw with you even when you do your very best. It’s weird to do a total 180Ā° on such a major component of pushing that theme forward, particularly two years after the game came out, at a time when players largely aren’t being caught off guard by the plague anyway. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is supposed to make me suffer! It’s supposed to flip the bird at me, damn it! I’m now just praying the DLC introduces some new bizarro mechanic that ruins my day in a currently inconceivable way so I can continue to have the true Dragon’s Dogma 2 experience. Though I guess if that’s the spirit I’m going for, I probably shouldn’t complain about potentially having to replay a chunk of the game to access the DLC, huh?
Dragon’s Dogma 2‘s Dark Arisen expansion is out October 9 alongside a Switch 2 edition, and I hope it really messes me up, because after the August update, Dragonsplague sure won’t.
