Dragon's Dogma 2

Dragon's Dogma 2 was released on March 22, 2024 on the RE Engine, the same engine used in RE4 Remake, RE Village and Monster Hunter Wilds. The director is Hideaki Itsuno, a 30-year Capcom auteur (Devil May Cry 3/4/5 and both Dragon's Dogma games). DD2 became his last game for Capcom: he left the company in August 2024.

You are the Arisen, whose heart was stolen by a dragon. In the fantasy kingdom of Vermund (a pseudo-European medieval setting) you face a political conspiracy, the Sphinx's riddles, the cult of Phaesus, and a path through the desert region of Battahl to the final confrontation with the dragon. The main campaign takes 30 to 50 hours; a full playthrough with the post-release Unmoored World takes up to 100+ hours.

The Pawn system is the series' signature mechanic: you create your main companion from scratch (appearance, voice, personality) and recruit two Pawns from other players' worlds through an asynchronous online exchange. No synchronous online session is needed: companions bring hints and loot from parallel playthroughs straight into your game. There are 10 professions available: from Fighter and Mage to Trickster (illusions, a debut in DD2) and Warfarer (a master class with access to all weapon types). You can change profession in any city.

A single save point is Itsuno's deliberate decision: "If you can reload, you will jump off a cliff without thinking. One save file means that a fall is a real risk." The fallback point is the last inn; several playthroughs require manually copying the save folder. If you are used to many saves, as in Skyrim or Baldur's Gate 3, this will feel unfamiliar; if you like the FromSoftware style with full immersion, it is a plus instead.

Performance: in the city of Vernworth (100+ NPCs, each with full AI calculation every frame) there is a design-level limit, a CPU bottleneck that cannot be removed through settings. Even on an i9-13900K, a stable 60+ FPS in Vernworth is unreachable after all patches (data from OC3D). The DLSS3 Frame Generation patch (June 2024, RTX 40 series only) gives +75 to 80% FPS and bypasses this limit. The September 2024 patch added +22.6% average FPS. On the recommended configuration (i7-10700 + RTX 2080), the game runs at 50 to 60 FPS throughout after the patches.

On release day Capcom added 21 microtransactions ($0.99 to $4.99) without warning, although critics had tested the game without them. All items can be earned in the game: Wakestones drop from quests, and Art of Metamorphosis is bought with in-game currency at any guild. This is pay-to-skip-grind, not pay-to-win. The controversy caused a wave of negative reviews on Steam (launch rating: Mostly Negative), but by June 2026 the rating had recovered to Mixed 67% (43,183 reviews). Metacritic 86 reflects critic scores without the MTX controversy, hence the gap of about 19 points with the Steam user rating.

The Russian interface and subtitles are included; there is no official Russian voice-over, only English and Japanese. Capcom began adding Russian voice-over to series not related to Resident Evil only with Monster Hunter Wilds (February 2025), and DD2 was released in March 2024, before this wave. A fan AI dub exists from SynthVoiceRu (Boosty, $2.99/month, about 18,873 subscribers, version SVR_TTS 2.1, May 2024). It is not an official Capcom voice-over and not a live professional actor dub; the support status after May 2024 has not been publicly confirmed.

Dragon's Dogma 2 is an open-world action RPG from Capcom (created by Hideaki Itsuno, director of Devil May Cry 3/4/5 and the first Dragon's Dogma). You are the Arisen in the fantasy kingdom of Vermund: a party of AI companions (Pawns), 10 professions with the option to change class, and emergent monster encounters. The interface and subtitles are in Russian; there is no official Russian voice-over, only English and Japanese. The single save slot is a deliberate design decision by Itsuno to create a sense of real risk. Metacritic 86, Steam Mixed 67% (the cause is the microtransaction controversy on release day).