Dragon’s Dogma 2 has finally been released and the initial player numbers are euphoric. The first user reviews are less so, only 40 percent of the reviews on Steam are positive.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 seems, at least according to the first reviews, to be one of the top titles of the year. And the first player numbers also look quite positive. On Steam, over 184,000 players were playing the game at the same time, which catapulted the title straight into the top 10 most played games of the last 24 hours.
This far exceeds the launch of its predecessor, at that time only 27,368 players could bring themselves to dive into the game at the same time and newer releases such as Granblue Fantasy: Relink (114,054) and Persona 3 Reload (45,002) cannot keep up.
However, satisfaction looks different, because Dragon’s Dogma 2 is currently being heavily discounted in user ratings – only 40 percent of the reviews are positive. It’s not just the game’s performance that is criticized – Capcom had already admitted that areas with lots of NPCs make the CPUs sweat. The controversial Denuvo copy protection is also a thorn in the side of many.
The main point of criticism, however, is microtransactions, which have now been discovered by players but were apparently not communicated in advance by Capcom. It is unclear whether this or their sheer existence is causing players to rage. For example, over twenty microtransactions for Dragon’s Dogma 2 are listed on Steam, with a total value of over 40 dollars. They range from character editing to fast travel and from reviving to “Rift Crystals” – an in-game currency.
Above all, the fact that gameplay elements such as fast travel or character changes appear in microtransactions heats up people’s minds. “Why can I only create one character and then have to pay 2 dollars to customize it again? How greedy do you have to be,” said one of the reviews. Another calls the microtransactions in a single-player game “predatory.”
It will be interesting to see whether and how Capcom reacts to the review bombing.