Nintendo Direct Offers New Dragon Quest X Details

Dragon Quest X, the upcoming MMO-styled sequel to the long-running Square Enix RPG series, had a few new pieces of information announced during this evening's Nintendo Direct video presentation.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said that though the game will normally require players to pay for play time, the first 20 hours will be free for all new buyers of the game. There will also be free "Kids Time" play periods, two hours per day, in the afternoons in Japan. Mr. Iwata then announced there will be another event in the near future dedicated entirely to Dragon Quest X details, and promised a new 11-minute long trailer will air after the conclusion of the Nintendo Direct video tonight.

Dragon Quest X launches this August in Japan for Wii, and a Wii U version is also in development. We've yet to learn any details about American plans for the game, but perhaps NOA President Reggie Fils-Aime will address that in the North American video presentation scheduled to air in less than an hour.



Source : ign[dot]com

Dragon's Dogma Review

Dragon's Dogma Review:

For as much as Dragon’s Dogma is a new IP for developer/publisher Capcom, there’s a lot about it that is strikingly familiar, not that’s a bad thing. It shares a lot of Monster Hunter’s DNA especially when it comes to boss battles. Many of the game’s fast-paced combat elements are partly due to the combined experience of veteran Capcom designers who have worked on several of the company’s action franchises. And of course, there’s the western RPG influence that is quite pervasive in Dragon’s Dogma. So it’s all the more of an achievement that this game manages to carve an identity all its own especially as its release rounds off a six-month ‘role-players’ paradise’ that includes Skyrim, The Witcher II Enhanced Edition, and Diablo III.

He Stole Your Heart

The initial set-up is as traditional as a fantasy plot could be, painting the playable character as the obligatory “chosen one” world savior known as the Arisen. This humble hero naturally comes from a quiet fishing village in the land of Gransys, which ends up being terrorized by a dragon. How the Arisen was chosen is the unusual part, as the dragon literally rips out the hero’s heart to signify this designation. Then the dragon departs, as if to say, “If you want your heart back, come and catch me, but not before you rid this world of its evils.”

Being the Arisen affords many privileges, not the least of which includes having access to ‘pawns’, warriors and spellcasters that will form your party, with a maximum of three companions at any time. One of these pawns will actually be designed by the player, using the same deep character creation tools that formed your Arisen. While devoted, your primary pawn is certainly not one-dimensional. This warrior might lack the backstory and character development that JRPG fans look for with their party members, but at least he’s reliable and his significance to the story actually grows as you get closer to recovering your heart.

Dragon’s Dogma sticks to traditional action RPG combat mechanics, starting you off with simple light/heavy attacks and blocking; and it doesn’t take long to learn new abilities specific to your class. Yet a collection of new talents is only as good as the control scheme that lets the player wield these skills. 

Dragon’s Dogma has sufficiently created a system where you can assign multiple special moves and access them with ease by holding one of the bumpers. The catch is that you can only learn new skills and assign them to the controller by visiting an innkeeper.

Pawns At Play

The pawns’ unquestioning servitude makes them easy to command and rely on, provided that they’re well-leveled. Capcom manages to keep the command-issuing mechanic very simple, letting you choose between “Help!”, “Go! (toward the enemy)”, and “Follow me!”. Pawns have enough sense to be proactive whenever a monster is nearby. It can be gratifying to occasionally hang back while you let your companions do all the dirty work. How you influence your primary pawn’s behavior is very subtle, but he will perform complementary to your play style and can be honed further by engaging in brief heart to heart chats back in town.

This pawn system is also another sign of the growing interest in asynchronous multiplayer. It's a wide-reaching term that encompasses everything from the typical Facebook social game to the enhanced leaderboard challenges of competitive titles like SSX and Ridge Racer Unbounded. Dragon's Dogma's multiplayer belongs to the ‘indirect assistance’ camp, drawing comparisons to From Software’s immensely challenging Demon's Souls. Yet unlike the hint-dropping mechanic of Demon's Souls, the sense of community in Dragon's Dogma centers around the ability to share your pawn with others and in turn, borrow other players' pawns for use in your party. It should be noted that while the primary pawn you’ve crafted will level up alongside you, the other pawns won’t. So it’s in your best interest to keep updating your party with new secondary pawns that are near or at your current level.

Never Short On Advice

The pawns’ ability to jump to friends’ sessions make them very busy beings. When you’re sleeping at an inn, they’re off helping other heroes like yourself with their quests. These include missions that you may not have signed up for just yet. Even if no one in real life actually rented your pawn, this companion will at least come back from an imaginary session and bring back gift items and quest knowledge. Whatever your pawn’s new experiences, he uses that to make your own adventures run smoother. Their advice is most useful when it involves pointing out enemy weaknesses, and it’s gratifying see the instant results of targeting and hitting those soft spots.

These pawns remark with trepidation when exploring catacombs and often comment about majestic cliffside ocean views. These observations help give your companions a sense of personality yet they also end up sounding disingenuous when they repeat the same line over and over, or worse, when another pawn uses the exact same words down the line.

Capcom is erring on the idea that there's no such thing as too much information. Unfortunately this is a negative when you're in a very involving boss fight and your three pawns are talking all at once. The worst part is when one of them actually has something helpful to say, but is drowned out amid the frantic context of the battle. You can toggle on pawn subtitles even though that clutters the HUD. If there was a way to tone down or toggle off the voices, I failed to find it in the Options menu. It’s even worse if you happen to be in a group mission with equally talkative Gransys soldiers. Of course that giant griffon is “a fearsome beast”! It just took out a large chunk of the floor in its latest dive bomb! You don’t have tell me three times in the last 20 seconds!

Talkativeness aside, your pawns are helpful where it counts, chipping away at enemy health and healing you as well, provided one of your party members has a curative spell. If you're a traditionalist melee combatant, diversifying your party with at least one skilled mage adds valuable magical offense; this pawn can even add temporary elemental bonuses to your weapons.

Like A Boss, Mount A Boss

Dragon’s Dogma encourages offensive assertiveness a bit more than defense, which is why the sooner you learn how to grab, the better. Fatally tossing dazed enemies off cliffs is as satisfying the first time as much as the hundredth time. The ease in grabbing hold of a creature ten times the size of the Arisen not only draws obvious comparisons to Shadow of the Colossus, but also provides a contrast to the less substantive gargantuan boss battles of the last several years, the ones that have been way too dependent on quick time events. The only action that qualifies as a QTE in Dragon's Dogma is in shaking the left stick in order to free oneself from a monster's grasp.

For a brief moment, that spot on the back or head of a boss becomes a safe zone to simply wail on the beast. The risk comes when a bipedal creature like a cyclops manages to take its arm back and grab you for a painful squeeze. It's impressive enough the first and second time, when you witness this enemy display the presence of mind to proactively grab you. Same goes for the smaller ogres; they can get easily frustrated with your climbing ways that they'll more than likely leap up in the air and land on their backs in the hopes of rushing you. These are opponents that are to be taken seriously, not just because of their thick hides, but also due to their tactics. Each boss has at least one trick up their sleeve whether it's the drake's hypnotic ability to turn a pawn against you or a cockatrice's slow and tortuous petrification spell.

Things get dicey when boss encounters occur in the woods, which opens up a can of wyrms in questionable camera work and minor collision. It especially the case when dueling against a drake, where its wings pass through trees and its penchant for low-level flying within the wood can be a headache with the camera. Speaking of questionable camera work, the game will occasionally zoom to a close-up of a pawn if it’s about to execute a dramatic move during combat. 4 out of 5 times it’s difficult to see what the pawn is actually trying to do and it’s just as hard to tell whether their maneuver was actually successful.

Diehard fans of Monster Hunter will recognize some recycled animations when winged creatures take to the air and when particular bosses collapse. Goblins scream and shake upon seeing you, skeletons ominously rise from their pile of bones, and annoying snow harpies pick you up so they could drop you from a great height. And it’s easy to feel sorry for an immobilized saurian whose tail you just severed but its writhing animation is just so fun to watch. The Arisen and the pawns are equally animated, depending on their active skills. I’m particularly a fan of the move known as the Antler Toss, a full body upper cut so thorough that the Arisen does a 360 to complete the motion. And if you’re the type of gamer who appreciates convincing pony tail hair animation as your heroine runs, Dragon’s Dogma has you covered there too. The only minor blemish is that Capcom didn't implement any character animation when it came to some object interaction like removing coffin lids and pulling switches.

Mission Possible

The mandatory missions spare you the truly challenging boss battles for the first half of the game. And unless you're incredibly creative and thoughtful about your skill advancement, weapon enhancing, and pawn optimizing, you should be ready to grind for a solid portion of your playthrough. A variety of optional quests--many found on the notice boards in urban areas--makes for an obvious goal-oriented alternative to merely leveling up by roaming the map. There’s very little problem solving needed when trying to find the next destination or the next person to speak with in order progress in a mission; it’s a mild case of hand-holding since the game will often mark the target’s location on the minimap. The bulk of the optional assignments are either involve killing specific monsters or escorting an NPC.

The escort missions underscores one of Dragon's Dogma's few shortcomings, taking the player back to 2002 where it felt like every adventure game had escort missions and poorly implemented ones at that. These NPCs certainly need guards for multiple reasons: they can't sprint like you, they can't wield weapons, and they behave like they don't get out much. They will run right through tripwires and they won't follow you down cliffs that can be used as shortcuts no matter how short the drop. If they drop too far back, they'll simply be teleported back to town and your assignment will be classified as a failure. It’s of some small comfort that these NPCs can be healed during the journey.

An Aged Open World

The map of Gransys is reminiscent of most RPG maps where the playable land is just a modest region within a much larger continent, in a world of many continents. Capcom created more than enough ruins and other aged structures to imply a strong sense of history. The little remnants of ancient castles stand in the shadows of existing ones and there are faded gravestones near the edges of seaside cliffs that imply that many, many other adventurers have traversed this land long before you. In fact, Dragon's Dogma's prologue has you controlling a pre-made hero from a time long before the events of the game's main story.

Some will complain that there isn’t enough environmental variety especially considering the expansiveness of Gransys. Sure, the overall landscape does lack cliched areas themed on elements like fire and ice, but such omissions work to the game's benefit in providing a very convincing unified look to the entire landscape. While the majority of the land feels idyllic with its abundance of lush, overgrown grass, Gransys certainly has its share of hostile-looking environments consisting of rough terrain, dead trees, and lethal bodies of water. The studio’s artists and level designers should get a lot of credit for crafting the landscape in a way that transitioning to these many environments feels seamless and natural.

This open world will give you a lot to do beyond the countless straightforward enemy encounters. Explore in the evening and you might find yourself rescuing a captive human caged by goblins or you might come to the aid of ambushed travelers. It's an added positive that it's very easy to veer off the beaten path where enemies who are out of your league are only a couple hundred yards away.

And Gransys doesn't mess around when it comes to nighttime exploration. Unlike many other RPGs with day/night cycles, the world of Dragon's Dogma is one devoid of celestial aids like moons that are bright enough to cast shadows. It's nearly pitch black if you forget your lantern or run out of oil (if you're a masochist, you'd might as well turn off your HUD map). Those committed to grinding--especially in the interest of making the later battles more manageable--should try facing the challenges of nighttime combat. It helps break any potential monotony as new enemies come out at night, the most common being a Capcom speciality: zombies.

Another positive indicator of the breadth of an expansive RPG map is by including entire castles that can be missed depending on the choices you make. Choosing or ignoring particular missions on the notice board will have long term effects, not to mention the trivial and meaningful favors you can do for specific townsfolk. What is particularly notable is how some side missions affect how some story missions play out. One of the game’s most spectacular battles is actually missable if you happened to ignore a specific fetching quest earlier in the game. And don't be surprised to come across a number of story-based crossroads where you might have to decide the fates of key NPCs. Yes, there will also be an opportunity to romance at least one of the supporting characters.

East Makes West

The pawns’ actions and assistance in battle ultimately have more value than any exploration advice that they can give. It's just as well; even if a pawn can tell you the right way to the top of a tower, many of us who play open world RPGs look to this genre for its sense of discovery (not to mention to satisfy our compulsion to color in unexplored parts of maps). Since Dragon’s Dogma presents us with enough challenges and incentives to make us want to level up and grind, why should we take the shortest route to a boss?

Dragon’s Dogma manages the rare feat of being a Japanaese-developed game that successfully emulates many of the design sensibilities and aesthetics of Western RPGs. Both the pawn system and the tactile nature of the boss fights are the exemplary features that ensures this game defies the categorization of being derivative. This is one of those promising rough-around-the-edges experiences where you can’t help but want a sequel even before your first playthrough is complete.

Editor's Note: One word of warning for owners of plasma TVs, though - Dragon's Dogma is letterboxed, meaning there are black bars at the top and bottom of the screen during gameplay. This was likely done to save screen real estate and improve performance, but if your TV is prone to burn-in or image retention, make sure you take the proper precautions.

Also, Dragon's Dogma was reviewed using an Xbox 360 copy of the game; however, we also played the PS3 version, and found no differences. If further investigation reveals any differences between the 360 edition and the PS3 edition of the game, this review will be updated to reflect those differences. 

Source : http://www.g4tv.com

Dragon's Dogma Review

Capcom’s fantasy RPG Dragon’s Dogma has been a long time coming, and it’s looked more and more interesting every time we’ve seen it, boasting robust action-focussed gameplay and an innovative Pawn system that lets you enlist avatars created by other players to fight alongside you. It often feels like an offline MMO, with a vast, scenic and perilous world to explore and a selection of thousands of characters to choose as your companions. It’s an interesting example of genre and style-mixing within the RPG, pulling in elements of traditional Japanese role-playing and churning them together with action-RPG physicality, open-world adventuring and MMO party tactics.

Dragon’s Dogma regularly reminds you of other games. There are flashes of Dark Souls in the real-time combat, of Skyrim in its open wildernesses, and of Shadow of the Colossus in its large-scale battles. Sometimes, these associations work in Dragon’s Dogma’s favour; other times, they just remind you how short the game falls of these outstanding inspirations. It offers a lot of innovative ideas and a real sense of adventure, but it’s also rough-edged and sometimes oddly hollow.

The plot centres on the rebirth of an ancient dragon, which runs around ravaging the land. You can customise your avatar down to the tinest, most insignificant detail – no matter how carefully you adjust the sliders, though, you’ll probably end up looking a bit weird thanks to the game’s eerie character models. After you unwisely try to take the dragon down with a rusty sword after it attacks your fishing village, it plucks out your heart and eats it. (A word of warning: it turns out that watching a reasonably accurate facsimile of yourself get eviscerated by a giant dragon is rather uncomfortable.) Afterwards, you are reborn as the Arisen, and set out to get your heart back.

After that exciting start, Dragon’s Dogma’s plot pretty much disappears for the next 35 or so hours, reappearing at the end to deliver a conclusion so bonkers that it’s destined to turn up in Weirdest Endings lists for years to come. There’s also a romantic plot thread that revolves around a certain fair maiden – which, if you’re playing as a female character, makes Dragon’s Dogma an unexpectedly progressive medieval fantasy.

“The story, characters and quests are about as interesting as porridge.

But for the meat of the game, the story, characters and quests are about as interesting as porridge. Everyone talks in this faux olde-worlde way that gets really irritating (“Prithee, Arisen, there be aught to find in yonder cavern, most like.”) There’s nothing gripping about the game world, which borrows heavily from Tolkien without adding much of its own personality. The capital city is strangely deserted, and there’s not much life anywhere in the towns. All the interesting stuff is to be found out in the great outdoors, where trolls and ogres hunker in winding mountain passes and griffins nest on clifftops. Outside, Dragon’s Dogma can look gorgeous, with mist-draped scenery that stretches far into the distance.

To make up for unimaginative fiction and repetitive quest design, Dragon’s Dogma has excellent combat. You start off by picking a class from fighter, ranger or mage, but after a few hours you can start switching between them and developing hybrid classes, becoming a magic archer or an assassin. As your character levels up, you gain points to be spent on skills that liven up the combat, from nasty-looking skewering strikes for warriors to conjured orbs of magic energy that shoot lightning bolts at enemies nearby. Though your avatar levels up passively, you always have complete control over what they can do. Each class comes with benefits outside of combat, too; mages can levitate, whilst warriors can duck and roll off higher ledges.

Whenever the enemies start to get boring – and they do, especially towards the latter third of the game – you can switch up your skill set and weapons to keep things fresh. Vitally, each class is fun to play with for different reasons. As a mage you can cast walls of fire from a staff, which is pretty awesome, but as a melee character you can climb up the bodies of a really big foe and drive your sword right into its fleshy bits, hanging on for dear life as it tries to throw you off. This flexibility carries the entire game, keeping you interested in Dragon’s Dogma even when the story and quest design give you no reason to care.

Just as important as your own skills are those of your companions – your Pawns. Dragon’s Dogma gives you one permanent partner that you can customise and develop to your liking, and two others that you can hire from the Rift, a kind of netherworld whether other player’s Pawns gather. You can hire anyone you want, whenever you want, and take advantage of their battle skills and knowledge. If you’re stuck on a quest, hiring a pawn who’s already done it can really help out. If you’re not online, the game provides some standard Pawns to choose from, but playing with other people’s creations feels more personal, like picking a party for an MMO raid – except with NPCs.

The makeup of your party is vital to success in Dragon’s Dogma, because this is a difficult game. Pawns are neither enormously smart and adaptive nor face-palmingly stupid – they’ll support you in battle, but if you’re up against an ogre or a chimaera, expect to have to take the lead. Being an open-world RPG, you’re likely to find danger almost everywhere you go, especially if you venture off the path and into the forests and caves, where the gloom encroaches upon your visibility and powerful monsters wait to slice you in twain and send you right back to your last save.

It’s unforgiving, certainly – investing in the right equipment is often the difference between dying ignominiously in some cavern or coming back with spoils. But sometimes it feels as if your numerical level is more important than your skill level, which can undermine the challenge. It’s unlikely that a brave attempt to fell a monster that’s just slightly beyond what the game wants you to take on at that moment will end in success, robbing you of those joyous moments of unexpected, hard-won victory that make stories out of your experiences in games like Skyrim and Dark Souls.

“All the effort that’s gone into the combat and character development has left other elements of Dragon’s Dogma feeling unfinished.

It’s clear, unfortunately, that all the effort that’s gone into the combat and character development has left other elements of Dragon’s Dogma feeling unfinished. Graphical glitches and technical problems plague the game from the start, and never go away. There are times when you’ll run up to a quest marker on your map to find that the person you’re supposed to talk to simply isn’t there, and you have to wait five or ten seconds for them to stream in. Fights out in the open wilds lose a touch of their drama when a griffin’s head or a Cyclops’ club disappears through the scenery. Some equipment doesn’t place nice with the character models, so your character’s elbow might poke through their shield when they run.

Walking along a road, your Pawns might start going crazy over some invisible enemy that will then suddenly appear out of nowhere. Big fights cause slowdown that can freeze the screen for seconds at a time on the Xbox 360 version. Dragon’s Dogma runs much better on the PlayStation 3 than on the 360, with a smoother frame rate and fewer streaming problems; if the 360 version is your only choice, a hard disk install is mandatory to make the game playable.

These technical problems are enough to sour the experience for anyone, but if you persist with Dragon’s Dogma, it gets more rewarding the more time you put into it. Where the game really succeeds is in providing a sense of adventure. As you press further and further out from the capital city, Gran Soren, you really do begin to feel like you’re on the frontier, exploring lands that human feet have rarely trodden. When night falls, you immediately start looking around for shelter – not because you’re told to, but because night is dangerous in Dragon’s Dogma’s world, and if you don’t hole up somewhere safe you’ll almost certainly die.

This palpable sense of danger makes quests feel exciting, even when their goals are uninspiring. Health doesn’t fully regenerate after a fight, so the longer you’re outdoors for, the harder things get. Hiding out in the wilderness in an abandoned fort, waiting for the sun to rise with only your Pawns for company, is an exhilarating feeling, as is bringing down a griffin or golem through a combination of tenacity and luck. You’ll breathe a sigh of relief every single time you return safely to an inn to rest, even 30 hours into the game.

Source : http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/05/21/dragons-dogma-review

IGN Live Presents: Dragon's Dogma

Capcom is set to release the action RPG Dragon's Dogma On Tuesday, May 22. But you can get a good long look at it a day early during IGN's live stream from 10:00AM-Noon Pacific.

What: Dragon's Dogma Live Stream

When: Monday, May 21, 10:00AM-Noon Pacific

Where: Here in this article and on IGN's new Xbox Live app.

See you Monday!

Source : http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/05/18/ign-live-presents-dragons-dogma