Much has been said about the performance of Dragon’s Dogma 2. We had to find out the truth for ourselves.
When Dragon’s Dogma came out in 2012, much of the world was still preoccupied with Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls Part V: Skyrim. It was a difficult time to be releasing an open-world fantasy RPG. In combination with the reality that the game had major performance issues on consoles and that it was not available on PC, I certainly didn’t give it a look on release, and likely many of you reading this were the same.The title finally came to Windows PCs almost four years later in 2016. This version included all of the updates and expansions that the console versions received, as well as being a quality port with excellent performance and stability. Many Steam gamers snatched it up and put hundreds of hours into it, making it a surprise success for Capcom. The success of the PC version was ultimately a major factor in the company’s decision to greenlight a sequel.
Now, Dragon’s Dogma 2 has arrived, and on Steam alone it’s showing over 200,000 players today. That’s a success by any metric, but it likely has sold many more copies on Xbox and PlayStation consoles too. There has been some controversy caused by individuals misrepresenting the story after seeing a smattering of one-time shortcut DLCs in the Steam store, but we’ll talk about that later. Instead, let’s talk about Dragon’s Dogma 2’s performance.
Much has been made of the game’s performance problems. Alex Battaglia of Digital Foundry, posting on Reddit, says that there are major performance issues in the game’s cities. Specifically, he notes that «they are always occurring there on machines of all types at all times in the city.» We were surprised, as loading up the game, it was quite smooth on our test system with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and a GeForce RTX 4080.
However, that’s because we hadn’t made it to the city of Vernworth, the capital of Vermund, the game’s starting area.
