IbizaPocholo
NeoGAFs Kent Brockman
Dragon's Dogma: The Most Influential Game No One Ever Copied - IGN
We talk to Hideaki Itsuno about his strangest creation - and why no one's stolen its ideas.
uk.ign.com
Don’t take my word for it, take creator Hideaki Itsuno’s. I ask him what he thinks Dragon’s Dogma did well that other games haven’t matched. He can’t keep it to one answer: “I think the three-dimensional combat based around climbing onto monsters’ bodies still holds up against other titles now. I also haven’t seen the pawn system anywhere else since. The way forgeries worked in the game was very clever, and I also think that Dragon’s Dogma has the best and scariest night-time of any RPG!”
I emailed the director to talk about the odd legacy of this game - a passion project for him, albeit a passion project with the kind of budget you’re given if you’re the person that heads up the Devil May Cry series. It’s a game I also love dearly, and have just finished again by means of the excellent Switch port. And while playing it the best part of a decade later, I realise we’ve still not seen anything else quite like it - never mind a sequel. There seems no one better to talk with about why that might be.
I start by asking Itsuno why he thought the game got that slightly muddled first reaction, and he is decidedly more forthright than I expected: “The pawn system and the game’s interpretation of RPG gameplay via realtime action were, I think, difficult to understand by players at first glance. To be honest, I’m not even sure all the internal staff fully understood it either.” Then I ask him what he feels the game’s key innovations were: he mentions the pawn system and Capcom’s action being applied in an RPG context. Essentially, the most important parts of the game were also the biggest perceived barriers to entry.
I ask if he purposely created something that would baffle people, a shock to the established system: “My approach to game design has always been to envision a game that I would want to play, and reverse engineer from that vision. For Dragon's Dogma I wanted to create a game where you could be connected with a lot of people but not have to worry about the courtesies one generally has to consider when playing online with others, and I wanted to play an RPG with the more troublesome aspects stripped away - so I designed the game to fulfill those two requirements. At the time there was no game that fulfilled either of these aspects. As a result, you have a game that plays like nothing that's ever come before.”
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