Dragon’s Dogma 2 is already punishing me for my negligence

I was only 90 minutes intoDragon’s Dogma 2 when I accidentally let a child die.

The trouble started when a local shopkeeper asked me to find his son who had been dragged off by wolves. He asked me to question the locals for clues about his disappearance. I only had three hours with Capcom’s open-world RPG, so I naturally found myself skimming through some dialogue, assuming a waypoint would pop up on my map once I sleuthed out his location.

But that’s not how Dragon’s Dogma 2 works. Had I been paying more attention, I would have learned that he went off in search of blue flowers. That would tell me that I need to follow a trail of those plants in the wild to find his location. Instead, I wandered out of town aimlessly for over an hour, killing monsters before a puzzled Capcom employee questioned why I had yet to tackle that introductory objective. By the time he helped me get back on the kid’s scent, it was too late.

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That anecdote taught me my first valuable Dragon’s Dogma 2 lesson ahead of its March 22 launch. This isn’t a game you can casually play between social media scrolls. If you don’t fully lock into its world, there will be consequences.

Fed to the wolves

My three-hourDragon’s Dogma 2 demo was split into two parts. In my first session, I tried out one of the RPG’s new vocations, the Mystic Spearhand. This class put an emphasis on staggering enemies at close range. I could zip into them for a heavy hit or leap into the air and jab my spear down on them. It’s a flashy class that I was eager to try out on some big enemies — and that’s perhaps why I took my eye off more serious matters so quickly.

Rather than following any quest in my first session, I decided to trounce around the world in hunt for monsters. That’s not usually how I’d act in a curated demo like