Excited For Dragon's Dogma? You Should Be.

We've been talking a lot about Dragon's Dogma here at 4Player, mostly during our Podcasts and in our videos, and now it seems a lot of people are starting to catch on. It's been a bit of an underdog from the very beginning, perhaps due to poor marketing and name recognition -Capcom's had a few Resident Evil titles to push during this time- and murmurs of the game really only started breaking through when it was found to be playing on the show floor at E3 2011.

That's certainly when we started ramping up our discussions on the game, and as its release date of May 22ndbegins to peak over the horizon I'm going to lay it all out and implore that you become as excited as the rest of us. So here are the top reasons why you should waiting with bated breath for Dragon's Dogma.

Because you liked the tone Demon's Souls / Dark Souls.

As much as I dislike starting my description of a game with another game, one simply cannot ignore the similarities found here. In terms of tone, Dragon's Dogma has almost all of the dark and dangerous atmosphere as these other titles, albeit with perhaps a bit more light around the edges. The world is fashioned with an almost Warhammer-esque brush that treats that player, not as an invincible hero character, but as one just above the fold of normalcy. Able to hold their own against fierce monsters...but only just able.

Though Dragon's Dogma doesn't come with the intensely high difficulty rating, it still presents a world which cannot be tread into lightly. This balance should go a long way to appealing to the 'core' crowd while also setting a lower barrier to entry for new players who might have been put off by the punishing feel of Dark Souls.

A large, beautiful and dangerous world.

The world of Dragon's Dogma is large, extremely large. Videos are currently available  detailing some of the scale and you can be sure that this is only a small part of what is actually available in the game. Not only that, but the world itself is separated into on-road and off-road areas, each having their own levels of danger. Stay on the roads and you'll meet some resistance, but go off the roads -or especially into some of the more forested areas- and you'll be sure to get attacked by some fairly large and terrifying beasts.

I like how this adds an extra sprinkle of danger to exploring, and if Capcom can balance out the risk and reward ratio properly, it can be just enough of a pull on the player to branch out into the more dangerous parts of the game world, and into places where the player might not yet want to be. One of my main criticisms in recent Bethesda games is creature scaling, where many of the beasts scale with your character. It extinguishes much of the danger from the world and favors mass exploration over character refinement. It's the directions they've wanted to go (although improved since Oblivion) and I respect that. But I do miss those first moments in a game when anything outside of the city walls could lead to a quick end.

Of course, there will be less dangerous areas in Dragon's Dogma as well. And if you feel like picking up random animals and throwing them around, you can do that too.

Creature Climbing (the money shot).

If you don't know about this yet then you don't know about Dragon's Dogma. It's the game's signature move, the jewel in the crown. The ability to climb creatures, although harkening back to Shadow of the Colossus, hasn't really been done in such a fluid way since then. Recently, the ability has been the focus of predetermined, and mostly arena based, boss fights on titans who are really chained to their own attacks and animations, and facilitated within a tightly scripted encounter. It is usually a strictly choreographed affair leading the player from one weak point to another.

Not so in Dragon's Dogma. The ability to climb is a skill with which to interact with the entire world, not some suddenly designated ability to reach the next glowing bit. So when creatures do attack, climbing upon them feels as natural as climbing the wall you scaled to get there. And to that end, as easy as well. There are no set 'climable' paths, just a creatures fur and your fire-hardened will to fight for your life.

In some cases it will be one of the only ways to defeat a creature, and in others one of the best ways to get a flying creature back to earth. And I can tell you from first hand experience, there is nothing like climbing onto a griffon and having it take off with you as you ferociously stab, attempting to get it to earth again before it hurls you off into the sky like so much a pile of wet rags. Its like nothing I've ever experienced in a game before and solely due to the fact that these fighting, climbing and open world mechanics all work with each in perfect tandem. None of them ever feel setup or staged, and because of that the creatures you're fighting seem to act truly alive.

The creatures.

Dragon's Dogma also seems to have a wide variety of creatures to fight. So far we've seen goblins, lizard men, giants, drakes, dragons, griffons, a hydra, and lions that have a snake on their back and a goat attached to their hindquarters (otherwise known as a Chimera). The developers seem to be taking a 'think of some crazy monsters you like, combine them with other stuff and we'll throw it in' mentality to creature creation and that sort of approach goes a long way to making some interesting enemies.

You should also note that many of the enemies, though powerful, can be witted down by attacking weak points that can be chopped off (Think of the Drake tale at the beginning of Dark Souls). Enemy dismemberment? Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Since the days of dungeon crawling in Deathtrap Dungeon for the PS1, I've always loved enemies who hack to pieces during the process of smiting them.

Hiroyuki Kobayashi.

The producer behind Dragon's Dogma has left some very good games in his wake over the years. For those who aren't familiar, Hiroyuki Kobayashi is not some new face trying out some fresh ideas with Capcom. He's been with the company since 1995 and has produced Dino Crisis 2, the Sengoku Basara series, Devil May Cry 4, Resident Evil 4 and Killer 7. And when he wasn't producing great games he was programming them with credits on Resident Evil 1 & 2, the original Devil May Cry under his belt.

Although one may argue that a game like Dragon's Dogma certainly has many more mechanics in play and interwoven -in an open world no less- than those other titles , pedigree dictates that if anyone at Capcom can pull it all together, it's Kobayashi.

Mages dress to impress.

With some fantastic spells in their arsenal:

Dragon's Dogma is availabe for PS3 and Xbox 360 on May 22nd in NA and May 25th in Europe.