Dragon’s Dogma 2 launched today, and while it had a warm critical reception, players are having a lot of problems with its PC port in particular. Currently, it has an overwhelmingly negative user score on Steam, with over 13,000 reviews as of the writing. Capcom has addressed common criticism of the game in the hopes of quelling the frustration of PC players.
Players are a bit peeved at the inclusion of microtransactions in all versions of the game, as well as the fact that it uses Denuvo anti-cheat software that’s known to impact game performance. I already found the game to be poorly optimized on Xbox Series X/S, but the issues get even worse on PC. For a game that already has demanding minimum required PC specs, performance still isn’t good for a lot of players, with frame rate drops, crashes, and freezing happening often. Players have had to find odd ways to improve the frame rate by doing things like murdering NPCs.
“A large amount of CPU usage is allocated to each character and calculating the impact of their physical presence in various areas. In certain situations where numerous characters appear simultaneously, the CPU usage can be very high and may affect the frame rate,” Capcom admits. “We are aware that in such situations, settings that reduce GPU load may currently have a limited effect; however, we are looking into ways to improve performance in the future.”
Dragon’s Dogma 2 is an impressively ambitious game full of dynamic NPCs and enemies that act of their own volition. Clearly, that’s a bit too much for some CPUs to handle. Capcom also highlighted all of the items that can be purchased with microtransactions and pointed out that there are ways to obtain all those items in the game. Finally, it says that it plans to fix bugs and other issues causing game crashes and freezing in the “near future,” in addition to adding the ability to restart your game save.
If you’re planning on picking up Dragon’s Dogma 2, it seems like it may be best to avoid the PC version for now. Capcom’s latest is also available for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
