Dragon’s Dogma 2 Takes Inspiration from GTA 5’s Emergent World, Director Says

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a game that fans of its predecessor have been waiting for for a long time, and now that the open world action RPG is finally beginning to take tangible shape, excitement surrounding it is continuing to grow. Capcom recently brought the title to Tokyo Game Show, showing off substantial amounts of gameplay that’s looked quite promising, and something that’s caught the eye of many is how closesly the sequel seems to be sticking to the original game.

In fact, it turns out that’s very much been the development team’s guiding philosophy as well. Speaking in an interview with VGC, Dragon’s Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno revealed that, above all else, he and the development team have been focused on implementing things they couldn’t do in the first game, whether that was due to time constraints or hardware constraints.

“We mostly just wanted to take things that we couldn’t achieve in Dragon’s Dogma at the time it came out, whether it be from just lack of time or pushing the limits of the hardware that was around at the time,” Itsuno said. “So the main inspiration was sort of ourselves, and finally being able to achieve what we wanted on this current console generation.”

Interestingly enough, however, Itsuno also mentioned that the one open world title that Capcom has taken inspiration from for Dragon’s Dogma 2 is its reactive world. According to Itsuno, the emergent nature of a living open world in the 2013 Rockstar title is something that Capcom’s upcoming action RPG tries to recreate.

“If I had to pick one other game that came out in the meantime, I would actually say GTA 5,” he said. “I kind of admired how they were able to create a world in which it really felt like the NPCs were going about their lives independently of the player. All kinds of interesting emergent behaviour could happen whenever you were exploring the city and all kinds of weird accidents felt like it would happen whether you were there or not. That feeling of a living world is something that I’ve definitely tried to achieve in Dragon’s Dogma 2.”

It’s also been confirmed that Dragon’s Dogma 2’s open world is entirely seamless, and has no loading screens whatsoever.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is in development for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. It doesn’t yet have a release date.