Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen - The Big Pre-Launch Interview

Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen Devs Talk Balance, Loot, And How It Feels Like A New Game Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen is almost upon us. The DLC for one of 2024’s best RPGs has been in the making for a long time, and it's just around the corner. At this year’s Tokyo Game Show, we sat down with Naoto Oyama, producer on Dark Arisen, and Kento Kinoshita, its director, to discuss how such a lengthy DLC came to be and the intricacies of what it involves. The Inception Of Dark Arisen, Again Dragon’s Dogma 2 getting DLC became a bit of an inside joke. Almost every major showcase over the last year was littered with comments from fans decrying that they were desperate for an expansion. That expansion came in the form of Dark Arisen, and that audience rallying helped make it happen. “The player feedback ever since launch was something we were acutely aware of,” Oyama tells me. “Not just the comments from the digital events, but just the fact that the people who loved playing the game wanted more. That was one of the big encouragements for us to get working on DLC.” Dark Arisen is set to be a whopping DLC, but Capcom faced a challenge— how much content did they want to add, versus how long did they want to make the audience wait? “Dark Arisen isn't quite on the same scale as the base Dragon's Dogma 2, but it's always a balance when you're creating a follow-up,” Kinoshita says. “We looked at a good balance between bringing the DLC not too many years after the original game, but also having it be a nice, meaty piece of content.” Oyama then outlines just what players can expect. “In terms of gameplay, to explore Norgan and finish the storyline in that region, we expect it to take between 15 and 20 hours for most players. And there are the new 12 Lost Rites dungeons, each of which can take anything between 30 minutes and an hour. When you consider that there are 12 dungeons in total added, the total content proposition for the DLC is 25 hours plus.” These new dungeons also bring new relic drops, inspired by the original Dragon’s Dogma’s Black Island. Items will drop after certain tasks are completed, but with random odds. I asked just how bad the grind would be for the rarest of items. ”We don’t want it to be excessively grindy. It is always fun whenever you find something that has a low drop rate, but it can also go in the wrong direction if it stops feeling like fun,” Kinoshita tells me. The drop algorithm has a tendency to favor the vocations that you and your main pawns have set, ”The drop algorithm has a tendency to favor the vocations that you and your main pawns have set,” he says. “It works on the assumption that you would rather have gear that works with your vocation, so you won’t find that you’re getting drops for vocations that you simply never use. “Secondly, there is a system in place for you to apply a certain bias to the outcomes. You’ll be able to specify ‘I’d like to receive drops for X vocation more often.’ Not only is it built into the algorithm as a vocational bias, but you’ll also be able to go in and apply a buff towards certain vocations’ gear. Hopefully it won’t feel like you’re praying to the RNG gods too often.” Dark Arisen won’t just add new areas for players to explore; it will also expand on the base game’s combat. Players will be able to make use of two additional skill slots as they play through the DLC, but with complaints that end-game builds already felt very strong in the base game, how did Capcom balance this? “It's important for there to be a challenge, and then to feel rewarded whenever they get through a tough fight, but I think sometimes you need to have a bit of a balance break where they get to feel really powerful, and feel that they had a huge achievement,” Oyama tells me. “The Relic system is what lets us achieve that. So even if you've got a powerful build, and you've now got six skills set rather than four, and you feel like you've got a wide toolset at your disposal, as you start the DLC and play the tougher enemies in the new area, rather than it being just a matter of what level you're at, the gear you've got through the Relic system will be what will make the difference” Performance and the Switch 2 Dragon’s Dogma 2 was lauded at launch, but it wasn’t without its issues. Early on, players complained about its performance semi-regularly, but Capcom moved to fix this. With Dark Arisen adding some pretty hefty new areas, I wondered if we might see similar struggles when the DLC releases. “The original game had quite a lot of improvements made in about the six months after launch, and there was a continuous effort to address some of the issues that we saw at launch. In fact, we’ve just released title update 3.2 to the base game, which we did a lot of work on refining the RE engine implementation,” Oyama says. “And actually, post-patch, we now expect that you can get 60 frames per second out of performance mode on the base PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Great strides have been made since the original game's launch in terms of performance and this will be reflected in Dark Arisen.” What about the Nintendo Switch 2 version, though? Capcom has had recent success with Pragmata, Resident Evil Requiem, and Onimusha: Way of the Sword; could we be about to hit a quadruple? We've actually also been able to achieve close to 60 frames per second performance on Nintendo Switch 2... “We've actually also been able to achieve close to 60 frames per second performance on Nintendo Switch 2 with the use of frame generation,” Oyama muses. “We've actually also been able to achieve While the base game specs are 1080p and 30-plus frames on docked mode and 900p, 30 frames a second in handheld mode, by activating frame generation, you can actually make that frame rate a lot smoother. There is a bit of a trade-off with visual fidelity when it comes to frame generation, almost like choosing a visual versus performance priority mode, but the performance is looking really great on Switch 2.” The success of the previously mentioned titles actually helped the Dragon’s Dogma 2 team, especially as Oyama was the producer for Pragmata. “We've actually been able to build on the work of Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata,” he says. “Every time a title is developed for that platform, all of the work that's done and the tweaks and improvements that are made can really be passed forward to the next team. I think working on our own engine rather than a third-party one has been a huge advantage, and we've been able to achieve great things with it.” Hard Mode Is A New Way To Play Hard Mode was one of the big announcements that came with Dark Arisen. It’s not tied to the DLC and will be its own free download. How much will change as part of this? “The concept is to have constant, thrilling combat throughout your experience in hard mode. To that end, in addition to buffing the enemies' stats, we've also changed some enemies' behavior and even enemy placement in some areas. So in total, it's different changes that will bring a tougher and more challenging experience,” Oyama says. Kinoshita adds, “I'd like to think of it not just in terms of its effect on the DLC, but if you start a brand new save file on the original Dragon of Dogma 2, straight into hard mode, I think it's a really unique experience that I'd like to encourage players to check out if they think they're up for the challenge. “It brings the difficulty to a level where your tactics will change, because you'll be so much more grateful for every single healing herb you can find. You'll need to be a lot more proactive in thinking about using items during combat as well, rather than just breaking enemies down with sheer power.” Released October 9, 2026 ESRB Mature 17+ / Violence, Blood and Gore, Sexual Themes, Language Developer(s) Capcom Publisher(s) Capcom Prequel(s) Dragon's Dogma 2 Number of Players Single-player PC Release Date October 9, 2026 Genre(s) RPG, Action, Adventure