rusty_shackleford wrote: ↑
March 29th, 2024, 20:10
Watched Scarlet Seeker play it for a bit while eating lunch, one positive I will give it is the various stuff other people's pawns can do for you is cool. e.g., a pawn knew where a chest was because she previously looted it with another player and guided him to the chest when he was in the area. Another pawn guided him to an NPC for his quest because she previously completed it, and so forth.
I think the first DD had this somewhat but I don't recall it being as detailed.
I genuinely love the Pawn system, which is an important point about my perception of the game cause I think a lot of people don't, or at least don't care much for it. There were and still are huge demands for actual online co-op. As someone who plays a lot of co-op with family and friends this is actually something I didn't want in DD2 because the Pawn system is so interlocked with the game's concept it just wouldn't feel the same without it, or even an alternative. If you've played the first game to the end you know how deep it goes concept wise.
Anyway yeah the Pawns are definitely further improved in that one. They'll tell you about chests they've looted with someone else, quests they've done. When they do you can press forward and they'll lead you to it. I was doing a Monster eradication quest and my boy's pawn was "hey I know where that is follow me". Was quite a long way so strayed a bit, had fights. He stopped to assist and "remembered" to resume leading me after each breaks on the way. After we were done in the caverns it took place we exited from a different exit and the same pawn was like "hey our next task is in xxx it's not too far from here maybe we should do it now ?" so I agreed and we did, straying even further away and exploring along the way. It felt quite organic, as in an actual travel through unknown places trying to stay focused on the task at hand but noting locations on the way to come back and explore later. The incentive for not methodically exploring everything on the way is that your max health decreases as you get damaged in battles, kinda like in DS2. You can restore to full max health at camp sites but they're pretty scattered. Max carry also becomes an hindrance pretty fast. So knowing I was probably going for a dungeon at our destination, I had to focus on that and the adventures on the path. This is quite different for instance to Elden Ring where you feel compelled to explore every nook and crannies on your first travel there, ending up giving you this open world fatigue of running around everywhere for hours on your "horse" with no carry weight or any kind of penalty to give you incentive to manage your travels.
I've played almost exclusively with my boys' pawns so far. 3 Steam accounts on the same copy with Family share enabled. Costs us no RC since we're Steam friends but we get RC rewards from each others. One new feature is you can set Pawn Quests with rewards of either Gold or Items, for example "Slay a Cyclop". If the person who hired your pawn slays a Cyclop they'll get the reward you set but you only pay once no matter how many people complete the quest you set.
edit: just got a 5-10 fps improve using this:
https://www.nexusmods.com/dragonsdogma2 ... escription