I still absolutely love my time playing Dragon’s Dogma 2. This is a great RPG that creates moments of urgency, if you can get past the weird microtransactions on day one (which weren’t even particularly good). It’s a chaotic situation where a pawn accidentally blows up a vehicle because you equipped it with a certain spell before a goblin ambush.
However, there is one problem that cannot be excused. It’s a puzzling performance problem in town. The game doesn’t look that terrible, but why do my framerates of brawling with 10 goblins in a crowded forest and 10 peasants leisurely strolling around with particle effects flying left and right send my framerate? I couldn’t understand why. Salty depth.
As it turns out, Capcom has found the answer. The NPCs were taking themselves too seriously. This is from an interview with Famitsu following a recent patch that fixed some performance issues (thanks to Automaton for the translation).
“In Dragon’s Dogma 2, CPU power is allocated to processing the thoughts of each NPC and the physical effects of the character. Therefore, in scenes where many NPCs appear at once, such as in the city, the CPU load can be extremely high. In some cases, the frame rate may be affected.
So, yes, it was caused by psychic noises from the game’s NPCs going about their daily lives. As Capcom told IGN in March, it was known that these NPCs were the root cause, but the idea that a rich internal life is causing the hiccups seems like new information.
To calm the situation down, the team says it’s “reviewing how NPC thoughts are handled and making small adjustments, such as changing the order of process execution,” but this is a bit of a mercy.
However, it’s really interesting to know that these thought patterns were focused enough to cause problems. There’s no doubt that DD2’s NPCs all have their own little routines, but that’s the latest technology from Oblivion’s old days. I can’t help but wonder what strange differences there are between the standard methods of the trade and Dragon Dogma 2’s decidedly intergalactic-brained secondary characters. Maybe Frog Nasty was a genius all along.
