Folks teeming with excitement to finally dive into Capcom's hotly anticipated fantasy action role-playing sequel Dragon's Dogma 2 on March 12 may experience some inconsistent frame rate performance issues on PC.
Responding to a query about frame rate problems from IGN, Capcom said in a statement that performance issues on PC may be linked to the heavy amount of CPU demanded from NPCs in the game.
"In Dragon's Dogma 2, a large amount of CPU usage is allocated to each character and dynamically calculates the impact of their physical presence in various environments. In certain situations where numerous characters appear simultaneously, the CPU usage can be very high and may affect the frame rate," a Capcom representative told IGN. "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."
Whereas games like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth give players a Performance or Graphics mode option — prioritizing either a consistent framerate or increased graphical thread count, as it were — Dragon's Dogma 2 only has one visual mode across all consoles. Speaking with Game Informer, director Hideaki Itsuno clarified his statement about Dragon's Dogma 2 releasing with an uncapped framerate for all consoles, saying, "We're aiming to go at around or higher than 30 FPS."
Although Capcom specifically addresses a fix for frame rate issues on PC, some with early copies here at IGN have experienced frame rate inconsistencies on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S as well. According to IGN performance reviewer Michael Thompson, Dragon's Dogma 2 can be impacted across all formats by CPU and memory bandwidth demands. These can impact consoles and medium to lower-end PCs far more. Areas such as Vernworth are very demanding, even on the highest-end machines and, in particular, the CPU.
During his playthrough, Thompson noted that the Xbox Series S suffered most with memory demands as texture would fail to load and become very low-quality after roughly 10 minutes of open-world exploration. In addition, Thompson lost saves a few times returning to an earlier point in the title and even cause a game reset from the start.
Dragon's Dogma 2 currently has high demands on hardware, with the Steam Deck struggling to run at playable rates and even high-end machines of an RTX4090 paired with an AMD 5800X3D CPU can drop into the 30s whilst in the denser populated towns.
Dragon's Dogma 2's framerate issues were so rough for IGN senior editorial producer Mark Medina that he had switch from playing on PlayStation 5 to PC because he was getting motion sickness.
"It's one of those games where if you look up at the sky or down at the ground, the framerate improves," Medina said. "So if you look up at a cliff to fight goblins, and you're at 40-50fps, and then you turn your camera down at the world and suddenly there's a quick drop in frames, it's disorienting."
While Dragon's Dogma 2 may not run as well as it should on PS5, IGN editorial producer Mitchell Saltzman says its performance issues were never a deal breaker for him.
"It's distracting at its best and annoying at its worst, and this game would unquestionably be improved if its performance was better, but it never robbed me from the thrilling moments of combat, nor did it take anything away from the exciting moments of exploration and discovery at the heart of the experience,"
Saltzman said.
Likewise, IGN gameplay producer Ronny Barrier said that altough Dragon's Dogma 2's framerate can be wildly inconsistent, "it never looked jittery" or hampered on how much joy he found adventuring the game's good-looking landscapes.
"Sure, I would love it if it ran at a solid 60fps at all times, and I'm not here to make an excuse for it. The performance in an action game should be consistent, even if it has to be a consistent 30fps! But any issues I have with the performance didn't detract from the adventure for me," Barrier said. "Thankfully, [Dragon's Dogma 2 is] a bit more methodical than most action games, with few mechanics that require very strict timing, and I think that helped soften the blow as well."
Isaiah Colbert is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow them on Twitter @ShinEyeZehUhh.
