Darkness clings to the small bubble of luminescence around you, the lamp at your waist struggling to keep the night at bay. And so, like four gasps of air amongst an ocean of the obscured unknown, you and your three pawns step cautiously, feeling your way between unfamiliar knolls, creeping towards your destination.

And then a yell. “Its a chimera!”

A clattering, the rasping of swords drawn against shields amidst confusion and paranoia to draw attention.

Where?

Scouring the darkness, your eyes skitter between one shape and the next, bow-string taut with anticipation.

Where?

One bubble of light becomes eclipsed in a blur of shadowed forms, of cries of pain, of steel meeting steel, locked in combat.

Where?

Then a roar.

And into the light, the relief of knowing swirling amongst choking despair, you see.

And you die.

And when you finally return, rewound hours before your own moment of temporary demise, you are left with a scar. It will not disappear with time, nor will it fully heal even when you are eventually triuphant. It will stay, as that occasional reminder: to be afraid; to stay wary; to avoid complacence.

Walking the line between power fantasy and grounded-ness, Dragon’s Dogma throws the player into a world where she is not only a fantastic fighter of extreme prowess, but also occasionally, helpless to contest the greater powers that exist or the situations that may occur. Stuck between slaughtering goblins in broad daylight to becoming a chimera’s prey in the pitch black of night, the player and her pawns/slaves exist within the order of the world. Not as plot-armored gods, but existing between a natural push and pull, of being powerful and yet vunerable. And by treating players this way: as more of just a cog in nature and less as a divine being; Dragon’s Dogma establishes a level of presence and role for the players in its world, giving a sense of adventure and meaning to every expedition beyond Gran Soren’s walls.

And yet, despite the buzz that these adventures may bring, the companions with whom you share it with take the forms of both a blessing and a curse. Your pawns’ obedience and their cohesiveness as a group: working together within each of their roles while providing information on the task at hand; reflects an ideal of how players (and even actual humans *gasp*) should work together. But the reality is, your npc companions are not human. There are no stories to tell each other, no rivalries or friendships or romances, no betrayals or profound trials of trust to spice things up. There’s no drama, no human interaction to throw a wrench in the mix. All these things that are vitally important to any experience that a group shares: that can drastically effect the outcome of events and how people perceive and change from those events; are missing. And so, stuck with these companions, the player is left in a situation that is just a little bit boring and quite a lot a bit lonely.

But despite the non-humanness of your pawns, Dragon’s Dogma is still pretty thrilling to play. The sense of danger (because save scumming ruins lives) and place within the world slakes the player’s thirst for adventure time and time again. And while the pawn dynamics make it halfway by creating a cohesive team experience by which the player is a part of, because pawns are only slightly better than npc slaves, the cooperative experience falls short. Instead the player should be sharing this adventure with real people who’ve earned real trust and camaraderie and who can also just take a step away from adventuring for a while to hang around and be cool people. So while adventuring around by myself with a couple of pawns in tow isn’t the worst thing in the world, I would really like it if one of them could treat me to coffee or something.

That would be nice.

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Yes I know Dragon’s Dogma Online is a thing. No I don’t know if it will be good but gods I hope so. :)