Dragon's Dogma II: Dark Arisen Hands-on

It took a long time for us to get Dragon’s Dogma II, a game that fans of the fantastic original had been crying out for for a long time. Fortunately, the follow-up launched in 2024 to critical acclaim (hint: we loved it!); however, it did seem like there was a little something missing when all was said and done.

A lot of the excellent features that Capcom added to the expansion of the first game (also named Dark Arisen) seemed to be missing here, and it left fans a little disappointed at times. Continuing Capcom’s current hot streak, though, meant that it was always going to be inevitable that Dragon’s Dogma II would see an expansion.

I recently got the opportunity to go hands-on with Dragon’s Dogma II: Dark Arisen and so far, it looks to be fixing all of my issues with the base game.

View Full-size

Dragon’s Dogma II: Dark Arisen sees you venture to Norgan, where new characters await you.

Norgan Beckons

Taking place in an entirely new region, Norgan, Dark Arisen sees you travel to the frozen northwest of the world. This new region is featured on the existing map, and although I didn’t have the entire map revealed, the new region does seem fairly large in size. Perhaps around the size of one of the base game’s regions, such as Vermund.

What is immediately apparent, though, is the difference in how this region operates. While Vermund required you to follow set routes throughout the world, Norgan is far more open and freeform, allowing you to leave the hub village and venture off in a direction, even if the main quest asked me to go to the fort to the north.

Aiding you in this endeavor is the addition of a new tool, the Climbing Hook. Although this is a consumable (so you’ll need to stock up on them before adventuring), you can use these on new tether posts around the world. Using these, you can either climb up to higher areas or traverse back down from, say, a cliff, more easily. This massively opens up how you get around the world, and where the game hides chests and other goodies, making open world exploration far more interesting.

Beyond that, it’s as you’d expect when exploring Norgan: new materials, the existence of spoils and relics (more on that in a moment), and caves all hidden throughout this new area. I also had access to the Eternal Ferrystone, which made going to and from the main village hub far easier, even if I’m not the biggest fan of the addition (I love how travel works in the base game). One thing to note about Norgan is that it has its own kind of Ferrystone that only works in that region. So, you can’t bring Ferrystones from the base game and set up a travel hub from the start.

View Full-size

Norgan is far more open than the other areas in Dragon’s Dogma II.

View Full-size

The Beorcan are raiding the local villages, and it’s your job to put a stop to it.

Unearthing Relics

One of the first tasks I was introduced to in the village I started in was to go out into the snowfields and source some relics (which the game also calls Spoils). I would then need to bring them back and have Jiera, an elderly woman in the village, appraise them. For those of you who played Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, this is a similar system to how you obtained weapons from Bitterblack Isle. These new weapons can feature new abilities for every Vocation, which is very welcome, as there are no new Vocations or abilities otherwise in this new expansion.

For example, using the Magick Archer, I obtained a weapon that had the Glacial Bolt ability on it. The tooltip said it dealt more damage and took less time to fire; whether this is true for all abilities or if there are some new ones altogether remains to be seen, but it does add an extra bit of excitement when appraising gear. Additionally, even armor will have abilities attached to it, although these are more in the style of passives.

There are a number of ways to get your hands on these spoils, be it from defeating enemies, searching gathering points on the ground, or taking out large boss-like enemies. They’ll also drop at certain rarity tiers. As you may expect, the higher the rarity, the better the chance of your gear coming with better abilities and stats. As a big fan of the first game’s expansion, seeing this system return here was perhaps my biggest source of excitement from my time with the game.

View Full-size

Spoils and relics drop from many different sources; these can be turned into special gear.

View Full-size

Many deadly threats await the Arisen.

Battling the Beasties

As with any new content for Dragon’s Dogma, a large slice of it is always about the new monsters you can encounter, and Dark Arisen doesn’t disappoint there. While you’ll run into Direwolves, Saurians, and the like around the world, you’ll also encounter the Beorcans, the main humanoid threat in Norgan, who raid the local villages.

As I ventured further towards the fort in the north, however, I did run into a large Yeti monster. Despite having gear and Vocations more powered up than usual, it still provided a decent challenge. For starters, it could blow ice out all around it, which would freeze me if I got too close. I also heard my Pawns comment that I could trigger an avalanche to fall down on it, but I didn’t quite work out how to pull that off, unfortunately. Instead, the goal was to break the tusks to topple it and then go all out with my attacks. Not too different from some of the beasts in the base game, but I did like how I needed to pay more attention to my environment.

The greatest threat, however, was the fallen dragon I found at the fort at the end of my time with this hands-on. What appears to be a clear theme: this dragon could spawn a blight substance at my feet and would, at times, spew out a large group of zombie-like creatures. This meant I had to make use of area-of-effect attacks where possible (good job I was a Magick Archer) whenever they were about.

View Full-size

The demo concluded with a battle against a deadly fallen dragon.

View Full-size

There are only a few areas where this monstrosity can take damage.

More importantly, after I took out the head of this massive dragon, it triggered a second phase, in which the dragon continued to attack me as if nothing had happened to it. Despite having thick scales over the majority of its body (and its heart completely protected), I noticed the legs were vulnerable, so I concentrated my attacks there instead. Toppling this beast a second time triggered a third phase where the head had grown back, before ending with a cutscene that signaled the end of my time with the game.

I can’t deny that I was massively curious about what was up with this dragon, and what else was going on in Norgan. This did enough to get me invested in the story that Dark Arisen is presenting, and I love all of the systems in place. If the rest of the expansion can live up to this short slice I played, I think I’m going to be spending a lot more time in this world come October.