I love Skyrim and Dragon Age – RPGs are my bread and butter. I won’t spoil anything – I’m trying to get you to play it after all – but I’m being completely sincere when I say that it’s one of the strongest games I’ve ever played. I didn’t even focus on completing quests – I literally just wanted to walk around, taking in the stunning scenery and being able to fully commit to an amazingly well-realized world. I spent hours last Christmas just chilling out with a beer and knocking about the windy walkways of Gransys.
It’s a world that revels in immersive exploration, so being able to play while you’re tucked up in bed with nothing to do is fantastic. I also reckon it’s worth mentioning that Dragon’s Dogma came out on Switch last year, and it’s one of my favourite handheld RPGs ever made. It’s absurd, and it’s genuinely spectacular. It has one of the most iconic opening sequences in the history of games – instead of being quietly introduced to its character, a massive dragon quite literally rips your heart out. If you’re willing to give Dragon’s Dogma a go over the holidays, you’ll be firmly hooked from the get-go. In fact, if you want to fast travel, you even need to build your own fast-travel system. The game doesn’t hold your hand and pull you through it – on the contrary, it trusts you to carve your own path through its immensely well-mapped world. It’s dark, foggy, and legitimately scary at times, but it never fails to make sense of itself. When you’re wandering through the Witchwood, you’re almost inevitably going to get lost – but never in a way that becomes irritating. This is where Dragon’s Dogma excels above the vast majority of other game worlds. I’ve always been a big fan of the empty space between spaces – it’s what makes a 10-hour game into a 100-hour one. If you just lump a few major locations in and have no traversable path in the middle of them, places start to lose their significance.
It’s not immediately noticeable when you’re riding from point A to point B, but connecting a world in a genuinely functional manner is what makes said world worth exploring. I think video game infrastructure is one of those mostly invisible features that can make or break a cohesive open-world experience. In fact, I have written 1,000 words about how good its roads are, in comparison to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. I could probably write 1,000 words about how good its roads are. But there’s so much more to Dragon’s Dogma than meets the eye.
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