Trailers: Dragon’s Dogma suffers from NPC insensitivity

“Pawns.” Seriously? Somebody call BioWare right now so we can get a protest going on until Capcom acknowledges that NPCs are people too! Wait…no they’re not. They’re just tools that you sacrifice for your own means, sort of like, like…a pawn!

Anyways, all nomenclature aside, Dragon’s Dogma seems to be onto something pretty cool here with their pawn system. While the game isn’t multiplayer, you’ll be able to create an NPC “pawn” to adventure and level up with you. This pawn will be completely customizable and will reflect your creativity. This main pawn then goes into “The Rift” when you’re not playing and becomes accessible to any other player in the world as a mercenary pawn. Every player operates with their personal main pawn, and an additional two mercenaries selected from The Rift. So essentially, you’re choosing characters that other people have created to fill out your team. The coolest thing is that when you boot your game back up, if anybody’s selected your main pawn as a companion, he or she will have gained experience without you doing a thing. He’ll even gain insights into parts of the world that you have yet to visit if he’s seen them in his mercenary adventures, thus allowing him to give useful information that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. This sounds like a wonderful way to give a sense of community to a single-player game. I can’t wait to see the community legends that will inevitably build around certain pawns.

Author: Cody