It's been over two years since Dragon's Dogma 2 came out, and I shamefully have to admit that while I did play through the majority of this somewhat niche RPG from Capcom, I never rolled credits. The final main questline was way too complicated for me to figure out, and it felt like the only way to complete it was to check out the guides from our team here at Game Rant, so I put the controller down, and it still haunts me to this day.
Still, I was looking forward to playing some of the Dark Arisen expansion at Gamescom 2026 to see what's new with Dragon's Dogma 2 and whether any of the changes would convince me to come back. But after checking it out for almost an hour, nothing seemed outstanding enough to make me pick the controller back up and explore the frigid new setting of Norgan.
Right off the bat, I was thrown into the Norgan region, a cold new area that makes things a bit harder to see since there's, um, snow everywhere. There are also some environmental hazards you can mess with to deal with enemies in interesting ways, like avalanches and falling icicles, which I was able to mess around with a little bit.
There was even a point in my demo where I interacted with a block of ice, not knowing what was going to happen, that ended up scaring the living daylights out of me, making me jump like I just watched the worst jump scare in a horror movie. The loud crash of ice startled me, and my character got hurt by the blast. I then looked around to the other gamers on my left and right to make sure nobody noticed, and thankfully, I think I was safe from embarrassment.
One of the biggest new features in the expansion that was shown to me from the jump is the new Relic Appraisal system. In the main village where my journey started, an older woman in a chair asked me to bring back ancient relics that seemed to drop randomly from enemies. And the stronger the enemy, the rarer the relic would be.
You bring these lost relics back to the lady, and you'll get random gear that may or may not be superior to the equipment you already have. It's sort of like Diablo's RNG-based loot grind. Instead of upgrading your weapons traditionally, you'll have to grind until you find the best relics from enemy drops, which seems like it could be annoying and something that is there just to make Dragon's Dogma 2 players keep playing longer than they need to.
As I explored the new region with my pawns, which are still some of the best parts of Dragon's Dogma, I was eventually steered towards a major boss fight with a super terrifying dragon at a Mountain Stronghold. It had about eight bars of health, so I was immediately taken aback by how powerful it seemed. I surely didn't need to fight this thing for like an hour, right? The only way to deal massive damage was to try and climb on top of it and attack its head, but even then, it felt like I was never doing enough damage to beat it quickly.
The dragon would also summon smaller enemies once we dealt enough damage, but they were super weak, so they didn't cause too much of an issue for my pawns and me. This may end up being a story spoiler, but I actually didn't need to fully defeat the dragon for the fight to come to an end, as a cutscene interrupted the fight and a certain character came to help out, but I won't go into the details on who they are (I personally don't really even know who they are!).
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://gamerant.com/dragons-dogma-2-dark-arisen-preview-early-impressions-gamescom/
