Dragon's Dogma is a typical case of a "cult classic." The game has a lot of objective issues and is very barebones in some ways (story, dialogue, most quests) but its core gameplay is so good and there's so much magic in it that fans are willing to forgive it anything. Fighting a dragon or griffin in DD is simply so good that it will spoil you on other action RPGs, empty world and boring NPCs be damned. I absolutely love this game and have way over 500 hours clocked into it across various platforms, since its first release on the consoles. And I can heartfully recommend the PC version as the best one thanks to 60fps and mod availability. With that said, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME ON GOG if you have the option to buy it elsewhere. The online features don't work - the companion rental system gives no rewards. This bug was present in the Steam release too, but was fixed right after launch - clearly nobody cares to do the same here. Perhaps an even more baffling thing - the photo mode was CUT from the game entirely. It's there on Steam, but the button is gone in the gog version. It's a minor feature, but still - this is an incomplete version of the game and there's NO info about it on the store page anywhere. There are also very few companions to choose from (due to gog having separate servers and a small playerbase, especially now years after release), but that's nobody's fault tbh. I feel bad telling people not to buy one of my all-time favourite games on my platform of choice, but it is what it is. The game is 5 stars for me (despite all its problems), but I can't recommend this release.
(I don't own this game on GOG, but I put probably 50 or more hours into the Steam version) There are some things about DD that are absolutely fantastic. The stellar art direction, the music and the Narrator's voice all create an incredible mood that I have yet to see in any other Lovecraft-inspired game. It's because of those that I gave the game the 3 stars that you see above. I simply couldn't rate it lower when it looks, sounds and feels so good. And in the beginning, it plays very nicely too. At its core, it's a turn based dungeon crawler: you assemble a party of 4 heroes and send them on a quest into one of 4 dungeons. If they succeed and come back alive, they gain XP as well as fetch gold and resources that you use to improve your Hamlet. This is initially very fun and addictive - your base is developing fast, your heroes are getting stronger, the dungeon crawls are quick and intense. The problems start emerging after about 10 hours. First, it's dimnishing returns: your Hamlet and hero upgrades are more and more expensive, but the amount of goods you earn per quest stays roughly the same, so you have to grind more and more to actually achieve anything. And then it turns out the game is not as fair as you thought it was when your party suddenly fails in what should be a perfectly manageable battle, because all your characters randomly missed and all enemies randomly scored crits. The game has permadeath, so if a character dies, that's it, and you can find yourself forever losing heroes that took long hours to build - not because you made a mistake, but because the RNG messed you up. Yes, you can always recruit and level up and upgrade new ones, and in 10 hours you'll have a new party like the one you lost, but the question is, do you care? The core gameplay gets really repetitive by this point (it's the same 4 dungeons over and over again), and its grindy economy makes it feel like a mobile game that someone forgot to put microtransactions into.
