I’m still pretty fond of my time with Dragon’s Dogma 2—it’s a banging RPG if you’re able to look past those weird day-one microtransactions (that didn’t even really give you anything good), one that breeds emergent moments of chaos, like your pawns accidentally blowing up your ride because you had the temerity to equip them with a certain spell before a goblin ambush.
There’s one issue I can’t really excuse it for, though, and that was the baffling performance issues in town. The game’s not terrible-looking, mind, but it never made any sense to me why I could be brawling with 10 goblins in a crowded wood, particle effects flying left and right, while 10 peasants taking a leisurely stroll would send my framerate to the briny depths.
Well, turns out, Capcom’s got the answer—the NPCs were thinking too hard. That’s as per a Famitsu interview in the wake of a recent patch, which tidied up some performance woes (thanks, Automaton, for the translation):
“In Dragon’s Dogma 2, CPU power is allocated to process the thoughts of each NPC as well as the effect on character physics. Therefore, in scenes where many NPCs appear at once, like in towns, the CPU load would get extremely high, which in some cases affected the frame rate.”
Which means that, yes—the psychic noise of the game’s NPCs going about their daily lives was the culprit. While it was known that these NPCs were the root cause, as Capcom told IGN back in March, the idea that it was rich internal lives causing a hiccup seems to be new information.
The team says it’s been “reworking how NPCs’ thoughts are processed and making small tweaks, including changing the order in which processes are executed” to help tamp things down, which is a small mercy.
It’s genuinely fascinating to find out that these thought patterns were intensive enough to cause issues, though—while I don’t doubt that DD2’s NPCs all have their own little routines, that’s been current tech since the ye olde days of Oblivion. I can’t help but wonder at what the mysterious difference is between the trade-standard methods and Dragon Dogma 2’s apparently galaxy-brained side characters. Maybe Frog Nasty was a genius all along.
